In November 2004 the Times had an editorial about the murder of Theo van Gogh.

I decided to dissect that editorial:

"One must read the editorial apropos the situation in Holland in today's New York Times. It is a masterpiece of willful miscomprehension and sly mistatement.

First, the title:

Deadly Hatreds in the Netherlands

Note the title: Hatreds, in the plural. You see, all sorts of people apparently "hate" other people, and everyone is to blame, and no one is guilty, and...

Second, note the text:

"Something sad and terrible is happening in the Netherlands, long one of Europe's most tolerant, decent and multicultural societies....brazen murder...10-minute film...horrific violence that Msulim women can be subject to by family members in the name of religion."

Stop right there: "in the name of religion" implies that the connection is factitious, not really there. They do things, bad things, not because their religion clearly prompts them to do them. No, they do them misusing that religion, falsely, wrongly, "in the name of that religion."

A little further on:

"It's just been a little more than two years since a Dutch extremist shot Pim Fortuyn, a rising populist politician who portrayed Muslim immigration as a grave threat to the nation's traditions of tolerance."

"Portrayed" -- get that? He attempted to paint it, to depict it, as something it of course was not. There were many other verbs that might have used: Pim Fortuyn

"said that Muslim immigration was a grave threat" OR

"charged that Muslim immigration was a grave threat" OR

"warned that Muslim immigration was a grave threat" OR

my favorite,

"argued that Muslim immigration was a grave threat."

But the Times won't have it: Pim Fortuyn was a rabble-rouser (some "populist" he was, this cultivated and humorful man), and he "portrayed" something nice (Islam) in an unflattering light.
The Times then tells us that "urgent efforts are needed to better manage the cultural tensions perilously close to the surface of Dutch public life."

Stop right there. "Cultural" tensions?

What "cultural" tensions would those be, pray tell? Are the native Dutch inflicting terrible damage on the Muslim immigrants who have taken over whole swaths of cities, and are attempting to undo Dutch society, Dutch political, economic, social, and intellectual arrangements? This is not a "clash of cultures" -- it is the workings out, in real life, of a belief-system whose elements can, if only the Times wanted to spare a reporter or two (what in god's name does it take to get them to take Islam seriously, and to stop repeating their mistakes with Duranty on the Soviet Union, and their sickening, and murderous, inattention from 1930 to 1945 to antisemitism and Hitler's war on the Jews? No shame, none, in the upper reaches of The New York Times. Secure in their own unassailable and unshakeable ignorance.)
There is only the "tension" that is created by an aggressively hostile belief-system -- hostile to all those who dare to say a word about that belief-system that does not consist of apologetics.

Finally, the Times assures its readers:

"The problem is not Muslim immigration [millions of intelligent Dutch people beg to differ] but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society."

Look, and look again, and think, and think again, about that last phrase:

"a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society."

What does this mean? Does it mean that the Dutch should reconcile themselves to surrendering, in the first place, the right of free speech, including the right to make a movie called "Submission"? Is that part of the "smoother transition" to a more "diverse" society that of course we all want so much to achieve?

If that "diverse society" means accommodating murder on the streets of Amsterdam, oh New York Times editorialist, sorry -- no can do.

If it means refusing to study either the tenets of Islam, or the history of Muslim subjugation of non-Muslims, about which there are many studies, from what happened to the Hindus in India to the Zoroastrians in Persia, to the Greco-Buddhist civilization of Central Asia, to the Christians and Jews of Mesopotamia, Syria, Judea, North Africa, and Spain (the real Spain, not the Spain of Washington Irving or Maria Rosa Menocal's dreamy fantasies), that to is something some Dutch people, and many Americans, are simply unwilling to do.

The Times vision of a "more diverse society" ignores the fact that Muslims do not believe in, or want, or have anything but contempt and hatred for, a "diverse society." They want a society that is Muslim, from top to bottom. If they do not call for the immediate imposition of the Shari'a (and by the way, some do), if they do not all echo certain Muslim leaders, such as Jahjah in Belgium, for a total parallel society, governed by Muslim (i.e. shari'a) law within the lands of the Infidels, the Bilad al-kufr, that is only because -- for the moment -- they are not sufficiently numerous to impose their will. But if nothing is done, they will be.

Is it too much to ask the Editorial Board of the New York Times to study -- I will be happy to supply a reading list -- the history of Islam, and to familiarize itself thoroughly with what is contained in Qur'an, hadith, sira, and the major commentators? Is that really too much for them to bother with?

