NOTE FROM MRC PRESIDENT BRENT BOZELL: On February 16, NB blogger Mark Finkelstein wrote a piece critical of "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough, stating in a discussion of radical Islam on his program that – he admitted the comparison was “very crude” – that “ultrafundamentalist Christians who believe every single word of the Bible has to be interpreted in the exact ways which could also lead to some violence.” Finkelstein argued “although Scarborough says 'I'm not comparing religions here,' that's exactly what he did.”
Mr. Scarborough contacted me to object, that he knew Islam and Christianity don’t really compare. I invited him to pen a response. In fairness I have chosen not to post comments, and to end this discussion here.
THE TRUTH ABOUT ISIS
Much has been made over Barack Obama's refusal to call out Islamic extremism by name. His clumsy attempt at the Prayer Breakfast to link groups like ISIS with Christianity was embarrassing, even by the president’s own standards. For some reason, American and European liberals continue to damage their reputations by awkwardly attempting to obfuscate the reality of Islamist terror that even Arab leaders now bravely confront.
How disappointing that most media outlets lack that same courage, even though they sit in the safety of their New York newsrooms.
That may be beginning to change. On February 17, Morning Joe invited the author of The Atlantic Monthly’s cover story to co-host our first hour. I had read Graeme Wood’s article on “What ISIS Really Wants" and was struck by how his conclusions about the Islamist terror group ran counter to what we have been told by the White House and mainstream media over the past several months. Even the subheading of The Atlantic article contradicted everything Mr. Obama has said about ISIS, proclaiming instead that the terrorist state was a “religious group with a carefully considered set of beliefs.” The author also concluded that President Obama's insistence saying ISIS is “not Islamic” and calling it al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” were statements that "reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.”
Morning Joe was the first to interview Mr. Wood, and the impact on other media outlets was immediate. News networks began discussing the article, The New York Times began describing the group’s apocalyptic end-times philosophy, and even VOX started publishing posts with headlines declaring that “Obama should stop pretending that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.” But don't expect liberals to completely abandon their approach to Islamic extremism anytime soon. Some longtime habits are hard to break.
Following the September 11th attacks, many in the media began trying to attach rational causes to Osama bin Laden’s murder of 3,000 Americans. Many groped for answers to explain “why they hate us.” Commentators who argued that Islamic radicals hated us, in part, because of the freedoms we enjoyed were openly mocked. But the truth is that the most important founders of the modern Islamist movement—from Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—expressed their hatred for those rights. Still, liberal commentators preferred instead to blame bin Laden’s terror plot, in part, on American imperialism and U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
A few years after the 2001 attacks, CNN produced a three-part series on religious extremism and tried to paint Islamic and Christian radicals in the same light. Unfortunately for the network, the host was stuck comparing al Qaeda’s murderous rampages with evangelical schools who dared to have dress codes that required young women to cover their knees. It was almost as if then-state senator Barack Obama was serving as a special advisor on political correctness to the CNN special.
No one is saying that all religions don’t have their share of extremists. In 1995, a Jewish ultranationalist terrorist named Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he was enraged by Rabin’s attempts to make peace with the Palestinians. And anyone fortunate enough to grow up in Pensacola, Florida, knows that one of the few blights on my hometown was the fact that it became the focus of several violent anti-abortion crimes. Two abortion providers were gunned down and a group of religious extremists detonated a bomb on Christmas Eve as “a Christmas present to baby Jesus.” I represented a defendant in once such case as a favor to family friends, and tried to find a criminal defense attorney to represent him after he announced that he wanted to defend himself and use the Bible as his legal document. As with the abortion bombers, this young man believed that his killing of the abortion doctor was God’s perfect will.
As a Southern Baptist who grew up going to church several times a week, I knew my way around the Bible enough to understand that the Jesus I worshipped sanctioned no such thing. Jesus instead demanded that we love our enemies, forgive those who cause us harm, turn the other cheek after we have been slapped, and strive always to be peacemakers. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus condone the killing of others. But that is not the case in the Koran, and while over a billion observant Muslims practice their faith peacefully, the media’s failure to educate Americans on the theological differences between the Bible and Koran has been one of their great failings in our post-9/11 world.
As I explained last week on my show, all religions have radicals. But the most prevalent example in the 21st Century comes in the form of Islamic extremists. And the greatest threat these terrorists pose in the world are not to Christians or Jews, but to fellow Muslims. Maybe that's why Arab leaders in the Middle East are more willing to tell the truth about ISIS than our own president.
