Americans 'Just' Ignorant

I found this excellent article written by Warner Todd Huston which is well worth reading.

Reuters: Americans Just ‘Ignorant’ About Muslims


By Warner Todd Huston

Did you know that Americans don’t want to "live next door to a Muslim", or that Americans want all Muslims to "carry special identification", or that it is but "Ignorance" that is seen as a "Key Problem" to these foolish American’s "hatred" and misperceptions?

Reuters knew, if you didn’t. And they are happy to let us all know about it, too.

It all stems from a Radio host misusing his audience to make a point that Americans are no different than the Germans who turned a blind eye to Hitler’s “Final Solution” against Jews during WWII.

A DC radio host announced that he thought that Muslims should be forced to have a crescent moon tattooed on them to readily identify them akin to the way Nazi Germany forced Jews to wear the yellow “Juden” star.

He then took phone calls — no doubt specially screened just to “prove” his point — to find, lo and behold, everyone in his audience were racists who wanted Muslims marked in such a way.

Naturally, he was not seriously proposing to do what he presented and it was all a hoax to prove that America was filled with Muslim haters. “I can’t believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said”, he went on to scold his listeners.

“Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen … We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous.”

Neat little package he created there, eh?

But, Reuters didn’t stop with just this story to “prove” that we are all Nazi-like, Muslim haters. They had “studies” and CAIR interviews, too.

Those in agreement are not a fringe minority: A Gallup poll this summer of more than 1,000 Americans showed that 39 percent were in favor of requiring Muslims in the United States, including American citizens, to carry special identification.

Roughly a quarter of those polled said they would not want to live next door to a Muslim and a third thought that Muslims in the United States sympathized with al Qaeda, the extremist group behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

And who carried out that poll? Why the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) did, naturally.

CAIR claims to have “found that for one in three Americans, the word Islam triggers negative connotations such as “war,” “hatred” and “terrorist.” The war in Iraq has contributed to such perceptions.”

I wonder what the words “9/11″ and “Suicide Bomber” triggers? I wonder why THOSE weren’t included in the “study”? Is it because such words afford Americans a REASON to suspect Muslims? You know, the same Muslims responsible for such acts of terror?

But, I guess we wouldn’t want to add that to the story. After all, it would tend to mitigate our obvious Goose Stepping tendency! So, we have a radio host who created a premise to get a predetermined end, and a CAIR “poll” to do the same, and we call that proof that we are all just Nazis in bluejeans?

Wunderbar!

Next Rueters brings up the self-manufactured “Clerics removal from a place” story to further prove we are all intolerant and helpfully informs us that the only reason we might be so evil as Americans is because “Ignorance Seen as Key Problem”.

So, if we are all Goose-stepping, Nazi-like, Muslim haters, there MUST be an awful lot of Americans attacking and mistreating Muslims all across the nation, right? I mean, if there is so much hate around, we certainly couldn’t expect nothing to be happening because of all that racism… right?

Well, not so much.

There are no hard figures on how many Muslims have been subject to harassment or prejudice…

What? How can there be racism everywhere yet no racist actions taken against the target of that purported racism?

Seems rather hard to believe that racism is so prevalent if we can’t even see a statistical example of the result of racism.

Anyway, the most amusing part of this story is its ending. There we see a sigh of relief in the fact that Keith Ellison (D, MN) won election to a Minnesota House Seat. Ellison is the first Muslim elected to Congress whose victory could “signal to people who are not Muslims that Muslims have a lot to offer to the United States and the improvement of our country.”

And Rueters highlights that Ellison “did not stress his religion during his campaign for a Minnesota seat”. No wonder. He isn’t a real Muslim, but a member of the racist “Nation of Islam” run by the “Reverend” Louie Farrakhan, a group few Muslims anywhere would claim as an Islamic organization. It’s no wonder he ran away from that identification!

In any case, it is a good thing that Reuters is there to tell us how rotten we lowly Americans are and how innocent Muslims are.

What would we do without them?