I left Boston to attend the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado where some 100 panelists gather annually to engage in what the late film critic Roger Ebert dubbed an event where speakers discussed “everything conceivable.” Ebert attended the conference for over 40 years. Over the years I have been on panels where we discussed how demagogues turn the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into warring factions by creating fanatic warriors. We are all the “people of the book” who are in these, the Abrahamic religions.

At the conference I spoke with other panelists in informal settings about how a small number of Islamic demagogues were using apocalyptic narratives to lure young Muslims into the role of terrorist. We agreed that more research was needed, but that the outlines of how it is done were drawn decades ago by scholars such as Arendt and Allport.

Demagogic rhetoric and conspiracy theories that name a scapegoat makes heroes of those who take violent action to preserve the “Us” against “Them.” This is what generates much terrorist violence, including in the United States the bombing of reproductive health centers by a tiny handful of Christians; and the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building by a dominant neonazi named Timothy McVeigh and a hapless subordinate Militia devotee named Terry Nichols. They were brothers in arms, one following the other.

After the bombing I was CNN’s expert on the movements from which McVeigh and Nichols emerged. I was later subpoenaed in the trial of Nichols by his defense team to counter a government witness who could not tell the difference between a McVeigh, an ardent neonazi and Nichols, a reluctant part of the “Patriot” movement who turned himself into police in horror because he thought the federal building was to be bombed at night.

It saddens me to see the major media ignoring the history of the Holocaust and the reality of terrorism in the United States in their rush to simultaneously sensationalize and trivialize the possible motives of the named suspects. First it was dark-skinned perpetrators, then a young innocent Saudi student.

Now on right-wing media such as Fox News vile bigotry feeds an Islamophobic frenzy. Yet the liberal media are doing no better with their glib dismissal of religion as a factor and resuscitation of outdated social science theories about maladjusted youth and juvenile delinquency.

Just outside Boston is the headquarters of the human rights curriculum Facing History and Ourselves. Journalists apparently need a refresher course. Their website notes that April is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. They describe their mission:

For more than 30 years, Facing History has believed that education is the key to combating bigotry and nurturing democracy. Through a rigorous investigation of the events that led to the Holocaust, as well as other recent examples of genocide and mass violence, students in a Facing History class learn to combat prejudice with compassion, indifference with participation, and myth and misinformation with knowledge.

Most journalists apparently need a refresher course.

It is increasingly clear the suspects in this case—one now dead—were influenced in one way or another by a marginal demagogic and apocalyptic version of Islam that allowed them to construct their identity as heroes with a Godly mission.

At some point I hope that mainstream journalists wake up to the fact that there is ample social science research to explain this process of mobilization and recruitment. Members of the section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements of the American Sociological Association have devoted whole careers to studying the dynamics.

When the preening talking bobble-heads have run out of gas, give a real scholar a call, and give some attention to what leads to events such as the genocides in Armenia, Germany, and Cambodia.

The bombing in Boston was horrific. If we fail to learn the dynamics of what happened at the Boston Marathon, we open the door to much more horrific outcomes.