Saturday, January 17, 2015

The Broken Windows theory of Islamist terrorism

Fox News has been peddling the police no-go zone view of large of European cities since the Charlie Hebdo atrocity occurred and it's good to see the well-deserved deluge of mockery, even if it was late arriving.

But why would Fox News keep peddling the no-go zone view of the world when the evidence for the existence of such zones, let alone their links to terrorism, was flimsy from the start? Beyond of course the usual imperveriousness to evidence?

Well, one reason is the Fox News demographic. It's a New York City-based "news" station that recruits heavily from local TV news and chases an audience that swung conservative partly as a reaction to urban crime waves of the 1970s and 1980s. So it's an audience with a paradigm that if you let the minorities run wild in urban areas, eventually they'll run wild everywhere. But if they vote Republican, they can stop it.

Their audience is being offered a narrative of Islamist terrorism in terms they'll understand.