My latest in PJ Media:
The cannibal Reza Aslan has somewhat faded from the public eye since he was fired by CNN for prematurely revealing that they’re a propaganda ministry, not a news outlet. He also recently exhorted readers in his last book to take the advice of the oldest and most celebrated self-improvement coach, Satan: “take a lesson from Adam and Eve and eat the forbidden fruit. Do not fear God. You are God.” Now, says LA Weekly, “he’s an E.P. on a new Chuck Lorre CBS comedy called The United States of Al, which aims to ‘de-exotify’ a Muslim character for a mainstream audience.”
Aslan has wanted to do this for a long time. “I’m waiting for a Muslim ‘All in the Family,’” he said in 2016. “Muslims are never going to feel like a part of the American family until people start to make fun of them on TV. That’s how minds have always been changed in this country.” Really? After all, we all know how much Muslims love being made fun of. And can Reza Aslan give us a single other example of a group that started “to feel like a part of the American family” when people started “to make fun of them on TV”?
This is just another spurious claim of Muslim victimhood from someone who has made a tidy living in the Muslims-Are-Victims industry, Reza Aslan. And it is more muddled thinking from a spectacularly muddled thinker. Which marginalized group began to “feel like a part of the American family” because they were made fun of “All in the Family”? Right-wing racist bigots? Polish hippies who were dubbed “Meathead” by their fathers-in-law?
Aslan here probably meant not “All in the Family,” but something like “The Cosby Show,” which has been invoked before in the same way (before the spectacular fall of Cosby): Katie Couric said a few years ago that we needed a Muslim “Cosby Show,” i.e., a TV show that shows Muslims as just ordinary folks, and this will supposedly melt away the alleged prejudice that Americans have toward them.
The fallacy of that reasoning lies in the fact that when “The Cosby Show” aired, there were no international black terror groups mounting terror attacks in the U.S. and around the world, and boasting of their imminent conquest of the U.S. The suspicion that Americans have of Islam comes from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, not from racism and bigotry, and Americans know this distinction, despite the best efforts of people like Reza Aslan to obscure it and make people feel guilty for opposing jihad terror. Some slick TV show depicting funny, warm, attractive, cuddly Muslims would not end jihad terror, or blunt concern about it — it would only serve to further the idea that resisting jihad violence was somehow “bigoted.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.