Much of the Muslim world seems to believe that Mohamed Atta and his gang of murderous thugs are now enjoying paradise, their every whim catered to by a host of eager virgins, while they bask in the divine glow of Allah’s blessing for murdering 6,000 innocent men, women and children. Meanwhile, newspapers and talking-head commentators in America are going out of their way to explain that what we saw on Sept. 11 isn’t what we really saw. “The Muslim religion is a religion of peace,” they assure us – even while we battle anthrax spores sent through the mail.
Recent polling in Britain (The Federalist, 2 Nov. 2001) found that “98 percent of the country’s Muslim community would not fight for Britain and 48 percent would fight for Osama bin Laden or Islam in opposition to their country.” So half of Britain’s Muslims support Mr. Atta’s actions of flying passenger aircraft into tall buildings. A number have already been found to have left Britain – to fight with the Taliban. British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon took time to remind them that if they return alive they will be tried for treason.
News reports since Sept. 11 seem to indicate that Mr. Atta and his fellow murderers spent a good deal of their time preparing for paradise by frequenting strip clubs on this side of eternity. During the week, the nation’s talk radio shows covered most of the hijackers’ sexual proclivities, as related by the various girls at their favored clubs.
While arguments sometimes arise in the West about how certain charities spend the money we give to them, as in the case of the Red Cross and the victim’s disaster fund, Western charities do not have a history of using their contributions to fund suicide bombers and terrorist training camps. To date, dozens of Muslim charities have had their funds frozen by U.S. and international governments after investigations found they were using their contributions to fund murder and mayhem. Yet Islam, in the minds of most American reporters, editors and talking heads – remains a “peaceful” religion. Either the credulity or credibility of these journalists is in serious disrepair. Call it the ostrich syndrome: Burying your head in the sand to avoid unpleasant facts still leaves a large, prominent part of your anatomy exposed to impact with the truth.
The twin difficulties Western journalists face in condemning Islam’s fanatical violence is their secular faith and historical ignorance. Secularism requires that they believe all faiths are equally true – or, put another way, that none amounts to anything. Their historical ignorance is likewise self-inflicted, its occasional wounds treated with a generous dose of morally relativistic clap-trap. Witness the case of David Westin, president of ABC News, who in a forum on “journalistic ethics” and the attack on America said, “I actually don’t have an opinion on that [the attack] as I sit here in my capacity [as a journalist] right now.” Nor is his view an aberration. Both Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace agreed in 1987 that reporters shouldn’t be distracted by loyalty to their own country (Ethics in America, PBS).
By the journalistic definition of “peace” now being applied to Islam, even Hitler would qualify: Eventually the Fuhrer would have destroyed all of his enemies, gassed the Jews, exterminated the deformed and mentally handicapped in medical experiments aimed at bettering mankind, and locked up all those in his own party who disagreed with him. Then the world would have experienced the “peaceful” reign of the Reich that was to last a thousand years. One wonders: Could reporters today have taken sides back then – or would their “journalistic ethics” have prevented them from choosing?
