American Media Cowardice

Much of old-stream media's recent sensitivity to religion would be welcome, if the hypocrisy wasn't so rank...

Much of old-stream media's recent sensitivity to religion would be welcome, if the hypocrisy wasn't so rank.

As crazed Moslems around the world burn down buildings and threaten to decapitate cartoonists because of a few Danish editorial cartoons portraying Islam's prophet Muhammad in caricature, writers and editors in the United States are engaged in retrospective hand-wringing about the hurt feelings of the mob. Never mind that Islamic "journalists" have said much worse about Jews and Christians for many years, or that a free press has evaporated anywhere Islamic control has been established. One could never have imagined that America's stalwart defenders of unfettered expression, quick to condemn even timid suggestions of self-censorship, would suddenly be questioning the efficacy of a free and open press that would dare treat Islam to the same disrespect that has been directed at Christianity for years.

After all, major American newpapers and media, like their Islamic counterparts, have never hesitated to condemn and degrade Christians and Christianity. At the same time, as if to stick it to America's majority of believers, the media has promoted every socially destructive agenda and distasteful Hollywood escapade. The most recent example of this is the fawning frenzy over "Brokeback Mountain", a film that graphically depicts a "love" story between two gay sheepherding cowboys. Of course, Mel Gibson's reverent portrayal of Christ's last days is hate-filled and anti-Jewish to America's media elites, but two men sodomizing one another in a pup tent is high art.

But in this case, American media has lost its collective nerve, which is really not surprising when you consider that they are, at the very heart, cowards to begin with. The Associated Press has chosen not to reprint the cartoons in question, saying that "we do not distribute content that is known to be offensive". ABC news ran very fleeting images on "World News Tonight" and "Nightline". NBC has been airing only part of the cartoon, CNN has reported with the graphics blurred, and CBS has refused to show the cartoons at all. Only Fox News aired the cartoon deemed most offensive to Muslims-a drawing that depicted Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, and only Fox's Brit Hume has mustered the common-sense to point out the "kinds of slurs against Christians and against the Jewish faith that are regularly spread abroad in the Arab world by the mass media and by many of the imams themselves".

Amazingly, European media, constrained by many different governmental restrictions and controls, has shown a greater understanding of the concept of free press and speech than their American counterparts luxuriating in nearly unlimited constitutional protections. Serge Faubert, chief editor of a French daily, invoked the 18th century free-thinker Voltaire in defending the publication of the cartoons, saying he did not agree with the sentiments, but would defend to the death the right of the cartoonist to make them. England's Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens wrote in his column that "the myth of Moslem tolerance needs to be exploded. Muslims should not be allowed to dictate what is, and what is not, published about them." Robert Menard, director of the media rights group Reporters Without Borders said that "modernity" was now at stake. Dozens of European newspapers and magazines have reprinted the cartoons, generally saying that the issue was not the cartoons themselves, but whether newspapers should be allowed to publish them.

Apparently, having your neighborhoods and national flags burned by roaming Moslem thugs, intent on stifling free expression and murdering those who practice it, brings a certain clarity of thought presently missing from the editorial boards of American media.

Recently, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a global security conference in Munich that "Islamic radicals seek to take over governments from North America to Southeast Asia and re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent" under the control of Islamic Sharia law. He warned that the rise of Islamofascism "could be as deadly as Nazi Germany and the early decades of the Soviet Empire", both of which triggered the slaughter of millions of innocent people. A day before, he told an audience at the National Press Club that radical Islamists "have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire".

While the old-stream American media falls all over itself to show deference to hypocritical followers of a crazed and destructive religion, don't expect them to report on the continually emerging threat to Western freedom posed by these radicals.

After all, two queer cowboys are so much more palatable.

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