If only those who write for The New York Times, such as Laurie Goodstein, could understand that they have a responsibility not to credulously accept such efforts as this transparent propaganda video at face-value, but to find out about the Muslims who actually appear on it, as is done here. Read what The New York Times reported about this video, under the title “Muslims Make Video to Rebut Militants.” That title parrots exactly the Muslim line that this is a heartfelt attempt to “rebut militants” rather than what it in truth is, a video in the main directed not at Muslims but at non-Muslims. It is an effort to show non-Muslims that “we, the Muslims in America, are doing the right thing, taking the right stand, and you’d better take note of this and not question the efficacy or the omissions in our video, you’d better be more than satisfied, and stop suspecting us, or else.”
If you read Laurie Goodstein’s article, you would remain entirely in the dark about those who took part in it. And since you would not have been informed about the religiously-sanctioned doctrines of Taqiyya and Kitman, and you might not be as suspicious as anyone who has either studied Islam and the (mis)representation of Islam or lived as a non-Muslim citizen of a Muslim-ruled country, you might not question that report.
But now that Robert Spencer has set out here, for easy reference, some of the unsavory connections and self-damning remarks, and examples of blatant lying about the contents of the Qur’an, and what Islam inculcates. He has set out, even so a reporter for The New York Times can understand, what the Taqiyya Nine — Suhaib Webb, and Maher Hathout, and Ihsan Bagby, and Mohamad Magid, and Zaid Shakir, and Jamal Badawi, and Hamza Yusuf (who is shown in a photograph, with three prayer rugs, one already turned Mecca-wards, and a bookshelf full of row upon grim row of Islamic books) and Yasir Qadhi — are truly all about.
Now The New York Times has a choice.
It can do a follow-up story, in which the reporter takes the information about these nine people, listed one by one above, with information about them, and quotations by them, and that reporter then investigates, studies the evidence that such remarks were made, that such connections can be made.
And then that reporter should report both what is given by Robert in the article above, and what those nine figures say to him when asked to explain those remarks.
Otherwise The New York Times will be guilty of having participated in a transparent fraud, in what for those who are knowledgeable appears unambiguously to be a fraudulent and, for the wellbeing of this country, and its citizens, a dangerous effort.
I do not know, and I hate to think, of how the New York Times covered the propagandists for Fascists and Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. Why, no sooner had Mussolini made his March on Rome, and the Ventennio just started, than a certain Count Constantini was telling the society ladies of Boston about how wonderful that splendid fellow and his wonderful Blackshirts were: “Tells Mussolini’s aims and progress; Count Constantini Speaks at the Chilton Club Italy’s leader Has Won Whole Nation’s Confidence, He Says.” (Boston Daily Globe. Jan 16, 1923, p. 13)
And of course the Germans could count on such people as Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Harvard Class of 1909, and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club (both biographical details are important, and would come in handy for Hanfstaengl, and for Hitler, later on), and others, so well connected to America’s ruling circles at that time. Why, so many were classmates. They arrived on these shores to spread misinformation about Herr Hitler and his National Socialist program. And within this country, Fritz Kuhn’s Bund was also doing yeoman’s service as it stood up for Hitler and wailed about the injustices done to Germany which he, Herr Hitler, had protested. And wasn’t it right and proper that the “Sudeteners” (never “the Sudeten Germans”) should be given “self-determination” (the Wilsonian phrase that nowadays has been distorted and misapplied to the case of the local Arabs, the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, who for obvious propaganda purposes — when such propaganda became necessary after the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War — were carefully renamed as “the Palestinian people”)?
Now The New York Times has reported, without a scintilla of skepticism, about this effort to “refute” the “militants.” And not a syllable of Goodstein’s sober prose is devoted to actually reporting on any of the views expressed elsewhere by these nine people who made this video elsewhere – views about America, about the political and legal institutions of the Infidel nation-state of America, about Jews and the “myth” of the Holocaust, or about what they see as the right role, and right goals, for Muslims now living in this country. There is nothing about the company they keep, or about their very own heartfelt expressions, made mostly to fellow Muslims, and mostly earlier, before they realized that they had to go into full taqiyya-and-kitman mode.
Will the New York Times publish a follow-up account, based on the information even cats and dogs can now acquire, if they only have a computer, and a little time?
