Islam, Postmodernism, and Poltiical Correctness

August 30, 2014
By Danusha V. Goska

 
One of the most important tools humanity needs right now is frank speech about Islam. 

Unfortunately, in journalism, on campuses, and in politics, politically-correct speech codes demonize any analysis of Islam as "Islamophobia." Speech taboos are obeyed across a wide spectrum. In September, 2001, after the 9-11 attacks, President George Bush stated, "Islam is peace." In 2007, his fellow officers declined to take effective action against U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, even after he exhibited to them a PowerPoint presentation that cited the Koran to predict and support his subsequent, 2009 shooting of soldiers at Fort Hood. As the Christian Science Monitor put it, the Army may have chosen to "ignore red flags out of political correctness." Hollywood is also wary. The 2014 Liam Neeson film Non-Stop depicts an attempt to hijack an airplane. A Muslim is suspected.  In fact he is kindly. The real villain is a 9-11 family member and a member of the U.S. military. 

The avoidance of analysis of Islam contrasts sharply with the excoriation accorded Christianity, Israel, and Western Civilization. The Catholic Church sex abuse crisis has received saturation coverage. Distinguished history professor Philip Jenkins, in a book published by Oxford University Press, claims that media coverage distorts the crisis and contributes to anti-Catholic bigotry. Israel's very right to exist is questioned and, in high profile media, at times denied. Western Civilization is depicted as imperialist, racist, and Orientalist. This politically-correct selective outrage that lambastes the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western Civilization while emphasizing positive images of Muslims only serves further to inoculate Islam from critique. 

Selective outrage does not stand alone. Politically-correct speech codes consistently deploy three more tactics: cultural relativism, postmodern denial of objective definitions of terms, and the threat of mass hysteria. 

The first tactic used to suppress speech about Islam, cultural relativism, has an honorable history. One hundred years ago, scientific racism dominated American elite thought. Inspired by Charles Darwin, American scientific racists like Madison Grant applied a hierarchy to human beings. Some cultures, those of hunter gatherers and peasants, were low and worthless; others were high and to be valued. Educated, atheist Anglo-Saxon males occupied the top of the human pyramid of value. 
Franz Boas, the Father of American Anthropology, became a professor at Columbia University in 1896. Spurred by his own experience of anti-Semitism, Boas was determined to overturn scientific racism. Boas argued for the worth of all cultures. 

The head-to-head confrontation between scientific racist Madison Grant and cultural relativist Franz Boas had high impact. Adolf Hitler declared that Grant's 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, was his "bible." Franz Boas died of a heart attack while speaking against Nazism. Today all American schoolchildren, whether they have heard of Franz Boas or not, are indoctrinated to repeat that to so much as question whether any aspect of American culture might be superior to any aspect of a 

Non-Western culture is racist and taboo. Even brilliant ideas from great men rot when they pass from the vivifying circulation of vigorous debate into the cloying closet of unquestioned dogma. 

Objective realities do mark Islam as different from other religions. Among the five major world faiths, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, Islam is unique in its doctrine of jihad, stated clearly in this hadith, attributed to Mohammed: "I have been ordered to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah's Apostle, and offer the prayers perfectly and give the obligatory charity, so if they perform that, then they save their lives and property from me." This hadith is echoed by over a hundred jihad verses in the Koran, a book that is a fraction of the size of the Bible. 

Jihad is established not only in Islamic texts. It is exemplified by action. Mohammed ordered at least forty-three assassinations and participated in at least one hundred militarized expeditions.  Mohammed is the "perfect example worthy of emulation."

Islam spread by war, warfare that began in Mohammed's lifetime, and that has continued in the Muslim world, without significant relief, for 1,400 years. Mohammed died in 632. Muslims reached the Indian Subcontinent by 664 and Spain by 711. Islam's expansion was stopped only at the Battle of Vienna, September 12, 1683. 

Abraham, the first Jew, was a nomadic herder. Abraham made no converts through war. Conquests of Old Testament warriors like Joshua at Jericho were time- and place-specific. Jews' command to conquer was limited to the land of Israel. The God of the Bible never ordered Jews to war on all humanity and conquer the entire earth, and Jews never tried. Judaism has a significant tradition of not seeking converts. Though Judaism rivals Hinduism as the world's oldest faith, it is the smallest of the top five. Approximately .02 percent of the world's population is Jewish. 
Buddha, founder of Buddhism, was a celibate, nonviolent monk, meditator, and teacher. Buddha made no converts through war. 

Jesus, founder of Christianity, was a teacher and healer. Jesus made no converts through war. Christianity was outlawed for its first three hundred years; early Christians were subject to public torture at the hands of the all-powerful Roman Empire. Christianity's greatest spread was and continues to be thanks not to the sword, but to the word. 

Hinduism has no historical founder. Its most popular deity is Shiva, a god of meditation, cannabis use, and tantric sex. Hinduism's indifference to proselytizing is reflected on world maps. Hinduism is largely limited to the Indian Subcontinent where it was born. 

Politically-correct speech code enforcers, using cultural relativism, insist that violent acts of jihad committed by Muslims are comparable to a predictable series of crimes that demonstrate that Christians are just like Muslims, and that Christianity is just like Islam. Christianity's crimes include the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and witch trials. One might hear, "Oh, sure, some Muslims are violent, but look at Catholics. They murdered millions in the Inquisition. As times goes on, Muslims will evolve to become peaceful, just as Catholics have evolved."

The charge that the Inquisition is just like jihad is fallacious for the following reasons. 

First, while jihadis kill in obedience to Islamic scripture, the Spanish Inquisition occurred in defiance of Christian scripture, which does not counsel violence or forced conversion. A time-and-geography-specific historical series of traumas conspired to bring about the Inquisition. Spain had been invaded in 711 by Tariq ibn Ziyad, who, in a famous speech, promised his Muslim warriors Christian riches to loot and Christian women to rape. The indigenous people of the Iberian Peninsula fought back. This is called the Reconquista. Fighting lasted for seven hundred years, until 1492. Jewish converts to Catholicism were doing relatively well in the newly unified, post-Reconquista Spain. Ethnically Spanish Catholics were envious. The Spanish Inquisition was instituted in 1478. It was a xenophobic manifestation of a land that had been at war for seven hundred years over identity issues. Given human nature, the Inquisition's psychological, economic and political roots are all too understandable. 

Compare the Inquisition's limitation in space and time to jihad, which is temporally and geographically coterminous with Islam. Wherever and whenever Islam has existed, it has been accompanied by the violence of jihad. Jihad is not a response to historical traumas. Economically and socially comfortable people have left placid lives in order to wage jihad. A prominent example is the multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden, who left the swank life of a construction magnate's heir in order to live in caves, eat swill, and pursue death. 

Second, those making their case through cultural relativism often say things like, "A long time ago, Christians were violent, but they evolved; with time, Islam will evolve, too." In fact, the Inquisition was condemned by Christians not because time had passed and they had evolved; it was condemned at the time it was happening, and it was condemned because it defied Christian scripture. 

