This USA Today piece by Mary Zeiss Stange, a professor of religion at Skidmore College, is patently absurd, but it is also absolutely unsurprising. Professor Stange, a hunter, has bagged the wrong deer, but it’s the only deer that those who employ her and publish her work care about. The mainstream media has a maniacal focus on absolving Islam for all responsibility for the atrocities committed in its name and in accord with its texts and teachings, and a concomitant fanatical commitment to highlighting the evils of “Christian extremism.” Yet as ridiculous as all this is, the media marches in absolute lockstep on these issues. No one ever breaks ranks. Neither USA Today nor any other mainstream publication would ever dare publish an article warning about the dangers of Islamic jihad, or even “Islamic extremism.” Why they march in this lockstep I do not know, but the mainstream media is now the mouthpiece of a single point of view. No dissenters or dissenting views are allowed to be heard. We no longer have a free press. We have the media of a one-party authoritarian state.
“Exquisite Timing: USAT Runs Op-Ed on ‘Beware the Christian Extremists,'” by Tom Blumer, Newsbusters, October 23, 2014 (thanks to Greg):
Sandwiched in between two domestic terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Canada during the past three days, USA Today ran a Tuesday op-ed which appeared in Wednesday’s print edition by Mary Zeiss Stange called “Beware the Christian Extremists.”
With all due respect, ma’am, we’ve got bigger worries. But in Ms. Stange’s world, Christian “religious extremism taken to potentially lethal ends” is really the “primary threat to homeland security.” She castigates the news media, which in her view “have been remarkably slow when it comes to zeroing in on the pervasive reality of hate-based Christian extremism,” because “It is easier, after all, to blame the un-American other.”
Stange’s op-ed is not a one-off misstep by USA Today. She is one of about 33 people on its Board of Contributors, absurdly giving her a status equal to credible commentators like Jonathan Turley, Jonah Goldberg, Kirsten Powers, and Michael Medved. She’s a professor of religion at Skidmore College in New York.
Stange pegs her contention that Christians are a bigger problem than Islamists to a July report by the federally funded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. That report has come in for a great deal of derision from people who live in the real world….
Other distinctions between the small number of Christian extremists and the apparently growing number of violence-prone Islamists in the U.S. should be obvious to Ms. Stange, but they clearly aren’t. Here are just a few:
- A jihadist generally sets out to commit murder — sometimes mass murder, often of complete innocents. Many of the offenses committed by Christian extremists, though annoying and outrageous, are nonviolent and relate to filing false liens and the like.
- A jihadist believes he (or she) is carrying out Allah’s will. It is far from clear that this is the case in the few instances where Christian extremists have committed murder.
- A jihadist often gets his (or her) inspiration as a result of participating in Islamic services at a publicly recognized mosque and fraternizing with its members. The roster of Christian churches advocating a murderous crusade against non-Christians is somewhere between zero and almost zero….