Oh, and if they can't bear to come to this website, would the editors of The Times be willing to talk with Ibn Warraq or Ali Sina or any number of highly intelligent ex-Muslims, who have written a good deal on what Islam teaches its Believers to believe, and why, as Ibn Warraq has shown, this Total Explanation of the Universe-cum-Total Regulation of Believers' Lives=cum-Blaming of Infidels for All Worldly Woes Whatsoever should be taken seriously, and the consequences of its unhindered spread, through migration, legal and illegal, and Da'wa (the Call to Islam), aided and abetted by hirelings of the Arabs and Muslims (a long list could be given here), including soi-disant "scholars" of Islam, but also including the truly ignorant, the truly lazy, the truly stupid -- of whom, alas, The New York Times, one is afraid, is supplying its share."

[Posted by Hugh at November 5, 2004]

Posted by: Hugh at June 25, 2008 9:20 AM

And here is an article I previously posted on Dhimmitude at The New York Times:

"What should The Times have been doing, not now, but for years, to cover Islam -- in and out of Europe -- appropriately?

In the case of Islam in Europe, it ought to have familiarized readers with the views of Oriana Fallaci, Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jacques Ellul, and all the others who cannot be dismissed as "right-wing" -- and not one of whom can be considered a "fundamentalist" Christian or a mad-dog anything.

It ought to have shown the reasons for the immigration to different countries of Europe by different sets of Muslims -- for example, Pakistanis to England, Moroccans to Holland, Algerians and Moroccans to France, Somalis and Libyans and Egyptians to Italy, and so on. It ought to have provided figures on the Muslim population in those countries over the past 30-40 years. For example, would it not have been eye-opening for readers to learn that there were 15,000 Muslims in Holland in 1970, and now there are a million?

It ought, that Times of New York, that New Duranty Times, to have noted that everywhere, in every Infidel land, there were problems with Muslim immigrants, no matter the political or economic regime, or the background of the local Infidels. It ought to have noted, and not merely noted but attempted to explain to readers, why it was that in places as different as Denmark and Spain, or Italy and Germany, with widely disparate national cultures and expectations, there was always the grim problem of Muslims who viewed their new surroundings not with gratitude, but as a place that as if by right belonged to them. It ought to have noted that when those immigrants repeat, as they do, that "we are here to stay" and "this is our country," those phrases, which ordinarily might be found stirring, take on an entirely different and sinister meaning.

And The New Duranty Times might have tried to understand why it is that wherever there are Muslim immigrants in sufficient numbers to give them the impression that they need not disguise forever their real attitudes, there have been problems -- so that the problem must lie not with the hosts, but with the Muslim guests, and does not depend either on the nature of that host country, or of the place from whence those particular Muslim immigrants came.

And then it was the duty of The New Duranty Times to do a comparative study: to show how Hindus from India, Buddhists from Vietnam, Christians from sub-Saharan black Africa, Chinese who are Confucian or Christian or nothing at all, somehow have managed without untoward incident to fit in to the countries of Western Europe. No doubt in some cases there have been problems, but always without the sense that there is a permanent and irreducible problem. For there is a great difference between those who arrive ready to adapt to new customs and mores and those who arrive carrying undeclared, in their mental luggage, an alien and a hostile creed.

And then there is the most important thing of all, the thing that has prevented people from understanding or making sense of the very small amount of "Jihad News" that The New Duranty Times permits, almost reluctantly, to appear in its newpaper of its own dismal record (a record not worse than that of other newspapers in the United States, but no better either): there has been no attempt at all to actually inform readers about Islam. You would not possibly know a thing about the actual disturbing contents of the Qur'an from reading, diligently, the daily and Sunday New Duranty Times. You would know nothing of 9.29 or 9.5 or the entire Sura 9. You would know nothing, have read nothing, about the more than one hundred so-called Jihad verses in the Qur'an. You would have not been exposed to the Hadith or understood what they are, or how they have been ranked according to "authenticity." You would be at sea whenever the phrase "Qur'an and Sunnah" were to be invoked, as it is a hundred million times a day, by Muslim Believers.

And you would not only be unfamiliar with the most basic texts of Islam, but you would also not know "how to read the Qur'an." What do you do when you come across an obvious contradiction between two passages in a book that is the uncreated Word of God, and that cannot be tampered with, cannot be changed? And what is a poor Infidel to make of the detectable difference in tone between what are often described as the "Meccan" or softer verses (the ones presumably written when Muhammad was less powerful and still needed to placate or woo his enemies) and the "Medinan" or harsher verses, when Muhammad felt strong enough to no longer disguise his Will to Power, and the worldly goals of his militant and aggressive followers?