On April 18, 1482, a critic of the Spanish Inquisition wrote, "In Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, and Catalonia the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls but by lust for wealth." This critic was Pope Sixtus IV. 
Pope Innocent VIII also criticized the Inquisition. 

Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), a Catholic priest, criticized the Inquisition. Estimates are that in some years between one fifth and one tenth of all books sold in Oxford, London, and Paris were by Erasmus; he was no lone voice crying in the wilderness. Regular clergy also criticized the Inquisition. 

Christians didn't just verbally condemn the Inquisition. They offered refuge. Catholic Poland actively invited Jews to settle in Poland, and protected their rights in the 1264 Statute of Kalisz. These sentiments were restated in the 1573 Warsaw Confederation. Medieval Poland was internationally dubbed "paradisus Iudaeorum" or the paradise of the Jews.

And, of course, Catholics continue to apologize for the Inquisition, including Pope John Paul II's 2000 apology. 

The voice of the Christian conscience in opposition to the Inquisition is reflective of a wider trend. Throughout the centuries, Christianity produced its own best critics, including famous examples like St. Francis, Teresa of Avila, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Dorothy Day. 

One searches in vain for equally unambiguous condemnations of jihad from Muslims. Rather, one finds an opposite trend. Muslim Turkey, for example, belligerently denies that its 1915 genocide of Armenian Christians ever took place. Turkey arrested and convicted one of its most celebrated sons, Nobel-Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk, for briefly alluding to the Armenian Genocide during an interview with a Swiss newspaper. Turks have burned Pamuk's books and attempted to assassinate him. 

When Muslims have critiqued other Muslims, it has often been to chastise them for not killing enough infidels. When the 8th-century Arab general Muhammad bin-Qasim defeated his opponents on the Indian subcontinent with craftiness, his superior, Al-Hajjaj bin Yousef, demanded that Qasim commit more massacres. In his next action, Qasim was sure to massacre thousands. 

There are many examples in Islamic history of relatively tolerant Muslims being replaced by more draconian ones. In Medieval Spain, the more orthodox Almoravid Dynasty replaced previous more tolerant rulers, and, in turn, it was replaced by the Almohads, an even more fundamentalist Islamic dynasty. In Medieval Baghdad, the more liberal Mu'tazilis, who emphasized reason and argued that the Koran was created, were denounced and defeated by more strict Muslims. In modern Iran the more conservative Ayatollahs replaced the Shah. Today the more extreme ISIS is eclipsing Al-Qaeda, whom they assessed as too moderate. The hope that time will temper Islam lacks supportive evidence. 

Even as Christians are driven out of their homes in Muslim countries, no Muslim country steps forward to invite refugee Christians to live, and no Muslim country offers Christians complete freedom of religion. 

The third problem with the culturally-relativist argument that "Jihad is just like the Inquisition" is this. Modern scholars agree that the Inquisition's evils have been exaggerated for propaganda reasons, beginning with Catholic Spain's rival, Protestant England. This continues; one website cites ninety-five million victims killed in the Inquisition. In fact, between three thousand and five thousand victims were executed, and they were executed by the state, not the church. 

This brief analysis shows why the cultural relativists' insistence on comparing the problem of jihad to the Inquisition is not valid. A brief essay cannot adequately address the fallacious, politically-correct, cultural relativist insistence that the Crusades and the witch trials are comparable to jihad, but the reader is advised to examine these claims with care. Rodney Stark's excellent, brief, and readable God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades shows that the Crusades were undertaken, not as PC would have it, to convert Muslims to Christianity by force, but rather to protect Christians in the Holy Land. Lyndal Roper's Witch Craze is one of several recent, revolutionary books that demonstrates that just about everything PC says about witch burning is wrong. 

In any case, the above-listed paradigm applies. Christian scripture does not encourage killing people for the faith. Outbreaks of violence by and among Christians are most easily attributed to the kind of trauma that might cause any population to go to war, like the seven hundred years of identity-fueled war that preceded the Inquisition in Spain, or the social chaos caused by the Reformation, and the crop failures caused by the Little Ice Age that contributed to the witch craze. Christians in the past who lived contemporaneously with these violent outbreaks, including pontiffs, decried violence as a means to advance religious ends, and Christian individuals and nations not directly involved in conflicts attempted to rectify conditions to the extent that they were able to do so. None of these points apply to jihad. Jihad is coterminous with Islam, it is approved of, not condemned by, devout Muslims, and Muslim nations have no significant tradition of aiding the victims of jihad. Muslim reformers have agitated for a more draconian and violent interpretation of Islam. 

A second tactic politically-correct speech code enforcers use to prevent analysis of Islam is the postmodern rejection of definitions of terms based on objective reality. The postmodern approach to definition might best be summed up as "words mean whatever I say they mean." Thus, PC spokespeople focus on model Muslims who insist that "jihad" means "inner struggle." They argue that one can interpret the Koran's numerous calls to violent jihad as referring only to Mohammed's lifetime, and having no application today. Imam Jihad Turk took this approach on March 15, 2012 at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. "I am instructed in the truth of my religion from people who are not Muslim," Turk protested.  I am a Muslim, his argument ran. If I say Islam is peaceful and tolerant, then that is what it is. 

The problem with this approach is that there is such a thing as objective reality. How can one know the essence, the objective reality, of a religion?
The following criteria might be used to assess the essence of any religion:

1) What does the critical mass -- not exceptional passages, but numerically representational ones -- of canonical scripture and interpretation say? What does the critical mass of practice based on that scripture look like?

Here is an example of numerical representationally in texts as reflected in behavior. Superstar Christian pastors Rick Warren, Tony Campolo, and Jim Wallis have repeatedly stated that over two thousand Biblical verses counsel care for the poor; they cite this statistic when spearheading charities that care for the poor all over the world. Christians and Jews are exceptional in the energy and resources they devote to care for the poor. Catholics invented modern hospitals, and the Catholic Church is the single largest nongovernmental provider of health care services in the world. Statistics show that American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews donate significantly more to charity than non-believers, or other populations. 

The Koran's plethora of jihad verses has already been mentioned. The Koran also frequently mentions Hell. There is a threat of hell in every 7.9 verses; contrast this with the New Testament, where Hell is mentioned once for every 774 verses. It is not surprising that a violent text inspires violent behavior. 

2) Difficult passages occur in every document. Is there a mechanism for interpretation?
Cultural Relativists insist that the Koran is just like the Bible. Muslims can interpret the Koran to be a peaceful book. 

In fact, though, the Koran is not comparable to the Bible. The Koran is perfect. It is in Arabic, only in Arabic, never to be translated. The Koran is uncreated. It has existed for eternity. In his article, "The Uncreatedness of the Quran and the Unity of Allah," Sam Shamoun writes that merely suggesting that the Koran was created could earn the death penalty. Scholar Christoph Luxenberg has adopted his pseudonym and lives in hiding because he wrote a book suggesting that the Koran may have been first written, not in Arabic, but in the Syro-Aramaic dialect. That scholarly, linguistic observation was enough to earn him credible death threats. The belief in the near divine nature of the Koran, and the threats against anyone who studies it, leave little room for interpretation. 

3) What are the facts on the ground?

