Who Are the Real Islamophobes?

Poor ISIS. The left  in our country — liberals, progressives, the administration and their media cohorts — can’t face up to, or even admit, the evils of radical Islam, no matter what the Islamists do. One wonders if the jihadists set off a dirty nuke in the press room of the New York Times whether the reporters would even object. They’d probably write an editorial about the unhappy childhoods of the bombers and how one of them was once humiliated by a Christian schoolmate in a volleyball game during recess in Beirut.

It’s almost like a disease. In fact, it is a disease — the real Islamophobia… not irrational fear of Islam, but irrational fear of blaming Islam.

Consider Orlando. Not just the uber-lefty slickster Van Jones, who comes off like a re-upped CNN version of the Soviet Union’s old Vladimir Pozner, but Kirsten Powers, playing her “liberal” role on Fox, blathered on about how she didn’t really consider Omar Mateen a radical Islamic terrorist but someone who was mentally ill and an unfortunately guilty homophobic gay.

I hate to be rude to Kirsten, who seems like a nice person, but that is incredibly naive. Of course Mateen was a mentally ill homophobic gay, unfortunate or not. So what? The point is he was a mentally ill homophobic gay who believed in radical Islam. It is radical Islam that gave him the license to kill, indeed urged him to kill with its precepts, all those innocent people. Without radical Islam, they would all be alive today.

If every non-Islamic guilty homosexual in America acted out like that, our country would be a charnel house of human remains in every major city and in a state of mass hysteria. It’s not. Why not? Radical Islam, to repeat myself, is the missing ingredient. Gays — guilty and otherwise — there are plenty.

I imagine if we went to Rakka we would find almost all the ISIS members we met to be mentally ill in some way and certainly homophobic — and not just because they are throwing gays off buildings, but because it is built into their culture, a culture imitated and admired by Mateen.

And what was it precisely that attracted Mateen? The simple, reductive answers of that radical Islam. Call it fundamentalist Islam, if you will.  And is this radical Islam in any way sane? By Western standards, not at all, unless you consider lopping off the heads of people of other religions and throwing their women in rape rooms to be normal behavior approved of by the DSM. ISIS leader al-Baghdadi is no less than a religiously motivated serial killer.

“Liberals” don’t want to face that much of Islamic society is absolutely off its rocker because that would undermine their absurd lib-prog, morally narcissistic, cultural relativist narrative about the Third World.  This would all be funny because, in a certain macabre way, it is, but we are all the butt of this bleak joke. We have to sit there, incredulous, when our own Justice Department, obviously on orders from the top, redacts the transcript of Mateen’s 911 call by omitting the references to ISIS and changing what is obviously the word “Allah” to “God.” It’s hard to decide if the people who do that are stupid or immoral — probably both. Highly political too, of course. But that’s the obvious (and most shameful) part.

Some, like certain State Department personnel and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, sound as if they have undergone twenty years of the Stockholm Syndrome when they discuss the topic. In a certain way they have. The insularity of the Obama administration does recapitulate the Stockholm Syndrome in the way it reinforces an entirely dishonest world view.

And then where are we — innnocent bystanders in this deadly game? What do we do? Are we next?

Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His next book – I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already – just published by Encounter Books June 14, 2016.  You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can order the book here.