Where, in what issue of The New Duranty Times, have you learned about "abrogation" or "naskh"? In what issue of The New Duranty Times have you learned who Al-Bukhari was, or Muslim, the two most important muhaddithin? In what issue of The New Duranty Times have you run across a single column by a single columnist other than the prating, clownish Tom Friedman (a pet of the businessmen's conventions, where Tom Friedman 'splains it all to you -- the world economy, the Middle East, the entire Future of Humanity, all kinds of immigrants -- for a mere $45,000 per appearance, and it's a bargain at any price) and the entirely ill-informed Nicholas Kristof, who still has no idea that the massacres in Darfur that he has made the subject of his Very Own Public Anguish have something to do, everything to do, with the Arab supremacism of which Islam is a convenient and powerful vehicle -- despite the outward universalist claims made for what Anwar Shaikh rightly calls "the Arab National Religion."

In what issue of The New Duranty Times will you find out how Islam is a belief-system that contains a Total Regulation of Life? In what issue will that set of regulations, of everything from clothes and hairstyles to the most intimate details of personal hygiene, be set down? In what issue will it be explained how in Islamic law life consists of that which is Halal and that which is Haram, and the entire universe is divided between Things Commanded and Things Prohibited? In what issue of The New Duranty Times will you find out about the Total Explanation of the Universe that Islam provides, so that the good Believer need not seek elsewhere for guidance, and ideally, will not? For the Qur'an contains everything -- including all of modern science -- if only we mere men have the minds to tease out its meaning, on everything. Yes, everything, including cosmology -- yes, no doubt we can find in the Qur'an predictions as to the anisotropy in the black-belt radiation as a result of our peculiar velocity, and the structure of recombinant DNA, and the origins of volcanoes, and fractals and chaos theory and the space-time continuum and positively everything, in this or any conceivable universe.

And where, in what past or present issue of The New Duranty Times, would one discover the nature of the God of Islam? In what issue would one discover how he is whimsical and obeys no laws, and is quite different, therefore, from the Christian God? In what issue is it shown how this difference helps explain the non-development of science in Islam -- that and the discouragement, at every step, of free and skeptical inquiry in Islam?

And where, in what past or present issue of The New Duranty Times, would you have learned that sculpture and almost all of painting is haram, forbidden, in Islam, that almost all music is similarly banned, and that the only outlets for artistic expression historically have been the architecture and geometric ornamentation of mosques and the Quran'ic or other calligraphy which compares -- not favorably, but compares -- to the much more spectacular and sophisticated art of calligraphy of China and the East?
Where would one find studies in The New Duranty Times on the collectivist nature of Islam -- where those who are persuaded or coerced, as so many have been over time, to become Muslims are seen not as individuals but rather as conscripts for the army of Islam, a belief-system in which the Umma or Collective is everything, and the right of individual conscience (as in exercising the right to leave Islam and choose another belief-system or none at all) is denied? Where would one find the information that individuals who dare to put their own thoughts above the good of the Umma al-Islamiyya can be punished, and should be punished according to the canonical texts, with death?

And where in all the back issues of The New Duranty Times, will you, dear reader, find any discussion of the division of the world between Believer and Infidel that is central to the Muslim worldview, and that arises naturally out of the tenets of Islam? Not all Muslims may accept that worldview, but they do so only by ignoring those tenets, by ignoring above all the figure of Muhammad.

And that brings us to another great lapse, in the series of unforgivable and unforgettable lapses by The New Duranty Times. This is its third challenge after its miserable coverage of Russia under Stalin in the 1930s (with the eponymous Walter Duranty pooh-poohing the truth, elevating the lies). Then at the same time The New Duranty Times minimized what Hitler began doing to the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, and what he planned to do on a much larger scale when he had the chance, until it was too late for hundreds of thousands of its trusting readers to understand fully the threat faced by their own relatives in Europe, so that they could move heaven and earth to save them. Thus does the Times have real blood on its hands, and forever.

And now comes the third failure: the failure to cover Islam, to make sense of Islam, to tell us anything except what the editors of The New Duranty Times or their mediocre and hopelessly uncomprehending "foreign-affairs" columnists (Friedman, Kirstof) or the apologists they favor on their Op-Ed page want to hear -- all the while keeping out all those who might actually offer some disturbing home truths about Islam.

