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Friday, October 3, 2014

MSNBC Panel Jokes About Beheadings

In a segment that was tone-deaf, tasteless, disrespectful to the victims and their families, and inappropriate to the gravity of the situation, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry briefly discussed Muslim-related topics including the recent Moore, Oklahoma beheading with a pair of Muslim panelists on Saturday. As you might expect, their chief concern was not the implications of the crime itself, but the specter of anti-Muslim bigotry.

“I would be remiss not to bring up the story out of Oklahoma,” Harris-Perry began, inadvertently revealing her reluctance to address a news item that might make Muslims look bad. “It is a story I read as a ‘workplace violence’ story.”

Of course she does, because to acknowledge that Islam might have motivated the alleged killer Alton Nolen would deal a blow to the progressive narrative about Muslims. The investigation is ongoing, but there is certainly enough circumstantial evidence to warrant the suspicion of a religious, specifically Islamic, motive.

After considering the crime scene, Dawn Perlmutter, Director of the Symbol Intelligence Group and one of the leading experts in ritualistic crimes, declared that “the Moore Oklahoma murder meets all the criteria of Individual Extremist Religion Homicide.” Perlmutter further noted that, “according to the Crime Classification Manual (CCM) the murder of Colleen Hufford is a textbook case of Individual Extremist Religion Inspired Homicide which describes the motivation for the murder as based on a fervent devotion to a cause or system of beliefs and to further the goals and ideas of the group.”

Harris-Perry was joined by Daily Beast writer Dean Obeidallah, who bills himself as a comedian but keeps busy hyping the mythical threat of the Brotherhood neologism “Islamophobia” in order to shift blame for Islam’s bad reputation onto good Americans who have legitimate concerns about it. He is a friend of CAIR, having performed at a CAIR banquet featuring the Brotherhood-linked, Islamophobia fearmonger Wajahat Ali and radical imam Siraj Wahhaj, who supports violent jihad. I’ve dealt with him before – he’s an intellectually dishonest apologist, preferring to spew accusations of hate speech and bigotry at critics of Islam rather than address their arguments. So he’s a perfect fit for the propagandists at MSNBC, the network rated as the least-trusted TV news source among all Americans.

They were joined in the video segment by writer and comedienne Negin Farsad, featured in Obeidallah’s documentary The Muslims Are Coming! about a troupe of Muslim standup comics touring the country, trying to enlighten all the middle-American bigots who have somehow gotten the crazy impression that there are Muslims who pose a threat. The documentary aims to show people that not all Muslims are terrorists; some of them are funny. It’s unclear how this changes the fact that many of them are terrorists and are an ongoing threat.

Harris-Perry played a snippet of press conference video in which a police official mentioned that Alton Nolen reportedly tried to convert some of his coworkers to Islam. “And then, that’s it,” she said after playing clip, while Farsad laughed. “And now, this is somehow about Islam.” Yes, it is “somehow” about Islam because Nolen himself made it about Islam, from his Facebook page praising Islamic fighters, to his proselytizing, to the Islamic phrases he may have shouted (unconfirmed) during the commission of the crime, to the beheading, which as anyone who watches the news lately knows is a favorite method among Islamic terrorists for dealing with infidels.

Obeidallah jumped in with, “It’s funny,” [emphasis added]. “You know, just so it’s clear for everyone, there is nothing in the Koran that says if you get fired, go back to your workplace and kill people,” he said, grinning while Harris-Perry chuckled – because beheadings are hilarious.

Then he expressed that the moment he learned the killer is a Muslim convert, “I knew instantly, this will be used… We’re seeing the right-wing media continuing the narrative that Muslims are here in America, they’re committing jihad.” If the right-wing media is continuing that narrative, it’s for two reasons: one, the left-wing media won’t touch it because it might expose their own multiculturalist narrative as a lie, and two, there are Muslims here in America committing violent jihad.

Obeidallah added, “There were over five hundred workplace killings last year. We don’t know about the religion of any of those murderers, but if someone is Muslim, [people think] it’s gotta be a terrorist.” This is more intellectual dishonesty. The reason we don’t know the religion of other workplace murderers is because religion reportedly wasn’t a factor in those incidents, the same way that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who did not commit his crime because the Bible told him to, cannot be considered a Christian terrorist.

Obeidallah  is also being disingenuous when he claims that Americans leap to bigoted conclusions about Muslims and terrorism. Our news media and government bend over backward to cover up Islam’s central responsibility in acts of homegrown Muslim terrorism, such as deeming the Fort Hood massacre to be workplace violence. But it’s vital for Obeidallah to push the narrative that we’re a nation of Islamophobes.

Harris-Perry went on to complain about the idea that being Muslim is “the relevant piece of information,” when in fact, as the investigation now stands, it is very relevant.

“That’s the biggest problem,” Farsad interjected. No, the biggest problem is that people like the ones on this panel insist on denying that the world has an Islam problem. She continued: “There should be a cultural paradigm shift in which it’s not okay to create that linkage immediately,” said. “We already know that it’s not okay to link all white men with school shootings.” Correct – because the connecting thread among such men tends to be mental illness, not a religious ideology that justifies school shootings. “We have gone on and on and on creating this language between Muslims and violence,” she continued, “and we need to have a counter-narrative, and we don’t. And that’s what we trying to do.”

“Muslims are funny,” Harris-Perry chimed in.

“That’s the new stereotype,” Farsad quipped. “Pass it around: Muslims are hilarious.”

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 10/1/14)