Two canards for the price of one

A common canard one sees and/or hears within the A.I.M. (the Anti-Islam Movement which, inchoate as it is, really doesn't yet deserve capitalization, much less an acronym) is that the danger of terrorism ("Islamic terrorism" of course would be a redundancy) comes mostly from young men. Needless to say, this canard is shared by the PC MC mainstream -- yet another bit of seepage from there into the A.I.M., as part of their asymptotic anxiety to dial down our problem from all Muslims, even if folks in the A.I.M. like to pat themselves on the back for unfailingly adding the M and I words to the suspect descriptions.

The other common canard -- both within the A.I.M. and out in the sunshine and worldly breezes of the PC MC mainstream -- is that these young men most likely to be terrorists are "Arabs".

The problem with these two canards is that they tend to reinforce the paradigm of the TMOE (the Tiny Minority of Extremists) which is intimately bound up with what could be called the "alqaedization" of anti-jihadism -- i.e., the limiting of terrorism to Al Qaeda (and to groups and individuals with "ties" to Al Qaeda).

Anywho, I was pleased to note the following information from a BBC report about one of dozens of post-911 plots by Muslims to mass-murder us -- the 2007 plot to blow up gas pipelines at JFK Airport and domestic neighborhoods nearby which could have killed thousands if successful and, as a US District Court judge said, according to the BBC report, "would have caused "unimaginable" devastation":

To wit, the two suspects are non-Arabic converts to Islam (one is from Guyana, South America, who took an Arabic name, "Abdul Kadir"; the other is named "Russell Defreitas" which sounds like a Hispanic type name, and indeed, as we see in this profile of someone else named "De Freitas", may well have hailed from Guyana himself -- and note that while he looks vaguely ethnic, he is decidedly non-black, while Abdul Kadir in the BBC report is black).

And: one of them was age 55 at the time of the plot, and the other was age 57.

So much for "young Arab" terrorists -- even if 50s are the new 30s.