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| Jihad Watch - The taser and the nuke |
| 2006-11-20 |
| I am attending the Restoration Weekend, where yesterday I spoke on a panel about the jihad in Europe along with Melanie Phillips, Douglas Murray, and Walid Phares. I am honored to be in such company. Anyway, I'm trying to keep up with the news as best I can while I'm here, but I am a bit behind, and I suppose that by now the entire world has seen the video and heard the stories about Mostafa Tabatabainejad, the UCLA student who was tasered in the UCLA library after refusing to show ID to campus police, or to leave the premises. Michelle Malkin has useful background and commentary here. The story is all over the TV news, CAIR is already on the case, evidently trying to spin the incident as an example of "Islamophobia." An investigation is certain to come, and almost certain to find the officers involved guilty of using excessive force. Even if they did, however -- and I am not presenting that as conclusively established -- it is noteworthy that this story has received exponentially more attention in the media than this one. Nor has CAIR taken any trouble to say anything about it. In one story, a Muslim in the U.S. is tasered in what may be a police brutality case. In another, a Muslim (probably) in the U.S. is arrested with information about nuclear materials and cyanide. Neither story may be representative of the status or disposition of the Muslim community in the U.S., but one gets a barrage of media attention and the other is ignored. The mainstream media, it seems, is engaged in storytelling and myth-making. They are constructing a picture of Muslims victimized in the U.S. by racism and bigotry. The Tabatabainejad story fits that agenda, or at least appears to. But the Dinssa news item may tell a different story: of Muslims plotting our destruction. That does not fit the prevailing mythos. So it goes relatively unreported. As the "cash & cellphone suppository" one, I'd guess. If the Judeo-Christian West and the rest of the world threatened by the jihad today is to prevail, this media mythmaking must be exposed and challenged. It is happening today, what with the fauxtography revelations, the exposure of Dan Rather, and so on. But it must be understood that the immense coverage given to the Tabatabainejad incident, and the relative silence about the Dinssa arrest, is just as much part of the media dream factory as fauxtography. It is all part of an attempt to refashion the world after their own desires, burying reality in the process. And that, of course, will make it all the easier for reality to bite us. It would be refreshing to see CAIR announce, if Dinssa is definitely a Muslim, that it is redoubling efforts to teach Muslims in America to reject the jihad ideology and live in peace with their non-Muslim neighbors. But they won't do that, not in this case or in any other case involving Islamic terrorism, because that is not the story they are trying to tell, or the myth they are trying to construct. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |