Islam According to Oprah
Is Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security?
By Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post
October 8, 2001 11:45 a.m.
s Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security? No, but now that
the war has begun, I worry about her, and here's why.
The nation cannot afford the naive illusions that have given many
Americans comfort in peacetime. Chief among them is the notion,
repeated ad nauseam by our leaders and the media, that Islam is a
religion of peace. This may not be an outright lie, but it is so far
from the full truth as to approach falsehood.
Americans have been told that they shouldn't attack the Muslims
among us, and only the lowest of the low would disagree. The
American people, with very few exceptions, have risen to the
challenge to be humane, decent, and loving toward Muslims in
this country. Well and good.
Americans by nature want to think the best of those from other
cultures. But we run the risk of blinding ourselves to the nature of
the threat facing our country and our civilization. In his 1996 book
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington warned us of deluding ourselves
about the true nature of the Islamic threat.
"Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued
that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with
violent Islamist extremists," Huntington wrote. "Fourteen hundred
years of history demonstrate otherwise."
We can sit around making diversity quilts and thinking happy
thoughts, or we can, with charity, commit ourselves to soberly
assessing the historical and present-day reality of "peaceful"
Islam, and its relations with non-Muslims.
Which brings us to Oprah. Last Friday, she devoted her program
to "Islam 101," purportedly a crash course in the Mohammedan
faith for her vast television audience of clueless Americans. It was
grossly imbalanced and extremely dishonest. In fact, given how
many Christians and other non-Muslims are horrifically
persecuted today by Muslims in the name of Islam, it amounted to
offensive propaganda.
Oprah called Islam "the most misunderstood of the three major
religions" ” yet did her best to add to the confusion by candy-
coating the complicated truth about the Muslim faith. If you were
to take Oprah's show as your guide to Islam, you would think
Muslims were basically Episcopalians in veils and turbans.
Take her interview with Queen Rania of Jordan, a lovely, modern
young woman who looks more at home in the pages of Vogue
than in a hijab. The queen said that Islam "doesn't impose
anything" on people ” an absurd lie. Oprah asked her about the
so-called "honor killings" of women in Jordan, murders
committed by men against women in their families who are
believed to have shamed the clan. For example, some young
women who have been raped are in turn murdered by their male
relatives for having stained the family's honor.
Progressive forces, supported by the palace and Jordan's Islamic
religious establishment, tried to outlaw these killings in 1999, but
were thwarted by the conservative Islamist party in Parliament.
Queen Rania, reflecting establishment opinion, told Oprah that
honor killings were a "cultural" phenomenon.
If that's true, then why have pre-Islamic Arabic tribal customs
been taken up and spread throughout the Muslim world?
Moreover, many Islamic religious leaders endorse them, or lesser
violent punishment of women for the same dubious offenses.
Anyway, if one grants, for the sake of argument, the queen's
contention that the Koran doesn't endorse honor killings, so what?
Clearly very many Muslims believe honor killings are Islamic
doctrine, and act on those beliefs ” and we must be aware of
that, and let that reality inform our judgment. If one were a Jew in
Torquemada's Spain, it would be useless to be told that the
Inquisition was a betrayal of Christianity. Theological disputes
would be ancillary to the question of survival: what would matter
would be how the local Christians interpreted their faith.
Queen Rania's dismissal of Muslim behavior that brings discredit
upon Islam as un-Islamic brings to mind the bankrupt apologies
leftists made during the Cold War for Communism. When the
wickedness of the Soviets, or other Communist forces, could not
be denied, it was claimed that these people did not represent
"true" Communism. They may have actually believed that, but
those who would be victims of real Communists, not theoretical
Communists, didn't have that luxury.
Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States,
turned up to say that "There is nothing in Islam that does not
accord women equal rights." Oprah did not ask her to name one
Muslim society in which women enjoy equal rights in the Western
sense, because the ambassador would have had to remain silent.
Or perhaps not: she had no trouble lying when she asserted that it
was "absolutely untrue" that some people in her nation had taken
to the streets to celebrate the September 11 attack.
Other quotes, from the program (available at www.oprah.com):
” "Muslims do not think that there is a non-Islamic world out
there that we have to conquer. That is not the concept in Islam.
Our job is to get to know one another, and the more we do that the
better off we are."
” "The main thing we would like non-Muslims to know about
our religion is that we're not so different from them."
” "I would like to reassure the American public that Islam does
not preach violence."
” "Islam and Christianity and Judaism, and all the world's
religions share a common heritage. We come from the same root.