Politically correct cultural relativists insist that Islamic gender apartheid is not significantly different from misogyny in the West. They attempt to make this point by referring to Christians in the West as "Taliban." For example, Hobby Lobby, an American chain store that sells arts and crafts material, has chosen not to cover abortifacients in the health coverage it provides employees. Opponents call Hobby Lobby the "Christian Taliban." Books like Michelle Goldberg's 2007 Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and Chris Hedges' 2008 American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America describe American Christians as genocidal monsters hiding behind the innocuous, welcoming smiles of megachurch potlucks. In her book, Goldberg reports keeping her passport handy and her bags packed in case she needs to flee the United States at any moment. 

The facts on the ground speak for themselves. Muslim countries are "high sex ratio" countries. They have more males than females. Females face of a gauntlet of survival-threatening customs, including sex selective abortion of female fetuses, the denial of health care to females, child marriage, subsequent early pregnancy, and honor killing. In Judeo-Christian countries, females tend to survive longer than males. 

Facts on the ground, including sex ratios, female literacy rates, wealth distribution, publication of scholarly articles, degrees granted, holding of office and other indicators, give the lie to the cultural relativist insistence that there is no difference between misogyny in the West and in Islam. 
In short, the postmodern refusal to define Islam according to objective criteria does not withstand analysis. If you stand in front of a moving train, you will be smashed, no matter how you interpret that train, or how invincible you tell yourself you are. There are multiple objective criteria that demonstrate Islam's differences from the world's other five top faiths. Statistics on gender are just one such objective criterion. 

The final politically-correct roadblock to analysis of Islam is the paranoid, fear-mongering threat that analysis of Islam will immediately spark mass hysteria, lynchings and pogroms. For this threat to gain traction, it must be accompanied by a conviction that Americans are a mob of frothing-at-the-mouth, knuckle-dragging troglodytes. Only anti-American bigots believe this. Americans are to be commended for significantly not scapegoating Muslims after 9-11. 

Nobel Prize winner Marie Sklodowska Curie said, "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." She is correct. 
Scholars, journalists, and media personalities are wordsmiths. While others work with their hands, their eyes, and their endurance, wordsmiths' job is to use words to clarify issues, to comfort the afflicted, to expand minds, and to find solutions. The world needs wordsmiths right now. Their articulate analysis of Islam will comfort and enlighten, not inflame, the masses. 

Now, when talking heads state simple truths, "Most Muslims are not jihadis. Most Muslims are peaceful. Most Muslims are just like you and I and most Muslims should not be the targets of our rage," many otherwise good people, rendered cynical, dismiss these words. 

Free speech is the best friend Muslims have. In the current environment, unspoken suspicions rankle and conspiracy theories proliferate. We must protect innocent Muslims from rancor, every bit as much as we must protect innocent people of all faiths. The best way to protect the vast majority of Muslims who are innocent and who just want to live their lives in peace is to tell the truth about Islam, and to publicly, verbally, fearlessly, and communally hash out solutions to the challenges Islam presents.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of Save Send Delete.

American Thinker

Eye-opening black Marine letter makes powerful case for why Bundy is not a racist

April 26, 2014
by Michael Dorstewitz

Charlie Delta with Bundy

 Now that the dust has cleared over Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s “Blacks would be better off as slaves” remark, how does the conservative black community feel?

Kevin Jackson, editor of The Black Sphere, published this eye-opening letter from a black Marine using the name Charlie Delta, which when distilled to its essentials, says Bundy is no racist. It reads:

The media distorts information to the point of social division. This is a photo of myself and the resilient, often charismatic, and maybe not so tactful Cliven Bundy. He’s a cowboy and a helluva family man, not an orator.

One thing he definitely isn’t – a racist. I found his comments to not only be NOT racist, but his own view of his experiences. Who the heck are we to determine another man’s perspective on the world around him?! Just because Picasso’s view of the world was abstract, does it negate the fact that his art was genuine?

Furthermore, if you take the time to do your own research, you’ll find that his statements about some black Americans actually hold weight. He posed a hypothetical question. He said, “I wonder IF” … Hell, I’m black and I often wonder about the same about the decline of the black family.

Bottom line is that we are all slaves in this waning republic, no matter our skin color. Mr. Bundy could have used any racial demographic as an example: Native Americans on reservations, whites in trailer parks, etc. He noticed the crippling effects of receiving government “assistance” and the long term result of accepting handouts.

It’s not progress at all. I challenge Sean Hannity, Rand Paul, and others to read my comment and reconsider their position in this matter. Individual liberties are at stake here, yours and mine. THAT is the issue.

Don’t let the liberal media and ignoramuses like Glenn Beck and that weasel Harry Reid make you lose sight of the real issue here: The federal government is a burgeoning behemoth and a bully on a once constitutional playground.I sincerely hope you real patriots out there who can see through the smoke.

Semper Fidelis

Bundy isn’t exactly a man of letters, nor of tact. But he’s become a symbol of liberty against a tyrannical government.

Bizpac

Women of MSNBC Silent on Martin Bashir's Palin Comments

by Frances Martel 20 Nov 2013

 
 It has been a week since MSNBC's Martin Bashir took the network's hatred of Sarah Palin one step further with a sexist rant suggesting someone defecate and urinate into the former Alaska governor's mouth. Having apologized but received no discipline, his female colleagues on the network declined to comment on the network's inaction to Breitbart News today. Breitbart reached out directly to hosts Chris Jansing, Rachel Maddow, Abby Huntsman, Andrea Mitchell, Savannah Guthrie, Mika Brzezinski, Alex Wagner, Krystal Ball, and Alex Witt, as well as reporter Kelly O'Donnell, through a publicist, requesting comment on the continued lack of discipline Martin Bashir has enjoyed since making his comments regarding Palin. As of press time, none of MSNBC's talent has responded to our request, nor have they commented publicly on the matter.

The silence is deafening, especially compared to the backlash against those on the right that have outraged the network's talent in the past with far less obscene statements. MSNBC has been pivotal in forwarding a narrative of the Republican Party and the American right engaging in a "war on women" by expressing moral opposition to abortion and skepticism at the government interfering with women's health.

Those Breitbart News have reached out to, in particular, have not been hesitant in commenting when the offender has been a right-wing pundit rather than someone on the left. At the peak of the Sandra Fluke contraceptive media scandal, Rachel Maddow contended that radio host Rush Limbaugh did not understand birth control; Krystal Ball started an online petition and boycott campaign against Limbaugh; and Andrea Mitchell invited Fluke on her program to discuss her sympathetic phone call with President Obama.
In response to former Missouri Congressman Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comments, Kelly O'Donnell tried to tie the Missouri Congressman to then Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan by arguing that his comments resembled something in a bill Ryan was involved in writing, which included the term of art "forcible rape."

The women of MSNBC have been much quieter for Martin Bashir, despite his monologue distinguishing itself for introducing human waste into the conversation. While Bashir himself took the time to apologize for his "wholly unacceptable" comments, he has so far seen no discipline from the network for his comments. His apology came after widespread backlash from the greater conservative community, coverage by Breitbart News, and a petition on TruthRevolt. While Bashir's network immediately suspended colleague Alec Baldwin for his latest homophobic outburst against a photographer, they have yet to note whether Bashir will face a similar fate for words spoken on air.