And what about Ibn Warraq, and Ali Sina, and all the defectors from Islam? When was the last time you saw any of them mentioned in The New Duranty Times? When could you have found out, in more than a passing reference, in a small, ill-informed, and unpleasant article by Craig Smith a few years ago, about the important work of Bat Ye'or on the institution of the dhimma, its legal framework, and the mental attitudes engendered by such a system not only in the Muslim overlord and the non-Muslim over whom he lords it in Dar al-Islam, but also, curiously, in the ways in which Infidel foreign aid to Muslims has come to resemble, in the attitudes of both the giver and the receiver, the classic Jizyah? No, nothing about Bat Ye'or or her important work. Indeed, if you wished to find out about the status of the non-Muslim or dhimmi under Islamic rule for nearly 1400 years, you would not find a word about it in the hundred thousand pages of print (well, often thin rivulet of print meandering between plump banks of swelling advertisements) that The New Duranty Times, the hideously inadequate New York Times, part of the hideously inadequate Western press, has published since 9.11.2001."

[Posted at October 14, 2006 8:39 AM]

Posted by: Hugh at June 25, 2008 9:24 AM

and the question is, "Why?" If the Sira is blood-soaked and if the reliable ahadith are vignettes of aggressive cruelty -- why does the Times make up a story?

Posted by: StillBreathing at June 25, 2008 10:06 AM

I posted last year an article about the failure of The Times to report adequately on the Nazis and the Communists. The failure to give attention to early Nazi atrocities against the Jews (often relegating stories to a few paragraphs deep inside the newspaper) was a failure that no doubt led some of the Times's readers not to make the efforts they otherwise might have made to rescue relatives in Europe. There is, thus, blood on the hands of the Times, and of the Sulzberger family, so eager not to have the paper devote too much attention to what it horribly saw as "Jewish matters."

There was a similar failure by the Times to convey adequately what Soviet Russia was all about, especially during the period when Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his dismal efforts, was writing about, or failing to, about famine in the Ukraine, and the growing grip of that bewhiskered wolf, the lupine Joseph Stalin, during the 1930s, when an earlier understanding of the Soviet system might have prevented all kinds of diplomatic naivete later on, both at Yalta and in the belated American reaction to the Soviet seizure of much of East and Central Europe.

Here is that piece:

Walter Duranty was the New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He also won a Pulitzer Press for his coverage of the Soviet Union. This was strange, because what he reported was nonstop apologetic nonsense, and perhaps worst of all was his supposedly splendid reporting in the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine.
The Times did a terrible job in its coverage of the Soviet Union. But that was not all. It also did a terrible job in its reporting on Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the persecution of Jews throughout the 1930s, and then of course, on the mass round-ups ("Aktion") and murders during the war. Many things were not mentioned at all. Others were relegated to tiny paragraphs deep inside the paper. You can read all about it in excellent book by Laurie Leff (of Northeastern University).

Because of the miserable coverage of the Nazi war against the Jews, many of the readers of The Times, and readers of other less well-endowed newspapers that did not have foreign bureaus but took their lead from The Times, never published the truth. And many readers of The Times had relatives in Europe, and could have done things to save them, had they been properly informed, properly alarmed. And perhaps, too, those in Washington who treated the groups of Orthodox rabbis who went to Washington to implore that something be done, might have done more, might have done something, anything. Instead, they let a cabal of antisemites stymie their efforts. These included Breckenridge Long in the State Department -- see "The Truth About the State Department" by William Bendiner, a pamphlet written during the war, who was determined to keep Jewish refugees out, and John J. McCloy, that swinish "pillar of the establishment." As Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, McCloy prevented the bombing of the rail lines to Auschwitz, even though American bombers were successfully destroying targets just a few miles away. One of the pilots on the first daylight bombing raids over Berlin, incidentally, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor, was one of my relatives. He and those who flew with him would have gladly bombed any rail-lines leading to death camps, had they only been given the information, and the target.

Anyway, that's why The Times -- that failed to properly cover the Soviet system, and failed to cover, and hence to warn many who might have, had they known more, worked to get their relatives out, out, out in the 1930s, out even from Germany itself -- is called The New Duranty Times.
And it has now failed again, in its miserable coverage of Islam -- of what Islam inculcates, of what is in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Does the Times even mention the Hadith and Sira? Have you learned a single thing about any teachings about Infidels in Islam from reading The Times over the past decade? Since 9/11/2001? Since last year?

No, you have not.

