by Bob Collins
Friday, April 24, 2015
On today’s Star Tribune op-ed page, former senator Norm Coleman took a one-sentence point — we need to figure out how people get so disaffected here that joining a terrorist organization seems like a logical choice — and expanded it to several paragraphs that offered no significant roadmap for doing so.
Coleman took a veiled shot at Gov. Mark Dayton, who said essentially the same thing on Wednesday that Coleman wrote today.
“I think we need to do a better job, all of us, in providing a lot of good reasons for young Somali youth to see their better future here in Minnesota,” Dayton said on Tuesday.
But it’s the headline of the piece that’s particularly shocking, one that presumably wasn’t written by Coleman.
It’s a familiar construct. Who hasn’t seen some variation of the “Land of 10,000″ cliche before?
But by using it against a smaller headline linking Somalis with terrorism, it suggests that thousands of Somalis here are potential terrorists. That, coupled with Coleman’s lack of substance, delivers an offensive — and we hope: unintended — message.
“We’re certainly not the villains many of you make us out to be,” a Somali commenter on Coleman’s op-ed said.
While Coleman is correct — we have to understand what attracts people to terrorism — the headline provides the worst possible innuendo: “because they’re Somalis.”
Coincidentally, on an opposite page, a letter to the editor offers a better starting point for the discussion in a fraction of the number of words.
That letter responded to one yesterday, which in turn was responding to Gov. Dayton’s comments in the aftermath of the arrests of six people in a federal terrorism probe on Monday.
Coleman recommended a task force study the situation, hardly an innovative idea.