London bombings lead to explosion of anti-Muslim bigotry

There are two good things about being a zionist media shill. The first is that you don’t need much of a brain or sense of responsibility.

Anytime the word “Muslim” is mentioned in connection with an act of violence, you just have to recycle standard libels against Islam; chant the mantra of fighting “the war on terrorism”; make unsubstantiated, disparaging assertions about “Islamic terrorism”; and ratchet up the paranoia that makes civil repression possible.

The second is that your screed is virtually guaranteed to be published–”no matter how absurd, ignorant or malicious. Facts? Analysis? Don’t need them. The job of the shill is to accuse, not explain; denigrate, not criticize; obfuscate, not elucidate.

On July 15, Vancouver Sun editorial writer Harvey Enchin penned a nasty little opus entitled, “A religion of peace vs. apologists for terrorism.” After engaging in a gratuitous, and possibly libelous, attack on Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Enchin proceeded to lecture “moderate Muslims” on the need to denounce “Islamic terrorism,” whatever the hell that is. The term is meaningless, because terrorism is not part of Islam.

After droning on in this vein for a few paragraphs, Enchin offered up this precious morsel of imbecility: “What is obvious is that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Iraq…nor has it anything to do with the Palestinians…No, the terrorists despise the West because it is there, because its principles of religious freedom and democracy are anathema to them.”

I have read my share of zionist claptrap in the Globe and Mail from the likes of Marcus Gee, Peggy Wente, and Norman Spector, but Enchin betrayed such an insularity of mind and obliviousness to recent history that I just had to call.

I first asked why he asserted that events in Iraq and Palestine had nothing to do with the bombings. He answered: “Because we’ve seen it before–”on Sept. 11.” By this statement, Enchin admits that he had nothing, however minimal, to say about the London bombings themselves. His rant was based on guilt by association.

Not only did Enchin betray inexcusable laziness, but showed himself to be oblivious to the fact that his analogy had long been debunked. I informed him that the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attack concluded that U.S. support for Israel was a major factor.

Furthermore, a month before the bombings, British security and intelligence officials warned that events in Iraq were continuing to act as “motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the U.K.”*

None of this made any impression on him.

I then suggested to Enchin that if he expected moderate Muslims to condemn acts of “Islamic terrorism,” shouldn’t he also expect moderate Jews to condemn acts of “Jewish terrorism.”

In fact, Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians fits the definition of genocide according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to say nothing of violating the Fourth Geneva Convention‘s laws concerning protection of occupied civilians.

Enchin’s response was typical: “There is no equivalence between Islamic terrorism and Israeli self-defence. The Israeli military does not deliberately target children.”

The idea that an oppressive military occupier could claim self-defence is perverse in the extreme. In one sense. Enchin is right to deny an equivalence: terror committed by Muslims is sporadic; Jewish terrorism is virulent, and has been ever since Zionist forces began the mass dispossession of Arabs in late 1947.

Regarding the Israeli military’s attitude toward Palestinians, I told him of the following account by Chris McGreal of The Guardian:

“It was the shooting of Asma Mughayar that swept away any lingering doubts I had about how it is the Israeli army kills so many Palestinian children and civilians. Asma, 16, and her younger brother, Ahmad, were collecting laundry from the roof of their home in the south of the Gaza Strip in May last year when they were felled by an Israeli army sniper. Neither child was armed or threatening the soldier, who fired unseen through a hole punched in the wall of a neighbouring block of flats.”– 

I asked Enchin if he would at least condemn the sniping of Palestinian children. He wouldn’t. Ultimately, he gave up: “You have your history and I have my history, and never the twain shall meet.”

Here we see how a shill insulates himself from having to face awkward questions. He asserts a false equivalence between real history and his manufactured reality, thereby reducing a discussion of empirical historical facts to a comparison of “opinions.”

Since Enchin had nothing useful to say about the London bombings, and no intelligent comments to make about Muslims or Islam, he must have had another reason for writing such a sloppy attack piece.

I suspect the answer lies in the second column, where he pulls a non sequitur argument out of nowhere and uses it to launch into a tirade: “The widespread delusion that the West, under the influence of Jews, is somehow responsible for the Islamic world’s decline and decay is reinforced daily in the news media, music videos, television programs and school textbooks throughout the Arab world and other Muslim countries.”

Ah, yes. It’s all about the Jews. Can’t have Muslims presenting points of view that make Israel look bad, now can we? Fact is, Jews and Jewish pressure groups in the U.S. were more than a little bit responsible for the ruinous, premeditated attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the world knows it.

The criminality of Israel is beyond debate, which is why I suppose that Enchin, Gee, Wente and the whole media zionist choir take any opportunity to regurgitate their diatribes, no matter how inept or ridiculous.

Notes:

* Richard Norton-Taylor, Vikram Dodd, and Hugh Muir, “Ministers warned of Iraq link to U.K. terror,” The Guardian, July 20, 2005.

–  Chris McGreal, “Israeli Army snipers continue killing children with impunity,” The Guardian, June 29, 2005.