While often maligned by the left as a divisive figure, Palin has a track record of reaching across the aisle when women in the public eye have become targets of sexist invective. In a recent interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Palin argued that many of the attacks against Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign, especially those based on appearance, were the product of sexism. Some women on the left, most notably today former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, returned the favor, tweeting today that Martin Bashir has "gotta go" for his commentary.

SarahPAC, Palin's political action committee, is also still awaiting response from the network over whether they will discipline Bashir. In a letter written to administrators at MSNBC, they list a number of disciplinary actions by the network (including the firing of Don Imus for inappropriate words about the Rutgers women's basketball  team and the recent Baldwin fiasco) and request an answer as to what Bashir's fate will be. This appears to be the only pressure on the network to react to such wholly unprofessional talk, however, as prominent feminist groups like NOW and the Feminist Majority stand out by their silence on the matter.

Big Journalism

Palin: Schweizer Book a 'Slap Upside the Head' to Media's Blindness to D.C. Corruption

By Sarah Palin 22 Oct 2013

  Governor Palin posted this to her Facebook page on Tuesday night with a link to the review she wrote for Breitbart News about Peter Schweizer's new book, Extortion. We are reposting what she wrote in its entirety because we feel she makes an excellent point drawn from her personal experience. Look, I’ll keep this brief because I want to spend quality time getting kids to bed tonight. Doubt I’ll get much sleep though because the recent proof of government corruption makes me nauseated. If it doesn’t you, and you can blindly ignore the status quo embraced by our politicians and low information voters, then I unapologetically call out your disloyalty to the ethical foundation of the greatest nation on earth.

When you have a moment, please read my review of a jaw dropping, searing new book that provides the proof that Washington, D.C. has strayed so far from the planks in both major political parties' platforms that we are fools for trusting any who have refused to fight against cronyism and extortion. This is the stuff Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and a few others have railed against so boldly. It's the stuff “tea party” patriots of all stripes rallied against to grow the grassroots movement that is the only political solution to defend our republic! “60 Minutes” covered some of this on Sunday, Sean Hannity had an outstanding interview with the book’s author tonight, and other mediums are doing right by not ignoring these revelations.

Here’s the deal: all politics is local. And personal. Let me personalize this. It is UNBELIEVABLE that the press would investigate every nook and cranny of my life; send gullible reporters to my little town to kick over every rock any family member ever tread underfoot; scour every email I’ve written; research every Palin campaign disclosure like junkyard dogs; sic 12 AP reporters to fact check my book; breathlessly report about my wardrobe and an old used tanning bed I bought to get some sun during Alaskan winters as if these were vital national news stories; hound friends, personal doctors, strangers, and just downright strange people, etc., etc., etc., to know everything we do (and they still get the story wrong!). They blew and still blow all those resources “investigating” the irrelevant hockey mom from Wasilla. Meanwhile our government goes to hell in a hand basket right before the “elite media’s” closed eyes, and it took my friend Peter Schweizer to slap you upside the head to see any of this corruption? Good God. Be ashamed, media, be very ashamed.

Now, I think I’ll go read “Green Eggs and Ham” to my little boy, then we’ll all say a prayer for our country as I join you in readying for tomorrow’s battle for America.

Here’s my review of Peter Schweizer’s new book “Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets”: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/21/Extortion
Photo credit: Shealah Craighead

Big Government

Dangerous Times: Obama The Crisis-Monger

October 5, 2013
By James Lewis

 Obama thrives on crises, not solutions.

That's the key to this whole administration.

The budget crisis today is the direct result of five years of over-the-top deficit spending, all demanded by Obama, who doesn't really care if the economy gets better or not.  Either way, he will blame the Republicans, with the unanimous support of our Soviet-style media.  He believes that politically he can't lose with a completely obedient media spinning everything his way.

As long as Americans are suckered by our monopoly media, we will never solve any real problems.  Instead, we will be drawn into phony crises instigated by Obama and the Democrats.  Any real dangers, like nuclear proliferation and the Jihad War, will be ignored as long as Democrats are in power.

The only permanent solution is to fire the mendacious media, and that is completely up to you.

Republicans are treated worse in this administration than mass-murdering Mullah Rouhani, who led Iran's truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1984, killing 299 young Marines and French peacekeepers.  That truck-bombing led to Hezb'allah, Iran's terrorist arm, taking over the nation of Lebanon.

Mullah Rouhani is now treated as a reasonable peacemaker by this endlessly mendacious administration.

Obama operates the same way domestically, where white and black unemployment is peaking, and he doesn't even bother to express concern.  The nation's crisis is his opportunity.

From tip to toe, Obama is a crisis-maker, not a healer.  He stirs up trouble every chance he gets.  Ask yourself how any U.S. president could willfully try to worsen race relations in the United States by flipping the judicial verdict in the Zimmerman trial, and you will begin to see the real Obama.  He doesn't care whether justice was done.  He only whips up more racial rage.

The chaotic launch of O'Care was done without adequate planning and testing.  Nobody knows if this thing could ever work, because it was passed, as Nancy Pelosi famously said, without anyone even reading the bill -- using unrelenting demagoguery in the media.  Nobody in the Democratic Party understood the bill, because no human being can understand 10,500 pages of technical jargon.  Like the 37,000 pages of the federal tax code, this law is not meant to be understood.  It is meant to give essentially unlimited powers to a bureaucracy that does not understand it, either, but which will use pieces of the giant law to implement what it wants.

Ordinary Americans don't even understand the United States Constitution, which can be printed on twenty pages, and O'Care is a hulking monstrosity by comparison.  It is intended to drive the best health care system in the world out of business.  That is perverse and malignant.

Every computer programmer knows that even "simple" programs can grow so complex that nobody can figure them out.  They become bloatware, with endless bells and whistles and a lifetime of bugs.  They can't be fixed, because their design is fundamentally flawed.  But nobody has ever planned for anything as complicated as one seventh of the U.S. economy.  This is a moon launch without any knowledge of basic physics or engineering.  It has all the arrogant presumption and ignorance of Soviet central planning.  Stay out of it if you can.

Obama doesn't care.  O'Care must go through, no matter what.

This is Obama's standard operating procedure: make a rigid demand; drive it through Congress, come hell or high water; and blame Republicans for the crash.  Or, in foreign affairs, undermine the Arab nations, blame Israel for all the trouble in the ever-violent Middle East, and praise the murderous mullahs for their peaceful intentions.

All American values are turned upside-down in this administration, which is why it has to tell an endless stream of lies.  Nobody can trust a single word.

In the Middle East, Obama insisted on the resignation of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the pillar of peace for four decades.  That was done without regard for the suffering it would bring to the people of Egypt and its neighbors -- not just Israel, but also Saudi Arabia, which relies on Egypt for its defense.  The Muslim Brotherhood was slated as the likely winner of the next election, and now it turns out that for years, the MBs have been feeding uncounted millions of dollars directly to Obama, to the looming Hillary campaign, and to weirdos like Anthony Weiner in New York City.  New York's Democratic candidate for mayor, Bill de Blasio, is an old unrepentant Communist.  Chances are that he won the money race with a mix of leftist and Islamist dollars.  Naturally, de Blasio has the support of hopelessly corrupt media like the New York Times.

