Freedom of religion is a sacred value in the USA, and that's why when many of my rightist friends point at it I still have the reflex reaction of asking: " Can we really police a belief?" . Well that's essentially what the "intersecitonality" crowd are campaigning for. Rather than address the real social and theological issues that occur surrounding the religion of Islam, they prefer to make hay of its more provocative critics by calling it something else (i.e. a race or ethnicity) and attributing to critics a phobia. This was done in the past to people who have religious or taste objections to homosexuality (homo-phobia) and transgenderism, both of which are phenomena explicitly rejected by . . . Islam. Indeed, this use of protection of certain classes of society from criticism has not reduced tension, but rather caused the rise of newer fears like "Politicophobia".
So on that note, how does a supposedly ethical journalistic enterprise like the Huffington Post address these fears? Do they invite their readership to have a forum discussing the theology, practices, and beliefs of Islam and how they cause friction with the western world? Do they take any other type of action to promote a productive forum for a topic that they know as well as anyone is troubling much of the world on a daily basis?
Of course not, HuffPo does not deal with actual news, it attempts to police those that report the news that doesn't suit them. Luke O'Brien, a "Senior Reporter" felt it was important enough for the public to know the identify of a person he calls "Trump's loudest anti-Muslim Twitter Troll". In that article he goes after @AmyMek, a suburban housewife with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. O'Brien, who himself has a Twitter following of less than 5 thousand was likely acting out of journalistic jealousy as he analyzed the lady's past down to her high school track team record. The piece even went into the "diversity" of her school, which was estimated by a "former classmate" to be less than 1% Muslim.
Other episodes that O'Brien brought up that are completely peripheral to anything going on here:
- He started out with this statement: "She was supposed to be a Russian bot. That seemed like the best explanation for @AmyMek. No normal person could be so prolific and prejudiced". What prejudice has to do with Russia is anyone's guess.
- The fact that she and her husband Salvatore Siino had raised money for the criminal defense fund of a former neighbour and friend convicted of murder. I wonder how indignant O'Brien was of the Women's March featuring of proud convicted murderer Donna Hylton last year? No, in fact film industry trade mag Shadow and Act featured a glowing review of an upcoming biopic of Hylton with the beautiful Rosario Dawson playing the lead. And for that matter, why do they not give the same treatment to Kris Jenner, the widow of attorney Robert Kardashian who led the same effort to defend OJ Simpson? Jenner had personal communications with Simpson right after the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her boyfriend Ronald Goldman? The reason of course is that these people have connections to political power, and at the same time are politically aligned with HuffPo.
- They claimed that they could not find evidence of Mekelburg holding a full time job anywhere. What did they use, her W-2s and tax returns? Where would they have gotten them?
- O'Brien called AmyMek an Islamophobic Jew, and claimed that she scrubbed her account of references to her heritage while cooperating with neo-Nazis, but in reality since I've been following her she has been tweeting out numerous Jewish themed topics and showing one where a Muslim threatened her to put "a bomb inside of ur pussy".
In a certain way, O'Brien's "reporting" mirrors the type of behaviour characteristic of Linda Sarsour, Anita Sarkeesian and other so-called progressive activists. In order to promote their own "anti-hate speech" message, these faux activists will either whip up their own crowd of online bullies against a person, or ignore the harassment that they face. This is not to justify every statement or share that @AmyMek has made; but to demonstrate that those who condemn bad behaviour while engaging in it are the real threat - the authoritarian control freaks.
To illustrate how perverted this thinking is, we must remember past episodes of doxxing figures that are "bigoted":
- Just over a week ago, internet activists ruined the life of Manhattan attorney Aaron Schlossberg for his anti-immigrant post. Meanwhile comedian and liberal icon Chelsea Handler claims incorrectly that First Lady Melania Trump can "barely speak English".
*The Charlie Hebdo shooting happened due to Islamic radicals' inability to civilly object to a blasphemous cartoon that depicted the Prophet Muhammad. - In response they murdered a group of journalists. What has been the response of the press? They have grown more timid and self-conscious about criticizing Islam. In the linked article a female student uses a couple episodes where she was criticized for wearing the hijab and refusing to do a required electrode experiment for a psychology class as well as for wearing a full body covering while playing club soccer as episodes of "Islamophobia". The reality is that in many of the countries that are Muslim dominated the very acts of going to school and playing soccer would be considered immodest and possibly heretical. She mentioned that there were men watching at her soccer game and according to Ummah Sports this is haram (forbidden).
The most important episode of Islamic intimidation of free thought occurred independently of the War on Terror, the Persian Gulf War, and many of the other events that could be construed legitimately as actions in which the USA and the West intervened in Muslim majority nations: the fatwa of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for the murder of British Indian author Salman Rushdie over his blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses. This book hypothesized that some of the verses that by tradition were alleged to have been inserted into the Qur'an by the Dajjal (Satan) were never removed as asserted under the early Muslim historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari. At the time British journalist Christopher Hitchens, a left-wing atheist, asserted correctly that Khomeini's fatwa was a much bigger issue and in effect was a direct attack on freedom of expression worldwide. Rushdie is a Muslim-born atheist himself, so how could his offense be blamed on "cultural insensitivity" or lack of diversity as in the case of @AmyMek. Yet in 2012, before she even issued her first "Islamophobic" tweet, the British Socialist Review wrotea diatribe claiming that it was Rushdie's novel, not the open call to violence by Khomeini, that had unleashed the torrent of book burnings in Bradford almost two decades earlier. The reality is that we never see book burnings of such a magnitude among Christian evangelicals or Buddhists of Hitchens' New Atheist milestone book G-d is not Great. I wrote the name of that book as I did, because I myself disagree profoundly with atheism, but am willing to live in a world where it is an option for people to believe in it in the absence of evidence that compels them.
Harassment for thee but not for me.
O'Brien's attitude on the other hand is not to actually discuss what exactly Islam is, and where all of the friction and conflict is coming from in relation to it, but rather to stifle any conversation, good or bad about it. To do it, he is willing to scour the depths of exploring a Twitter user's personal life and friends' gossip in order to both silence her and possibly expose her to a direct physical threat. Pamela Geller, a fellow anti-Islamic critic and herself a Jewish woman, has received several direct physical threats and attempts at violence including a beheading plot as well as a failed attempt to shoot up a Prophet Muhammad drawing contest that she was holding in Texas on May 3, 2015. At the time of that incident, neither Huffington Post nor any other publication in its ideological orbit stepped forth to condemn the attempted murder of satirical cartoonists by two crazed gunmen. Sickeningly, HuffPo decided to feature a piece by Michael Keegan, an operative of the Super PAC People for the American Way that backhandedly claimed that it was glad Geller has the right to speak her mind in the United States before they proceeded to assassinate her character. Keegan had once called Geller's activities the "New McCarthyism" but did he apologize when in fact she was vindicated by a terror plot against her? No, he claimed that she's "not a hero, but. . ."
. . . But what? These are people who consider speech violence while excusing violence against speech. Huffington Post is no longer a media publication but a muzzle that is applied to activists that, regardless of their flaws, have the right live their lives in safety just like Muslims that think Islamophobia is criticizing their soccer outfit. Should @AmyMek need personal protection from new death threats I doubt Keegan or O'Brien would be willing to take the mea culpa and chip in to the costs.
Coincidentally, neither O'Brien nor anyone else have ever expressed skepticism of McCarthyism stoked by their own former colleague Ryan Grim.
Curated for #informationwar (by @TruthForce)
Relevance: Informationwar Organization
