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Final Call:5:50PM Sunday 21 March 2010
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David Cohen
The lynch mob cometh
The death toll stands at 13 from last week’s deadly attack at Fort Hood, Texas. The perpetrator, Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who appears to have been motivated by religious conviction and was finally brought down by one very cool lady, is now said to be in a coma.
As unexpected as Hasan’s rampage was, at least one aspect of the subsequent media coverage has been entirely predictable: the depressingly familiar chorus of headline writers warning of an imminent anti-Muslim backlash.
Nowadays, of course, any major outrage apparently involving Muslims sees the media narrative almost immediately switch from the event itself — the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Bali bombings, attacks on the London Transit System, et al — to idiotic proclamations of the supposedly ghastly fate about to be visited on the perp's beleaguered co-religionists by the bigoted Christian masses yearning to lynch free.
Closer to home, the backlash theme has also enjoyed some media play over the years, most notably from the New Zealand Herald's Australian correspondent, Greg Ansley.
Given that these backlashes always turn out to be more anticipated than actual, you might have thought the narrative has had its day, if only for the sake of good manners.
After all, as Mark Steyn says, “it is, to put it at its mildest, the grossest bad taste to default every single time within minutes to the position that what's of most interest about an actual atrocity with real victims is that it may provoke an entirely hypothetical atrocity with entirely hypothetical victims.”
(For a more intelligent take on the Fort Hood massacre, blogger Barry Rubin’s satirical analysis is brilliant.)
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Comments
Media routines
Good point ! The role of the Western media as an apologist for Islam needs to be interrogated. Some journalists seem to have mindliess default positions when reporting terrorism - unfortunately a routine activity.
Taquiya
Information derived from Islamic websites:
Taquiya - the God given 'right' to lie to non-Muslims in order to ultimately trick then conquer them.
A religion of Peace - i.e. the peace of non-resistance to Islam.
The land of peace: defined as Muslim dominated nations.
The land of war: areas in which Muslims are the minority.
Jihad:
Jihad of the heart: when a minority one must smile to the unbeliever and practice Taquiya whilst hating them in your heart.
Jihad of the mouth: as our numbers grow chastise the unbelievers and ridicule their ways.
Jihad of the fist: crush the unbelievers.
Pretty scary stuff... I prefer to find out my information from the horse's mouth rather than from Western Liberal Journalistic elites. Islam is not race-exclusive, so it cannot be racist to monitor the frowth of Islamo-Fascist Imperialism.
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