Move Along, Nothing to See Here

A Kuwaiti-born immigrant named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed four servicemen on Thursday at a recruiting center and another military site in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but don’t jump to any conclusions that it might have anything to with Islam. There’s always a chance it was caused by some Confederate battle flag emblazoned on a passing pick-up, or something that some Republican presidential candidate might have said about immigration, and in any case it couldn’t have had anything to do with what everyone knows is a religion of peace.

By now the ritual is all too familiar. Someone named Muhammad commits mass murder at a military installation or some other obviously symbolic target, has announced to his friends and the internet and anyone who will listen that everything he does is motivated by his understanding of Islam, millions of Muslims with a similar understanding of the faith “tweet” their congratulations or celebrate in the streets or otherwise express their approval of the slaughter, and polite opinion and the official pronouncements insist that it has nothing to do with Islam. By now the far more impolite average American’s instinctive opinion is that it must have something to with Islam, somehow or another, but the official record and the most massive of the mass-media will somehow veer around this increasingly inescapable conclusion.

This particular Muhammad died during his mass-murder spree, which will absolve the authorities of the unpleasant necessity of charging him with terrorism rather than the mere mass-murder charges that might be more conveniently brought against someone motivated by a Confederate battle flag or a Sarah Palin graphic or some other domestic provocation that doesn’t require apologetics, and although the investigation will likely be forced to concede that Islam did have something to do with it  somehow or another the carefully-worded report won’t require widespread news coverage. In the meantime the four Americans who were gunned down while serving their country in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will be easily forgotten as the four Americans who were gunned down while serving their country in Benghazi, Libya, and there will be stories about how America hasn’t suffered 9/11-style attack during the current administration, just the occasional pesky cases of “work place violence” at Fort Hood and shootings at a recruiting center in Arkansas and this one in Tennessee and cars being driven into pedestrians in a couple of towns and a beheading in Oklahoma and unspeakable carnage all across areas of Iraq that had once been pacified and almost civilized by American military might, and much celebration that the Iranian theocracy and its very bellicose understanding of Islam has promised the Great Satan that it won’t get a nuclear weapon for at the least the ten years or so that it will take them to acquire the ballistic missile systems that America’s politely indulgent understanding of Islam has now allowed to buy from their newly-acquired Russian and Chinese friends.

There are no doubt many Muslims who do subscribe to that Religion of Peace of version of Islam that we keep hearing about, every time some some self-proclaimed Muslim commits mass murder, and we wish them well. The best possible outcome would be that they somehow convince their co-religionists to reach a similarly placid understanding of Islam, and persuade them to live in peace with a western world that is anathema to their generations-old understanding of right and wrong, and are able to point to America’s capitulation to a Shiite Iranian nuclear bomb and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood’s legitimacy in Egypt and elsewhere as proof of its good intention, but barring that unlikely possibility some frankness will be required among the both the officials and their mass-media accomplices. A widely-held understanding of Islam is utterly incompatible with the values that both the left and the right of western civilization, is causing the all-too-frequent deaths of Americans and far more massive bloodshed throughout the rest of the world, and cannot be peacefully be resolved without capitulations to a medieval theology that goes way beyond repealing same-sex marriage and women’s suffrage and is offended even by the more old-fashioned morality of the Christian right, and some resistance must be offered.

We can’t say where to begin the bombings, as the threat is by now far too diffuse and well-armed in the deserts and well-hidden in the suburbs and too politely ignored by official pronouncements and mass-media commentary, but at a frank acknowledgement that this has something to do with Islam, somehow or another, would be a good start.

— Bud Norman

Islam in the News

Another American has been sadistically beheaded for the benefit of a worldwide internet audience, terrorists are frolicking poolside at an abandoned American embassy in Libya, the reports from northern England are every bit as shocking, and Islam is back in the news.

Some effort is usually made by the western world’s editors and producers to keep Islam out of the news, except for the occasional multi-cutural puff piece about the Religion of Peace around Ramadan or another op-ed about the impending threat of an Islamophobic backlash by those barbarians out there in the American heartlands, but it’s lately been impossible to completely excise the word from the coverage. The beheading was carried out by an organization variously described as ISIL or ISIS, and even the most polite press is obliged to explain on first reference that in either case the “IS” stands for “Islamic State.” Those shady-looking characters enjoying a cool dip in that American taxpayer-funded swimming pool are just as insistent on proclaiming their Islamic allegiance. The 1,400 English children who were sexually abused in the hitherto little-known village of Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 ordinarily wouldn’t warrant the world’s attention, but England’s more robust newspapers have at last found it noteworthy that the abuse continued so long because local authorities purposefully overlooked the overwhelming evidence against the Muslim perpetrators for fear of being accused of racism and religious prejudice.

