On Satire and Bigotry

Last night, for the first time in God only knows how long, I watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report with Andrew and his roommate. By this, I mean I watched the reruns from the night before. Those shows air way too late for this old woman.

The Colbert Report had a segment on the recent tragedy in Norway, which can be found here, which the Colbert writers referred to as the "Norwegian Muslish Gunman's Islam-Esque Atrocity."

I suppose I may have noticed this myself, were I the type to have television, but I haven’t seen anything but Netflix streaming episodes of Buffy in weeks now, and I get my news mainly from The New York Times website (although my twenty free articles for the month are gone, so…).

Evidently, in the hours immediately following the events in Norway, though Norwegian authorities were hesitant to point fingers regarding the culprits, American newstations, reporters, and newsbloggers the country over were attributing the attacks to Al-Qaeda, and even after the Norwegian and white Breivik claimed responsibility for the attacks, American newscasters were still asking questions such as "What do you make of the fact that he looked Nordic?" and "experts" were still responding with answers such as "Maybe it was a good disguise."

Steven Colbert reminds us, of course, that "Just because Norway's confessed murderer is a blond, blue-eyed, Norwegian-born, anti-Muslim crusader doesn't mean he's not a swarthy, ululating madman."

What the hell is wrong with America? Not all Muslims are terrorists, and not all terrorists are Muslims. Hasn't any at all seen Die Hard, Die Harder, Die Hard with a Vengeance, or Live Free or Die Hard?