TERROR DOUBLE STANDARD
SUDDENLY, words do count to the Left, after all. Suddenly, it’s never too soon to link those words to terrorism. Take the ABC, which instantly joined in blaming US President Donald Trump for pipe bombs mailed to some of his critics, including CNN and Hillary Clinton.
Even before the bomber was identified, the ABC gleefully reported “suggestions that Mr Trump’s inflammatory comments may have incited the attacks”. As one ABC headline put it: “Donald Trump’s words mattered in a week in which bombs were sent to Democrats, CNN.”
Yes, Trump’s heated rejection of untruths spread by Clinton and the “fake news media” was to blame for a lone crazy mailing pipe bombs.
As it turned out, the suspect had made bomb threats since 2002, 14 years before Trump was elected president.
Now contrast and compare. While the ABC is hair-trigger quick to link Trump’s words to one nutter’s terrorism, it’s deeply reluctant to link the words of many Islamist terrorists to even their own crimes. In 2009, for example, US army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, a known Muslim hothead, shot dead 13 soldiers at Fort Hood as he shouted “Allah is great”.
But in its first substantial radio report of the massacre, the ABC failed to note Nidal’s faith even once.
Same after the 2013 Boston bombing. The first report on the ABC’s AM program didn’t once mention “Muslim”, though it was already known the two Chechen terrorists were Muslim, and the elder had videos of Islamist terrorists on his Facebook site.
This contrast does more than show how insanely hostile the mainstream media is to Trump. More seriously, it shows how unwilling it is to discuss any link between Islam and terrorism, or other dysfunction.
That was a worry even before a disturbing decision last week by the European Court of Human Rights.
We’ve already seen world leaders claim after the September 11 attacks, the Paris massacre and other horrific Islamist terrorism that these had “nothing to do with Islam”.
Yet there is undoubtedly some link, even if most Muslims reject it.
That’s why the Islamic State, in its infamous statement ordering Muslims around the world to kill unbelievers, could quote holy scripture at least 25 times in support, including this, from the Koran: “Kill the polytheists wherever you find them.”
But the Koran and the Hadith — the sayings of the Prophet — also have other disturbing passages that may cast light on some sickening crimes.
In Britain last week, 20 men from Huddersfield — Muslims, plus a couple of Sikhs — were jailed for raping girls as young as 11. Other mainly Muslim rape gangs have preyed on girls in at least 13 other British towns, including Rochdale, Telford and particularly Rotherham, where an estimated 1400 children were sexually abused.
How to explain such abuse of young girls by so many men of such similar cultural background? Is there something in Islam, perhaps, that may be interpreted by some men as an excuse?
Most Muslims would deny that strongly.
Yet in Austria, teacher and anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff gave a lecture on passages in the Hadith that declare the Prophet Muhammed married his favourite wife, Aisha, when she was just six, and slept with her when she was nine and he in his 50s. Sabaditsch-Wolff asked: “What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?”
This seems to me an important discussion, particularly for Muslims wanting to reform their faith. Indeed, reformist scholars now suggest Aisha was much older than believed.
But Sabaditsch-Wolff was fined for disparaging Islam, and the European Court of Human Rights last week dismissed her appeal, ruling that Muhammed could not be called a paedophile despite sleeping with a nineyear-old: he’d had many adult wives, so wasn’t primarily attracted to children.
Having “proved” Sabaditsch-Wolff’s description false, the court said it “could only be understood as having been aimed at demonstrating that Muhammed was not worthy of worship”. And that was illegal.
For a court to declare it a crime to suggest “Muhammed was not worthy of worship”, even after having had sex with a nine-year-old, is not just a ludicrous restriction of free speech, but dangerous.
For one, Europeans now cannot freely debate the bad example Muhammed’s alleged behaviour may set to followers today.
But, naturally, the ABC ignored this case and that potential link.
Far safer to spuriously link Trump with terrorism instead.