"It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult."
Thomas Friedman
The oppressors choose to forget the history of their depredations, or substitute a civilizing mission for their history of brutalities, bombings, massacres, ethnic cleansings and expropriations. It is the oppressed peoples who know the history of their oppression: they know it because they have endured it. Its history is seared into their memory, their individual and collective memory.
The NY Times plays a key role in fanning the flames of anti Arab bigotry in the US, principally through its chief op-ed columnists, Thomas Friedman and David Brooks. Their bigotry is veiled and politically correct. Instead of finding Arab DNA defective (a la Hitler), they find their culture defective. Terrorism is portrayed by Friedman and the Times as a Muslim problem. This is a convenient lie.
Friedman and Brooks and other Times correspondents regularly refer to Islamic culture as sick, bad, hateful and prone to violence and terror. Equally bad, Muslims have done nothing to root out the evil that afflicts their society. Friedman writes "to this day -- no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden."
Let us leave aside for the moment Friedman's bit of misinformation: (hundreds of esteemed Muslim scholars and influential theologians have categorically condemned al Qaeda terrorism as unIslamic. They have repeatedly questioned the authority of bin Laden in issuing fatwas and the legitimacy of his so called jihad.) What is astonishing is Friedman's historical amnesia. The terrorist acts of a few Muslims are terrible tragedies. But these acts did not occur in a vacuum. They have a history behind them. Western provocations in the Muslim world go back centuries. Terrorism is a result of a chain of causation. Al Queda, for instance, emerged with the aid and assistance of the Reagan administration. But a layered understanding of history does not allow for a moral cartoon with a good guy and a bad guy.
Friedman's first big lie is that West is innocent, that it bears no responsibility or guilt. His second big lie is that Islamic culture is at fault because it is inherently sick. Friedman knows these are lies.
The Times has a highly biased agenda when it comes to the Middle East. Call it Neocon lite. The Times it will be remembered played a key role in selling America on the Iraq war via the columns of Juith Miller. The Times also systematically misrepresents particularly when it comes to the Middle Eastern issues. For example, this morning in the Times Book Review the authors Walt and Mearsheimer write that Leslie Gelb, the reviewer of their book The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, continually referred to a "Jewish lobby" even though they never used that term. They write, "we explicitly rejected this label as inaccurate and misleading, both because the lobby includes non-Jews like the Christian zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard-line policies favored by its most powerful elements. By using the phrase "Jewish lobby" in the headline of the review, in the text and the pull quote, Gelb and the editors of the Book Review misrepresented a key part of our argument." Incidentally, The Times played a similar dirty trick on the Jimmy Carter book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid when it was reviewed last year.
The New York Times: all the news thats fit to print or all the news that fits?