The mainstream media are closing ranks on the Ground Zero mosque, no kidding. It's got to happen as far as they're concerned, and no insult is too extravagant for opponents.
Time asks, "Is America Islamophobic?" The New York Times's Frank Rich blames mosque resistance on Rupert Murdoch's "Islamophobia command center." The New York Daily News: "Scary fanatics." The Los Angeles Times, in a supposed news article — "reporting from Beirut" — worries:
The heated debate across America over construction of the so-called ground zero mosque is reverberating across the globe, with the potential of creating a worldwide black eye for the United States. …
Many Muslims tuning in to the debate see a demonization of their religion by some Americans, who have been painting the 1,400-year-old faith as a dangerous political ideology. They bristle at the ignorance of politicians who argue that the structure should not be allowed because Muslims don't allow churches in their countries. Despite tensions between Christians and Muslims in some countries, Saudi Arabia is the only country to specifically bar churches.
Muslims worry that the campaign has become caught up in the same racially tinged clash-of-civilizations campaigns to ban Muslim women in France from wearing Islamic garb or Muslims in Switzerland to build minarets on their houses of worship.Demonization. Ignorance. And, of course, "racially tinged." Even Americans who don't (yet) know what dhimmitude means might sense that something is wrong when a major American newspaper appears to be following the party line of Middle Eastern Muslims.
However, if you want to plumb the absolute depths of the Pravda-like media, the utter lunacy, the desperate overreaching … I give you Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times.
Kristof is here to tell you that if you oppose the Ground Zero mosque, you are supporting Osama bin Laden.
Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world’s English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition to the community center and mosque to try to recruit more terrorists.
There is an old song with the lyrics, "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets." That's like the position of the bien-pensants of our degraded mass media concerning Islam. If they want it, they must have it, otherwise all the "moderate" Muslims will turn against us, and the "extremists" will win their souls.
The second misconception underlying this debate is that Islam is an inherently war-like religion that drives believers to terrorism. Sure, the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent, and mullahs sometimes cite the Koran to incite murder. But don’t forget that the worst brutality in the Middle East has often been committed by more secular rulers, like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. And the mastermind of the 1970 Palestinian airline hijackings, George Habash, was a Christian.No, Islam is an aggressive political system inseparable from its religious component, whose followers assume its unique legitimacy. It drives some believers to terrorism; other believers simply want to win through colonization, legitimizing sharia law, and high birth rates. Nobody claims Islam is the only cause of violence in the world, but that is a mighty poor excuse for promoting the reach of the most intolerant of faiths.
Kristof concludes: "Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it."
May I suggest that America's mass media are promoting a paranoid intolerance of many Americans' quite reasonable suspicions about Muslim expansion. It will be interesting to see if this is what enables Americans finally to cast off the Leftist Establishment propaganda machine for good. One thing you can be pretty sure of: Nicholas Kristof will never be ashamed. After all, he speaks through the New York Times.
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Kristof wrote of bin Laden:
"He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism."
Do these Muslim clerics somehow possess the ability to get blood out of a rock?
Hilarious. And yet in all likelihood Kristof and his ilk probably sincerely believe that flyover country is full of crazed fundie Christians who would unleash an orgy of blood-letting but for the unceasing desperate efforts of their superior selves to flood the zone with 24/7 "religion of peace" bleatings. And yet, at the same time they insult these same alleged hair-trigger psychos day-in, day-out with no apparent fear for their own safety.
I don't think they're being disingenuous; I think they're completely sincere. I doubt they could make any sense even to themselves if called upon to organize their beliefs into a consistent, non-contradictory package. So they just become crazier and more Antoinette-ish by the day.
One strand of the liberal guy wire dictates that there shall be no designation of the enemy. This seems to be an outgrowth of the "power of attraction" principle, which has it merits but also its limitations.
Modern liberalism itself is perhaps the West's worst enemy since it forbids the spectre of self defense or protection- except against Bible-thumping, gun-toting Christian whites, either alone or in any combination.
"Despite tensions between Christians and Muslims in some countries, Saudi Arabia is the only country to specifically bar churches." So then, I suppose it would be OK if Mississippi were the only state that forbade blacks to sit at lunch counters?
-Jas
Possible headlines:
MSM to America: Drop Dead
Media to Patriotic Americans: We Hate You, We Really Hate you!
As for Kristof, as loopy as what he said was, he is actually by far the best op-ed columnist the Times has to offer. While his colleagues all write predictable boilerplate, he sometimes writes something that will surprise you, in a good way.
The New York Times's Frank Rich blames mosque resistance on Rupert Murdoch's "Islamophobia command center."
One wonders if this is the same "Islamophobia command center" that is partially owned by the House of Saud.
Despite tensions between Christians and Muslims in some countries...
Despite tensions between Bolsheviks and kulaks in some countries...
At the time of 9/11, I wrote that 9/11, far from being a disaster for Islam, would turn out to be a publicity coup for it. So it turned out.
We are now in a similar situation. If the GZM proponents win their case, and build the mosque, it would be seen in the wider Islamic world, that allah had yet again granted a tremendous victory to Muslims. If OTH, the said mosque has to shift its location, or is cancelled altogether, then CAIR and all the other Islamic groups will be crying "foul", and seeking sympathy - Islam is being victimized.
Either way, this crisis is going to be milked for all it’s got.
The real aim of the controversy though, like 9/11 itself, is to keep Islam right up there on the national and international agenda, i.e., making Islam preeminent, and the focus for all attention. Obama, willingly or unwittingly, has made this objective a reality, turning a NY city issue to an international one.
The more this controversy rages and polarises the America people, the greater a publicity disaster for the West this, and great propaganda boost for Islam.
It would appear that we are going to lose this battle either way. Not necessarily so. What some of the opponents have to do, is to seize this opportunity to tell the truth about Islam. That is, use the propaganda opportunity that has been created by Islamists to defeat their real purpose, of publicising for Islam – not just stop it but turn it against Islam. If some of the opponents can do this, the GZM proponents will themselves halt the controversy.
Repeat. The GMZ controversy is not about the GMZ mosque, or even the triumphalist proclamation of Islam on the site of its first North American victory, but an opportunity for keeping Islam preeminent in the public eye. That is always the objective for all Muslims, Always. Obama may backtrack now, but that is not the point. He has succeeded in raising the profile of Islam to the highest international level, which was never there in the first place. He can now withdraw his comments, as his main purpose has been accomplished.
The best way forward is to seize the opportunity that the GMZ proponents have created to raise Islam, and use it to expose the reality of Islam. As they say, "never let a crisis go to waste". Glad to see that the crisis opportunity is not being wasted.
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