RUTHFULLY YOURS

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer’s hope, expressed on the air, that the Times Square bomber “was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country” has been definitively disappointed. Will she now host an in-depth investigation of the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism, explaining the concept of jihad warfare and Shahzad’s real motivations to MSNBC viewers? Don’t hold your breath – but Shahzad’s explanation of his motives once again exposes the dangers of the mainstream media’s ongoing refusal to discuss honestly the jihad against the United States.

Only Islamic theology makes sense of Shahzad’s words and actions. In court Monday, Shahzad said he was retaliating against those who “attacked the Muslim lands.” U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum responded by pointing out that those attackers were “not the people who were walking in Times Square that night. Did you look around to see who they were?”

Shahzad then explained: “Well, the people select the government. We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit…”

Cedarbaum then interrupted him to ask: “Including the children?”

Shahzad responded: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.”

The idea that the allegedly indiscriminate killing done by Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq gives Shahzad a license as a Muslim to kill Americans indiscriminately in Times Square comes straight from the Qur’an: “The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto” (42:40).

Nonetheless, the obfuscation and denial was especially egregious this time: Ezra Klein in the Washington Post led the way into fantasyland when he observed that Shahzad had defaulted on the mortgage on his home in Connecticut and that the property was now in foreclosure: “foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don’t make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we’ve done to save the financial sector, we’ve not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.”

Will Ezra Klein now issue a retraction, an apology, and an explanation of what it means to be a “Muslim soldier”?

Don’t count on it. Mainstream media reporters reflexively deny and ignore the facts about Islamic jihad because they have completely bought into the idea that Muslims, as non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners, cannot possibly be anything but victims. It appears to be impossible for the mainstream media to conceive of a paradigm in which Muslims can perpetrate any kind of evil at all. In the lenses through which they view the world, only white Judeo-Christian Westerners can do anything wrong.

The facts that there are white Western Muslims, such as Adam Gadahn, the first American to be charged with treason since World War II, and John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, and that the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism are not racial issues, but constitute an ideological and societal challenge, are completely lost on them. Likewise the non-white victims of the jihad, such as the monumentally courageous and outspoken Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng, and ex-Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ali Sina and Amil Imani, mean nothing to them.

Yet the more we remain in denial about how jihad attacks in the West happen, as well as attempted attacks such as the Times Square car bombing, happen, the more we will see of attacks like Faisal Shahzad’s. Why? Because nothing is being done to prevent them. Instead of the denial we encounter from the mainstream media after every jihad attack and attempted attack in this country, we should be seeing frank and honest stories about authorities calling the American Muslim community to account. We should be seeing stories about authorities demanding transparent, open programs in American mosques and Islamic schools, teaching against the Islamic doctrines that inspired Faisal Shahzad.

But that won’t happen. Political correctness has the mainstream media in a stranglehold. That will only ensure that nothing will be done to address this problem at its root, and that Faisal Shahzad’s car bomb in Times Square will in a few years look positively trivial.