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“Nothing to do with Islam.”
That’s what our political leaders keep telling us when radical Muslims enslave, rape, crucify, behead, and otherwise slaughter people by the thousands all over the world. It has nothing to do with Islam.
Teaching in public school a few years ago, I showed students pictures of burning cars in France. French media said it was exuberant “youths” torching the cars — well over a thousand vehicles in one night. NBC News also called them “youths.” French and American media both averted their eyes from the plain truth that youths burning cars all over France were Muslim.
Reuters said only 1137 cars were burned on New Year’s Eve in 2009, while 1147 had been torched the year before. Responding to what it called, “another wave of reader complaints that we don’t brand these arsonists as Muslims,” Reuters explained: “Sure, there were Muslims among them — but there were non-Muslims as well. What value do we add to a news story by using a questionable religious label to describe a political and socio-economic phenomenon?” Nothing to do with Islam. The arsonists were victims of western capitalist greed, they suggest.
When my students asked why media refused to call the “youths” Muslims, I told them it went against their cherished concept of “Multiculturalism.” They looked at me with blank faces, having no idea what multiculturalism was. I told them to look it up on their laptops.
Some recited the Wikipedia definition, which said: “Multiculturalism refers to the historical evolution of cultural diversity within a jurisdiction, incarnated by its selection policies and institutionalized by its settlement policies.”
“Okay now?” I said. That should clear it up.” Some laughed. Most remained confused.
“Countries in Europe have formed into something called the ‘European Union,’” I explained, “kind of a United States of Europe. Elite EU leaders made ‘multiculturalism’ one of their founding principles, and it basically means that all cultures are equal. No culture or religion is any better or any worse than any other. They’re all the same.”
Then I explained how Muslim imams were like priests of Islam, and when many encouraged Muslims in the mosques to kill the rest of us, that made it hard for European leaders to continue insisting that Islam was no worse than any other religion. So what do European leaders do in the face of Muslim violence? “They pretend it isn’t happening, that’s what. Don’t call the arsonists Muslims. They’re just ‘youths’ getting a little rambunctious.”
Then I showed them media accounts of how radical Muslim US Army Colonel Nidal Hasan shot forty-three American soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I told them Obama Administration officials insisted the shootings had nothing to do with Islam. The president said: “Well, look, we -- we have seen, in the past, rampages of this sort. And in a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable.”
I told them how the Pentagon investigated and published an 86-page report that never mentioned jihad, Muslim, Islam, or Koran. My students knew what all those words meant. Ultimately Obama’s Department of Homeland Security explained the Fort Hood shooting as “Workplace violence.”
Nothing to do with Islam.
Muslims believe Mohammed was “The Prophet” of Islam and the “Hadith” is an ancient record of Mohammed’s sayings, secondary only to the Koran. The Hadith prohibits making images of Mohammed. Radical Muslims kill people who draw cartoons of Mohammed, but President Obama and socialist French President Hollande insist those killings have nothing to do with Islam.
When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) murders thousands of Iraqis and Syrians in the name of Islam, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, and Attorney General Eric Holder maintain it has nothing to do with Islam. When Islamic terrorists from al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and al Shebaab torture and murder thousands of people across Africa and the Middle East in the name of Islam, our leaders assert it has nothing to do with Islam.
When the Koran, the holy book of Islam, instructs Muslims: “…cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them,” it has nothing to do with Islam. So what if there are over 100 sections of the Koran encouraging followers to commit violence against non-believers? If our leaders are right, we must conclude that the Koran has nothing to do with Islam.
Get it? The teachings of Mohammed — the Prophet of Islam, the teachings in the Koran — the holy book of Islam, the teachings of imams in the mosques of Islam, and the actions of millions of Muslims around the world — have nothing to do with Islam.
Islam is a religion of peace. If not, multiculturalism would be seen as a fraud, and we can’t have that.
21 comments:
Tom: You have hit the nail squarely on the head once more. How long will the media throughout the world persist in their denial of what is patently obvious?
If you didn't like this column, you're going to hate my book.
Sign me up for your book
OK, fairly good explanation, with citations, of "The A B Cs" concerning this "new" phenomenon.
When do you get to the part about
"Well, it's complicated!!"?
Oh, wait.....
I don't "endorse" it, other than my ex libris, as ONE "source" granted a "stay" from a recent culling of an astonishing amount of multi subject dreck
from MY personal library:
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an
Islam and the (US) Founders
(associate professor)Denise A. Spellberg 2013
Knopf. 978-0-307-26822-8
CaptDMO
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/27/quotes-of-the-day-1980/comment-page-2/#comment-9091599
From a Hot Air comments entry.
Kinda' long list of citations.
I apologize if there's no auto-hyperlink here!
