The west including its governments have not attributed a major attack to Islamic Terror which turned out on further evidence to not be Islamic Terror.
I'm not sure whether that statement is true in that form.
Glenn Greenwald on democracy now:
And so you have a lot of them who work at think tanks, like Brookings Institute, which employs Will McCants, who misled American media outlets into believing for a full day and then telling the world that the Anders Breivik attack in Norway was actually the work of a jihadist group.
FBI informants also pay Muslims money to commit terrorist acts to them imprison them before the actual act.
More controversially there an embassy bombing in London about which Annie Machon:
This brings to my mind the appalling miscarriage of justice that occurred in the 1990s when two Palestinian students, a young woman called Samar Alami and a young man called Jawad Botmeh, were both wrongfully convicted of conspiracy to bomb the Israeli embassy in London in July 1994.
But in this case we have more than just Western sources, we also have al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claim responsibility.
The Anders Brevik thing is interesting. That the west got the story correct within about 24 hours in my opinion leaves my point largely intact. Particularly in that I am opposing my point to the idea expressed by the Turkish president that the Charlie Hebdo attack was perpetrated by Israeli's trying to make the Muslims look bad, or the claims soon after 9/11 that 9/11 was either Israeli's or was a lie or whatever. One guy at the Brookings institution getting it wrong for one day, I'm happy to agree that my statement could be modified to something like &...
After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?