Pressure cooker bombs and other “signatures” of extreme white privilege

An article at Salon.com expressed the hope that the bomber is a white man.

The reasoning?

If recent history is any guide, if the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident — one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate the political debate from any fallout from the attack.

Prominently pictured to illustrate the “point” are pictures of Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden.

Sorry, but I remember the McVeigh/Oklahoma City case quite well, and it was very definitely not “portrayed as an isolated incident.” President Clinton went out of his way to blame conservative talk radio, and (without any basis at all for such a “connection”), actually singled out G. Gordon Liddy by name. The MSM had a field day blaming anyone and everyone they could think of for McVeigh’s actions.

How is that white privilege?

OTOH, if the bomber happens to be white and decidedly on the left, as was Ted Kaczynski, or the various members of the Weather Underground, there is generally not a chorus of blame in the MSM. Is that the white privilege the author is talking about?

Beats me. Maybe I’m too old and curmudgeonly, but I’m just not seeing a race in this, and I won’t see race in it no matter who the suspect turns out to be.

But the MSM are certainly trying to spin this into what they want. Earlier, CNN said that pressure cooker bombs are “a signature of extreme right-wing individuals“:

A senior U.S. counterterrorism investigator told CNN that pressure cooker bombs have also been a signature of extreme right-wing individuals in the United States who he said tend to revel in building homemade bombs.

For example, the devices planted by Erich Rudolph at an Atlanta park during the 1996 Olympic Games were pipe bombs filled with gunpowder and nails to increase their lethality; it also had an alarm clock as a timing mechanism. Like the bombings in Boston, those devices were concealed in a backpack, according to a Department of Homeland Security report detailing the 1996 attack.

At least two previous terrorist plots on U.S. soil have involved variations on the Inspire recipe, and both involved “lone wolves.” Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad tried to detonate a vehicle bomb in Times Square in 2010 that included “a pressure cooker containing approximately 120 firecrackers,” according to the 2010 DHS bulletin.

Hey wait! The Weather Underground used pipe bombs. And while Eric Rudolph rots in jail as the son-of-a-bitch should, the malevolent individuals from the Weather Underground are tenured professors, even friends of Barack Obama.

What a strange thing this white privilege is.

Anyway, I looked, and while I found some discussion of the matter by Freepers, I was unable to find one single example of any “extreme right-wing individuals in the United States” who ever made a pressure cooker bomb.

Except maybe Naser Jason Abdo. He is sort of white. Or is he? Does his Islamism disqualify him from whiteness? Or right wing?

Who decides these things?

How many Americans own pressure cookers? How many of those who own pressure cookers also own nails?

Beware of these extremist signatures!

UPDATE: After quoting James Taranto’s piece on the subject, Glenn Reynolds asks whether the game of wanting the bomber to be white is “just white people trying to feel superior to other white people.”

Interestingly, if these images turn out to be photos of the bombers, then they will most likely turn out to be in fact — and at law — white.

And what if they also turn out to be adherents to an extreme right wing, theocratic ideology?

What race will that make them? Why, the same race as the privileged John Walker Lindh Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi. And Adam Pearlman.

Still, there is lingering question to which I do not have the answer.

What exactly is whiteness and what is white privilege?

Clearly, these terms mean whatever certain privileged white men want them to mean.

Logic has nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: FBI pictures of the suspects have been released. They look to me like two scruffy young white men from the United States and not the Mideast.

MORE (4/19): It turns out that the young men are immigrants from Chechnya — long a troubled hotbed for al Qaeda recruitment.

Whether they were actual al Qaeda operatives is not being reported.

They immigrated here as boys in 2000-2001; hence their general American appearance and demeanor.

But the main question in the minds of top white racialists who write for Salon will be whether they are white.

AND MORE: This Atlantic article pretty much makes it clear that the older brother Tamerlan was an al Qaeda supporter.

Tamerlan Appears to Have Posted a Video With an “Extremist Religious Prophecy Associated with Al Qaeda” on YouTube. 

Mother Jones’s Adam Serwer explains:
Among those videos is one dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The videos posted on what appears to be Tsarnaev’s YouTube page may shed light on the motivations for the attack on the Boston Marathon. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of “Khurasan,” a large portion of territory in central Asia.

If the above is true, it certainly helps explain their motive.