USA Today was right to print editorial defending Islamic violence

People are going off the rails that USA Today printed an editorial claiming the massacre of a French satirical newspaper was justified by the Quran, and the fault lies on the French government for not censoring the paper's blasphemous images of the prophet Mohammed.

People, you just don't get it.

Washington Post blogger Radley Balko voiced a typical response to the editorial criticizing USA Today for running it. That's what drew it to my attention and while I read the editorial, I thought it was written by the Washington Post editorial staff and they were complete fools. Look at this excerpt:

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security. 

So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

Then I got to the bottom and saw it was a guest editorial written by Anjem Choudary, the radical British Imam I've heard about for years from Pat Condell.

Well, that's completely difference.

USA Today did the world a favor by letting us see exactly what we're up against, and how crazy and perverse radical Islam is. Anjem Choudary doesn't speak for all Muslims, even the violent radicals, but he does speak for some Muslims. Look at this gem he wrote, presumably in blood:

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people's desires.

Isn't that worth knowing? Shouldn't you be aware that some Muslims truly believes Islam needs to conquer the world, not as a response to the west's foreign policy decisions, but because of divine right? It doesn't tell us how widespread the view is, but now we know it's not zero. Don't you want to know that? Thanks to USA Today, you now do.
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Immigration politics of the Boston Marathon Bombing

We thought it was a hoax.

I was in the newsroom a little after 3 p.m. on April 15 when Jack, a fellow reporter, said he just read on Twitter that there were two blasts at the Boston Marathon. We had shut the TV off after the early runners crossed the finish line and Jack switched it back on to disprove the rumor. You know how that went.

We spent the next few hours getting details to put on our website and Twitter. Our city editor said that The New York Post was reporting 12 people had died, but then added "but it's The New York Post" and we did not put those numbers online. We had a sports reporter who was at the event but had left before the explosions.

About an hour after the blast, when we were still calling them "explosions" and not "bombs," our editor asked for a reporter and a photographer to drive 50 miles to Boston to check it out. Jack was all over it and spent the rest of the day trying to get something, but it was all chaos. No one really knew what was going on and we had trouble getting any substance.

I finished writing the small potatoes stories I had reported on earlier in the day and on my way home I stopped by the commuter train station to talk to people coming from Boston. The local police had stationed a motorcycle officer there to watch people disembark. Most people didn't want to talk but I was able to speak to a father and son who made a day trip to watch the Red Sox. They were held up several hours getting back because the subway was shut down and they had to walk six miles to the train station where they were wanded and frisked.

The next day I got called in early to write about how the bombing would impact events in smaller communities. When a big story like this happens in our backyard we will have primary stories talking about the event supplemented with tons of lesser stories on different angles. We all wrote several of them. By the time Saturday rolled around and one suspect was captured and the other was dead I was talking to local state lawmakers, all of them democrats, about why they support the death penalty in this case.

The political implications of this case is overwhelming. On the night of the bombing a piece was being passed around from the Daily Kos about Carlos Arredondo, one of numerous civilians who helped save people by picking them up and rushing them to medical staff. In his case, he had the foresight to stop blood loss in a victim and tore down several barriers to help other people get to the victims.

Arredondo became a media darling and received more attention than anyone else who helped saved people. I suspect it wasn't just because of heroic actions and the famous photograph he appeared in, but also his status as an illegal immigrant from Costa Rica, war protester and father of a soldier killed in Iraq. People who support immigration amnesty jumped all over this case because it showed the value to our society immigrants can bring.

As the story unfolded we learned Arredondo wasn't the only immigrant that played a major role. Lu Lingzi, a Chinese grad student who studied statistics at Boston University, was one of three people killed by the bombs.

Then it turned out that the bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were Chechnyan immigrants.

So what lesson does this teach us about immigration? I say, nothing. Immigrants are just people. It's a bit embarrassing for people who wanted to trumpet Arredondo's heroism when it turns out the bombs came from immigrants too. It's also awkward for the anti-immigration people who want to stress the evil caused by the Tsarnaev brothers, both legal immigrants, when they are counting an immigrant as one of the victims and an illegal immigrant was clearly a savior.

