{"id":4741,"date":"2011-07-24T06:43:04","date_gmt":"2011-07-24T10:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/news\/?p=4741"},"modified":"2011-07-23T19:49:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-23T23:49:51","slug":"is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry","title":{"rendered":"Is Norway\u2019s terror being used as excuse for anti-faith bigotry?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Beliefnet&#8217;s Robert Mims observes: &#8220;The horrific terror attacks in Norway Friday \u2014 and that\u2019s what they were, whether perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or home-grown extremists as it appears to be in this case \u2014 led to a lot of initial knee-jerk bigotry.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Blame in on the Christians . . . Muslims, Republicans, Democrats, etc.<\/p>\n<p>In this case, it was not demonizing of Muslims at large, but use of the increasingly popular pejorative in the media of \u201cfundamentalist Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At first, news organizations identified one of the suspects as a Norwegian citizen who was a fundamentalist Christian and Muslim hater.<\/p>\n<p>Then, it turned out, the man in custody was more of a extreme political right-winger, apparently with no love for Muslim immigrants, who had \u201cposted\u201d his opinions on what were described as fundamentalist Christian websites. And, of course, anyone with a computer or smartphone could do that.<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to what my college philosophy instructors called the logical fallacy of the \u201cstraw man\u201d argument. It boils down to misrepresenting a group, in this case Christians who continue to hold to a strict interpretation of the Bible, based on the actions of an individual.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/preacherskid\/2011\/07\/is-norways-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry.html#ixzz1SyVMj7MN\" target=\"_blank\">CLICK HERE to read more<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beliefnet&#8217;s Robert Mims observes: &#8220;The horrific terror attacks in Norway Friday \u2014 and that\u2019s what they were, whether perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or home-grown extremists as it appears to be in this case \u2014 led to a lot of initial knee-jerk bigotry.&#8221; Blame in on the Christians . . . Muslims, Republicans, Democrats, etc. In&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":270,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2201,1221],"class_list":["post-4741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-news","tag-norway"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Is Norway\u2019s terror being used as excuse for anti-faith bigotry?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway\u2019s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Norway\u2019s terror being used as excuse for anti-faith bigotry?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Beliefnet&#8217;s Robert Mims observes: &#8220;The horrific terror attacks in Norway Friday \u2014 and that\u2019s what they were, whether perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or home-grown extremists as it appears to be in this case \u2014 led to a lot of initial knee-jerk bigotry.&#8221; Blame in on the Christians . . . 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Muslims, Republicans, Democrats, etc. In&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway\u2019s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry","og_site_name":"Beliefnet News","article_published_time":"2011-07-24T10:43:04+00:00","article_modified_time":"2011-07-23T23:49:51+00:00","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry","name":"Is Norway\u2019s terror being used as excuse for anti-faith bigotry?","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/#website"},"datePublished":"2011-07-24T10:43:04+00:00","dateModified":"2011-07-23T23:49:51+00:00","author":{"@id":""},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/07\/is-norway%e2%80%99s-terror-being-used-as-excuse-for-anti-faith-bigotry#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Is Norway\u2019s terror being used as excuse for anti-faith bigotry?"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/","name":"Beliefnet News","description":"Top Religious News From Around the World","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/author"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/270"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4742,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4741\/revisions\/4742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}