This latest article in TIME reduces critical thinking to rehashing tired cliche's and recycling the same hateful and misleading rhetoric we have seen time and time again(no pun intended). Ishaan Tharoor, like most of the media and the current crop of pundits and left-wing ideologues wants to believe that when you talk in a negative way about Islam or Muslims you are the problem. His myopic view of anti-jihadist bloggers as right-wing nutjobs only belies his own narrow view, a view which allows him to misrepresent and lie easily for the sake of political correctness. Tharoor is serving Muhammad as he is commanded to do, by demonizing and marginalizing the enemy until they become irrelevant and inconsequential. He must have read the Sal Alinsky playbook on agitation and political manipulation as well as the Qur'an.
From TIME August 6 by Ishaan Tharoor
When Slogans Beget Slaughter
Last year on Sept. 11, I stood at Ground Zero as hundreds of people shouted obscenities against Muslims and Islam. They were gathered to protest the proposed construction of a Muslim-run interfaith community center nearby, which had earned the inaccurate moniker Ground Zero mosque. The rally was conducted by a motley crew of Islamophobes, among them several European visitors. Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has called for a ban on immigration to the Netherlands from Muslim countries, denounced the arrival of a "new Mecca" on the shores of what was once New Amsterdam. Members of the far-right, anti-immigrant English Defence League unfurled banners voicing support for an American war on Islam.
I mention this because the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the man behind the massacre in Norway, echoed those calls. Multiculturalism, Marxism, the supposed insensibility of Islam to Western values and the appeasement tendencies of a naive liberal elite: such were the grievances raised separately by both Breivik and the riled-up crowd in lower Manhattan. The writings of Robert Spencer — an organizer of that rally and an anti-Muslim polemicist routinely accused of hate speech — were cited 64 times in Breivik's manifesto, according to the New York Times.
This is where I object. Douthat's argument that we must not lose sight of the supposedly flawed liberal policies that fueled Breivik's rage meshes with a broader Western impulse to cast terrorism by the xenophobic far right as somehow more excusable than the terrorism of jihadists. After 9/11, few Western commentators would have dared dwell on Washington's foreign policy in the Middle East. Yet the argument can be made that this was as much a spur for al-Qaeda as Europe's problems with Muslim integration were for Breivik's killing spree.
Calculated murder is calculated murder — except when the West says it's not. In the wake of 9/11, the bombings in London and Madrid, the Fort Hood shooting and the failed plot of the Times Square bomber, one explanation was frequently offered: namely that Islam is collectively in the grip of a dogmatic belligerence, compelling pious and seemingly sane Muslims to blow things up. Breivik's killing spree, however, and Jared Loughner's attempted assassination of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — in which six died, including a 9-year-old girl — are cast as the demented acts of fringe lunatics, as psychological nightmares, not ideologically inspired ones.
Well, yes that explanation is partially true, but by dismissing it as an aberration and being not "normal" Islam, that just clouds the issue and re-enforces the confusion and inability for the common man to understand.
There is more, read it all
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