Many Muslims, and their unthinking supporters, believe that they can intimidate well-prepared critics of Islam, or of mosques being built hither and yon, by shrill cries about “freedom of religion” when Islam is, in the main, quite unlike any other religion. It is a Total Belief-System that in large part makes political and geopolitical claims, the claims of Allah to the whole world, that is, the claim or insistence that Islam must everywhere dominate, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
And if “freedom of religion” is a red herring, so is this absurd cry about “racism” that is flung about, as if Islam, an ideology, can be compared to a “race,” and Muslims forever be entitled to hide behind that cry of “racism” even where it so obviously does not apply. There is a “racism,” however, that does apply – and that is the “racist” sense of superiority exhibited by Muslim Arabs against non-Muslim Arabs. For Islam, despite its universalist claims, is and has been a vehicle for Arab supremacism, in the ways I have many times discussed here.
No one should be embarrassed, much less apologetic, for daring to consider the evidence of his senses – that is, the Jihad news that mounts and mounts, from all over the world, and especially that which demonstrates the cruel treatment of non-Muslims by Muslims wherever Muslims rule, save in a handful of cases where special circumstances have allowed for a taming or constraining – possibly temporary – of Islam, as in Kazakhstan or Kemalist Turkey. Nor should we be apologetic about becoming aware of the evidence provided in books, rather than newspaper dispatches, by the historians of Islamic conquest: that is, the 1350-year history of the conquest of non-Muslim lands, and the subsequent subjugation of the autochthonous non-Muslims. And we should be unapologetic about reading the scholars of Islam, such as C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Arthur Jeffery, and dozens of others, who wrote before Arab money and influence and other factors aided the Muslim takeover of many academic departments in the West having to do with Islam and related studies. And finally, we can read Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam, Nonie Darwish, and a growing list of other Defectors from the Army of Islam, whose articulate works, whose morally and intellectually advanced temoignages, can be compared with the deceit practiced by those listed as participating in the Feelgood video that is given such credulous treatment by the New York Times reporter, and by those who vetted, but did not change, the story about the “Muslim video.”
The West is now imperiled in a way unique in its history, mostly from an ideological pressure brought from within, and not by military pressure from without. Not everyone thinks we should simply throw up our hands and wail “but what can we do?” and “there’s nothing to be done.” There are those who are not, sometimes out of a mere want of imagination and intellect, able to figure out the many things that they could legitimately and rationally do to preserve (and perhaps even extend) the civilisational legacy they inherited. But there are also those who wish to protect it from its present-day most dangerous enemies, those who have not lost their senses, those who refuse to make burnt offerings of themselves or their children on the Altars of the Idols of the Age, Tolerance and Diversity – a misapprehended “Tolerance,” a diseased conception of “Diversity.” The latter group must regard with alarm and disgust the irresponsibility of The New York Times.
The irresponsibility of a great part of the media is beginning to alarm, beginning to disgust. Nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and several decades after the slow but steady growth, seemingly unstoppable, of the Muslim presence in the historic heart of the West, the countries of western Europe, and after these great and costly and squandering military-cum-reconstruction efforts first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, how much do we in the United States need to rely on The New York Times. Does anybody, anymore, still “rely” on the New York Times after the display of its non-coverage of Islam? How often, in the New York Times, have you seen any intelligent discussion or explanation of what the word “Sunnah” means? Have you had any inkling of what the Hadith are, or what the different collections of Hadith are, or how individual Hadith have been ranked as to presumed “authenticity,” or even how the different muhaddithin are regarded, and why Bukhari and Muslim stand above all the rest? Have you been informed properly by The New York Times as to what is in the Qur’an concerning Unbelievers? Have you seen, in the pages of The New York Times, even a single mention of the murders of Abu Afak and of Asma bint Marwan, or about what happened at the Khaybar Oasis and why, or about what Muhammad did when the 600-900 members of the Banu Qurayza, taken prisoner and bound, were decapitated? Have you ever, even once, in the pages of The New York Times, read anything about little Aisha, and why virtually the first act of that learned theologian, the Ayatollah Khomeini, when he came to power, was to reduce the marriageable age of girls to nine years?
Oh, I could fill up the page and printer, and so could you, with what The New York Times has, in nearly a decade, chosen not to tell its readers, willfully refused to enlighten them about — that is, the ideology and the practice of Islam. And this is curious, because the best way to convince the public to support what the New York Times supports – a pullout from Iraq and Afghanistan – is to make them more aware of what Islam inculcates, what Islam contains, what Islam means.