In Egypt, modernist Egyptians rebelled against Obama's Muslim Brotherhood pals, who were trying to impose sharia law.  But it took an Egyptian and Saudi rebellion against the MBs to counter Obama's penchant for supporting the worst characters in sight.  Obama favors instability because he can get his way only through crises.  That is his ideology.  That is also why he sneers at the U.S. Constitution, the great stabilizing foundation of America for two whole centuries.  

As long as this president controls the U.S. media, it doesn't matter how much disaster he creates.  His corrupt media servants will tell their Lo-Fos that he is not responsible.  The news media may be going out of business, but last week Al Jazeera advertised 800 openings for job-hungry American journalists.  Guess where their loyalties now lie.  Not to this country.  Only to the tiny oil sheikhdom of Qatar and its war theology.

In Syria we are giving arms to the Qaedist rebels, who have been torturing and decapitating women and children in Christian villages like Ma'aloula, the way they have done since Mohammed raided the Jewish Qureisha tribe in the 6^th century.  In Kenya we are seeing the same mass murders of civilians at a modern mall, the pride of Nairobi.  Ordinary people taking cell phone pictures and videos are showing us the reality of America's bestial "allies" under Obama.

Yes, we are running arms to the worst murder gangs in the world, no matter how demonic they are.  That was the big secret of Benghazi: the United States was sending shiploads of Libyan arms to al-Qaeda in Syria.  Why?  Nobody in the media has even dared to ask that question.  If Obama does it, it has to be good.  But the media knew enough to bury the facts during the election.

In Syria, Sunni rebels are now an estimated 60,000 fighters, coming from the peace-loving Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and Salafists.  Iran has poured in 20,000 fighters on Assad's side, from Hezb'allah and Iran itself.  Assad has his own army, supported by Russia, while the CIA has trained some thousands of "moderate rebels."  Guess who will win.  Not the outnumbered moderates, for sure.

The Center for Policy Studies has now exposed secret money streams from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Democrats.  That hidden flow of cash explains everything that made no sense before, going back to 9/11/01.  The MBs run layers of shell corporations to hide money for the Democrats from the IRS -- which isn't looking very hard.  The Clinton Center is one major conduit.  The Obama campaign is another.  The Democrats have a long history of corruption, going back to Boss Tweed; Joseph Kennedy, Sr.; and the Daley Machine in Chicago.  Today's "transnationalist" (socialist) Democrats are copying the European Union, which dances to the tune of Gulf oil money.  That is the seductive side of jihad, the propaganda war, which has rendered the American media deaf, dumb, and blind to the danger of Iran's suicide cult, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudis, and al-Qaeda.

This week, we also found out about Malik Obama, yet another half-brother of the president's, who turns out to be a big muckety-muck in -- you guessed it -- the radical Muslim Brotherhood.  Their slogan is "Our ambition is to die in the way of Allah!"  And naturally to commit murder and torture in the way of Allah, too.  This is an ancient evil come alive, with the active aid of the radical left in Europe and America.  Without the Western left, there would be no huge Muslim immigration flow into Europe and the U.S.  That is why famous "feminist" Naomi Wolf has signed on with Al Jazeera, the voice of the ancient desert patriarchy itself.

So here we see Malik Obama, with a big smile on his face and a dozen "wives" tucked away in his harem.
Want to see a real war against women?  Wherever sharia takes over, women are systematically intimidated, brainwashed, beaten, raped, murdered, jailed in their homes, and treated with contempt.  American feminists are so utterly deluded that they can't see crimes against women all over Dar al Harb, the House of War, right in front of their unseeing eyes.  And Obama's "alter ego," Valerie Jarrett, born and raised in Iran, can't be in any doubt about the facts.  She knows the facts, Obama knows the facts, and the only explanation is purposeful crisis-mongering: things have to get worse before they can get better.

That perverse logic failed for seven decades in the Soviet Union.  Under the glorious reign of Obama, it isn't working, either.  Leninism is nothing but personal animosity turned into government policy.

In civilized Iran, the mullahs just passed a pedophile-enabling law, allowing men to "adopt" young girls and then to officially "marry" them.  This is all fine according to the barbaric laws of the formerly great land of Persia, where child sex slavery, drugs, and pervasive tyranny are par for the course.

From the New York Post:

Iranian news reports (in 1992) said (Rouhani's) son shot himself with his father's pistol in 1992. But now Iranian dissident Ali Reza Nuri reports that the son wrote a suicide note. Writing in the London-based, Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, he says the note read: "I hate your government, your lies, your corruption, your religion, your double standard and your hypocrisy."  

This is the man Obama is so eager to "negotiate" with.

In five critical years, Obama has done nothing to stop Iranian nukes, while telling Israel and the Saudis he would never let it happen.  Obama's goal was to trap Israel into a no-win do-or-die dilemma.  The Saudis are even more scared of the Iranians, who tried to overthrow the Saudi royal family when Khomeini was alive.  Saudi Arabia has a tiny population and a huge desert to protect, along with Mecca and Medina.  They are much more vulnerable than Israel, which packs a big retaliatory punch.

Obama has consistently lied to our allies.  None of them trust us today, under a man who was called "aliéné" by France's Nicholas Sarkozy -- meaning "alienated from reality."  Like all intelligence agencies, the French Sûreté has psychiatrists on its staff, and you can even look up Obama's personality on Wikipedia.

More than any nation on Earth, America has made war, when there were no good alternatives, with a clear sense of moral purpose.  Historians always argue about wartime decisions after the fact.  The Declaration of Independence makes the case for the American revolution in moral and legal terms.  The Civil War was fought as a last resort against the spread of slavery and to keep the "last, best hope of mankind" alive.  World Wars I and II were fought to defend civilized values against tyranny, and the Cold War had a convincing rationale explained by John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Obama is the first American president to have abandoned the moral high ground in his foreign policy.  Like Bill Clinton and unlike George W. Bush, Obama has never used the bully pulpit of the presidency to explain why we are at war.  Because don't doubt for a moment that war has been declared on us by every jihadist regime from Ayatollah Khomeini to Muhammed Morsi.

The Obama presidency pre-emptively surrenders to the enemy whenever it gets a chance.  It has appointed Muslim Brotherhood loyalists to high positions in this administration.  It has swept under the rug jihadist assaults on our military and our civilian population.  It has failed to stop the aggressive jihadist regime in Iran in its assault -- not just on Israel, but on America itself.

Prime Minister Netanyahu just pointed out that the Iranians are building ICBMs with enough range to hit the United States.  The mullahs already have missiles able to hit Israel and the Sunni oil regimes across the Gulf.

Why does a war theocracy build long-range nukes and missiles while impoverishing its own people?  No sane person doubts the answer.  But as long as Obama is president, the United States will act like a helpless giant.  We have the best military in the world, and the most inane and flabbiest leadership.

A British saying from the Cold War goes:

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. But three times is enemy action."

