RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reza Aslan has built a career complaining about Islamophobia. Throw a dart at a map of colleges and the odds were good that Aslan would be speaking at one of them about the rising threat of Islamophobia.

Earlier this year, Aslan, an Iranian Muslim, announced that he was going to change people’s minds about Islam and make them more tolerant, “through pop culture, through film and television.“

“Stories have the power to break through the walls that separate us into different ethnicities,” Aslan rhapsodized, “different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different religions.”

CNN gave Aslan a forum. Nearly every episode of “The Believer” that aired has made some religion that isn’t Islam look freaky, unpleasant and threatening. Instead of breaking through the walls, it has surveyed different non-Islamic religions only to sneer at them as strange and weird.

Instead of Islamophobia, it offers Non-Islam-ophobia.

“The Believer” kicked off with an episode featuring a sect of cannibals whom the show associated with Hinduism. Its last episode spread fear over the threat posed by Orthodox Jews. CNN’s “Believer” clips offer Reza Aslan explaining why he’s a Muslim sandwiched between a doomsday cult leader who calls himself “Jezus”, voodoo, scientology and a Mexican death cult.

Not even Al Jazeera would have been this blatant about its Islamic agenda.

Reza Aslan, CNN and “Believer” have already offended a whole range of religious groups. Hindus angrily denounced the misrepresentation of their religion. But the left has much less interest in Hinduphobia than it does in Islamophobia. Hindu protests outside CNN offices in five cities garnered almost no coverage from the same media that covers every single Islamic protest against Islamophobia.

The media doesn’t believe that all forms of religious bigotry are created equal.

Orthodox Jews condemned Aslan for his fearmongering aimed at Judaism. But the left is uninterested in criticizing anti-Semitism from Islamists. Especially those on its payroll.

“The Believer” has tried to smear Christians, Hindus and Jews. It has yet to profile Muslims. Despite Aslan’s interest in teaching Americans not to be Islamophobes, he seems to prefer pushing Christophobia, Judeophobia and Hinduphobia. But bigots can’t be expected to fight bigotry.

“The Believer” treats non-Islamic religions as a freakshow. The gimmick attracts viewers. See Reza Aslan eat brains, talk to a doomsday cult leader or act afraid of Jews in fedoras. Look at all those freaks!

But don’t expect to see Shiite Muslims cutting their children in the street for Ashura on “The Believer”.

Race hatred is soaring in the US and Donald Trump is to blame — that was the gist of a 7.30 report which went to air on March 14, two weeks after the perpetrator of one such attack was arrested. No Trump fan, he was a black, left-wing Muslim journalist. The ABC has not bothered to correct the record.
On March 14, 7.30 ran a fake-news piece whose intent was to stitch up President Donald Trump for inciting a wave of anti-Semitic bomb threats and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries in the US. Compere Leigh Sales intoned: “Some people blame Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric for unleashing people’s worst impulses, something Trump backers of course dispute.” You can view the report here.

The show’s US correspondent Conor Duffy then interviewed a conga-line of Democrat activists to ramp up the 7.30 narrative which amounted to ‘the disgusting Trump incites cemetery vandalism, race hate and bomb threats’.

On the ABC news website the same day, under the nakedly-propaganda banner “Trump’s America”, Duffy’s story included pictures of desecrated Jewish headstones and the header, “Shootings, bombings, desecrated cemeteries and racist graffiti — minority groups in the United States say the number of race hate crimes are spiking in President Donald Trump’s America.”

On the evening’s 7.30 report, Sales and Duffy proffered no evidence whatsoever connecting Trump to the anti-Semitic upsurge. As professional journalists, Sales and Duffy must already have been aware that black, Muslim anti-Trumper Juan M. Thompson, 31, had been arrested at least 10 days earlier and charged with making multiple bomb threats against synagogues. His motive was not anti-Semitism but to frame a white ex-girlfriend for the calls, as revenge because she’d ditched him. If neither knew by that stage about Thompson’s arrest, they are incompetent. If they did know, they are liars by omission. You can read the FBI charge sheet hre, and do notice the date — March 1, almost two weeks before 7.30‘s beatup.

As time passes, others parties are now named and charged over the wave of anti-Semitism. They include Andrew King, 54, a Jewish man in Schenectady, N.Y. King claimed on Day 21 of the Trump administration that someone defaced his home with three swastikas. He’s now in the slammer, convicted of having sprayed the swastikas himself and making false reports to police.

