In his usual brilliantly entertaining way, Mark Steyn points out the apparently un-point-outable in a piece called “Silence = Acceptance”, in which he reminds us that, at some point, acqueisance to evil IS evil:
Silence=Acceptance
Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy.
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round, Bombay, it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.”
Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-” and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations, “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists”, and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
Read the whole thing, and try to grapple with the questions it raises. Why do our media and government agencies try so hard to avoid saying the obvious?
If you doubt any of Steyn’s perspective on this (it is, after all, only a brief article, and perhaps you think he’s cherry picked a few anecdotes), you should consider reading his book, America Alone. I know, all you jihad deniers think that “most muslims” wouldn’t do such things, but would they acquiesce to them? What kind of data would you need to have that demonstrated to you? At what point do about a zillion “anecodotes” start to add up to real data?
The “moderate Muslims” in our communities know who the extremists are in their own orbit. If they don’t, they are being willfully blind and ignorant. Why don’t they report them?
I am prolife. I positively despise abortion, and think it is the greatest contemporary stain on American culture. If I attended a meeting somewhere in which some yahoo talked glowingly about maybe blowing up an abortion clinic as the only moral thing to do, and God’s will to punish the ungodly, I’d be on the phone with the cops in about three seconds out of the meeting. And I’d be doing the fool a favor. Better to be watched closely than to become a murderer.
Talk similar to that is directly quoted from the Koran and Hadith, and effusively praised, in mosques every week in non-majority-Muslim countries. Jihadists who do horrible things are routinely held up as objects of praise. How many phone calls do you think are made alerting authorities? Free speech is supposed to stop at conspiracy to murder or incitement to terrorism, isn’t it?
Tags: Islam, media, national security, terrorism