Immigration needs to be debated on its own merits, and rare but horrible events like the one in Boston last week contribute little more than anecdotes. I've been in favor of open borders for a long time, although I support keeping tabs on who comes in to give us the chance to filter out known criminals. I dislike seeing anti-immigration folks capitalize on this tragedy. But by the same hand, is it any better for us pro-immigration supporters to capitalize on it in the same way? I don't see much of a difference.
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This proves nothing

We're still picking up the pieces from the chaos following manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last night. Now that we have the identity of the terrorists, the moment I've been dreading is upon us. The villains are Chechen, a predominately Muslim ethnicity. I don't have it confirmed that Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev and his brother are Muslims, but they most likely are.

On Tuesday Ross Douthat put out a great message on Twitter:

Dreading the moment when we find out whose pre-existing political views this atrocity "vindicates."
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) April 15, 2013

I've been hearing wild, baseless speculation that the suspects will turn out to be Muslims, right wing extremists or left wing extremists. Perhaps they were motivated by American foreign policy or Boston's cosmopolitan atmosphere. Maybe they hate civilization and technology.

Well, all of those unfairly firm conclusions were based on groups the guessers hated. Someone was going to win, and whoever it turned out to be was destined to get smug about it.

It turns out, it will be the anti-Islamic people who get to say "I told you so" today when in fact, they didn't know so. They were only guessing.
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The Libya attacks were not a game changer

I have to disagree with something Hillary Clinton said in response to the violent attacks on the U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt this week that killed an ambassador, among others.

It wasn't this statement:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

Some conservatives, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are falsely trying to paint President Barack Obama's administration as apologizing for the Internet video an obscure American citizen posted that inspired the attacks. Breitbart.com chopped off the final sentence, which completely changed the statement. That's bogus and I agree with the general idea of what she really said.

No, her statement I disagree with is that these events "Should shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world.”

Who is shocked here?

I'm going to pull a CJ Cregg here and say the obvious: If some minor private citizens publicly does something insulting to Islam, we must expect crazed mobs to murder people. It's a simple cause-and-effect routine we all know very well.

As always, I have to clarify that it's the Islamic extremists who are behind all the killings, not the majority of peaceful Muslims, otherwise I will be assumed to condemn the entire religion and we all know how dangerous that is. However, it's still true that the bad ones are worse than the bad ones of any other religion.

I've been hearing for months on the BBC about the war crimes and human rights violations caused by rebel groups empowered by the Arab Spring uprising. Now some of those same protesters still wearing Guy Fawkes masks have turned their attention on U.S. embassies.

So no, I'm not shocked people were murdered because of some lame Internet video no one here ever heard of. Anyone surprised by this just wasn't paying attention.
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Free speech doesn't need to be refined

The far left loves conservatives. They will bend over backwards to protect them.

Just as long as they're brown and don't come near them, that is.

Danish professor Lars Hedegaard was nearly locked up for two years for saying there is a serious domestic violence problem in the Muslim community, or as the authorities defined it, hate speech.

The case coming this close was a major victory for multiculturalists and cultural relativism. They don't dare pass judgment on the morals of a non-white culture, even if it's ripe with social conservatism. To them, dodging sticky cultural friction is more important than free speech.

This is a serious threat to human rights, but it could never happen here, right? National Review Online insists otherwise.

Four Democratic New York state senators have recently argued for a “more refined First Amendment,” declaring that speech should be “a special entitlement granted by the state on a conditional basis that can be revoked if it is ever abused or maltreated.” These legislators justified their proposed speech restrictions in the context of cyberbullying; there is always some hideous incident to use as the rationale for censoring speech.

Ouch! These vague anti-bullying bills require us to trust the government to apply them reasonably and not abuse the newly-minted power. No civil libertarian would ever fall for that.


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Don't let violent mobs destroy freedom of speech

While the stupidest thing to happen in the past week was the murder of 12 people in Northern Afghanistan by a mob angered by a recent Quran burning in Florida, the second stupidest thing happened today when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suggested we let that same mob write our policies for us.

Graham told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation this morning that "Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war" and we should put legal restrictions on blasphemy.

