MARILYN PENN; A DARK LOOK AT WHAT DOES AND DOESN’T OFFEND MUSLIMS
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2012/01/24/a-dark-look-at-what-does-and-doesnt-offend-muslims/
Pity the NYC Police Department. Entrusted with safeguarding the welfare of almost 9 million people daily as the first guard of defense against terrorism, their only hope is to be smarter than the enemy and intercept him before he strikes again. After the horror of 9/11, and after all the other Muslim generated terrorist acts in the U.S. and abroad, this is a very tall order and one which our police department, under the command of Commissioner Kelly, deserves great praise for having accomplished. Undoubtedly they have gotten assistance from the FBI, the Dept of Homeland Security and from various community watchdogs but since we have not had a repeat of 9/11 since then, we should all be eminently grateful for the success of their training and the bravery of New York City’s police corps.
Apparently not everyone feels that same sense of gratitude. Members of the City Council, American Muslim leaders and civil rights activists are complaining that a film shown to the department, “The Third Jihad,” casts unsavory suspicions over the American Muslim community. Though the film seems to have been distributed by the Dept of Homeland Security and would therefore have been carefully vetted, these objectors are offended by its implications and the Times headlines it as a “dark film.” In our Alice in Wonderland society, offending someone’s feelings about their religion, race or gender often takes priority over common sense or the urgent need to protect millions of people from harm. Thus, though the majority of violent crime in New York is committed by black men against other black people, it’s considered racial profiling for cops to be suspicious of young black men hanging out on streetcorners in high crime neighborhoods. And though the great majority of terrorist incidents on planes has been enacted by Muslim men, every other man, woman and child has to be screened before getting through security. Americans have complied with these expensive, time-consuming and overly inclusive searches to avoid the perception that we are racially profiling Muslims.
In the same paper that reported the unease felt by Muslims at this “dark film,” there is the news that the Palestinian Authority’s highest Muslim cleric had advised his constituents on a televised broadcast that Judgment Day could only come when Muslims fight and kill the Jews. He quoted Mohammed’s saying, overly familiar by now, that “the Jews will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Who knew? We naive non-Muslims were only taught that nature abhored a vacuum. None of the City Council Members or other leaders of the Muslim American community had any statement to make disavowing Sheikh Muhammad Hussein’s remarks; they obviously didn’t feel that threatening Jews with murder should “offend” anyone or cast a negative shadow over the Muslim faith. None of the complainants about the police film has ever issued a public statement condemning the Muslim imams in our prison systems who similarly inflame and radicalize the population they are meant to counsel and uplift.
The problem with “The Third Jihad” may not be solely the message that it conveys but the messenger behind it. The film has been financed by the Clarion Fund whose previous documentary was financed by a wealthy Jewish supporter of Israel who is also supporting……OMG …..Newt Gingrich! Here then are the true evil buzzwords in the lexicon of the left: Jew/Israel, Republican. Let’s hope that tomorrow’s paper doesn’t contain an apology from Commissioner Kelly, a fine and upright man who has done an outstanding job of running the police department. Let those who are uncomfortable with “The Third Jihad” understand that the only way to erase the shadow over the Muslim religion is to speak out forcefully and loudly against its representatives who purvey hate and foment violence. If “The Third Jihad” is a dark film that is not properly reflective of the precepts of Islam, let Islamists themselves reform those perceptions by word and deed and not by insisting that we deny what we painly see and continue to live through.
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