In a post-9/11 dispatch ever so slightly sensationally titled “World War III,” New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman launched what would become a career-long tradition of lambasting the Muslim world for a perceived failure to adequately condemn terrorism:
“Surely Islam, a grand religion that never perpetrated the sort of Holocaust against the Jews in its midst that Europe did, is being distorted when it is treated as a guidebook for suicide bombing. How is it that not a single Muslim leader will say that?”
Never mind that the 9/11 attacks were condemned as “barbaric and criminal” by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, representing 57 countries, and that even George W Bush acknowledged that “the terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics.”
In ensuing years, Friedman’s Muslim lectures became progressively more apocalyptic in nature, as he discovered that “a death cult has taken root in the bosom” of Islam and that “this cancer is erasing basic norms of civilisation.” The first bit of evidence presented in support of the alleged erasure was that, “[i]n Iraq, we’ve seen suicide bombers blow up funerals and schools.”
Apparently, civilisational norms remain intact when the United States and its Israeli adjunct blow up the same events. Nor are all Americans and/or all Christians ever required to collectively denounce it when, for example, the US president goes on bloody rampages abroad underimagined instructions from god. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.