That's not how it works, people. America should not pass legislation against specific messages just because certain groups promise to use violence when that message is expressed.

Instead, let us behave like civilized adults and remind people that the answer to speech we don't like is more speech, not violence or suppression.

I will lead by example. Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who burned the Quran, is irresponsible. We get it Terry, you've proven for us once again that Islamic extremists currently present a great danger than the extremists of the other major religions. One would have to be a fool to think otherwise. If someone burns a Bible or Torah people get offended, if someone burns a Quran people get beheaded.

So knowing that, why would Jones go ahead and make a gesture that he knew would cause the death of innocent people? I don't want the law to stop people from desecrating holy books, but I thought common sense and human decency would have kicked in by now.

There is a lot of shame to go around here. Most of it belongs to the rioters, but Graham and Jones deserve plenty as well. There are no good guys here, and and I don't expect anything positive to come from this whole wretched incident. This is just awful.

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FBI: Blacks more likely to commit hate crimes than whites

CNN offered a quick summary of a new FBI hate crime report. Of course, CNN was quick to point out that 62.4 percent of the offenders were white, while 18.5 percent were black.

What they forgot to include was a population comparison. Whites make up 74.8 percent of the population, while blacks are only 12.4 percent. That means that an average black person is 78.9 percent more likely to commit a hate crime than a white person. That's not a shame all people of a race should be burdened with, but it should dispel some of the popular views in our culture.

In addition, Jews were victims of 71.9 percent of the religiously-motivated hate crimes, while Muslims were 8.4 percent. Between 1.2 and 2.2 percent of the population is Jewish, and between 0.6 and 1.6 percent is Muslim.

Every hate crime is a problem, but it's good there were only 6,600 in the whole country in 2009. The crimes against gays lined up with the popular opinion, but the idea of the white hate monger and the anti-Islamic bully did not. The public underestimates the problem of Antisemitism and minority hate mongers, and how can we stop a problem if we don't understand it?
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Why Americans distrust Islam so much

At a recent gathering I challenged a few friends to name the most popular Muslim comedian in the last ten years.

No one had an answer, but they all agreed with me when I said "Dave Chappelle." Most said they never knew he was a Muslim.

Now what can we learn from this story? It's obvious, really: Well-behaved Muslims rarely make the news.

Americans usually encounter Muslims who wear their star and crescent on their sleeve when they are harming people. America laughed alongside Dave Chappelle for years without knowing his religion. This isn't some plot by the media to shuffle the good Muslims in with the rest of society and let the bad ones represent Islam. Instead, its a failing of Muslims to announce their religion and motivations as loudly when they do good things as when they do bad.

This is a blindness to public relation tactics, as I've written before. If your group has an undeserved bad reputation, it is your responsibility to improve that reputation. Unfortunately, most of the work I've seen in this direction is in attempts to shame critics of Islam, instead of showcasing positive Islamic accomplishments.

A Steve Chapman piece this week demolished some of the myths about the scope of anti-Muslim hatred in America:

For the most part, Muslims have achieved integration and acceptance. Only a quarter of them say they have ever suffered discrimination. Most have many non-Muslim friends.

Could that be because non-Muslims do not regard them with fear and loathing? Hate crimes against Muslims do not support the charge that Americans are frothing Islamophobes. In 2008, there were only 105 anti-Muslim incidents, compared with 1,013 against Jews.

Chapman made a lot of other great points, such as the hate crimes that do happen get a lot of attention the same way airplane crashes get more attention that car accidents. When asked if Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions, 35 percent of Americans said yes. However, 42 percent said no.

Still, 35 percent is not zero. That's a significant portion of our nation. Are these people blinded by some irrational hatred of a foreign religion?

If they are, you have to include President Obama in that list, as he and a number of military officials warned that a small Florida church's aborted stunt to burn a Quaran would encourage terrorism.

"You know, you could have serious violence in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan," Obama told ABC television in an interview.

He went on to say that this would turn more Muslims into terrorists and possibly cause suicide bombings in American and European cities. Anti-Christian stunts, like purposely-blasphemous art and Bible burnings, do not carry the same dire warnings of violent retribution.