And our prophets and the characters in our holy books are the
same. In Islam, all the religions are permitted to exist in peace
with these others until Judgement Day."
That Oprah let these statements be broadcast unchallenged is
appalling, an absurd fantasy that ignores the enormous suffering
actual Muslims are inflicting on non-Muslim populations
worldwide. "Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam,
Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors,"
Harvard's Huntington wrote. "Muslims make up about one-fifth of
the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more
involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other
civilization. The evidence is overwhelming."
In Sudan, the Muslim government in Khartoum imposed Islamic
law nationwide in 1993, and has killed 2 million Sudanese
Christians and animists, and enslaved countless more, in an
attempt to Islamize the country. Coptic Christians in Egypt, whose
presence in that country predates the arrival of Islam, have been
slaughtered by fundamentalist Muslims, with authorities doing
little or nothing to stop them.
In the Philippines and East Timor, Christians are being massacred
by Muslims. Churches and Christian homes in Nigeria are being
burned, and Christians murdered, by Muslim extremists. Arab
Christians are oppressed by Muslims in the Holy Land, too. In
Nazareth, Muslims are building a mosque just steps from the
Basilica of the Annunciation, and make no secret of their intent to
provoke and intimidate Christians. An imam in Gaza earlier this
year broadcast a sermon over Palestinian Authority radio calling
on Muslims to murder Christians and Jews as their Islamic duty.
The ancient Christian presence in many Arab lands ” Syria,
Lebanon, Iraq, among others ” has been decimated in the last
century by Muslim persecution.
The list goes on and on. While it is true that there are relatively
peaceful Muslims who wish us no harm ” the Sufis of Turkey
come to mind, but there are others ” it is unarguable that very
many Muslims and their leaders despise non-Muslims, attack us
rhetorically in religious terms, and wish to see us die for our
infidelity to Allah. To these Muslims, many of whom are
Wahhabi (the Muslim sect that, according to Islam scholar
Stephen Schwartz, accounts for 80 percent of the imams in the
United States today), there are two worlds: that of Islam, and that
of war. No compromise is possible between them.
What can possibly be gained from ignoring this ugly reality?
Nothing ” and a great deal to be lost. As Andrew Sullivan notes
in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, our leaders' "laudable"
post-9/11 efforts to discourage seeing the conflict in religious
terms "doesn't hold up under inspection."
"The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its
meaning," Sullivan writes, adding that it would be "naive to
ignore in Islam a deep thread of intolerance toward unbelievers,
especially if those unbelievers are believed to be a threat to the
Islamic world."
It's naive to ignore it on a macro level, and it's naive to ignore it
on a micro level, too. We know that the Muslims who carried out
the 9/11 attacks lived for years peacefully among other
Americans. We also know that they couldn't have carried out their
operations without the support of others. Further, we know that
some mosques and Islamic institutions in this country have been
helpful to the jihadists. Believing that the threat to America comes
simply from foreign Islamic extremists may make Oprah viewers
feel better, but it's dangerous ” and it lets moderate, patriotic
American Muslims evade their responsibility to repudiate and root
out fundamentalists among them. In Sunday's New York Times, a
reporter wrote of interviews she had with Muslim American
students right here in my own Brooklyn neighborhood. One of the
male students said, on the record, that he would abandon the
United States and give his own life to back an "observant Muslim
who is fighting for an Islamic cause." Oprah honey, this is called
sedition, and if there is an Islamic fifth column in this country, the
American public needs to know about it.
American Muslims understandably feel pressured now to show
the non-Muslim majority that they are no threat, and well-
meaning dolts like Oprah are key to this effort. Watching Oprah's
"Islam 101" program, I thought of the Lebanese Catholics at my
church, who stopped me after a prayer service for the World
Trade Center dead to talk, on the record, about the anti-Arab
persecution they feared coming.
They all said they knew plenty of Muslims here in New York who
were peace-loving people, and that it would be wrong to think ill
of them. I asked these Arab Christians if these Muslims supported
terrorist organizations, monetarily or otherwise. Every one of
them said yes, sheepishly. After the interview was over, the group
asked me not to use their last names. They were afraid of being
physically attacked by Muslims in their neighborhoods ” this, for
standing up for America in print.
"That's amazing," I said to them. "You are all Christians living in
the United States of America, yet you are afraid to have your
names attached to patriotic statements, out of fear that your
Muslim neighbors, the same people you are defending to me, will
attack you. What does that say about the reality of Islam in
America?"
They did not answer me, because they had no answer. Think about
that next time you're told that Islam is a religion of peace. There's
more to the story than what Oprah is telling you.
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