Henry Srebrnik, Canadian Jewish News
In the days after ISIS terrorists carried out their attacks in Paris, virtually every media outlet immediately rushed to produce stories about a feared anti-Muslim backlash. For example, these two headlines appeared in the Nov. 21 edition of the Charlottetown Guardian: “Paris Muslims Facing Hostility After Attacks” and “Don’t Let Concern Mask Racism, says Ontario Premier.”
The media all seem in lock-step on this issue, and these sorts of stories are so ubiquitous now that you can count on one appearing the day after any terror activities related to Islamists. A visitor from Mars might get the impression that Parisians, or Torontonians, are running around bombing mosques and killing Muslims.
It all makes you wonder who decided on the “party line” to be taken by the media?
The great British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the ideas of economists and political philosophers are more powerful than is commonly understood. “Practical men,” he wrote, “who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
And so it is with journalists. They have become intellectual prisoners of those academic ideologues they studied in university.
Theorists like the immensely influential Edward Said believed western populations are innately racist, xenophobic and bigoted against those he called non-western “others.” His acolytes believe that such negative attitudes now manifest themselves after every atrocity. They also contend that the perpetrators are mainly disturbed criminals, the products of poverty, unemployment and alienation, and not of religious fanaticism.
In other words, the reaction to terrorism is mainly “Islamophobia,” and has little to do with well-founded fear.
This term is, by the way, a very effective means of putting critics on the defensive, by portraying them as hysterics. But the word “phobia” describes irrational fears. One may suffer from a phobia regarding moths, but to fear potential terrorists is a different matter altogether.
Of course I’m not speaking about those who assign collective guilt to all Muslims and Islam. One can differentiate between such odious people and those who have genuine concerns. After all, does anyone assume that opposing Nazism meant condemning all Germans?
The frustration felt by many who chafe at this political correctness and self-imposed censorship has led to the explosion of blogs. They have become the modern internet version of the samizdat, the clandestinely printed material that circulated in the old Communist states.
These self-published works include analyses of political events and often suggest alternatives to the government’s handling of issues. Their proliferation today tells us something about our “official” media.
Ever since politicized radical Islam came to the fore in the 1970s, intellectuals on the left have lionized it as a new form of anti-capitalist “liberation.” In 1978, Michel Foucault, an academic god in most university Humanities departments, travelled to Tehran, then in the midst of revolution against the Shah.
“It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems,” wrote Foucault of Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise, “the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.”
As the noted political philosopher Michael Walzer wrote recently in the American social democratic journal Dissent, “I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning Islamist zealotry.”
They, he continued, “are so irrationally afraid of an irrational fear of Islam that they haven’t been able to consider the very good reasons for fearing Islamist zealots -- and so they have difficulty explaining what’s going on in the world.”
Ideological hegemony does not require secret police or torture chambers to keep people in line. The media are perfectly happy to take the lead.
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