New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com |
Ignorance is true culprit in riots Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 There is now a lot of blather about Newsweek's reporting erroneously that a Koran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay (this, of course, avoids the question of the difficulty of flushing a book down a toilet). President Bush has criticized the reporting and the press in general. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has lightly paddled the President for not taking off the gloves and telling it the way it should be told about the sorts of wild Muslims who killed 15 or 16 people during three days of rioting in Afghanistan. Some are now fretting about how bad it is for America that the Muslim world is seeing a picture of a fairly buffed-up, shirtless Saddam Hussein in his cell, which Muslims might interpret as an insult, making them sympathetic to him. People seem to think this is all about whether or not Americans are sufficiently respectful of Muslims, but I'm not sure that really matters. The question at this moment is how we will respond to hysteria. Perhaps - even though our government denies it - there is some interrogator with a knucklehead so dense he or she might have thrown a Koran in the toilet. After Abu Ghraib, anything is believable - and plenty of Muslims seem ready to believe. A new study by Manhattan-based Charney Research queried 14 focus groups in Egypt, Morocco and Indonesia, made up largely of college-educated men and women. Apparently, the Muslim attitude toward the United States is so hot that people accept anything they think proves our cruelty, our bigotry against Islam and our imperial intentions. Much of this, of course, is based in the perception of inordinate Jewish influence on our foreign policy. But the old idea of the Jewish mouse pulling the American bull around by a ring through its nose has been replaced by the belief that, instead of the actual 2%, the Jewish population in the United States is as high as 85%. So much for a college education. When it comes to international public opinion, we are often dealing with people who can seem as irrational as the rednecks in the South during the civil rights movement. In 2002, violence was sparked in Nigeria when a reporter suggested Muhammad would have approved of the Miss World beauty contest. Muslim mobs burned down a newspaper, rioted and attacked anyone on the street who "looked Christian." That same year saw rioting and mass murder in India. A train of Hindus was set afire by outraged Muslim men and a number were burned to death. Then the stuff really hit the fan, sending the death toll above 2,000. America's racial policies remained retarded for almost 100 years because Northern politicians sold out to hysterics. Our job is to create a reasonable discussion of our differences in perspective. But we have to face up to how hard that may be in countries where the educated elite believe that only 15% of us are not Jews. |