The red herring here is terrorism. I agree with the defenders of Islam that its foolish to mix up the phrase "most terrorists are Muslim" with the incorrect "most Muslims are terrorists." I'm used to this fallacy, often in the form "most whites are bigots" or "most conservatives are racist." Those are false statements and people who say them are not thinking.

But terrorism isn't the only time Muslim violence and human rights violations dramatically splash across the television screen like a vial of acid on the uncovered face of a young woman. Look at the culture in Islamic states. Gay men are publicly decapitated in Saudi Arabia not by bloodthirsty mobs, but as a formal part of the legal system. Thieves there are luckier; they only have their hands cut off. Don't forget "honor killings," where typically a father kills his own daughter for crimes such as being a rape victim, trying to get out of an arranged marriage or not following the local dress code.

It wasn't terrorism when Ayatollah Khomeini commanded all Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie for writing a novel that insulted Islam. He didn't even have to write the book to deserve death; the Quaran clearly demands the execution of all apostates. Theo van Gogh was murdered for making a film highlighting the abuse of women in Islamic societies, but his assassin was merely a religious extremist, not a terrorist. What about the three-digit body count following the Dutch cartoons that criticized Islamic terrorism, wasn't that really the work of angry mobs? When two Spanish nuns were murdered after the Pope insulted Islam, was that really a terrorist act, or a hot-blooded reaction? Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, wasn't a terrorist. He just decided that there is only one response to repeated insults to Islam.

So yes, most of our Muslim citizens are better than that. An Iranian immigrant I interviewed when I was a reporter told me about how much better it is here in America where he has such wild freedoms as the right to wear short-sleeve shirts in public. The Chapman article I posted earlier revealed most Muslims in America think women are better off here - a far cry from burqa promoters of the Middle East who say the American society forces women to dress like whores.

But Christopher Hitchens showed how peaceful Western Muslims will sometimes use the terrorists and their capacity for violence to get what they want:

We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

The reason so many Americans distrust Islam is based on what they observe. Yes, those anecdotal observations are flawed, but only to a point. The bad is louder than the good because the bad is so very, very loud.
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Can't we treat Islam the same as other religions?

There's a lot of attention going to a Florida church that plans to burn a copy of the Quran on Sept. 11.

I realize there is a lot of talk about how Americans treat Muslims today, and for good reason - there is a lot of anger being directed at innocent Muslims. However, Christians have been in that boat for as long as I can remember. Bible burning never gets this much attention, and a quick google search churns up tons of photographs and videos of the act.

When trendy artists showed off a crucifix soaked in urine and a painting of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung, Christians were angry. They wrote letters to the editor, made lengthy speeches and boycotted art galleries.

Compare that to the rather tepid form of blasphemy that Muslims usually endure, such as the Danish cartoons in 2005 which lead to more than 100 deaths, or the murder of Theo van Gogh after he made a film about the violence women face in Islamic cultures. The creators of South Park were bullied into changing an episode earlier this year. From the New York Times:

Cognizant that Islam forbids the depiction of its holiest prophet, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker showed their “South Park” characters agonizing over how to bring Muhammad to their fictional Colorado town. At first the character said to be Muhammad is confined to a U-Haul trailer, and is heard speaking but is not shown. Later in the episode the character is let out of the trailer, dressed in a bear costume.

The next day the “South Park” episode was criticized by the group Revolution Muslim in a post at its Web site, revolutionmuslim.com. The post, written by a member named Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee, said the episode “outright insulted” the prophet, adding: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid, and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”

It's true that the anti-Muslim fervor in New York City recently lead a young man to stab a Muslim cab driver with the intention of murdering him simply for his faith. Mosques have also been the target of vandals. This is a terrible wave of hate crimes.

But in fairness, so are the attacks on Mormon churches. Some members of the religion organized an anti-gay marriage campaign in California, so all Mormons are being held responsible by the vandals. A Mormon bishop was murdered a week ago, but it wasn't worthy of national news.

Muslims deserve to be treated fairly in America. They are not below the other faiths, but they're not above them either. All I ask is that we treat them the same as any other religious group.

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