The Islamophobia Revolution Will Be Brought to You by Diet Coke By Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/the-islamophobia-revolution-will-be-brought-to-you-by-diet-coke/print/
While Americans yawned through another weekend, watching television or playing catch with their kids, the greatest human rights violation in our nation’s troubled history took place in the sky above Chicago.
Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim chaplain at Northwestern University who has participated in MSA and ISNA events, and gotten her photo taken with Obama, was denied an unopened Diet Coke.
“Muslim Chaplain Tahera Ahmad Denied Diet Coke,” NBC News blared. “I Can’t Help But Cry,” the CNN headline declaims. “’No Diet Coke for you’: Islamophobia at 30000 feet,” bleated The Guardian.
“Outrage after United Airlines refuses Muslim woman Diet Coke,” the Mirror chimed in.
The Diet Coke crisis was upon us. Islamists called for a boycott of United Airlines and #unitedfortahera became a trending hashtag as random idiots denounced racism and commiserated with the horror of being denied a Diet Coke and pledged not to fly United until they actually need to use their airline miles.
Most of the rest of us would have to lose our legs in an airplane engine to get this much publicity and even if that happened, we would still be stuck crawling across the tarmac while the media eagerly converged on a Muslim passenger who had gotten an Islamophobic eyelash caught in her eye.
But that’s Muslim Privilege. It means that your whiny complaints about airline service suddenly become an international incident. A million people complain about airline service, but tag your complaint with #IslamophobiaISREAL, as Tahera Ahmad did, and suddenly your Diet Coke denial is a hate crime.
According to Tahera Ahmad, the flight attendant wanted to open her Diet Coke for her instead of giving her an unopened can. On a scale of hate crimes this is somewhere between 0 and -0.02. About the only person who could possibly complain about it is a celebrity whose color allotment of M&Ms is specified in a rider to their contract or a professional Islamic grievance-monger looking for any excuse to play victim.
And yet Ahmad’s Diet Coke tribulation was covered by more media outlets than the Muslim rape of thousands of girls in the UK or the suffering of Yazidi girls in Iraq. Her demand for a Diet Coke was compared to Rosa Parks and her tweet about it was launched with the hashtag #IslamophobiaISREAL.
The Islamophobia revolution will be brought to you by Diet Coke.
The TSA isn’t too fond of passengers having closed cans of soda on them. It may have something to do with when a Muslim woman attempted to bring down a China Southern Airlines flight to Beijing using soda cans that she had injected with flammable liquid and dropped in the bathroom trash can.
It’s unknown whether they were Diet Coke cans. But what was in them probably tasted like Diet Coke.
Tahera Ahmad’s Diet Coke crisis is a study in Muslim entitlement. Not just in the scope of it, but in the pettiness of it.
Of all the petty complaints about airline service, hers may be the single pettiest complaint in history. Tahera Ahmad isn’t even complaining that she didn’t get a soda. She’s complaining that she had to endure the filthy impure infidel fingers of the flight attendant groping her Diet Coke can.
And it’s equally a study in the media’s rush to take her ridiculous soda martyrdom and turn into it yet another piece of evidence that Muslims in America are oppressed by the Christian Diet Coke patriarchy.
Tahera Ahmad had appeared at an ISNA convention. She had been to the White House and had her photo taken with Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Not to mention Tariq Ramadan [2]; an open supporter of terrorism against Americans and other non-Muslims around the world.
Despite being a product of traditionalist Islamic institutions like Al-Azhar, the media was eager to buy into the idea that Tahera Ahmad was a reformist.
Her recital of the Koran at an ISNA convention was hailed as a breakthrough without anyone asking how that can be said of reciting a creed that deems women and Muslims to be inferior at a convention for a Muslim Brotherhood front group, one of whose officials has stated [3], “Islam will prevail over other religions”.
On her Twitter account, Tahera Ahmad had retweeted a call to deny an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist who was raised a Muslim, but left Islam after recognizing the violent text of the Koran. Ayaan Hirsi Ali suffered through many challenges. None of them involved a Diet Coke.
Instead Ayaan Hirsi Ali had FGM inflicted on her. As an adult, she had to deal with death threats. Her response to them was to continue speaking out. And yet the media prefers the entitled bleating of Tahera Ahmad’s Diet Coke crisis to a serious ex-Muslim intellectual who risks her life every day.
Tahera Ahmad’s sense of entitlement echoes that of her progressive allies. As feminism has taken a dumpster dive into pettiness and entitlement, it has little room for a woman like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who speaks to them about a world in which women are raped and murdered by Islamic Jihadists. They prefer to instead turn minor inconveniences into micro-aggressions to their swollen egos.
In Ahmad’s world, not getting exactly what she wants is a hate crime. And Tahera Ahmad’s whining embodies the torrent of petty Muslim complaints about America in microcosm.
Muslims claim that they’re most oppressed group in the country, but so far that oppression isn’t reflected in such objective metrics as hate crime statistics or actual incidents of oppression.
The banner Islamophobic hate crimes never seem to pan out either.
Shaima Alawadi was supposedly murdered by a racist American because she wore a hijab. The perpetrator left behind a note on the floor reading, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”
A social media campaign complete with hijabis making duckfaces at the camera while holding up signs reading, “I am Shaima” was launched. The campaign had to be scrapped when it turned out that she had been murdered by her Muslim husband. But it did give “I am Shaima” a new authentic meaning.
The Chapel Hill shootings turned out to be just a parking dispute no matter how desperately Islamist groups and their lefty accomplices tried to turn the perpetrator’s atheism into evidence of a hate crime.
There isn’t a single fatal anti-Muslim hate crime on record. Islamophobia has never killed anyone [4]. The average anti-Muslim hate crime is committed by other Muslims [5].
What’s a good Islamist to do? Try to spin complaints about airline service into oppression. No one likes air travel, especially since Muslim terrorism inflicted the humiliating regimen of the TSA on the entire country. But Muslim complaints about it get a unique hearing because of their Muslim privilege.
Islamophobia is a self-reinforcing myth. The Americans groped at TSA checkpoints aren’t victims, but when a Muslim who has had a photo taken with Obama can’t get her Diet Coke the way she wants it, then it’s the worst soft-drink related human rights incident since Gitmo stopped serving Crystal Pepsi.
Muslim oppression of non-Muslims requires a narrative of victimhood to grease the wheels. So does leftist subversion of America under the guise of aiding the oppressed. And if that victimhood sometimes has to be found at the bottom of an unopened can of Diet Coke, that’s the fizz of the Jihad.
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