It is wrong, it is unjust, it is cruel to its readers, it is dangerous, it is a dereliction of journalistic duty, for those reporters and editors on the New York Times, to sanction this deception by their inattention, their nonchalance amounting to criminal negligence, their unwillingness to dig just a little bit on such things as the real views behind the for-the-camera smiles and wiles of those Nine Supernumeraries of Islam who took part in this video charade, this tableau-vivant of taqiyya-suffused viciousness. Those reporters and editors are doing what The New York Times, in its embarrassing history, did in the past to aid and abet propagandists for totalitarian ideologies – including one of its most famous reporters, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer for his efforts at hiding the reality of the famine-ravaged Ukraine.
This time it is not Walter Duranty, doing his best for Joseph Stalin. Nor is it some suave mustachioed well-tailored Count Constantini talking to untouchable Brahmin wives at the Chilton Club on Beacon Street. And this time it isn’t Ernst Hanfstaengl telling his old classmates from the Harvard Class of ’09 – perhaps even some fellow members of the Hasty Pudding Club, with whom good old Putzi may have high-kicked-it in drag for one of those Hasty Pudding Theatricals — about how Hitler was merely a useful tool of Krupp and Thyssen, a tool to beat back the Bolsheviks, and in America they had nothing to worry about, for the National Socialists just wanted to get Germany back on its feet, to give it its self-respect. No, this time it is another Total Belief-System, with many similarities to the totalitarian ideologies of the previous unappetizing centuries, and another set of adherents to an ideology that flatly contradicts, in letter and spirit, the American Constitution and everything else that makes America America. Adherents who want to make sure we do not find out much about the ideology of Islam, or about those who work to undermine the legal and political institutions of this country.
Let’s all wait right here — at this very website, Jihad Watch — and see if The New York Times will indeed, under the circumstances, feel it has an obligation to run another story, a follow-up, where the information presented above about the nine participants in this video – most of them well-versed in the arts of taqiyya and kitman – is no longer omitted, but becomes the very subject of the story.
Perhaps you’d like to make a wager on what The New York Times will do.
So go ahead. Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs. And do it fast, because any moment now the croupier at this website is going to announce that “les jeux sont faits.”
And les jeux sont faits, for many Americans, in another sense. Yes, for many of us, when it comes to trying to get people to meet their responsibilities and report adequately on the contents of Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, and to analyze truthfully the content of Muslim propaganda and campaigns of Da’wa, for us les jeux sont faits, which in English means — the chips are down.
And when those chips are really down in every sense, who will be there to defend the political and legal institutions of this country, its social understandings, its art and science and literature, its political freedoms, and the conditions that make those manmade laws, those political institutions, that art, that science, that literature, those individual freedoms, possible? Those conditions could not possibly exist for one minute under Islam. Who will defend these things, if not those who, even if in some cases hesitatingly, begrudgingly, not really wanting to find out what they suspect they will find out, finally decide to learn about the texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam? And then, too, they must learn also about all the ways that Muslim propagandists in the West attempt to keep non-Muslims unaware and thus unwary, confused and thus unable to see things clearly.
Okay, New York Times. You have one last chance. You didn’t do right when it came to Walter Duranty and the misreporting on the Soviet Union. Your coverage of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, throughout not only the 1930s, but right through the war, was laughable, and cruel, and had consequences. It resulted in many deaths, for there must have been many readers of The New York Times who, unaware of what was really going on, did not do enough either to save their own relatives, or to raise holy hell, wherever and whenever they could, because they relied on The New York Times, and the Sulzberger family was not about to let its paper be tarred as “too Jewish.” In other words, that family cared more about itself, and its own position, then it did about reporting the truth. And right now, I suspect, those who run The New York Times have no desire to let themselves be open to charges of “racism” or “Islamophobia” or some other such obvious nonsense. Apparently they lack the wit, they lack the imagination, they lack the knowledge, to be able to respond appropriately to such charges.
Well, I’ve had my fill of analyzing or psychoanalyzing those who report for, those who are columnists for, those who edit for, those who run, those who own, The New York Times.
I repeat, one last time, the question I asked more than once above: having published that story about this Muslim propaganda-vehicle video as a splendid attempt to “rebut militants,” will The Times now publish a follow-up article, one that gives full weight to the information supplied by Robert Spencer in his article above, about the nine Muslims who appear in that video, or will it not?