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)
