Tag: Ross Douthat

My Breaking Point


Everyone has their breaking point for hate speech and racism.  Mine came when I watched the video you can find here, where what started out to be a “decent” interview between a Fox reporter, Megyn Kelly, and a representative of the Media Research Center and Council of American-Islamic Relations ended with the Fox reporter shouting ‘that’s way out of line, that’s way out of line’  at the CAIR representative as if to imply he had no businesss making the assertion that more abortion clinic personnel  have been killed by members of the Christian right who protested what is  a legal right women have to abortion than people who’ve been killed by Muslims protesting depictions of the Last Messenger and Prophet.   Evidently that fact doesn’t fit into Fox News’ ideas of domestic terrorism and who the adherents of terrorism are especially if they are white Christians and not brown skinned bearded, covered and menacing Muslims.

Glen Greenwald’s breaking point must have come when he read a New York Times editorial by one Ross Douthat a rather nasty Islamophobe who has been featured in the pages of Miscellany101 before here.  Douthat’s piece put forth the premise Muslims can intimidate artists who live by poetic license into not offending Muslim sensibilities but law abiding Christians who supposedly don’t engage in the same polemic are  offended by artists who are not afraid of them nor have any respect for Christian religious beliefs.  Greenwald pretty much slams the door on Douthat and by extension the visibly upset FoxNews reporter’s argument thusly:

It looks like Ross Douthat picked the wrong month to try to pretend that threat-induced censorship is a uniquely Islamic practice.  Corpus Christi is the same play that was scheduled and then canceled (and then re-scheduled) by the Manhattan Theater Club back in 1998 as a result of “anonymous telephone threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff, and ‘exterminate’ McNally.”  Both back then and now, leading the protests (though not the threats) was the Catholic League, denouncing the play as “blasphemous hate speech.”

I abhor the threats of violence coming from fanatical Muslims over the expression of ideas they find offensive, as well as the cowardly institutions which acquiesce to the accompanying demands for censorship.  I’ve vigorously condemned efforts to haul anti-Muslim polemicists before Canadian and European “human rights” (i.e., censorship) tribunals.  But the very idea that such conduct is remotely unique to Muslims is delusional, the by-product of Douthat’s ongoing use of his New York Times column for his anti-Muslim crusade and sectarian religious promotion.

The various forms of religious-based, intimidation-driven censorship and taboo ideas in the U.S. — what Douthat claims are non-existent except when it involves Muslims — are too numerous to chronicle.  One has to be deeply ignorant, deeply dishonest or consumed with petulant self-victimization and anti-Muslim bigotry to pretend they don’t exist.  I opt (primarily) for the latter explanation in Douthat’s case.

As Balloon-Juice’s DougJ notes, everyone from Phil Donahue and Ashliegh Banfield to Bill Maher and Sinead O’Connor can tell you about that first-hand.  As can the cable television news reporters who were banned by their corporate executives from running stories that reflected negatively on Bush and the war.  When he was Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani was fixated on using the power of his office to censor art that offended his Catholic sensibilities.  The Bush administration banned mainstream Muslim scholars even from entering the U.S. to teach.  The Dixie Chicks were deluged with death threats for daring to criticize the Leader, forcing them to apologize out of fear for their lives.  Campaigns to deny tenure to academicians, or appointments to politicial officials, who deviate from Israel orthodoxy are common and effective.  Responding to religious outrage, a Congressional investigation was formally launched and huge fines issued all because Janet Jackson’s breast was displayed for a couple of seconds on television.

All that’s to say nothing of the endless examples of religious-motivated violence by Christian and Jewish extremists designed to intimidate and suppress ideas offensive to their religious dogma (I’m also pretty sure the people doing this and this are not Muslim).  And, contrary to Douthat’s misleading suggestion, hate speech laws have been used for censorious purposes far beyond punishing speech offensive to Muslims — including, for instance, by Christian groups invoking such laws to demand the banning of plays they dislike.

It’s nice that The New York Times hired a columnist devoted to defending his Church and promoting his religious sectarian conflicts without any response from the target of his bitter tribalistic encyclicals.  Can one even conceive of having a Muslim NYT columnist who routinely disparages and rails against Christians and Jews this way?  To ask the question is to answer it, and by itself gives the lie to Douthat’s typically right-wing need to portray his own majoritarian group as the profoundly oppressed victim at the hands of the small, marginalized, persecuted group which actually has no power (it’s so unfair how Muslims always get their way in the U.S.).  But whatever else is true, there ought to be a minimum standard of factual accuracy required for these columns.  The notion that censorship is exercised only on behalf of Muslims falls far short of that standard.

(1) Several people are insisting that the problem of violence and threats by Muslims is far greater than, and thus not comparable to, those posed by Christians and Jews.  This is just the same form of triabalistic, my-side-is-always-better blindness afflicting Douthat.  Who could possibly look at the U.S. and conclude that brutal, inhumane, politically-motivated, designed-to-intimidate violence is a particular problem among Muslims, or that Muslims receive special, unfairly favorable treatment as a result of their intimidation?  Do you mean except for the tens of thousands of Muslims whom the U.S. has imprisoned without charges for years, and the hundreds of thousands our wars and invasions and bombings have killed this decade alone, and the ones from around the world subjected to racial and ethnic profiling, and the ones we’ve tortured and shot up at checkpoints and are targeting for state-sponsored assassination?