American Thinker

Media Target the Powerless; Protect Powerful Liars, Bigots & Race Hoaxers

by John Nolte 14 Aug 2013

 Last month, a wealthy movie and television star took to Twitter to hurl homophobic slurs at a gay reporter, and to urge his million-plus followers to commit acts of violence against the man. Last week, a nobody -- a jester, a clown, a performer performing at a rodeo, donned a Barack Obama mask and joked about having a bull attack him.

Today, after much of the media chose not to report on Alec Baldwin's reprehensible behavior, he is in talks to join NBC News.

Meanwhile, the clown has been banned for life, the president of the organization that hired him has been forced to resign, and the powerful NAACP is demanding a full investigation.

Earlier this week, on the pages of Politico, a powerful Hollywood director smeared rural whites as racists with the bigoted and provably false claim that they would not see a film with an all black cast.

Three decades ago, a woman who is now 66 years-old and once hosted a cable cooking show, used the N-word.

Today, Lee Daniels can be seen all across the media landscape in softball interviews asking him about his
 Oscar chances with "The Butler." He has never once been challenged on his bigoted beliefs.

Meanwhile, a national media frenzy has destroyed Paula Deen and everything she worked for.

Last week, a nobody shopgirl was globally defamed after one of the most powerful people in the world publicly accused her of racism.

Today, Oprah Winfrey's tale of being victimized by this shopgirl has completely collapsed.

Meanwhile, the media are too busy talking about Winfrey's Oscar chances to vindicate this poor shopgirl's honor or to hold Winfrey accountable for her behavior.

Last month, even after all the evidence proved race had absolutely nothing to do with the fatal shooting of a Florida teenager, a sitting president and the architect of the Tawana Brawley race hoax teamed up to falsely claim it did.

Today, Barack Obama and Al Sharpton are hailed by the media as the new face of civil rights, even though the fallout of their dishonesty included dozens of acts of racial violence and lawlessness.

Meanwhile, George Zimmerman has been forced into hiding for fear of his life.

Last year, a sitting president and secretary of state falsely accused a nobody filmmaker of causing a riot that resulted in four American deaths at a diplomatic outpost in Libya. An unquestioning media ran with the story and the filmmaker became a worldwide pariah.

The worldwide notoriety would result in the hapless filmmaker being arrested in the dead of night (on a parole violation).

Today, we know the film had nothing to do with the terror attack in Libya. We also know that Barack

Obama and Hillary Clinton were aware of that at the same time they were calling for the filmmaker's head.

Obama and Clinton falsely scapegoated an innocent man to cover up their own incompetence and to win an election. The American media have responded (with very few exceptions) only by doing everything in their power to protect them.

Today, after almost a year in prison, that nobody filmmaker lives in hiding for fear of his life.

Meanwhile, the media are eagerly prepping Hillary Clinton's coronation as the next president of the United States.

Big Journalism

Six Reasons Why CNN Is Now... The Most Disgraced Name In News

by John Nolte 25 Jul 2013

  Based on history, most media watchers would probably expect NBC News to win the award for the most shameful coverage of George Zimmerman, the 29 year-old Florida man recently acquitted for the tragic shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin. But an objective look at the coverage from major print, online, and broadcast outlets, makes clear that by a fairly safe margin, CNN is most deserving of this win. Before we get to the nominating process, here is some crucial context and background:

Introduction
On February 26, 2012, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman fatally shot 17 year-old Trayvon Martin. Almost eighteen months later, a jury would unanimously acquit Zimmerman after his attorneys made a case that the shooting was an act of self-defense.
Zimmerman is Hispanic. Martin was black.

Under the mistaken impression (probably based on his last name) that Zimmerman was white, within a couple of weeks after the shooting, major media outlets begin to drive the story with a  white versus black racial narrative.

The evidence that shows that the media mistakenly believed Zimmerman was white is convincing: On March 8, the Associated Press describes Zimmerman as "white." March 13, NBC's Al Sharpton hosts Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump on his primetime MSNBC show; Crump repeatedly refers to Zimmerman as "white." That same day, Matt Gutman, the ABC News reporter covering the case for the network in Florida tweets that Trayvon was killed "bc [because] he was black." March 19, CBS News falsely describes Zimmerman as white.

Apparently, sometime between March 19 and March 22, the media discovered Zimmerman is Hispanic.

The Media's Dilemma
Once it was revealed Zimmerman is Hispanic, the media had a real problem on its hands. The white vs. black narrative was already in place. Sharpton was set to hold a high-profile rally in Florida on March 22; and In order to launch the story into the stratosphere, President Obama would -- without a shred of evidence -- inject race into the story the very next day, March 23.



In other words, this was already a runaway black vs. white train. But due to a lack of simple due diligence and fact-checking, the all-important "white" part was found missing -- but only after it was too late.

What to do?

It was at this point that the media as a whole entered into an eighteen month push to prop up a fabricated white vs. black racial narrative. And before it was over, most every major news outlet in the country would sully themselves in some way to keep this manufactured reality alive.

But no outlet, not even NBC, would play as dirty or come out as tarnished as CNN.

Here, and in no particular order, are the six categories (and the winners in each) that led to CNN winning the award for Most Shameful Coverage of George Zimmerman:

1. Singling Out George Zimmerman for a Lack of Racial Purity
Due to the fact that a now-unstoppable black vs. white narrative train was already carrying the entire mainstream media, Al Sharpton, left-wing civil rights groups, and even the president of the United States, something had to be done to ensure it didn’t derail based on the inconvenient fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic.



Enter the term "white Hispanic." The rationale…

Like Barack Obama, George Zimmerman has one white parent. Quite properly, the president has always been described as black for the simple reason that he is black. Historically and editorially, racial purity has never been an issue for the mainstream media when it comes to describing Hispanics, American Indians, blacks, Arabs,  Asians, etc. 

That didn't matter, though, and the loophole the media came up with to deny Zimmerman his racial identity was that he failed a racial purity test. The white part of him would now be cynically amplified at every opportunity.

Though Zimmerman is as Hispanic as Obama is black, for the next eighteen months, various news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, and CNN, would strip Zimmerman of his identity by making the previously unheard of editorial decision to describe him as a "white Hispanic," or some variation of "self-described Hispanic."

Thanks to a recent editorial by former CNN staffer Roland Martin, we now know that the network's decision to focus on Zimmerman's lack of racial purity was an institutional one -- not a decision made on-the-fly by individual producers or anchors.

Winner: Tie

It is highly likely that the same institutional decision was made at other news outlets to use a racial purity loophole to artificially prop up the white vs. black narrative. For that reason, there is no clear winner in this category.

2. Fabricating Evidence Against George Zimmerman
Three major news outlets are responsible for violating basic editorial standards in order to frame George Zimmerman as a racist and/or murderer. The first network guilty of this was CNN.

 

CNN:
On March 21, CNN falsely accused Zimmerman of using the racially explosive term "fucking coon" on a 911 call. Live, on the air, during Anderson Cooper's primetime show, an audio expert listened to an unintelligible audio tape and incorrectly concluded Zimmerman had described Martin as a "fucking coon" just moments before he shot him.

