Pretext, Not Context

Hollywood is alive and well—in the Middle East and the United States. What else could explain the fantasy-world interpretation of the recent disaster in Libya and Cairo by the White House and his administration? Those who have been duped by this flagrantly false narrative, that these recent attacks were perpetrated by “spontaneous” demonstrators outraged by a film’s negative portrayal of Islam would do well to listen to the words of Libyan President Mohammed el-Megari: “The idea that this criminal and cowardly act was a spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous,” said el-Megari, adding “We firmly believe that this was a pre-calculated, pre-planned attack that was carried out specifically to attack the U.S. Consulate."

The problem with this reactive reasoning from our President and his sycophantic supplicants (beyond the fact that they are hell-bent on doing damage control for President Obama while savaging Mitt Romeny) is that the public is now confusing two very different words: context and pretext. The ersatz media would have you believe that the poor Muslim radicals, along with their ordinary, Middle-Eastern equivalents of Joe Six Pack, inflamed by a “hateful” film (read parody in poor taste), had no choice but to attack our embassies and slaughter innocent Americans. The film was simply so overwhelmingly insulting, so revoltingly contemptuous, and so unassailably insensitive that all manner of reason and sense of ethics was banished forthwith, and the primordial Id given license to create carnage and suffering.

Here is context offered by the Moslem world and promulgated by the likes of Susan Rice and left-leaning media talking heads: Best not insult Islam, or defame the prophet Mohammed, lest we slaughter your diplomats. Be careful about political cartoons that depict Moslem extremism in an unflattering light, or you will die at the hands of jihadist. Do not write literature that describes Islam in a pejorative manner or there will be a life-long fatwa with the penalty of death on your head. Insult their sensibilities in any perceived manner, and Allah will use them as a blunt and unyielding weapon of destruction.

But this is really just a pretext, because Moslem extremists, like ALL extremists, live in a perpetual state of moral indignation and outrage. They inhabit the periphery of reality, utterly and intentionally disconnected from reason, insufferably wrapped in self-righteousness, suffused in the accelerant of a narrow and perverse ideology. Thus their world is tinderbox, just waiting for the tiniest of sparks to justify conflagration.  Oddly enough, it was the moderate Muslims of Libya who recently took to the streets to demonstrate their outrage with the radicals who perpetrated their heinous acts on our embassy. And while their actions may have been inappropriate, at least hey did not become apologists.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what we do or don't do, what we say, or how we say it, only that they have the opportunity and the convenient excuse to seize the moment to foment terror, and then fall back upon a twisted fairy tale that we are merely witnessing the natural reaction to our unbelievable temerity to question the validity or ethical reasonableness of an ideology based on conformity, oppression, and violence in the name of God.

So this is where we are today. We not only condone the creation of Piss Christ, but bankroll the "artist" with taxpayer funds via the National Endowment of the Arts. Then we tell American citizens who object to having their hard-earned dollars prop up anti-Christian trash that they cannot trample upon the free speech of the artist.  When the artwork (not the artist) was attacked and destroyed by protestors, the gallery director, Eric Mézil, said it would reopen with the destroyed works on dispaly "so people can see what barbarians can do".  It is worth mentioning that the aforementioned objet d'art was afforded protection behind thick plexiglass and extra guards, security conspicuously absent on September 11, 2012 in our embassies.

In contrast, when confronted with the moral inconsistencies and excesses of acts of murder and violence, we don't recoil in terror and threaten strong retaliatory measures, but rather backpedal, fabricate context, and obsequiously and profusely apologize. As White House Press Secretary Jay Carney stated, it was “a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting." That’s right Mr. Carney, the film was reprehensible, but the acts of murder and destruction, they were, well understandable. After all, parody of religion has always been punishable by death…oh that’s in countries run by radical Moslem jihadists. Not America. Not yet, anyway.

Our French counterparts are also floating in the pick juice of political correctness. As Dalil Boubakeur, first president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith once intoned, “Words have a price, one can kill with a word. Freedom of expression stops at the point at which it does damage and the Muslim community feels insulted.”

Moreover, regional responses to the embassy massacres should stand as proof of the rhetorical and political aims endemic in radicalized Moslem organizations. In “reaction” to the video in question, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the militant group Hezbollah, called for an international ban on insulting Islam, stating: "Since you officially represent the governments and states of the Muslim world you should impose on the United States, Europe and the whole world that our prophet, our Quran and our holy places and honor of our Prophet be respected." In Saudi Arabia, the Human Rights Commission of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has 57 members, has requested "an international code of conduct for media and social media to disallow the dissemination of incitement material". Such inflammatory rhetoric flies in the face of the separation of church and state, something liberals regularly remind us should a public high school have a prayer during a graduation ceremony. 

These attitudes and behaviors are, ironically, most problematic for the peace-loving, progressively-oriented Moslems, whose voices have been silenced or removed by their oppressors, or marginalized by our own media, which is complicit in the stratagem of discounting their concerns in the name of political correctness. These people also live in very real fear from truly xenophobic extremist groups, such as neo-Nazis, as well as misguided, stupid, or just evil individuals who cannot seem to accept people who don’t have the same skin color or faith. And so they must straddle evil from both sides, a difficult, if not impossible job.

In the end analysis, we can no longer bury our proverbial collective hands in the sand. We must start dealing realistically with these kinds of acts and the ideology that fuels them. We must quit hiding behind political correctness, or we will find ourselves ensnared in an ideology that will continue to undermine not only the values of many peace-loving Moslems, but Western society in general. As the Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed once threatened: “We will use your democracy to destroy your democracy.”