Needed more than ever after 9/11 is probing, intelligent, honest reporting about Muslims and Islam. But this hasn't materialized. With few exceptions, the mainstream media continues to publish misleading, incomplete, distorted material that leaves Americans ignorant of the true nature and dimensions of the terrorist threat.
The New York Times, in an unconscionable breach of journalistic ethics, revealed the real name of Bat Ye'or in a recent article and labeled her one "of the most extreme voices on the new Jewish right." This is not only arrant nonsense, since Bat Ye'or is in no sense a figure of "the right," but also Times-speak for "pay no attention to this person." She "argues in her latest book, Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis, that Europe has consciously allied itself with the Arab world at the expense of Jews and the trans-Atlantic alliance." But she is of "the right," so the Times feels no need to examine the evidence for this that she marshals in Eurabia.
The Asia Times reported this week on a jihadist cell in France that with connections "throughout Western Europe in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom." Could this be a function of Europe's longstanding policy of allying itself with the Arab world? No, you can't say that - that would be "right wing."
Like a garbage scow pulling in its wake the trash in the water, the New York Times carries along lesser papers:
Whoever it was at the mosque who told Simmons this has mastered the art of pushing today's most sensitive cultural hot buttons. Muslims believe in diversity, you see. Not like those nasty Christians. But Simmons seems to have asked nothing about the humiliations and second-class status mandated for non-Muslims by Islamic law, and rooted in the Qur'an (9:29).
Mahmoud also dismissed the idea that suicide bombers were guaranteed Paradise in the Qur'an: "No one can be assured he is going to Heaven," he said, and one who kills himself "will stay in Hellfire for eternity, committing suicide." Here again, Evans didn't ask him about the Qur'anic verse that promises a place in "the garden (of Paradise)" for those who "fight in His cause, and slay and are slain," and calls this "a promise binding on Him in truth" (Qur'an 9:111). Nor did she stop him when he said that women pray in the back of the mosque, behind the men, "out of respect and protection," although I expect that she would have stopped him if he had said that blacks should sit behind whites on the bus "out of respect and protection."
All this is typical of the state of inquiry on Islam and jihad terrorism in the American media over three years after 9/11. No doubt all this is intended to build bridges to Muslims, to dialogue, to accommodate, to show once again that we are decent folks who don't hate anybody. But dialogue on false pretenses is not dialogue at all; it is deception.
When the media prints whitewashes of known truths about Islam; when it smears those making legitimate inquiry into the inroads Islam, including violent jihadists, are making into Europe; when it declines to ask necessary questions about what steps (if any) mosques in America are taking to eradicate the Islamic jihad ideology among Muslims in America; when it ignores evidence that that ideology is being taught in American mosques - then it is not strong enough to say that the American media has abdicated its responsibility. It has become an accomplice of the global jihad.
