OK, Class: today’s story comes to us from The New York Post via Instapundit.
So, this footpad espies a van–a red van, class–parked for about a month on at 53rd Street and Second Avenue in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. On July 3 at about 5:00p.m. he decides to check out the contents of said vehicle and effects entry with larcenous intent. He was, as the Post reports, “stunned” to discover the haul:
it was filled with gas cans and Styrofoam cups containing a mysterious white substance with protruding wires and switches.
AdvertisementThe street is lined with brownstones, and there’s a ballet studio and a small Muslim school. So he drove the van 15 blocks to 37th Street and parked it at a desolate waterfront location behind the Costco store and next to some little-used piers.
He then called a cop he knew and alerted him to the van and its contents, probably, said a hig-ranking police office, “saved a lot of people’s lives.”
So, what do we notice about this story? What is the most salient detail?
1. The van is red. Y or N
2. There’s a ballet studio on the street where the van was parked. Y or N
3. It was 5:00p.m. when the prospective robber broke into the van. Y or N
4. There’s a Muslim school on the street where the van was parked. Y or N. (Hint: In the last ten years, this part of Sunset Park has seen “a growing Arab muslim population mostly of Palestinian background.”)
Time’s up! How did you do?
Take a brief recess. Then consider the overall picture, again via Instapundit, in The Daily News. The headline gives a good sense of the burden of story:
Undercover city detective finds hints of danger among mosques
And the body of the story has the expected details:
At great personal risk, he participated in everything from prayers at a mosque to martial arts training under cover of darkness to watching jihadist videos, with many of the activities laced with talk of killing, according to a source familiar with the undercover’s investigations.
His experiences paint a vivid portrait of the potential for local terror.
Based on your reading of other such news reports, common sense, and the general state of your instinct for self-preservation, how will the next sentence mostly likely begin?
No hurry.
Take your time.
Ready?
Do you have a piece of paper and a pencil?
Ok, write your answer.
And here’s what the story says: “While the picture is in no way indicative of the city’s Muslim population. . . ”
Did you come close?
Give ‘em a break, Roger. This is just one of those sycophantic idiocies that emerge in all cultures and presist until supereded by the next stylish obeisance. They are all obeisances. Every scientific paper published in the Soviet Union or in Mao’s China — let alone every journalistic account thereof — began or provided within its first paragraph a statement on the genius of Stalin, or of Mao, which fully anticipated and made possible the work to be discussed. Likewise, on the other side, Der Fuehrer and the local Gauleiter. All forms of political correctness are really obeisances to POWER. In the present case, “…no way indicative of the city’s Muslim popuation…” is the required arse-kissing, not of Muslims, but of the nice people who have or control (quoting Cornford), “all the money going.” The penalty for failing to exonerate Muslims-in-general is loss of esteem and probably of one’s job.
The interesting question is why the plutocrats who own, e.g., the media, or run universities, or even some great industrial companies, are so eager to exonerate their pledged conquerors or assassins.
Your punchline — “While the picture is in no way indicative of the city’s Muslim population. . . ” — is, as you probably know, repeated as an axiomatic mantra in various ways in innumerable news stories from nearly every mainstream media news source. It is an axiomatic assumption throughout the West today that “most Muslims are harmless and abhor terrorism”. I have never seen a shred of evidence to back up this assertion: it simply must be true, therefore it is, that’s the logic.
Meanwhile, with the metastasizing violence and the widespread indications throughout the Muslim world and Muslim communities within the West of everything ranging from active support to passive enabling of Islamic pathologies including terrorism (as well as abuse of women, children, honor killings, anti-liberal attitudes about free speech, homosexuals, women, Sharia law, etc.), the evidence of a massively endemic cultural pathology among an amorphously large number of Muslims worldwide is mounting.
It is far more likely that the next horrific muslim attack on the West, in Europe or America, will be met with apologetics than with a counterattack. Translation: they are winning.
The green tide is going to sweep over us all, and there will be nothing we can do about it
ref: “’most Muslims are harmless and abhor terrorism’. I have never seen a shred of evidence to back up this assertion: it simply must be true, therefore it is, that’s the logic.”
my anecdotal impression is that most Italians are harmless and abhor organized crime. but, perhaps i am illogical.
I am always unmoved when apologists stress that not all Muslims are terrorists. It never occurred to me that we should concern ourselves with the non-terrorists. Puts me in mind of William Burroughs remark about gun controllers, along the lines of “Whenever somebody commits a crime with a gun, the reflexive response always seems to be to punish the people who didn’t do it.”
The reason I don’t quote that more often is because Gibson is hardly the poster boy for responsible firearms ownership.