05 October 2011

Danger Room's Incessant Drumbeat

Attackerman is at it again, decrying government officials' 'attacks' on Islam without any counterevidence of Islam's supposed moderation. I'm not going to sit here an denounce every Muslim as a suicide-vest-wearing Jihadi-martyr-in-waiting. In fact, the few Muslims I personally know are right nice folks. But that doesn't change the fact that there's a distinct lack of prominent voices of Muslim tolerance in the wider media and public sphere. Personally, I think it's because they don't exist, rather than Jihadi apologists just not looking hard enough for them. This lead to my comment over at Danger Room on the blog post linked above:

In the meantime, I'd love to see Danger Room give us an article on the relative prominence of Islamic groups that have publicly renounced terror as a tactic, routinely denounce religious-motivated attacks through media channels, and actively operate or support anti-Jihadist websites, media outlets, and/or public information campaigns. If the DoD, FBI, Justice Department, and everyone else is so wrong for equating everyday Muslims with tacit Jihadist supporters, then show us how wrong they are not by shaking your head and saying "tsk, tsk". Give us a consistent pattern of public statements or actions demonstrating outrage at terrorist actions and actively denouncing them as not representative of Islam.

For the sake of completeness with my comments over at Danger Room, the following was at the top of my comment:

"The course is known as FA30, an “Information Operations” course, which instructs mid-career Army officers how to get the military’s message out."

Actually, FA30 is a career field. "FA" is for "Functional Area" and "30" is the numeric code for the IO guys, just "57" is the numeric code for the modeling/sims guys. There's no *one* course, but rather a curriculum that includes several different courses as a part of the mid-career education of officers at FLKS.


Edit: as of early this morning, my comments had about 10 "likes" on the DR post, and it'd only been up an hour or so.

By: Brant

1 comment:

Guardian said...

Just to play Devil's advocate, do the "good Muslims" get much press?

Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and the like are (hopefully) not representative of many rank-and-file American Christians. Similarly, do "bad Muslims" like al-Awalki get all the media coverage?

Somewhere on the outskirts of Jakarta or Riyadh there is probably a nice, soft-spoken iman who emphasizes zakat (giving alms to the poor, one of the Five Pillars of Islam) in his preachings. But he doesn't get the press that a fire-brand in Sana or Peshwar preaching violent jihad gets.

(Mark this one down on your calendar's boys and girls: I'm actually defending religious people!)

-- Guardian