Fitzgerald: The Times, in its shrinking dotage

"Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister, told a public television reporter that he found it 'irresponsible to broadcast this film.'

'That’s because Dutch companies, Dutch soldiers and Dutch residents could and will be in danger,' Mr. Verhagen said." -- from this Times article

But "Dutch companies, Dutch soldiers and Dutch residents" will always "be in danger" whenever there is an attempt to alert Dutch citizens, by such means as this 15-minute film, of the meaning, and menace, of Islamic Jihad. The threat will never go away. If the Dutch do not make or see such films, how will they know about Islam, since the government policy is simply to chloroform them, permanently, and never to mention what Islam is all about? How can the citizens of the Netherlands, which had 15,000 Muslims resident in 1970 and now has more than a million, decide to halt, and reverse (and there are a thousand ways to do this) Muslim immigration, to end all the subsidizing and all the coddling of Muslim immigrants, and all the turning of the other cheek to Muslim demands for this or that change in the social arrangements and understandings, in the legal and political institutions, in anything and everything at all, that they, those aggressive Muslims, believe is not to their liking, or contradicts the Shari'a, or constitutes an obstacle to the spread, and dominance, of Islam?

Those who are trying to censor Geert Wilders do not realize, out of fear of "what Muslims may do" to Dutch people, that this implies a permanent policy of preventing anything like Wilders' movie from being made and disseminated. It has no end. And having no end, it means that the Dutch will have been terrified into surrender, even now, when Muslims are about 6% of the population.

And the same will, or can happen, everywhere in Europe -- for Dutch surrender will not sate but whet Muslim demands elsewhere, and the belief of Muslims that their tactics of threatening retribution, anywhere in the world, against the nationals of whatever country that dares to permit something like the truth to be offered about Islam to be made, or once made, to be disseminated.

The Wilders case is no more about Geert Wilders alone than was that of John Peter Zenger in 18th century America, or any of the other celebrated cases, tried both in court and in the court of public opinion. It is no different from the case of Alfred Dreyfus, whom a military kangaroo-court sentenced in a travesty of injustice fueled by antisemitism to Devil's Island, or the case of that teacher, Mr. Scopes, whose discussion of evolution with his students jarred sentiments in Tennessee.

It is about the future of the Netherlands. It is about the future of the West.

This the New Duranty Times does not begin to ponder. But why should it? What responsibility does the Times have, to begin to make its readers understand the contents of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira? Why should the Times be expected to give little history lessons on the 1350 years of Muslim conquest? Why should one expect the Times to explain to us the views of Yousef Al-Qaradawi on, for example, the future Muslim conquest of Rome (see the MEMRI excerpt put up at JW yesterday)? Why should one expect the Times to offer real and not fleeting coverage of Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and all the other articulate and very brave apostates who surely stand out, who radiate intelligence and whose views deserve to be heard, at length?

Why should the Times bother to explain the precise legal and other disabilities which non-Muslims -- if they were lucky, if they were "People of the Book" and not Hindus and Buddhists and others -- were forced to endure as "dhimmis," and to relate that to the position of Christians today, in the Arab world -- what about more articles on those Copts? Why should the Times explain how non-Muslims have fared also in the larger Muslim world -- how do Christians fare in Pakistan? In Bangladesh? In Indonesia? In Iraq, now that the iron rule of their sometime protector Saddam Hussein has crumbled, and the Americans never understood what that meant for the Christians, and haven't a clue as to what to do next?

What about, not a merely occasional and fugitive coverage, but articles that in fact bring together reports from different countries, that explains, that makes sense, of how Muslims view non-Muslims?

What about a series of articles on the goals of Jihad -- the Jihad as widely understood by Muslims as the "struggle" to spread Islam, to remove all obstacles to that spread and dominance? Why not articles on demographic conquest by Muslims of Western Europe, as discussed openly by Muslims, at least since Boumedienne felt no hesitation in doing so, in 1974, quite openly at the U.N.?

Why not do this, and so much more? Or is the Times, in its shrinking dotage, incapable of seeing what it has a responsibility to do, and which responsibility is now being met by others, using other forms of communication? In its coverage of Islam, the Times is having circles run around it, not least by this website, and related websites.

Ask yourself, reader, this question: in the more than 2,000 days that have gone by since 9/11/2001, which means more than 2,000 different editions of The Times, during a period when there were about twenty thousand stories, each concerned with Islam, put up at this website (and another ten thousand were not put up, but could be found elsewhere), what have readers of the Times -- the ordinary, trusting reader, the one who "gets his news" from the Times -- learned about Islam? How much further along has that reader been helped out of his ignorance, by the Times?

And the same could be said for them all -- for the paper we call here the Bandar Beacon (the Washington Post), and all the others. They all seem to match, in their credulity and sentimentality about Islam, and confusion therefore about the meaning and menace of the threat and how to handle it, the confusion, credulity and sentimentality of the man and Administration they love to hate: George Bush, and the Bush Administration. They mirror each other, the popular press (and the Times is not very different, not very special) and the politicians who run around, supporting this (for all the wrong reasons) or opposing that (for all the wrong reasons).

One still waits for the army of the well-prepared, in the press, and in politics, to assume their rightful place. It hasn't happened yet.
Thanks Jihad Watch