(2) There’s no question that violence or threatened violence by Islamic radicals against authors, cartoonists and the like is a serious problem.  But (a) simply click on the links above — or talk to workers in abortion clinics about the climate in which they work — and try to justify how you can, with a straight face, claim it’s not very pervasive among extremists and fanatics generally, and (b) avoid exaggerating the problem.  The group that threatened the South Park creators is a tiny, fringe group founded by a former right-wing Jewish-American settler in the West Bank who converted to Islam and spends most of his time harrassing American Muslims (the former “James Cohen”; h/t Archtype); they’re about as representative of Muslims generally as Fred Phelps and these people are representative of Christians.  Moreover, numerous blogs displayed the Mohammed cartoons and plan to do so again; the notion that the Western World is cowering in abject fear from Muslim intimidation is absurdly overblown.

(3) Sarah Palin recently defended the Rev. Franklin Graham’s statement that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion.”  That barely caused a ripple of controversy.  Imagine if a leading political figure had said anything remotely similar about Christianity or Judaism.  The claim that Muslims receive some sort of special protection or sensitivity is the opposite of reality.

I might add everywhere you see The New York Times and or Ross Douthat in Greenwald’s piece above, you can safely insert FoxNews and Megyn Kelly, or any other corporate media type and their corresponding lackey/reporter….the rhetoric is essentially the same and equally perverse.  If you want to really get a flavor for Greenwald’s piece read it in its entirety here.

What is common about these two media encounters, mine and Greenwald’s is how it appears media wants to inflame public passions against a group of people who are 0.00067% of the Muslim population (548 members of Revolution Muslim out of an estimated population of 6 million Muslims)  of the US in such a way as to imply they can possibly limit or even do away with the freedoms of speech we hold so dearly when it has been the government’s response to this minuscule number that  poses a greater threat to that freedom than anything the Revolution Muslim can conjure.   Such is the rhetoric which drives media and government ever closer to the precipice of destroying the social order in a way no amount of terror, Islamic, foreign, domestic, militia driven or otherwise could ever do and yet the general public seems alright with that notion that freedom and liberty are ok to forfeit or lose at the expense of persecuting minorities, the opposition, but certainly for now Muslims.  It is a notion we have embraced to readily in our past and it’s time to forgo it now.

The Religious Warmongering of the New York Times


NYTLeave it to the main stream news media to editorialize about the necessity for religions to confront one another in the timber box times we now live in.  With the nation’s first black president who many in American society want to delegitimize because of his color, his origin or his ethnicity, the editorial which appears here in the New York Times is just one more attempt to kill two birds with one stone; the black president many wish they never had and the menacing Islam which many think he, Obama, represents.

One should come to expect the type of bombast which fills Ross Douthat’s editorial; after all the New York Times hasn’t been known for being very accurate here lately, with all their false articles about WMDs and its  reporters cavorting with government officials while engaged in outing covert agents of various intelligence agencies.  It comes as no surprise to me therefore that the Times has printed such inflammatory statements about Islam and it’s coexistence with the aspirations of an hegemonical Pope Benedict like, “in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.” (I never thought Islam was out for the count or dying?  How can it therefore be ‘resurgent’?) Or this quote, “Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 message in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.” (Does Douthat think the confrontation should extend to the shores of America too?) Why Benedict, at least according to Douthat,  wants to pick a fight with Islam is beyond me.  Maybe it’s because Europe sees itself  threatened by the existence of Muslims in its midst and wants to expell them much like they did in the 15th century with its pogroms against Muslims they expelled from Spain. In some way I would hope a parallel can be drawn sothat a papal inspired  Europe could understand the frustration Palestinians feel about having an alien force on their soil whose compatibility is different from their own, but I don’t think that’s going to happen because frankly Europe, like America, is fine tuned for war and confrontation, to use the editorial’s word(s) and there’s is very little else, like empathy or understanding or even peace for that matter, that they are interested in.  It pains me to see a religious figure dial into the lustful emotion of hate and distrust the way this Pope has.  I am reminded of his meeting with GWB and wonder if they two didn’t share a scriptural text or two to talk about their worldly ambitions; after all, it is this perfect dichotomy between the Church and temporal power that allows them to say to one another, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ isn’t it?  Glen Greenwald does a pretty good job of dissecting Douthat’s editorial on a political level here.

What interests me however is the benign reaction the Muslim world has exhibited toward Benedict’s remarks, which some Muslims took offense to because of the defamation of the Prophet,  alluded to in the Douthat editorial.  You can read the official Muslim response here where a certain group of scholars extended every olive branch there is to the Pope who is being encouraged by his parishioners the likes of Douthat to “confront” Muslims in order to gain Anglican converts.  The Muslim response linked to above contains over 50 references to the word “love” in describing their relationship to God and their fellow man and several references the need for “peace” between the different groups of the world.  I would think a thoughtful, considerate and judicious clergyman would want to inspire and encourage such sentiments among members of another faith, not incite or aggravate their opposites.  In an extraordinary attempt at conciliation meant to allay already heightened fears, concerns, paranoia on the part of papal Christendom, the Muslim reply to Benedict begins thus

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population.
Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no
meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between
Muslims and Christians.
The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very
foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour.
These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and
Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of
the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.

and remains consistently conciliatory throughout.  Nowhere in the Muslim response is their any attempt to touch on the hot button issues that are usually brought up in discussions between Muslims and non Muslims.  Doing so would be distracting at best and tend to feed the appetite of any already hungry desire for war between the two faiths.  Instead these “scholars” appear to want to emphasize a common ground that can support a foundation of understanding and mutual respect.  I wish that had been the tone of Douthat’s editorial and not the one that seems to encourage Benedict to go down the road of his predecessors whose hands have stained the annals of history with the blood of their religious conquests, read murder, of European Muslims. However, such is the tone of main stream media and the New York Times these days, which is known for reporters who have told Muslims, ‘suck on this’.