My latest in PJ Media dredges up some of the latest absurdities:
Every time there is an act of jihad terror or a thwarted jihad plot, there is a flurry of attempts to dissociate the atrocities from the Islamic texts and teachings that inspire them. As Muslims in Canada and the U.S. have heeded the Islamic State’s call to attack non-Muslims in their home countries, these attempts have become both more frequent and more risible. A sampling of the latest:
8. Canadian rock star Torquil Campbell blames “fascist” PM Harper for Ottawa jihad attack
The Huffington Post Canada reported last week that the Ottawa jihad murder moved Canadian rock singer Torquil Campbell to call Prime Minister Stephen Harper a “fascist” and claim that “this terrible event will be used by @pmharper to further his authoritarian agenda.” Campbell also fumed that “this government has made this country the kind of place where these things are more likely to happen” and hectored Harper: “tell the lies, foment the fear, watch the people fall in line. it’s a good day to reread 1984.”
Even better, today would be a good day to reread the Qur’an’s ninth chapter – the one that exhorts Muslims to wage war against and subjugate “the People of the Book,” i.e., primarily Jews and Christians.
7. Memo from U.S. consulate refers to Jerusalem jihad terror attack that murdered baby girl as “traffic incident”
Just hours after a Palestinian jihadist plowed his car into a crowd at a railway terminal in Jerusalem, killing a three-month-old baby girl, in a statement expressing condolences the U.S. consulate called the murder a “traffic incident.”
Oddly enough, this “traffic incident” came only days after the “traffic incident” in Canada in which a convert to Islam, Ahmad Rouleau, ran over two Canadian soldiers, murdering one. The U.S. consulate’s fastidiously politically correct choice of words signaled to Palestinian jihadis and the world that the U.S. government is still in the same deep denial about the jihad threat that led it to label the Fort Hood jihad massacre as “workplace violence,” as well as to downplay or deny the Islamic aspect of every other jihad attack and plot.
6. Canada Muslim leader after jihad murders: “The main victims, other than the people who died yesterday, are Muslims themselves”
After Rouleau’s act of jihad murder, Haroun Bouazzi, a spokesman for the Association des Musulmans et Arabes pour la Laïcité du Québec (AMAL-Québec), declared: “The main victims, other than the people who died yesterday, are Muslims themselves because more and more, they are seen as an enemy from inside.”
The pattern never changes: in the wake of a jihad terror attack or plot, Muslims in the West do not do what they should do: redouble their efforts against jihadis in their own communities, and their cooperation with law enforcement officials. Instead, they claim that they are already cooperating, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and complain that they are being victimized by a “backlash” and try to seize the spotlight as victims.
The mainstream media, of course, is all too willing to oblige. Four separate studies since 1998 have shown that 80% of the mosques in the U.S. teach hatred of Jews and Christians and the superiority of Sharia over constitutional law, and the percentage is likely to be similar in Canada, but no one seems concerned. To be concerned would be “Islamophobic.” Meanwhile, this claim of victimhood is designed to deflect attention away from the jihad murders themselves, and intimidate people into thinking that it would be wrong to pile on to these poor victimized people and demand that they do more to stop the preaching of the Islamic doctrines that incite people to acts of hatred and violence.
5. Amid jihad murders in Canada, USA Today says Christian “religious extremism” is “primary threat to homeland security”
Tom Blumer reported last week in Newsbusters that “sandwiched in between two domestic terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Canada during the past three days, USA Todayran a Tuesday op-ed which appeared in Wednesday’s print edition by Mary Zeiss Stange called ‘Beware the Christian Extremists.’” Stange claimed that Christian “religious extremism taken to potentially lethal ends” is today the “primary threat to homeland security.”
Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of religion at Skidmore College, and she is, of course, here expressing what are mainstream views at her college and at virtually every other institution of higher learning in the country – as well as in the mainstream media. Both the media and academia have 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.
4. Canada’s National Post: “It’s been a tough week for Canadian Muslims”
After the two jihad attacks in Canada, the center-right National Post ran an interview with Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong, titled: “Is Islam inherently violent? Quest for power — not religion — motivating jihadists, author says.” Before the interview proper were some notes by the interviewer, Patricia Pearson, who began with this: “It’s been a tough week for Canadian Muslims.”
Michael Greenspan, a reader of my website Jihad Watch, had the perfect analogy to show up exactly how grotesque that sentence really is: “National Post, Nov. 28, 1963: ‘It’s been a tough week for the Oswald family.’”
And to follow that sentence with an interview with Karen Armstrong, who has likened Muhammad to Gandhi and said that Islam came to spread compassion among the nations of the world, just adds insult to injury.
3. Ex-counterterror official: “We don’t have enough FBI agents who understand Islam”
The former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, said last Sunday: “We don’t have enough FBI agents who understand Islam.”
Whose fault is that? In October 2011, the Obama administration banned all mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism from counterterror training, for the FBI as well as other agencies. Counter-terror trainers who had trained FBI and military personnel to understand the motives and goals of the jihadis (including me) were let go.
And now three years later, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center laments that we don’t have enough FBI agents who understand Islam. But that is what the Obama administration wanted. They wanted an FBI full of agents who didn’t know anything about Islam, because they wanted to pretend that Islam had no connection with terrorism. And now Leiter wonders why agents don’t know anything about Islam.
Leiter’s solution? He also said Sunday: “We don’t have enough Muslim FBI agents.” And no doubt when they are hired, there will be no serious attempt to determine whether these agents have any sympathies for or ties to the global jihad. The vetting agents won’t know how to make such determinations, and to make too thorough an investigation would be “Islamophobic.”
Read the rest here.