Clueless Leftist M.O.: Imagine There's No Jihad...

...and, if you have sufficient chutzpah and a flair for the ridiculous, you could always play the Timothy McVeigh card, as a Slate writer named Shankar Vedantam does here in making the case, or so he thinks, for the non-correlation between Islam and terrorism:

...The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were unusual. In seeking explanations for those events, our minds are drawn to other unusual things linked to them -- especially at the group level. When members of a minority group are associated with a series of unusual incidents, our minds inflate the connection between the two. As with the snake and the tree, our association is not limited to the particular members of the minority group but all members of the group.

Juan Williams pointed out on Fox that we do not associate Timothy Mc-Veigh and the rude people who protest about homosexuality at military funerals with Christianity. But he didn't understand why our minds fail to make that connection. Illusory correlations disproportionately afflict minorities because, in making associations, we mainly link unlikely events. Whites and Christians are not minorities; they are like the newspaper delivered to our front door every day. We do not associate McVeigh with Christians any more than we associate our upset stomach with the newspaper.

Muslims are only the latest victim of illusory correlations in the United States. African-Americans have long suffered the same bias when it comes to crime. In every country on Earth, you can find minority groups that get tagged with various pathologies for no better reason than that the pathologies are unusual and the minorities are minorities.

Whenever people who strongly believe in illusory correlations are challenged about their beliefs, they invariably find ways to make their behaviour seem conscious and rational...

Oh, you mean like researching Islamic teachings and history and hearing--really hearing--Osama bin Laden and Turkish flotilla "humanitarians" and other Muslim supremacists when they mention and draw inspiration from those things? Yeah, that's, like, cr-a-a-a-a-zy!