This irresponsible and premature segment aired the very night before Al Sharpton's high-profile rally in Florida.

After the audio was fully enhanced (something CNN obviously didn't wait to do before falsely defaming Zimmerman), it became clear that Martin had either said "fucking cold" or "fucking punks."

More than two weeks would pass before CNN would retract its falsehood.

NBC News:
On March 27, the "Today Show" would air audio of a 911 call that they had maliciously edited.

Here is what NBC broadcast:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

Here is the actual conversation:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about. 

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

After the fraudulent editing was discovered (first by Breitbart News), NBC News issued a full retraction and fired a number of the producers involved.

ABC News:
On March 28, ABC News proved themselves every bit as irresponsible as CNN by breaking a major story before the evidence was all in. Using surveillance video that hadn't yet been fully enhanced, ABC claimed that "video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman."

This premature and completely false accusation would be retracted by ABC News four days later after a full enhancement of the video clearly showed lacerations on Zimmerman's head.

Winner: CNN by a mile

Though Zimmerman and his attorneys have filed a lawsuit against NBC News for the malicious editing of the 911 tape, what CNN did is far worse.

NBC News was attempting to make Zimmerman look like a racial profiler. CNN, on the other hand, was attempting to make Zimmerman look like an enraged outright racist (there was no racial angle in ABC's fraud). It also took CNN far longer to retract their story than either NBC or ABC.

Moreover, on its own airwaves, CNN would allow the complete fallacy that Zimmerman had said "fucking coon" to live on.

Which brings me to…

3. Outright Dishonesty
Unfortunately, there simply isn't enough room on the Internet to list all of the media dishonestly hurled at Zimmerman. To save time, rather than make a comparison, I will simply focus on the very worst of it, which undoubtedly came from CNN.



Nothing was more harmful to our country or to Zimmerman personally than the lie that race somehow was involved in this tragic shooting. Therefore, the worst of the media's outright dishonesty came from their zeal to falsely prop up  the  false narrative that Zimmerman is racist or that race had anything to do with the shooting.

On two separate occasions (I'm aware of), even though CNN had retracted the falsehood back in 2012, the inflammatory lie that Zimmerman had described Martin as a "fucking coon" moments before shooting him was allowed to live on uncorrected during CNN broadcasts in July of 2013, when racial tensions were at their highest.

On July 16, 2013, on Erin Burnett's primetime CNN show, guest Safiya Songhai claimed Zimmerman's "on the tape saying F-ing coons."

Burnett did not correct the record.

Even worse, however, is that three days earlier on the 13th, one of CNN's own employees spread this lie.

Nancy Grace falsely claimed Zimmerman said "fucking coon" during her HLN primetime show.

As far as I know, Grace has never corrected the record.

Winner: CNN

Again, the dishonesty throughout the media during this affair was everywhere, and at times  staggering. But nothing I know of reached the heights of a cable news network intentionally allowing racial tensions to be enflamed by something they knew was an outright lie.

4. Phony Objectivity
It might be a little unfair to declare CNN the winner partly because of the fact that their phony objectivity is a 24/7 juggernaut, but there is more to condemn them than just that.

 

While ABC, CBS, NBC, the Washington Post , AP, etc. were all on the exact same dishonest narrative track in covering this case, they are not a 24/7 bullhorn across numerous media platforms. CNN is, and while it is true that MSNBC is not objective, unlike CNN, MSNBC does not pretend to be objective.
CNN, therefore, is far more sinister than MSNBC in how it disguises its leftism as objective truth. And when it came to the Zimmerman case, the network was especially toxic for all the reasons listed above.

There is, however, one CNN segment of outrageous bias that sticks out like no other.

Even if this particular segment had occurred on the openly left-wing MSNBC, it would have been worthy of note. But for it to happen on a network that advertises itself as "objective" made for an extraordinary thirty-minutes of television.

In 2012, and before there was a shred of proof race had anything to do with anything, President Obama injected race into the Martin shooting. His cynical goal was obvious: In a swing-state crucial to his upcoming reelection, Obama sought to turn a tragic local story into a national media obsession that would galvanize his Florida base via racial division

Post-verdict, what Obama did last week was even worse. After the trial and a thorough FBI investigation, the president knew that race had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting. Regardless, on July 19, the president made a surprise appearance in the White house briefing room and delivered the kind of racially divisive remarks unheard of from a sitting president in my lifetime.

CNN's reaction from its "objective" anchor Brooke Baldwin and four "objective" analysts (Gloria Borger, Jessica Yellin, Sonny Hostin, and Candy Crowley) can only be described as orgasmic. The surreal segment is described in detail here.

The topper, though, was when "objective" CNN anchor Don Lemon joined the celebration by breaking down into tears.

Winner: CNN

5. Outright Racism
The mainstream media's decision to single out George Zimmerman for his lack of racial purity was without question a shameful and bigoted act. But the only moment of outright virulent racism occurring in the mainstream media came from CNN's Nancy Grace during her HLN primetime show.

With racial tensions at their peak as America awaited a verdict, a sneering Grace lashed out at the Hispanic Zimmerman with a racial tirade about him enjoying a life of "driving through Taco Bell every night, having churros" as Trayvon Martin lies dead.
--

--
In my two decades of watching the mainstream media, I have never once seen any media personality use this kind of open racism on the air. The fact that the rest of the media have ignored Grace's statement is depressing. The fact that Grace still has a job is outrageous. The fact that neither CNN nor Grace have even acknowledged or apologized defies explanation.

In 2010, CNN fired Hispanic anchor Rick Sanchez for falsely accusing Jon Stewart of racism.

In 2013, a CNN anchor is using CNN's own airwaves to hurl racism at a Hispanic, and there have been absolutely no consequences.

Winner: CNN not only wins this category, "The Most Trusted Name In News" stands alone.

6. Lies of Omission
The media almost made a game of not reporting proven facts inconvenient to their phony  white vs. black racial narrative. This is a form of lying known as lying through omission. There are almost too many lies of omission to count, but let us focus on this:

George Zimmerman's past indicates he is color blind. He has dated black women, tutored black children, once stood up for a black homeless man against the police (we're told he so desperately wants to impress), has black relatives, and voted for the first black president.

Moreover, the investigative arm of Eric Holder's Justice Department, the FBI, did an in-depth investigation into Zimmerman and found no evidence of racism in his past or the night of the shooting.

Winner: Tie
Every mainstream media outlet in America shamefully downplayed these facts.
--
Of these six categories, CNN tied in two and handily won four.

In a vast ocean of reprehensible media behavior surrounding the coverage of George Zimmerman, CNN -- once one of the most respected and trusted news outlets in the world -- stood alone as a bright, beaming lighthouse of falsehoods, racism, and fabrications.

Big Journalism

The Muslims the Media Doesn't See

Sunday, May 05, 2013 
by Daniel Greenfield

The media coverage of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has one theme and one tack. Like 30 of the 31 men on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, they were terrorists who just happened to be Muslim.

