Ignoring the obvious on terrorism
Given the frequency of violent outbursts by people waving Korans or yelling “Allahu akbar!” the news media have an ongoing need for a Muslim point of view. A need for someone who can help confuse the issue, offer an Islamic alibi.
That role invariably falls to CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. The slick outfit describes itself as the nation’s leading Muslim “civil rights organization.”
Check out CAIR’s propaganda fare. You’ll see that the United States is teeming with “Islamophobes,” with bigots who spend their days plotting ways to make life miserable for Muslims. America, in CAIR’s view, is overrun with people of ill will ignorant of Islam’s true, peaceful tenets.
You might wonder why, then, CAIR doesn’t devote its resources to warning would-be Muslim immigrants away from the American hell hole. And to helping those already here resettle in jurisdictions more friendly to Islam. Saudi Arabia, say, reportedly a major source of CAIR’s finances. Or the Islamic Republic of Iran, if a taste of Shia rule is preferred to Sunni.
But CAIR seems to regard America, despite the nation’s widespread oafish hostility, as nevertheless amenable to reform. It keeps up its Sisyphean labors of chronicling and condemning America’s cruel mistreatment of Muslims.
So when CNN or The Associated Press needs Muslim input on the latest bloodletting, CAIR’s the go-to source. CAIR will explain for you that, no matter what the facts are in a particular incident, the incident had nothing to do with Islam.
And only an Islamophobe would think so.
It’s one of the great, baffling mysteries of politics (or maybe psychology) that liberals remain vigilant to the point of paranoia regarding the suspected subversive agendas of evangelical Christians but indifferent to the harsh doctrinal importunities of Islam. Consider:
• Islamic jurisdictions doctrinally incorporate the most savagely truculent forms of capital punishment now practiced anywhere on earth. Abolishing all remnants of the executioner’s trade tops the liberal to-do list of accomplishments essential to advancing the cause of civilization. Yet liberals go all kumbayah-ish over Islam.
• Islam widely and actively enforces its doctrinal, anti-gay sentiments. Such sentiments among Jews and Christians get little more than textual lip service these day in the yellowing, fading, mostly ignored pages of Leviticus. Yet liberals are willing to make an exception to their sermonizing for the LGBTQ agenda to welcome Islam to the “diversity” fold.
• Islam fairly resounds with summons to take up arms against all foes of the faith. The faith fairly resonates with bugle calls to man the battlements for Allah. This imagery is hardly surprising. As Princeton’s renowned scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, notes, Islam was, after all, founded by a man who was at once a spiritual and military leader — who created a faith-based military empire from the get-go.
Liberals typically regard militaristic allusions of all kinds with a horrified shudder. But they strangely gaze upon Islam’s with unconcerned cow eyes. In contrast, Christian advocacy for a moment of silence in public schools sets off the progressive klaxon, sends liberals scrambling to battle stations. But persistent demands for public institutions to accommodate themselves to Sharia, to make room for Islamic law?
The nonstop triumphalist tone throughout the Koran, the belligerent, us-against-them attitude, is not easily overlooked. And it’s not just an us-against-the-sinners attitude. It’s an us-against-all-others attitude.
Other faiths largely abandoned such attitudes long ago. “There has been no parallel development in Islam,” notes Prof. Lewis.
In July alone, there were 194 attacks in 24 countries, 1,671 killed, 2,249 injured — and 28,984 deadly attacks worldwide since 9/11.
By denying that ISIS has any Islamic roots, Obama and other liberal apologists pitch right into the radical militants’ wheelhouse by seeming to confirm the militants’ claim that Americans lie about Islam.
The media, meanwhile, keep CAIR’s phone number handy — and never mind that the Justice Department listed CAIR as an unindicted coconspirator in one major terrorism case and that the FBI cut off its contacts with the organization.