CaptDMO
Don't you really admire the bravery shown by the Anonymous-s here? They hide behind their screen-names like ISIS savages behind their masks, even believing that juvenile swearing makes their silly comments more .. um .. relevant. Quoting Bobby Jindal, well known southern racist and hate monger, from 1/27/15:
“One of the great things about America is it doesn’t matter if you’ve been here five minutes or a hundred years, we have folks that come here, want to be Americans. They join our military, they start companies, they work to create a better community. And that’s wonderful. What’s not acceptable is people that want to come and conquer us. That’s not immigration, by the way, that’s colonization. If someone wants to come here and change our fundamental culture and our values. If they want to come here and they want to set up their own culture and values that’s not immigration, that’s really invasion — if you’re honest about it."
It's amazing how many Americans have dropped all pretense of honesty.
Hi Tom,
Well done! I posted a link on https://www.facebook.com/FryeburgFriends
Mike Corthell, Editor
Fryeburg Free Press MEDIA
Fox News sheep neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. Many terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who were neither Muslims nor dark-skinned.
When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who had long histories of networking with other terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.
Below are 10 of the worst examples of non-Islamic terrorism that have occurred in the United States in the last 30 years.
1. Wisconsin Sikh Temple massacre, Aug. 5, 2012. The virulent, neocon-fueled Islamophobia that has plagued post-9/11 America has not only posed a threat to Muslims, it has had deadly consequences for people of other faiths, including Sikhs. But to a racist, a bearded Sikh looks like a Muslim. On Aug. 5, 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page used a semiautomatic weapon to murder six people during an attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page’s connection to the white supremacist movement was well-documented: he had been a member of the neo-Nazi rock bands End Empathy and Definite Hate. Attorney General Eric Holder described the attack as “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred.” It was good to see the nation’s top cop acknowledge that terrorist acts can, in fact, involve white males murdering people of color.
2. The murder of Dr. George Tiller, May 31, 2009. Imagine that a physician had been the victim of an attempted assassination by an Islamic jihadist in 1993, and received numerous death threats from al-Qaeda after that, before being murdered by an al-Qaeda member. Neocons, Fox News and the Christian Right would have had a field day. A physician was the victim of a terrorist killing that day, but neither the terrorist nor the people who inflamed the terrorist were Muslims. Dr. George Tiller, who was shot and killed by anti-abortion terrorist Scott Roeder on May 31, 2009, was a victim of Christian Right terrorism, not al-Qaeda.
3. Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church shooting, July 27, 2008. On July 27, 2008, Christian Right sympathizer Jim David Adkisson walked into the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee during a children’s play and began shooting people at random. Two were killed, while seven others were injured but survived. Adkisson said he was motivated by a hatred of liberals, Democrats and gays.
4. The murder of Dr. John Britton, July 29, 1994. To hear the Christian Right tell it, there is no such thing as Christian terrorism. Tell that to the victims of the Army of God, a loose network of radical Christianists with a long history of terrorist attacks on abortion providers. One Christian Right terrorist with ties to the Army of God was Paul Jennings Hill, who was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 3, 2003 for the murders of abortion doctor John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett. Hill shot both of them in cold blood and expressed no remorse whatsoever; he insisted he was doing’s God’s work and has been exalted as a martyr by the Army of God.
Too much Christian terrorism for one post....to be continued...
Christianity obviously has nothing to do with Christianity.
Ah, poor Tom, once agin caught in the trap of having his die hard beliefs not backed up by reality. Just like with global warming, the evidence just ain’t with you, pal.
In the Boston Marathon year of 2013 you were more likely to die by getting shot by a toddler (5 deaths), then by an Islamic terrorist (3 deaths) in the USA. How about around the world?
According to the European Union Police Office, or Europol, the percentage of terror attacks motivated by religious extremism within the EU over the last five years is very small, somewhere south of 2 percent]; and the number in the United States is only slightly larger.
And if you don’t trust Europol, check out the CIA statistics at:
“All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 94% that Aren’t”
Open up the old closed mind, Tom. Join reality.
Racism trumps facts every time.
Oh, I see Tom. THe CIA and the rest of the world do not give facts that fit your narrow, closed mind so they must be all wrong. Got ya, little genius man! If you say Muslims are what is wrong with the world, who is to argue with you? As a matter of fact, the burger I got last night was way overcooked. Damned Muslims!
Now back to your "book". I'm sure it will be as funny as Colberts "I am America…".
Ignorance Trumps ALL!!!
It never fails…when Tom gets blasted by reality and has no rational argument at all, he suddenly get's "busy" and has to work on his book.
Hee hee.
Democrat Tourette's symptoms on display above: "Racism! Racism!"
They can't help it. It's a disease.
No Tom, the disease is racism itself.
But the REAL disease is ignoring facts and reality that go against what you want to believe. A disease of little men.
"Democrat Tourette's symptoms.."?
Disagree.
