To the editor, The Oregonian



Susan Nielsen raises a very important question but fails to answer it adequately. She asks why an actual bomb that kills two lawmen is perceived by the public as a simple bank job when carried out by a white middle-aged far right ideologue and his patsy son.



In the other case, a FBI fake bombing in which the only violence is visited on innocent Muslims as a consequence of the story is perceived as another scary terrorist plot.when the FBI finds a foreign-born teenage Muslim to carry out their scheme. For Nielsen, the answer is "just human" [nature?].



Really? Then on what do humans rely to form those perceptions? Better look to how the media--including The Oregonian—present the two "Oregon bombs,"one real, the other fake. The Woodburn murders are not covered as a terrorist bombing trial of a because a county prosecutor choose to downplay the ideology of the defendants. But the Christmas tree non-bomb is reported as a federal level terrorist plot against thousands of innocent Oregonians by a Muslim jihadist brainwashed by foreign websites.



Perhaps the larger reason the Woodburn bombers are not depicted as terrorists is because their ideology actually reflects that of a significant minority of American opinion which the media and the prosecutor cannot afford to challenge, while the foreign born Muslim fits the media-constructed symbol of a marginalized but frightening "enemy" perfectly.



Michael Munk