All Muslims should not be blamed for terrorist attacks perpetrated by radical Islamic extremists, a Vox reporter wrote in a Thursday article.
Trump “feels that the whole of Islam, collectively, is a threat to the United States and the West,” Vox writer Brian Resnick wote. “All Muslims are often blamed for single acts of terror. Psychology explains how to stop it.”
He cites the psychological theory of “collective blame” to infer that Trump and much of society are acting on a psychological impulse to blame a whole group of people for the actions of a few.
The Vox writer references Fox News Channel chairman Rupert Murdoch’s tweet from 2015 that says, “Maybe most [Muslims are] peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.” Murdoch tweeted this after the 2015 ISIS terrorist attack in France.
“There’s nothing logical about condemning millions of people — who are spread across the globe and are unrelated to each other except by religious tradition — for the actions of a few,” Resnick wrote.
Resnick mentions killer Dylann Roof, who killed nine black people in a Westboro Baptist Church in 2015, and wrote that society doesn’t blame Christians for the act of violence.
Roof was a white supremacist and wrote that he killed the church goers because they were black. Authorities also had pictures of Roof holding a confederate flag before the time of the shooting.
Resnick points to a group of experiments that concluded collective blame is related to dehumanization and revenge. “If you collectively blame an entire group for the actions of individuals, it makes it totally reasonable to exact your revenge from any person from that group,” said researcher Emile Bruneau, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Vox writer did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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