Posted on 09/14/2010 5:56:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
Why did Florida pastor Terry Jones garner all that media attention last week for threatening to burn Qurans on Saturday's 9/11 anniversary? I believe it's because network swells had spent weeks trying to frame opponents of the ground zero mosque -- also known as the Lower Manhattan Islamic community center -- as stupid anti-Islam bigots, but that story line wasn't sticking. So networks found a stupid anti-Islam bigot in Florida who had nothing to do with the mosque, but who reinforced their political view.
Two people died in protests in Kabul. If Jones had gone ahead with his stunt, pundits would have blamed him -- not themselves, not those who committed acts of violence -- for any bloodshed. It is a sad day in journalism when a huckster Holy Roller with a 50-person parish exhibits better judgment than many in media.
The Sunday talk-show types still don't get it. "Meet the Press" host David Gregory lamented "the demonization of the other." Said guest Reza Aslan, "Anti-Muslim sentiment in this country is at unprecedented levels. We all know this. ... Let's call a spade a spade for a moment. If you are painting 1.5 billion people with the same brush of violence and extremism, you're a bigot."
Last week, Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent announced that he had found "clear evidence that there's a direct link between public anti-Islam sentiment and public opposition" to the ground zero mosque. A Washington Post poll reported that 49 percent of Americans have generally unfavorable views of Islam and 66 percent oppose the Islamic center. His smoking gun: Two-thirds of those 66 percent have generally unfavorable views of Islam.
Funny. In 2002, after the priest-child sex abuse scandal erupted, an ABCNews/Washington Post poll found that 52 percent of Americans -- including three in 10 Catholics -- expressed an unfavorable opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. Now, I don't recall pundits referring to the majority of Americans as anti-Catholic bigots who are too stupid to know that most priests are not pedophiles. They likely figured, negative stories yield negative poll numbers.
Consider Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot to death 12 soldiers and one civilian in 2009. Ditto Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, the Nigerian arrested for trying to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas. Add the attempted Times Square and New York subway bombings. Islamic extremism was the common thread in those stories -- which makes it amazing that Islam polls better today than the Catholic Church in 2002.
At Friday's news conference, President Obama was righteous when he said, "We are not at war against Islam. We are at war against terrorist organizations that have distorted Islam or falsely used the banner of Islam to engage in their destructive acts." He then talked about the millions of Muslim Americans who are "fellow citizens," neighbors and friends. "And when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?"
It's a true shame that Obama fails to exhibit such understanding toward, say, people in Arizona who support federal immigration law, or oppose putting a mosque near Islamic extremism's great crime. For such people, Obama has no problem with odious stereotypes.
Islam needs to be wiped off the face of the earth.
Stunt? Bias much?
If this had been someone who was going to burn a Bible, piss on a crucifix, or burn a US flag, I doubt it would have been called a "stunt."
Jesus is coming.
while most muslims aren’t terrorists, most muslims ARE terrorist enablers.
Islamic extremism was the common thread in the incidents mentioned, but not in the stories told by the media and government.
The incidents of homosexual molestation by priests received massive coverage only because the media hates the Catholic Church's doctrine and structure. (The media approves of intergenerational same-sex intimacy, so it couldn't have been the activity itself that upset them.)
Why the media likes radical Islam, given the state of "journalism" in Islamic countries, is one of life's abiding mysteries, along with why the media digs Communism. Perhaps each reporter imagines himself as the darling of the regime, rewarded with wealth and power far beyond his merits ... rather than as one of the multitudes tortured, shot, imprisoned, or simply unemployed.
He would have benn given a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
benn=been
I need to just start mainlining coffee in the mornings.
From a purely objective point of view, this is not a bad strategy and seems to be working just fine...for islam.
In this vein, obfuscation and confusion of issues is a very old technique in islam. And again, Obama is a master of islamic strategies in that he has used this very technique in his campaign and presidency to great effect.
He tells huge piles of lies and blurry stories about his actions...and then, when caught in the act, redirects the blame against those who caught him by changing the charge from lying to discrimination.
Pretty smooth on his part too.
If we didn't know better, we might conclude that Obama is the very finest practitioner of the islamic arts of propaganda and obfuscation.;-)
It's a real puzzle to me. I think possibly that reporters actually don't believe it can happen here, and as for what happens to unpopular people (reporters, women, etc.) in Middle Eastern or African countries, they honestly don't care. They love anti-Western cultures and approve of anything that goes on in them and feel they cannot make "value judgments."
This is because the left doesn't accept natural law and doesn't believe in the inalienable rights of man. They think torture and oppression are just one of those cultural things, and therefore its victims are used to it and it doesn't matter. But most of all, it's because they think inhabitants of those cultures aren't really human - the way a New York Times reporter is, for example.
Why is this Jones guy being portrayed as a nut. I haven’t heard him speak, but I’m guessing he was upset with the in-your-face gesture of building a mosque at ground zero and decided to counter with another in-your-face gesture, perhaps not as grand and intrusive as the first.
He didn’t create all the furor...the media did.
I think that's an excellent point. That form of practical solipsism - "Nobody really exists, except me." - is common among leftists.
Well, there’s the problem. If Terry Jones had declared that burning the Koran was a work of artistic expression, none of this brouhaha would need to have happened.
Lets put some Korans in a pile in a pig sty with some pigs in background, take a photo of it and call it art.
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