But they ARE symptoms of folks whose maladies have been outlined by the APA, (often "revised" to ameliorate "less than perfect" egos and ids), and "observed" by
writers of stories for 'children" (Aesop, Grimm, et al.), and "humor" thinly veiled as social commentary (Shakespeare, Chaucer, et al.) LONG before "gets along with others" was a check box on (previously voluntary)kindergarten report cards.
It's just that the only "party" such folk can find solace HAPPENS to be the Democrat one.
"History" has shown us the "promises" put fourth by such folks to address and "repair" the issues exacerbated by the "solutions" of their "like minded" predecessors.
I suspect that is was NOT "progressives", of the era's "Can't we all just get along", and subsequent "Oh, but not in MY back yard" (Bell on the cat"?) that actually donned the uniform of armor and a Maltese Cross surcoat, nor the original US Marine Corp.
ALWAYS the "tell", Strawman, ad homonym, non sequitur, (OK, I'm bad with that too), and egregious malapropism "defended" as "useage".
FAR more generous of you, than I, to tolerate it. Suitability and character for years of (actual)repeated classroom patience with adolescent minds I suspect.
Keep hammerin'
CaptDMO
Do you read the articles you link? In order to prove the media is sanitizing Muslim references from their reporting, you have to show proof that Muslims accounted for the majority of the arsons, and none of the articles do that.
The second Reuters article you linked and an article linked to it explain why Muslims weren’t identified. “We mention race and religion in Reuters news stories when they are relevant to the event being covered.
When Muslims marched in Paris demanding the end to a ban on headscarves in public schools, we called them Muslim protesters. When French Muslim Council members speak out on an issue, we call them Muslim leaders. These people are speaking as Muslims, so we identify them as such. They also have other identities — they may be French or foreign citizens, male or female, football fans or music lovers — but these other identities would be irrelevant to a story about Muslim issues. Young men, often hooded, roamed the suburbs at night and firebombed cars, dumpsters and a library. They did not shout Muslim demands, spray Muslim graffiti or wear the trademark beards and baggy pants of a salafi. They did not gather at mosques or shout ‘Allah-o-akbar!’ They avoided journalists, presumably seeing them as part of ‘the system’ that they oppose, and made no demands related to Islam. When those detained were questioned by police, they were not asked about their religion or ethnic identity — that’s not allowed in France.”
“The idea that we want to ‘protect’ Muslims from bad publicity hardly holds water when you go back through some stories and posts the Paris bureau has done. On this blog alone, we’ve had posts about a French Muslim football team refusing to play gays, the problem of forced marriages in the Muslim community, a Muslim man who divorced his new wife for not being a virgin, the failures of the French Muslim Council or cases when Muslim men forbid doctors to treat their wives. If the Muslim angle is relevant, we mention it.”
You wrote “The arsonists were victims of western capitalist greed, they suggest.” Are you referring to the estimate that 20% of the car fires were started by gangs who were paid to light them so the owners could collect the insurance claim? That doesn’t make them victims, and the author didn’t suggest that. That’s your own creative interpretation.
Political opportunists mischaracterized the government’s report on the Fort Hood massacre since its publication. The purpose of the report was to educate those in the military of the signs of a soldier’s evolving radicalization. A soldier can be radicalized to any end. Timothy McVeigh taught us that. The report doesn’t mention Islam once, but references “radical” and “radicalization” 24 times. Hassan isn’t mentioned by name, but rather as the alleged perpetrator. The report was written to identify common signs of disaffected soldiers who might have a growing penchant for violence. It’s in the title of the report, “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.”
Esquire magazine published a substantial article in the wake of the shooting. While violent crime is up 22% in Kileen, TX, home to Fort Hood – the largest base in the U.S. – crime is down 7% in towns comparable in size. Crimes include soldier suicide, killing other soldiers and a 75% increase in domestic violence since 2001.
The Military had a choice of using the report as a learning manual to help identify those who might become violent or turn it into an 86-page screed against radical Islam that would have accomplished nothing. They made the smarter choice.
Hmmmm, seems Tom has no response to a rational post like Steve's. Not surprising. When trapped Tom is one who silently cowers in surrender.
It was nice to see Tom get ripped and exposed for a fraud by Peter Hustons letter to the Daily Sun yesterday! He made a great point about Chicken Littles who run around squacking about an issue that causes WAY, WAY few lives than alcohol or gun deaths (hmmm, why so silent about that?). As Peter said:
"Why do conservatives always play right into the enemies hands? You want to give terrorists the credence they seek? I'm glad Obama is too smart for that."
They are playing Tom like a fiddle though.
But I bet you cheered like a true believer when Tim McVeigh blew up a federal building. And I bet you said a prayer of thanksgiving when adkisson attacked the unitarian church. Bet you and son black have some great conversations as well. Have you started a chapter of the covenant,sword and arm of the lord? Or is membership in the order enough for you?
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