And last week US police charged Michael Ron Kadar, 18, an American-Israeli Jewish dual citizen living in Israel, with making 245 threats against Jewish institutions in Florida between January and March.[i] The youth, who may be mentally disturbed, allegedly earned $310,000 in the internet currency bitcoin from his worldwide on-line threats and extortions.

Antifa protesters loves them some violence. From punching people with cameras to rioting because you don’t like who is talking. A few times, apparently. So, leave it to the New York Times to run an op-ed that seems to argue that the rioters who disrupt speech of those they disagree with are the true guardians of free speech.

The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencer’s visit — as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others — should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.

The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth. We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing. CONTINUE AT SITE

Once upon a time, David Brooks was considered the house conservative at the New York Times. But in his April 21 New York Times column he put President Donald J. Trump on a list of “strong men” that includes Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Mr. Brooks noted that Erdogan has “dismantle[d] democratic institutions and replace[d] them with majoritarian dictatorship.” The Times columnist went on to assert: “While running for office, Donald Trump violated every norm of statesmanship built up over these many centuries….” Mr. Brooks, however, does not elaborate, explain or elucidate the nature of the alleged violations.

But when it comes to discussion of President Trump, Never Trumps like David Brooks feel no need to place their anti-Trump views on a foundation of fact. For Trump-haters, the truth is in the accusation. And so, comparing President Trump to Turkey’s Erdogan, Mr. Brooks does not set forth the democratic institutions dismantled by Mr. Trump, nor does he provide evidence of the “majoritarian dictatorship” that was constructed during the first 100 days of the Trump administration. How could he, there being no such dismantling, no such dictatorship here?

Mr. Brooks recognizes “the collapse of liberal values at home,” citing “fragile thugs who call themselves students [who] shout down and abuse speakers in a weekly basis.” But are these illiberals to be found under the banner of Trumpism — or under the banner of the totalitarianism of left?

Mr. Brooks goes on to cite a study suggesting that only 57 percent of “young Americans” (age range not provided) are committed to democracy, compared to “91 percent in the 1930’s….” What is the source of this declining commitment to democracy: student Republicans, or students influenced by leftist professors? Mr. Brooks does not say. For David Brooks, apparently, critical thinking about political trends does not require precise analysis; anti-Trump innuendo will do.

I challenge David Brooks to point to any instance of political repression attributable, today, to conservatives on college campuses. I challenge David Brooks — or any of the Trump-detesting columnists at The New York Times (and aren’t they all?) — to explain how it is, that if President Trump is the American version of Kim Jong-un, the New York Times is still publishing?

The threat to the American spirit of liberty is not to be found among conservatives, or in the corridors of today’s White House. The threats to democracy, to free speech, to the free flow of information, are to be found on the left side of the political divide, from neo-totalitarians who, like the execrable Howard Dean, would limit free speech to persons who agree with the political biases of leftists — with the encouragement of Never Trumps in the media like David Brooks, who lack the ability to distinguish a duly-elected American president from the brutal dictator of a totalitarian state.

It is predictable, if not horrifying, that leftist-elitist Time magazine would print an article on the dangers of uranium falling into the wrong hands – and nowhere mention Bill and Hillary Clinton’s role in enabling the Russians to lay claim to 20% of American uranium from mines in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Texas.

Did the editors at Time forget that it was Hillary’s State Department who granted approval of the uranium sale to a Canadian firm middleman who then sold it in 2009 to the Russians in Kazakhstan – the world’s second largest holder of uranium?

Was it sheer coincidence that at about the same time the Clinton Foundation received $145 million in donations from the Canadian company, Bill Clinton received a nice speaking fee of $500,000 from Putin and the Russians for enabling the deal?

Finally, the Clinton-enabled transfer of uranium from the U.S. to Kazakhstan (controlled by Putin since 2010) is actually underscored by the article that Putin released to Pravda on January 22, 2013. In open mockery – for it was the month Hillary was leaving the State Department – Putin taunted Hillary (and the Obama administration) before the entire world by announcing that Russia now controlled 46% of the world’s uranium and the U.S. only 3%.

The headline, however, was doctored by the U.S. It did not read, as reported, “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World,” but rather (in the original Russian):

Putin’s Open Mock of Hillary: “Russia Controls Energy Weapons”

Can it be that Time’s interests are not to educate, enlighten, and warn Americans about terrorist dirty bomb threats to our country and to our soldiers abroad – but rather to conceal these threats from Americans? Does P.C. stand for “political censorship” of truth?

Enough said.