While the New York Times dispatched its best and brightest lackeys to Boston to write sensitive
pieces on how hard it was for the two Tsarnaevs to fit in leaving them no choice but to bomb the Boston Marathon and then send LOL texts to their friends, it fell to a UK tabloid like The Sun to conduct an interview with the ex-girlfriend of the lead terrorist and learn that he wanted her to hate America and beat her because she wouldn't wear a Hijab.

There are all sorts of jobs that Americans won't do. Like pick lettuce, bomb the Boston Marathon and report honestly on the motives of the bombers. The only news network that operates outside the media consensus is owned by an Australian mogul who also owns The Sun.

Americans like to think of their press as freer, but it's only free in the sense that it voluntarily puts on its own muzzle. European tabloids get into bloody brawls with regulators. American newspapers have nothing to brawl about. They will gleefully report anything that undermines national security at the drop of a hat, knowing that they won't be touched, but there is a long list of subjects that they won't touch with a million mile pole.

In Europe, editors risked their lives to publish the Mohammed cartoons. In America, on the rare occasion that they were depicted, they were usually censored. CNN, which could show Kathy Griffin trying to molest Anderson Cooper, without the benefit of pixelation or a suicide button, blurred out Mohammed's face; assuming that Muslims would appreciate the sensitivity of treating their prophet's face like an obscene object.

The American media does not need to be censored. It censors itself.

Did the New York Times really fail to come across Tamerlan Tsarnaev's ex-girlfriend and domestic abuse victim while they were busily interviewing every single person in Boston who ever ran into the future terrorists? Doubtful. The New York Times may be incompetent, but it isn't that incompetent. If it could track down Tamerlan's old coach, it could track down his old girlfriend. It chose not to.

So did every other paper.

Either The Sun is staffed with crack journalists who could do what no American newspaper, news channel and network news program could, or The Sun got the scoop on Nadine Ascencao because no newspaper on this side of the ocean wanted to touch it. And it's easy to see why.

Nadine talks about being beaten in the name of Islam, forced to memorize Koran verses and being taught to hate America. Most journalists on this side of the ocean want quotes on what nice boys the two Tsarnaevs were and how, in true liberal fashion, no one could have expected them to do something like this.

Every background story on them is filled with the same pabulum, because the endless march of “We couldn’t have known” quotes provides the government-media complex with the plausible deniability it needs to continue doing the same thing all over again. If the people couldn’t have known, then it stands to reason that their government or their media couldn’t have known either.

No Islam please, we're American was the mainstream media's unspoken message. We don't do Islamic terrorism. We only report on terrorists who happen to be Muslim.

The only newspaper besides The Sun to do an interview with Nadine Ascencao was the Wall Street Journal; which just happens to be owned by the same tabloid mogul. But there is an interesting difference between The Sun and the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece doesn't mention Hijabs, Koran verses or hating America. It doesn't mention Islam at all.

Co-written by a Pakistani journalist, it emphasizes only that Tamerlan was a bully of no particular religion. That reporter's twitter feed features a retweet from another Muslim WSJ reporter who broadcasts that the plans of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to head to Times Square amounted to nothing. Nothing to see here. Move along.

 Nothing to see here is the theme of the media's coverage. Like a movie, it begins with inspirational tales of courage, and then just when the villains were about to come on the scene, the credits began to roll. It's only been twenty minutes, but the audience gets hustled out of the theater and told to leave their sodas and popcorn behind.

The "folks who did this", in Obama's patently false folksy parlance, were caught. Or at least one of them was. The sacred liberal ceremony of the Miranda warning was recited by a judge at his bedside and the trial will now move through the traditional phases of expensive lawyers paid for by the taxpayer pleading that their client was traumatized by our foreign policy and the entire story being shoved to the back of the media's coat rack behind the next sports star who comes out of the closet.

This is the surreal world of the American media, which wields its weapons of mass distraction with clinical precision, so that the news hour and the local paper are virtually indistinguishable in content from an old episode of The Jerry Springer Show. But it can't possibly spare the time for a coherent discussion of the real world motives of two men who carried out a major terrorist attack in Boston.

Soviet citizens listened to the Voice of America to find out what their own government wouldn't tell them. American citizens have to read The Sun and the Daily Mail, publications whose standards are slightly above that of The Huffington Post and yet, like the National Inquirer, have become one of the few outlets that will chase after the stories that the media has embargoed as effectively as Pravda.

Instead of wasting time on a dead end like Islam, the media has spent its time chasing down every other possible angle.

Did Tamerlan turn terrorist because he took too many blows to the head while boxing? Could the Boston Marathon bombing have been prevented if only we had let him win?

The New York Times assembled a touching story of an aspiring immigrant boxer radicalized by the petty restrictions of a government that wouldn't let him apply for citizenship because of his history of domestic violence and appearance on a terrorist watch list. But how does that jibe with the Tamerlan from five earlier who beat up a boy that his sister was dating because he wasn't Muslim? 

When the media must deal with Tamerlan's theology, it keeps him in the category of the troubled man who turned to some wacky extremist version of Islam propounded by a YouTube convert. The man who beat his sister's boyfriend because he wasn't a Muslim and beat his ex-girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab wasn't some brainwashed drone who had his mind stolen by YouTube videos. He was a Muslim.

The Tamerlan of 2007 might not have watched as many Jihadist videos, but it would be a mistake to assume that he would have disagreed with their content. That Tamerlan might not have been looking at bombing targets, but neither would he have been upset and angry if some other Muslim had done what he would go on to do. Like Dzhokhar's two Muslim friends, his first reaction would have been to cover it up.

When it comes to serial killers and mass shooters, the media is conditioned to look for a break that follows some life crisis. But with Muslim terrorists there is no discontinuity, only continuity. A few setbacks might have made terrorism more appealing to Tamerlan, but that would not have happened if it had not already been on his menu of life choices. Or that of his brother.

That angle is the most terrifying one that the media can think of. It's the one that they can't touch. It's the one that they won't let anyone else touch either. If they have to mention the "I" word, they will sandwich it between "extremist" and "radicalization". But it's not Tamerlan who was the radical extremist. Among Muslims, his views were mainstream. The Wahhabis are in ascendance in most parts of the world, including the United States. Islamist parties roundly won the Arab Spring.

What was the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the Syrian Jihadists held up by the media as the epitome of courage and bravery? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Hamas and Fatah terrorists that the media peevishly contends Israel must make peace with? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the tens of thousands of Muslim terrorists fighting in conflicts around the world?

While the European media, for all its faults, occasionally grapples with the incompatibility of liberal values and Muslim values; on this side of the ocean the topic is all but untouchable. There is no national censorship body that does this. Instead stories are held down by the weight of a consensus that insists the media exists to promote liberal values. All else follows from there.

The stories that promote liberal values are reported. The stories about a future Muslim terrorist beating his girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab are not because those stories create a sneaking suspicion that Muslim multiculturalism is incompatible with liberal values. And the incompatible Muslims, like Mohammed’s face, have been pixelated out of existence in reports on the terrorist attacks by disgruntled boxers, doctors and perfume salesmen who just happen to be Muslim.

These are the Muslims that the media doesn’t see. And it is doing everything possible to make sure that we don’t see them either.

Sultan Knish