By Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 28, 2005
Needed more than ever after 9/11 is solid, probing, intelligent, honest reporting about Muslims and Islam. But not only has this not materialized; if anything, reporting has gotten worse. From the New York Times to the smallest local papers, with remarkably 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. If the stakes weren’t so high, this would be just another instance of the media bias that has been exhaustively documented for decades; but in light of the continuing activity of the global jihadist movement, it becomes something much more urgent.
The Times, in an unconscionable breach of journalistic ethics, revealed the real name of Bat Ye’or in a recent article. But perhaps even worse from the standpoint of their abysmally inadequate reporting on Islam was that they labeled her one “of the most extreme voices on the new Jewish right,” which 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,” you see, so the Times feels no need to examine the evidence for this that she marshals so relentlessly in Eurabia.
Incidentally, no sooner had the Times sniffed at Bat Ye’or that the Asia Times reported 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 great garbage scow pulling in its wake the trash in the water, the Times carries along lesser papers. These two examples from this week are not significant for the influence of the papers themselves, but because they reflect the mainstream approach of reporters today: credulous and uninformed to an extent that they are not even able, much less willing, to challenge the disinformation that is coming in a steady stream from all too many Muslim spokesmen.
• The Montgomery Advertiser ran a story last Friday entitled “Entertainment media’s Muslims bear little resemblance to reality.” Reporter Darryn Simmons seems to have gone to the Masjid Qasim B El-Amin in Montgomery to ask about Fox’s 24, which committed the great faux pas of depicting terrorists who are Muslims. Credulously reporting as fact what he was told in the mosque, Simmons writes that “Muslims do not believe in converting people to their religion by force. In fact, the Qu’ran [sic] (or Koran) accepts religious pluralism and sees strength in diversity.”
Note the language: the “Qu’ran” accepts “pluralism” and “diversity.” 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 apparently asked nothing about the humiliations and second-class status mandated for non-Muslims by Islamic law, and rooted in the Qur’an (9:29).
“Pluralism”? “Diversity”? Jews and Christians in societies governed by Islamic law, according to a manual of Islamic law endorsed by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, are “subject peoples.” They must “pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)” and “are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with ‘as-Salamu ‘alaykum’ [the traditional Muslim greeting, “Peace be with you”]; must keep to the side of the street; may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are forbidden to openly display wine or pork . . . recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals or feastdays; and are forbidden to build new churches.” If they violate these terms, the law further stipulates that they can be killed or sold into slavery at the discretion of the Muslim leader. (‘Umdat al-Salik, o11.3, 5.)
That’s pluralism and diversity, all right. But in accord with the practice of the Times and virtually every other paper in the nation, Simmons apparently seems to have accepted what Muslims told him at face value.
• The illustrious Bogalusa (Louisiana) Daily News the same day reported on a talk on Islam by Imam Jehad Mahmoud of the Islamic Center of Baton Rouge. “If I talk about Islam,” Mahmoud declared, “I’ll be talking about Christianity, I’ll be talking about Judaism. We are all the same.” Really? Mahmoud doesn’t seem to have discussed Qur’anic verses stating that “the Religion before Allah is Islam” and that the “People of the Book” — that is, Jews and Christians — “dissent therefrom” (3:19) and are under “the curse of Allah” (9:30); nor, evidently, did reporter Eleanor Evans ask him about them. Probably she simply doesn’t know that such passages exist – but after 9/11, it is the business of reporters to know such things.
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.” Evans doesn’t even seem to have summoned up even a murmur when Mahmoud’s remarks edged over into the wholly risible, as when he said that “the Muslim dress code is a choice, he said, adding that he’s even heard of Muslims who have attended nudist camps.” I’m sure nudist camps do a booming business in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
These two love-fests, along with the Times’ head-in-the-sand label-mongering, are typical of the state of inquiry on Islam and jihad terrorism in the American media over three years after 9/11. No doubt the media is anxious to build bridges to Muslims, to extend the right hand of fellowship, to show that we are ready to listen, to dialogue, to accommodate, to show once again that we are decent folks who don’t hate anybody. But what the Times and the papers that follow in its wake are really doing is leaving Americans less aware and prepared than they should be in the face of the jihad; dialogue on false pretenses is not dialogue at all; it is deception.
When the media prints innumerable bland 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 even to ask the questions that need to be asked about what steps (if any) mosques in America are taking to curb enthusiasm for the Islamic jihad ideology among Muslims in America; when it consistently ignores evidence that that ideology is being taught in American mosques — then it is not strong enough to say simply that the American media has abdicated its responsibility. It has become an accomplice of the global jihad.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
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