One good reason not to trust Fox News
FRANK MIELE/Daily Inter Lake | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 11 years, 11 months AGO
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and the same thing goes for Al Gore and Rupert Murdoch, right?
I wrote a column recently excoriating Al Gore for selling his Current TV cable channel to Al Jazeera, the Arabic news broadcast company based in Qatar. It isn’t just that Al Jazeera is Arabic, but rather that it is a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes.
Turns out that the new Al Jazeera America may not be the only problem, however. An interview with columnist Diana West on the website www.radicalislam.org has pointed to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News as another unlikely point of origin for Islamic propaganda in the United States.
Before we consider the particulars, let’s look at the larger picture.
Does American freedom of the press mean that our country is obligated to provide a forum for those who would destroy us? That is the central philosophical question on which hinges our cultural survival — for if we cannot ban anti-American propaganda within our own borders, then the Constitution is indeed a suicide pact, as a Supreme Court justice once famously assured us it wasn’t.
Yes, I know we are a diverse society, and we welcome all opinions, but nonetheless it is insane to allow foreign agents to promote anti-American viewpoints from within our very own shores. That’s why I wrote a column last month that blasted Gore for selling his company to Al Jazeera and its Muslim Brotherhood backers.
But this isn’t just a problem created by liberal Democrats. It is a social problem, and it reaches so deep that it avoids any partisan label. There was plenty of evidence of American subservience to Islamic sensitivities during the Bush administration. President Bush was famous for calling Islam a “religion of peace” at the same time when its clerics were calling for his head on a platter.
More recently, a perfect example is the failure of the Army to declare the attack at Fort Hood either a military attack or terrorism. Nope, just a plain old psycho who coincidentally happened to be a Muslim in communication with Islamic terror leader Anwar al-Awlaki.
And one more example: The U.S. military has responded to attacks on our soldiers by their Afghan trainees not by halting the training programs, but by implementing “Islamic sensitivity” sessions so that our GIs know why they annoy the Afghans so much.
Which brings us back to Fox News and Rupert Murdoch. I’d been vaguely aware that a minority shareholder in Fox News was Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, but the interview with Diana West showed just how much concern that should cause. Not only does bin Talal own 7 percent of Murdoch’s News Corp, but Murdoch also owns 19 percent of Rotana, which is bin Talal’s Arabic media group. These two are intimately involved in each other’s profit motives, and West makes a convincing case that Fox News has avoided controversial topics involving Islam ever since bin Talal made his first investment in News Corp in 2005.
Indeed, bin Talal bragged publicly that year about complaining to Murdoch that Fox News was characterizing street violence in Paris as “Muslim riots.” A short while later, Fox joined the rest of the mainstream media in referring to the “civil riots” in Paris without reference to the Islamic origin of the unrest.
It appears that Alwaleed’s investment in Fox News, as well as Al Jazeera’s purchase of Current TV, both represent the culmination of a plan which Alwaleed himself expressed in a 2002 interview with his own Arab News:
“Arab countries can influence U.S. decision making “if they unite through economic interests, not political... We have to be logical and understand that the U.S. administration is subject to U.S. public opinion. ... And to bring the decision-maker on your side, you not only have to be active in the U.S. Congress or the administration, but also inside U.S. society.”
That is an absolutely transparent confession of what is going on, and yet Congress, the news media and the American public just act as though it doesn’t matter. They apparently believe that the United States is invulnerable to any threat — foreign or domestic — and that we really ought to just welcome our Muslim brothers to our shore as part of the great American melting pot that is now so diluted that there is virtually nothing American left about it.
Ask yourself: How exactly does the United States benefit by having the propaganda arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and the worldwide Islamic revolution being welcomed into millions of homes across the country?
I guess there’s nothing like humanizing the face of jihad so that Mr. and Mrs America can start to feel better about submitting to sharia (Islamic law) and dhimmitude (subservience by non-Muslims to their Islamic betters). Not much chance we will be watching programming on the “Real Oppressed Wives of The Casbah” or “My Big Fat Obnoxious Terrorist.” Instead, it will be a steady stream of how reasonable, rational and peaceful everyone is in the Middle East when they are not throwing together a “spontaneous demonstration” outside the U.S. mission in Benghazi, sentencing rape victims to death for provoking men by not wearing a burka, or stoning Christians for... well... for being Christians.
Oh, wait, I remember now. As I have been informed by my liberal betters, there is no reason to fear Islam. It is just right-wing hate speech to point out the historical basis of that fear. It is bug-eyed McCarthyism to suggest that foreign elements might not have America’s best interests at heart (even though history has proven that McCarthy was right about the Soviet Union’s spy network operating throughout the U.S. government in the 1950s).
Muslims, we are told, are not our enemy until they do something to prove they are an enemy. But tell that to journalist Danny Pearl, who was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2001 by Islamic fundamentalists who later cut his head off. Tell it to Nick Berg, a Jewish American businessman who was executed in Iraq by the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2004. Tell it to Eugene Armstrong or Jack Hensley, American contractors who were also decapitated after being captured in Iraq in 2004. These are but the tiniest indicators of the nature of Islam, but like the arrow of a compass aiming infallibly toward the magnetic field at the North Pole, these murders point inexorably toward the gathering force that confronts Western civilization.
But, of course, we need to all try to get along — so the less said about those brutal murders the better. We don’t want to insult our Muslim brothers by making them feel unwelcome. Remember, our self-interest as a free society should always come second if there is the slightest chance that our honesty might offend someone from a more oppressive, less tolerant culture. Otherwise we are being selfish, and that is politically incorrect.
Which is why, I suppose, there is absolutely no way for our country to stop our enemies from taking over our media centers, our digital networks, our manufacturing facilities, probably even our military and our government eventually. We are just too darn polite to ever say anything about how much our institutions and traditions mean to us. We used to fight to the death to preserve our culture, but now we are way TOO cultured to presume that the American way of life is in any way better than any other.
Hey, maybe that anti-American propaganda is working! Just a thought.
ARTICLES BY FRANK MIELE/DAILY INTER LAKE
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