A chill wind

Dan Sernoffsky

A couple of years ago, an actor by the name of Tim Robbins delivered a speech at the National Press Club.

Probably best known for his role as pitcher “Nuke” LaLoosh (a guy with a million-dollar arm and a 10-cent brain, as the character was described by another character) in the movie “Bull Durham,” Robbins was among the Hollywood elites who have been virulently opposed to U.S. military action in Iraq, and, for the most part, in the war on terror. Because he had been “uninvited” to ceremonies at baseball’s Hall of Fame for his anti-war opinions, he voiced considerable concern about what he felt was a censorship of voices opposed to the policies of President Bush.

“A chill wind is blowing in this nation,” he said.
As it turns out, Robbins was right in his assessment. He was just putting the blame in the wrong place.

The real censorship is taking place in what has familiarly become known as the mainstream media, the major newspapers and television networks in the United States.
Although they weren’t much of an issue when they first appeared, a series of cartoons commissioned and printed in a Danish newspaper have raised particular ire in certain parts of the world. The cartoons were of Muhammad, one of which depicted him wearing a turban which was really a bomb, another that showed him apparently in heaven telling some suicide bombers, “Stop, we’re running out of virgins.”
Abetted by factions in both Iran and Syria, those cartoons have sparked some widespread rioting, and while any number of European newspapers have reprinted those cartoons, the American media, for the most part, has not, ostensibly to avoid “insulting Muslims.”

This from a group of people who see nothing wrong with insulting Christians by proclaiming Andrew Serrano a cutting-edge artist for immersing a crucifix in a jar of his urine and calling it art, or by funding a museum exhibit of a photograph of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung; a group of people that see nothing wrong with reprising the famous Butterfly McQueen role from “Gone With The Wind” racistly showing Secretary of State designate Condoleezza Rice saying “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout aluminum tubes,” the reference being to Iraq’s weapons program.

Somehow, lost in the concern about “insulting Muslims,” whether through the re-publication of the Danish cartoons, whether by raising questions about the mishandling of the Koran in providing it for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, whether by failing use political cartoons to lampoon Islam with the same gusto it uses to lampoon President George W. Bush and his administration, is one simple fact.

America’s enemy, indeed, the enemy of freedom and liberty throughout the world, are the Islamo-fascists who are resorting to terrorism to achieve their aims, whether by flying hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or by staging riots and threatening any who oppose them.

Where is there any criticism of the Islamic media that regularly depicts Jews in the same manner as the German media did in the 1930s? Where is there any criticism of the Islamic leaders who issued fatwas against the Danes who drew the cartoons and against the newspapers that published them? Where is there any criticism of the Islamists who demand that their law supersede the law of the country in which they reside, particularly when they reside in the West?

In Islam, there exists the concept of Dhimmi, which is, basically, a willingness to allow nonbelievers (in Islam) to exist under Islamic governance but only by accepting second-class status and paying tribute for that right. By following the politically correct expediency of respecting diversity and multiculturalism, the American mainstream media has admitted that it will accept Dhimmi. And so has much of the American left.

There is a chill wind blowing, and it is blowing from Islam. To criticize the enemies of Islamo-fascism is acceptable. To criticize Islamo-fascism is not. All too soon, the question will not be “why are there no synagogues and churches in the Islamic Middle East,” but rather, “why do they still exist in the West?”

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Dan Sernoffsky is an award-winning sportswriter and political columnist for The Lebanon Daily News in Lebanon, Pa. A career journalist, he is a graduate of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Ks., and attended graduate school at Central Michigan University. The father of four grown children, he and his wife reside in Lebanon.

dsernoffsky@yahoo.com