One of the most unfortunate aspects of the politically correct straitjacket that binds contemporary public discourse is that deceitful mediocrities and intellectual flotsam and jetsam who aren’t capable of independent thought or of defending their own positions except with lies and scorn are lauded and lionized by the clueless and compromised elites, solely because they parrot currently fashionable opinions.
Omid Safi is an arrogant and dishonest Islamic supremacist academic at Duke University, here peddling a sly justification for ending resistance to jihad terror under the guise of “love.” This is bitterly ironic, since even as Omid Safi publishes comforting pablum in the Huffington Post about respecting other people and blathers about “love” to his audience at Chautauqua, he is a supremely hateful man: sometimes he fails to suppress his sputtering rage and hate, in one notorious column repeatedly screaming “screw you” at North Carolina Republicans (the column has since been sanitized). Also he has falsely claimed that I threatened to kill him and his family, and of course refused to retract. This came after I dared to challenge his smear of me with the manipulative Muslim Brotherhood neologism of “Islamophobe” and offered to come to the class where he was slandering me and engage in discussion and debate with him and his students. Islamic supremacists like Safi never debate, never discuss, they only defame.
In today’s thoroughly corrupt academic establishment, that passes for intellectual substance, and gets you an invitation to mouth sweet nothings at Chautauqua.
“Safi calls for focus on love, not hatred,” by Jake Zuckerman, The Chautauquan Daily, July 30, 2015:
Most discourse on Islam today revolves around politics, but Omid Safi is trying to bring love back into the conversation.
Safi spoke Tuesday from the Hall of Philosophy, delivering his Interfaith Lecture, “Love and Justice in a World of Suffering: An American Muslim Perspective Towards Healing and Liberation.” He said the Muslim voice of love is drowned out by the extremist Muslim voice of hatred, and now it’s time to rebalance the scales.
Great. Aside from addressing non-Muslims at Chautauqua, what is Safi doing to disabuse jihadists of their supposed misunderstanding of Islam? Why, nothing, of course. His goal appears to be lulling non-Muslims into complacency, not actually confronting the “extremist Muslim voice of hatred.”
“At a time where the quickest way to get a microphone in front of you and to have your action broadcast all over the news is to go behead somebody, how did we get like this?” Safi asked. “The most hideous acts of violence immediately find a receptive audience, but love and tenderness and beauty have become all but invisible. Whose bright idea was this?”
“The most hideous acts of violence immediately find a receptive audience”: Safi isn’t referring to those Muslims who applaud and celebrate acts of jihad terror. Oh, no. He means that the media should not report on acts of jihad terror:
Safi instead said the media should tell stories of compassion, tenderness and humanity, not violence. However, the media instead stray in the opposite direction.
“To see people that have made the spectacle of violence into something that is distributed with horrific efficiency leaves me speechless,” Safi said.
So the media should report about Muslims acting with compassion, tenderness and humanity, instead of reporting about jihad terror. Will, then, the acts of jihad terror cease? Of course not. If Safi’s advice were taken, the jihadis would continue to kill, while Americans would have no idea that any of it was going on, and thus no resistance would be mounted: the jihadis would have a free hand.
While love is typically understood as an emotion, Safi instead said love is not an emotion but evidence of the divine. Citing recent high-profile issues of social justice, he said love has been forgotten in recent times.
“This country — the richest country in the history of humanity — is not doing so well,” Safi said. “The pain and the suffering that you see in Ferguson and in Baltimore and in Staten Island, this is [indicative] of what is to come until we rapidly transform our ways.”
And how should we “rapidly transform our ways”? By disarming ourselves even as the Islamic State has repeatedly threatened to commit acts of carnage on the scale of 9/11 on American soil:
While he didn’t offer specific political solutions to social issues, he did say there is a drastic over-usage of resources in defense spending. He said politicians say there is no money for things like child care, elderly care, decent public housing, universal healthcare or environmental care, yet we still spend billions on the military.
“This is not a Republican thing, this is not a Democrat thing. This is an American catastrophe,” Safi said. “The reason we don’t have money to take care of our most vulnerable is that it’s going to do that over there [the Middle East], which, by the way, makes people over there hate us.”
Tying in the concept of art, Safi said, in times of low morality, it is artists or politicians who are supposed to get society back on track by starting a dialogue. Using the Quran as an example, Safi pointed out that God never spoke to the people until the people rallied and petitioned God to speak to them. He said artists have sold out and are no longer asking society the hard questions they used to.
“Whether you’re talking about art, religion or politics everything is up for sale,” Safi said. “And, sometimes, it feels like everybody is up for sale.”…
Speak for yourself, you lying charlatan.