The New Bell Curve

“But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.”

These were the words of Professor of History David A. Bell in a recent Los Angeles Times article.

Now, these words are, unhappily, nothing new in the terms of our ridiculously and recklessly myopic public discourse. They represent sentiments—blandly insinuating an equivalence between our rational and righteous self-defense in World War II, and the evil mass murder perpetrated by jihadists against us—that go back several decades, sentiments which have only further entrenched their mainstream dominance after 9/11.

And Prof. Bell’s articulation of them is also nothing special; but his name, felicitously, rings an unhappy bell. We therefore use it to christen the phenomenon of our public’s inability to graduate to the head of the class along the Learning Curve of the Problem of Islam.

And thus we have a new “Bell Curve”, representing not those few who are smarter and get the Problem of Islam, but those many who seem incapable of matriculating to the simple insight that extraneous non-Islamic factors cannot explain the mountain of disturbing data (including the tinkle of a headless ice cream vendor’s bell in Thailand) coming out of the Muslim milieus. The new Bell Curve is cracked—not from tolling the clear-headed clarion of independence and liberty, but from ignoring the incessant knell of Islamic slavery, intolerance and eschatological imperialism.