By now everyone is familiar with the obligatory disclaimer that most of the world’s Muslims are peaceable people with no intentions to behead or blow-up or gang rape anyone you know, but only because it’s been appended to so many stories about the endless slaughter and countless atrocities committed in the name of Islam. Most Muslims truly would prefer a peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world, we’d like to think, but until they start enforcing this sensible preference on their more militant co-religionists the truism will be of no practical value to the rest of the world. Thus far the more militant are the ones imposing their preferences, with the relatively peaceable sorts of Muslims being the most numerous victims, and all the carefully worded disclaimers cannot hide the ugly consequences. Even the fear of being accused of racism and religious prejudice will not forever conceal the truth that much of the Islamic world is resolutely at war with the rest of us..

This has been true for the past 1,400 years or so, another unhappy fact that polite opinion would rather ignore, but the latest conflicts have been especially worrisome and worthy of frank consideration. The violence inflicted by the Islamic State features a brutality not seen since the glory days of Islam’s conquests, the land being conquered is broader and more resource-rich than in the past several centuries, western passports and porous borders and seized jetliners provide the terrorists with unprecedented opportunities for mass slaughter in almost any country, and there’s the problem that polite opinion in the rest of the world would rather ignore it. The President of the United States candidly admits that he has no strategy for dealing with the Islamic State, and quite conceal his disappointment that the big speech he gave in Cairo and his boyhood days in an Indonesian Madrassa haven’t placated the head-chopping and land-grabbing Islamists of the world.

Another 350 troops are heading back to Iraq, whose safe and stable democracy was once one of the administration’s greatest achievements, and drone strikes and special forces missions are ongoing elsewhere in the Muslim world, but of course it’s all accompanied by lots of talk about peaceable majority of Muslims and the need for Israel to show restraint in its efforts to deal with more pressing problems concerning the religion of peace. There still seems some faint hope that the whole matter can be settled without any mention of any religion, and in a way that won’t interfere with the planned downsizing of the military, but it’s going to take some sympathetic coverage. Islam is back in the news, and is getting harder to ignore.

— Bud Norman

The Write Stuff

Back in our newspaper days we watched the typesetters, inserters, many of the pressmen, and even much of the clerical staff gradually fade away from the industry, all victims of the relentless progress of automation. We were especially saddened to see the departure of the typesetters, whose painstakingly learned sleight of hand was as entertaining to watch as any of those plate-spinners who used to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, but we always reassured ourselves that a flesh-and-ink-stained-blood human being would always be required to write the stories.

Now we learn that even the all-too-human art of writing news stories can be mastered by mere machines. The Los Angeles Times has already run a story written by what is ominously called a “writer-bot,” and according to the chief technical officer of a company called Narrative Science, another ominous coinage, as much of 90 percent of all news stories will be computer-generated rather than human-written by 2030. This is after our hoped-for retirement date, but the apparent advent of the automated reporter is still a sobering enough development to make us reconsider our career path.

It seems a shame to leave so many decades of journalistic experience unused, however, so we’re thinking of getting on this computer-generated news racket. The classical economists’ answer to automation has always been that it creates a new job for every one it destroys, as people as required to design and build and maintain the machines doing the work, so we’ll simply get involved in the program-writing end of the biz. How hard can it be, after all? There’s something to do with algorithms, we’re told, and so far as we can tell that has nothing to do with Al Gore, but we’ll just get some unemployed computer geek to take care of that gobbledygook while we provide the necessary instructions. Many decades of being reprimanded by mainstream news editors have taught us all the rules of modern journalism, and it should be a relatively simple task to get a machine to obey them.

At the risk of revealing proprietary information, we’ll share with any potential investors out there a few of the stylebook entries we’ll have programmed into our machines. By following these few simple rules our computer-written copy should meet all the requirements of modern journalism.

First of all, any political story with the word “scandal” should omit any mention of the subject’s party affiliation unless he is a Republican. Any economics story bearing bad news should include the word “unexpectedly,” unless a Republican occupies the White House, in which case the words “dire” and “cataclysmic” will be added. All reports of Islamist-inspired terrorism must include a reference to the “religion of peace,” as well as some vague allusion to Israeli intransigence. Stories regarding the Internal Revenue Service’s harassment of conservative activist groups will not be written at all, but immediately replaced with the salacious details of the Kardashian clan’s most recent sexual exploits. Partial-birth abortions will described as “what opponents call partial-birth abortions,” at least until proponents can decide what to call it. All stories making reference to the Koch brothers must include the phrase “billionaire businessman, while those mentioning George Soros should use “philanthropist” and “social activist.” Crime stories must omit any mention of race or sex, unless the suspect is white and male, and just to be safe the neighborhood in which the crime occurred should also go unmentioned. Any mention of President Barack Obama should be free of any unflattering adjectives, and any accompanying photographs should be altered to include a suitably hagiographic halo effect.

There are lots more rules, as we have learned through hard experience, but that just means plenty of lucrative work for the aspiring journalistic programmer. The rules keep changing, too, depending on who’s in office, so this scam might yet get us over until the hoped-for retirement date.

— Bud Norman