MICHAEL COREN
Casual anti-christian bigotry has become the credo of the liberal, the atheist, the dinner-party poseur and the fool who merely follows the times.
In the end, the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, was revealed to be a native blond, blue-eyed Norwegian, a strange and disturbed loner, whose motivation was partly political, and whose ideology seemed in some confused, confusing way to be based on an objection to Islam, multiculturalism, and Marxism.
Yet within hours of Breivik’s attack, there were countless accusations in newspapers and on radio and television that the gunman was a Christian fundamentalist, motivated by his evangelical Christian religion to hate progress, change, and, in particular, Muslims. Why, therefore, he should attack a group of young people who were themselves mostly Christians was not fully explored, especially when there were myriad Islamic targets in Norway. But the sudden, new, self-evident “fact” that he was a “Christian fundamentalist” was repeated over and over again in media reports, until it was considered virtually treasonous to question the statement.
How radically different all of this is from when attacks are committed by Muslims, in the name of Islam, with the vocal support not only of millions of Muslims, but of numerous Islamic leaders, including leading and senior theologians and clerics.
It is estimated that more than 17,000 jihadist attacks have been successfully carried out or attempted since the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocity, most of them on fellow Muslims in the Islamic heartland of the Middle East and Asia. Almost every time such an attack occurs, we hear the same arguments: that all of this is more about poverty and injustice than it is about Islam and the Koran, and that the “Christian” world is rushing to judgment.
We even hear that this massive number is vastly exaggerated, which exposes an ironic racism within so many allegedly liberal and progressive people who write and broadcast in the Western world: What they mean is that there have not been 17,000 attacks in Europe and North America. Quite so. Most of the murders have been committed, as already explained, in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and other parts of the developing world, and most of the victims are other Muslims. It is the nature, theology, and ideology of the perpetrator, not of the victim, that should concern us.
These same self-appointed experts and guardians of the moral conscience within mainstream, supposedly responsible, media also make every effort to qualify or disguise the words “Muslim” or “Islamic.” The killers are jihadist, Islamist, militant, or extremist. Indeed, to directly call them Muslim or Islamic is seen as being so politically incorrect as to provoke waves of angry letters and complaints to various editors and control boards, and even reprimands, suspensions, or dismissals. Large media corporations such as the BBC steadfastly forbid their reporters to refer to “Islamic” or “Muslim” terrorism, in spite of what the terrorists themselves would rather we said and believed.
On the one hand, we have a passionate, perennial explanation that evil is committed by Christians, juxtaposed with an aching refusal to ever link Islam with violence and terror. And these journalists tend to be the same people who accuse more conservative reporters of being extreme and unfair.
(Read the complete article here)
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