What a paper. What an example of so much that is wrong with America, and the Western world. The ignorance. The arrogance. The lack of sense and lack of responsibility. I wish it ill. Don't you?
If you subscribe, unsubscribe and read it online. Don't give them money, if you can possibly help it. If you place advertising in The New Duranty Times, stop it. Use the Internet as much as you can. If you see glossy ads in The New Duranty Times, call up the advertiser. Tell him that you will only reluctantly patronize his store, buy his goods, act in whatever way his advertising was intended to make you act. Tell him you strongly urge him to, at the very least, cease for a month -- no make that six months -- in The New Duranty Times, until they change their editor. Oh, and their attitude. Newspapers With Attitudes, when that attitude consists not of intelligent and potent criticism of the Administration's "war on terror" (the kind that can be found, for now, almost exclusively at this website or in the columns of those who read this website and take it to heart), but of the revelation of details about programs designed only to make us safer.

Do it. And do the same thing to any other newspapers (e.g.. The Boston Globe, with its Op/Ed page still open to anti-Israel ignorant-of-Islam former "Jerusalem Bureau Chief" H. D. S. Greenway in his bow-tied retirement, anti-American apologist-for-Islam Jonathan Power, the egregious William Pfaff, and others of that ilk) that may be owned by the cost-conscious owners of The New Duranty Times.

Do them damage in the only way that now counts. Until they start humming "I'm Beginning to See the Light."

[Posted by Hugh at April 30, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at June 25, 2008 10:12 AM

As for the egregious Feldman, after his first piece, in praise of Shari'a, appeared in The Sunday Times (I wonder what sub-editor at The Times thought it a swell idea to have Feldman appear at regular intervals to make Islam plain, and Islam palatable, to the too-many still too-trusting readers, of the Times), I offered this:

"The article by Feldman deserves a longer treatment, for it was so meretricious, and meretricious in so many different ways. And how amusing that the same Noah Feldman who a few years ago was playing up his role in writing the new Iraqi constitution now carefully states that he had a very minor role after all. Yet that was not what Feldman was stating a few years ago, that was not what Feldman made clear when he appeared to let others believe that he had a very great role indeed, a useful impression to leave, not only with editors of the Sunday Times Magazine, but also with faculty members at Harvard Law School who, no doubt impressed by letters of support from Roy Mottahedeh and John Esposito, were disinclined to question Feldman's understanding or representation, of Islam because they were unsure of themselves, convinced (wrongly) that that they would have had to be specialists to give voice to the doubts they might have harbored about Feldman and his understanding of, his representation of, his way of dealing with, Islam. Now, for many decades, this man whose entire corpus is not worth a paragraph by Joseph Schacht, will have a major say on who comes to Harvard Law School to give courses, or lectures, on Islamic Law, and to judge by his first invited guest, Khaled Abou el Fadl, the students at Harvard are going to suffer through a lot, and be very little the wiser about Islam or Islamic law."

Posted by: Hugh at June 25, 2008 10:31 AM

how much of our so call(sic) free media like the times is owned by SOW-DI princes and no reporter or editor will go against his owners

Posted by: crusader at June 25, 2008 1:18 PM

Today the word "Jizyah" appeared, for what may be the very first time, in the pages of The Times. It can be found in the story, which begins on the front page, about the imposition of a "protection tax" on the Christians of Iraq, and how every single Christian in Iraq was quietly paying the Muslims who demanded the money, in order to stay alive, and that money, in turn, has been used, as the story says, "to fuel the insurgency."

The reporter calls this Mafia-like extortion, but he also mentions the Jizyah as historically levied on "Jews and Christians" -- a tax which, he curiously notes, explains the "diversity" of the Iraqi population -- meaning, if the tax had not been paid, the Muslims would have killed the non-Muslims and that would have put paid to that "diversity" in northern Iraq of which he, the reporter, takes note and we, the American readers, are no doubt to be impressed with, trained as we all are to salivate at the mere mention of the word "diversity."

Posted by: Hugh at June 26, 2008 9:15 AM

In addition to Bawer's explanations of the Times' modus operandi, I think perhaps also the Times is being conservative of their easily gulled, mentally captive, zombie army of lemmings' time and resources. By anesthetizing them to certain topics, stories and events, they can keep the zombies' focus and attention on the more important agenda of replacing this country's government with Socialism. That's why women's rights and the treatment of homosexuals under Islam can be glossed over or ignored. They've already covered those topics, you see, and it would be diversionary to address them in the format of a discussion of Islam. Plus, it would be a wasteful (and potentially desensitizing) use of demonization, which could be more constructively directed at, say, the Bush administration, capitalism, etc.

Posted by: Concerned Citizen at June 26, 2008 12:16 PM

I take issue with Bawer's characterization of Vlaams Belang, but otherwise an excellent article.

Posted by: Infidel33 at June 26, 2008 12:25 PM