The MSM: Miserable Misunderstanding Misunderstanders of Islam

The media’s reaction to the Faisal Shahzad story was quite telling. It began with many clamoring for the idea that the would-be bomber had to be a rightwing nutjob. It ended with many drawing a curiously sympathetic picture of an enemy of everything we believe in.

As the narrative went, Shahzad fell on tough times due to the recession and grew ever more insular. So he picked up the Koran and devoted himself to Islam, and then up and left for Pakistan to train with al-Qaeda. Surely this is the natural reaction to being short the month’s mortgage payment. I find it more plausible that it was the plight of the New York Mets that drove him to attempt to blow up a car bomb in Times Square.

Which is to say that the rationalization by the MSM for why Muslims are driven to carry out terrorist attacks is utterly incoherent. Equally as dumbfounding is the MSM’s tortuous attempt to humanize those who would carry out the most inhuman of acts.

The New York Times recently ran a piece on Anwar al-Awlaki, Imam to the stars, in which they tried to explain how a “lanky, ambitious man, with the scholarly wire-rims and equal command of English and Arabic,” how an American with a “sense of humor, [who] loved deep-sea fishing, had dabbled in get-rich-quick investment schemes and dropped references to “Joe Sixpack” into his sermons,” could become a “radical” cleric. The Times spoke of him as being similar to an “Evangelical pastor,” who “preached against vice and sin, lauded family values and parsed the scripture, winning fans and rising to successively larger mosques.” According to the article, an elder recalled that al-Awlaki “had a beautiful tongue.”

After painting this romantic picture, the authors drew the following conclusion as to what pushed al-Awlaki over the edge: “after the Yemeni authorities, under American pressure, imprisoned him in 2006 and 2007, Mr. Awlaki seems to have hardened into a fully committed ideologist of jihad, condemning non-Muslims and cheerleading for slaughter.”

If this seems like an unsatisfying conclusion, that’s because it is. The media just cannot seem to understand what would possess so-called “moderate Muslims” to preach violence and commit terrorist attacks, so they try to come up with hypotheses based on what drives regular Americans to lose it, be it economic struggles, relationship problems, humiliation or derangement. Being mostly atheists themselves, the religious nature of the crimes utterly eludes them.

When these theories are debunked, the media parrots the typically obfuscatory story given by the terrorist group taking responsibility for the attack, honest chaps that the terrorists are. If it is not because of some unfortunate circumstance that caused the man to turn to jihad, blame it on the evil American occupiers or their Zionist oppressor allies (pre-Obama that is). One can only imagine how the terrorists, or how the media for that matter would justify the attacks on the Buddhists of the Bangladesh Chittatong Hills Tracts.

Additionally, one wonders why it is that the media jumps through such hoops to avoid addressing the possibility that there might be something in Islam itself that draws people to commit terrorist attacks. Generally speaking, those with enough common sense to get this far will conveniently choose the default answer that terrorists merely misunderstand their religion. They make a distinction between Islam and Islamism.

However, some such as Islamic scholars such as Robert Spencer (see below speech, the complete transcript of which can be found here), counter-terrorism experts such as Stephen Coughlin, apostates such as Mossan Hasab Youssef and political activists such as Pamela Geller argue that this is a false construct. These folks and a handful of others argue that the proper doctrinal understanding of Islam is that it is a theo-political ideology, that sanctions jihad both violent and peaceful. On the latter point, inquiring minds may want to look into the crucial Islamic tenet of taqiyya, which encourages Muslims to use any and all deceptive means possible to push for increasing dhimmitude and ultimately full on submission to Sharia by nonbeliever infidels.

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Yet the mainstream media will almost never approach this school of thought on Islam. Why is this so? There can only be a handful of reasons.

1. The first is that the media is genuinely ignorant of this viewpoint. And if they have heard of the people who present this theory, it is probably only in context of a CAIR spokesman going on a diatribe about how intolerant they are. Thus, the school is merely marginalized.
2. The second is that the media has grappled with Islamic law and believes the position of these experts to be incorrect. That would be news to all of us.
3. The third is that the media understands this school, and may even believe it to have an inkling of merit, but finds it to be too politically incorrect for it to present. If this is the case, then not only is the media being cowardly and not doing its job of presenting all relevant viewpoints, but it is saying that political correctness trumps truth. This is of course the hallmark of leftism which subverts truth in promoting a system of social and economic policies that is wholly sophistic. More importantly, a failure to acknowledge this school might amount to tacit complicity.
4. The fourth and most frightening possibility is that the media knows these positions to be true, but continues to lie and give deceptive apologists, Muslim and non-Muslim, a legitimate platform with which to mislead the American public. This would essentially be the Walter Duranty option. And this would explain why we see such charming words being ascribed to the barbarians who attack us. As far as I am concerned, this camp would be blatantly complicit with our enemies. Praise the real enemies and vilify the Tea Partiers.

The truth is probably a combination of all of the above, with the degree to which the media harms the public varying by source. Sadly, even Fox News has taken a turn for the worst when it comes to Islam. It is reflected in the appearances of unindicted co-conspirators with Hamas. It is reflected in the evolving position of Glenn Beck, who now calls Geert Wilders a fascist and has argued that Islamic aggression is at least in part due to our presence in the Middle East. It is reflected in the visible reluctance of anchor Shepard Smith to name a terrorist like Nidal Malik Hasan in the hours after the Fort Hood tragedy. One cannot help but question if this change in coverage is attributable to the influence of Saudi billionaire and major News Corp shareholder Al-waleed bin Talal.

Regardless, the fact of the matter is that there is an abundance of substantive theory and evidence out there that makes for a compelling case as to what it is that motivates some Muslims to actively work to destroy Western Civilization. To the extent that those in the media portray these terrorists sympathetically, they are at best useful idiots and at worst treasonous. In light of the growing Islamicization of Europe, and the increasingly frequent examples of homegrown terrorism and cultural accommodation being made to Muslims in the U.S. today, it would do the media some good to brush up on their research. Otherwise, someday down the road they may end up regretting it, to the detriment of the American people.