Wow! The Washington Post has identified “rabble-rousing outsiders!” I haven’t heard language like that since southern segregationists complained about civil rights activists descending on Mississippi. So who are these interlopers stirring up the unwashed masses? It’s anyone who dares criticize plans for an Islamic center near Ground Zero in Manhattan. According to reporter Jason Horowitz, New Yorkers take a “dim view” of them.
Horowitz informs us that the planned Islamic center has become “the prime target of national conservatives who, after years of disparaging New York as a hotbed of liberal activity, are defending New York against a mosque that will rise two city blocks from Ground Zero.” The hypocrisy! Have they no shame?
Horowitz interviews Ali Mohammed who sells “falafel over rice” in the besieged neighborhood. Opponents of the project, he says, “got nothing to do with New York and they don’t care about New York.”
Horowitz also interviews Oz Sultan, a spokesman for the project, who sings from the same hymnal: “The people behind this (Islamic center) are New Yorkers. These are local yokels.” How does that square with Sultan’s refusal to rule out the possibility that funds for this $100 million project may be raised in Saudi Arabia and Iran? Horowitz does not even ask.
A Washington Post interview with Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, key organizer of the project, is headlined: “When Will Muslims Be Accepted?” The veteran journalist Sally Quinn asks Khan nothing about the project’s funding, nothing about the Imam’s past statements regarding 9/11 (American policies were an “accessory”), Osama bin Laden (“made in America”), Hamas (the Imam would prefer not to characterize the group), terrorism (“complex”).
A Time magazine cover story titled “Is America Islamophobic?” asserts that “many opponents” of the Islamic center “are motivated by deep-seated Islamophobia.” The evidence? A poll that finds 46 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers.
Why would anyone think that? Could it have something to do with the fact that there have been thousands of terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam since 9/11/01? Just last month, Time had on its cover the photograph of an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears were sliced off by members of the Taliban because she had violated Islamic religious law by “running away from her husband’s house.” The word “Taliban” means “the students.” Of what? Of Islam.
Let’s say it one more time loudly for the media moguls in the cheap seats: Most Muslims are not terrorists. But in the 21st century, most of those slaughtering women and children in the name of religion are Muslims. This is a problem. It ought to be seen by Muslims as very much their problem – a pathology within their community, within the “Muslim world.”
Instead, the most powerful Islamic organizations – often financed by oil money from the Middle East – incessantly play the victim card. Khan tells ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that in America, it’s “beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims.” Time encourages this grievance mentality by asserting that “to be a Muslim in America now is to endure slings and arrows against your faith … some of the country’s most powerful mainstream religious and political leaders unthinkingly (or worse, deliberately) conflate Islam with terrorism and savagery.”
No, what they conflate with terrorism and savagery are al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Shabaab, Abu Sayyef, Fatah Al-Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood and dozens of other groups that justify their terrorism and savagery based on their interpretation of Islamic doctrine.
Many religious and political leaders would like to hear more of their Muslim neighbors say plainly: “Not in my name! Not in the name of my religion!” They are distressed when they learn – not through the mainstream media – that Rauf has said instead: “The United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda.”
He said that when he was still answering questions. In recent weeks, he has been “unavailable.” Time does not criticize him as they would any non-Muslim who declined comment for a cover story. Instead, Time excuses him, saying he seems to have been “stunned into paralysis” by the unfairness of it all.
Is this moral posturing or self-delusion or just more multicultural media mush? Whatever the cause, it is madness. No wonder the rabble is becoming roused – with our without the help of those pesky outsiders.
WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@ocregister.com. Please provide your name and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published). Letters of about 200 words will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.
