There is an American habit that's “curiouser and curiouser”
as it is, and that's also exploited to the hilt once in a while. Have you ever
heard someone say 'the whole world has gone mad'?
The Americans often use that expression when they mean to
communicate that a handful of people – not the whole world; not even all of America – have
gone mad. Well, you may call it an acceptable idiom of the kind you find in any
language, and you could be right. The trouble, however, is that these same
people never say 'the whole world has gone exceptional' to mean that a handful
of new immigrants accomplished something extraordinary. But that's beside the
point.
Where things start to get sticky is when professional
commentators use that American habit to promote a point of view that has no
merit. What they do is take something that concerns a single individual and
make it sound like it is shared by the whole world. At other times, they do the
opposite in that they take something common to a multitude of people, and make
it sound like it only concerns a single individual.
You'll find an example of such use of the American habit in
an article that came under the title: “Bill Maher makes us dumb,” written by
Steven A. Cook and Michael Brooks, and published on March 26, 2017 in Salon
Magazine. The article also has a double-entry subtitle. One goes like this:
“How ignorance, fear and stupid pop-culture clichés shape Americans' view of
the Middle East .” The other goes like this:
“Americans used to be just ignorant about Muslims and the Middle
East . Now we're also fearful, stupid and wrong”.
Those who are old enough to have been around during the
Watergate era may remember that this American habit and its opposite were
played out simultaneously. It is that the commentators of that time blamed the
degeneration of the political system on a single individual: President Richard
Milhous Nixon. And they blamed the street crimes that were committed by
individuals on the entire society.
Fast forward forty years, and you catch Steven Cook and
Michael Brooks do two contradictory things at the same time. As can be seen in
the title and the two subtitles, they blame the wrong attitude that some
Americans display towards the Muslims on Bill Maher alone. And in the same
breath, they blame that same wrong attitude on the entire American society. Go
figure.
But really, why do they do this? Well, let's say they do it
because they don't want to blame what's unfolding among some Americans on the
real culprits who are Fox News and the mob of Jewish pundits. These are not a
single individual; and they are not the entire American society. Call them what
you want, but many would agree they are a part of the Jewish Hate and
Incitement Machine (JHAIM).
Long before the fall of the Soviet
Union , JHAIM was scheming to engineer a falling out between the
Muslims – especially what they used to call the Arab core – and the West. It
was not easy for them to score because the object of Western hatred was the
Communist villain. But when that villain fell, the Jews moved quickly to
replace it with the Muslims and the Arabs … and that's when they scored a
success.
I was one of the first to feel the effect of their
machinations in this regard. While a few of them knew I was Christian, others
did not. They told me what I must do to be rewarded with successes beyond my
wildest dream. To make a long story short, believing that I was Muslim, they
wanted to make me what they later made of Salman Rushdie. I deemed this idea to
be so repugnant, I rejected it instantly and never relented despite their
continued pressure on me.
Decades later, I think of that offer to have been such a
horrible thing; if I had to choose between two forms of punishment, I would
choose to spend an entire day watching video of animals crapping one after the
other, than spend one minute watching Fox News showing Muslims denigrate Islam,
African Americans denigrate Africans or Asian Americans denigrate Asians. This
is what the folks at Fox News do for a living. To my mind, if cowardice can be
so intense as to become a crime, the mangled creatures at Fox News are showing
us what that crime would look like.