Thomas Friedman on The Narrative
My opinion of TF as one of the great writers holds. He penned an OpEd in the NYT that uses Fort Hood to assail (rightly) the Muslim Mein Kampf named “The Narrative”.
The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.
In other words, it’s weakly written tripe for the weak-minded.
Broad brush? Perhaps. The Jihadi makes up a statistically small portion of Muslim society, yet the Jihadi cheerleader, love the imagery, is vastly numerous.
The Jihadis mask the fact the Muslims are killing themselves off heinous numbers; we get blamed, and it sticks with the Islamic hive, packed with drones of multitudinous nationalities. This myth is perpetrated and perpetuated by Muslim governments. Like the German Jews, America is too easy a target to resist.
Lastly, this:
“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”
Bravo. The Islamic world had a chance at their version of an Enlightment in the early 1970s. Then Sadat was assasinated, the Ayatollah led a revolution in Iran, and a Fatwah was issued against Rushdie. (Yes, I’m missing some incidents but these are good bookends.) Since that decade, we’ve not seen an inkling of any sort of bubbling up of a secular movement in the Islamic world. No Magna Carta, Martin Luther, Galileo, or an other sort of thinker to challenge the Mosque’s stranglehood on all Life in the Muslim world.