Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender” and, most recently, “The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.”
From the moment it became clear that the ongoing Islamization of the Western world was a potential disaster of historic proportions, the mainstream media – in their perverse effort to defend the indefensible and keep the cart careening downhill – have been making use of shameless sentiment to overcome the plain facts. One of the first examples of this practice that I can recall was way back in 2003, when the big, bad Norwegian government put resident terrorist Mullah Krekar through the first of what would turn out to be many deportation scares. Since Krekar, back in his homeland of Iraq, had been responsible for the violent deaths of innumerable innocents – children included – it wasn’t an easy proposition to try to whip up sympathy for him (although, heaven knows, some media tried).
Instead, many reporters chose the family angle: Krekar might be a bad guy, but what about his poor wife and kids? Repeatedly, the papers ran tearful close-ups of Krekar’s wife and pictures of her and Krekar embracing. VG ran a whole story about the intelligence services’ confiscation of her beloved cookbook, which had been in the family for generations and which contained the recipes of all of Krekar’s favorite foods. Dagbladet, for its part, ran a report whose headline told us that when Krekar’s kids heard on TV that Daddy had been released from custody and was headed home, they kissed the TV screen. It was Dagbladet, too, that published one of the great sob stories of all time. The headline: “My children are waiting every single day to hear from Papa.” The first sentences: “Mullah Krekar’s wife (39) is scared. For her four children, and for the future.”
And so on. You get the idea. If you’re trying to obscure the truth, defend the indefensible, and smear the good guys, go for sheer, unadulterated bathos. So it is that as the clock ticks down to the March 15 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands (which, as it happens, I write about in this week’s National Review), Anna Holligan of the BBC – in an effort to paint Geert Wilders, head of the Freedom Party (PVV), as a racist hatemonger – kicked off a March 7 article from The Hague by focusing on one of the Dutch Moroccans whom Wilders, as she put it, had “accused…of making the streets unsafe.” Needless to say, Holligan didn’t talk to one of the majority of Dutch Moroccan males who have dropped out of school and are living on social welfare benefits; nor did she buttonhole one of the nearly 50% of young Dutch Moroccan males who have rap sheets.
