Noting the coverage of Mr. Wilders by the National Post and the Sun, Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui observes: “We can just imagine what the two would have done had some crazy mullah from the Middle East been allowed into Canada and said exactly the same things about Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism or any religion that Wilders said about Islam and Muslims.”
Mr. Levant was – by coincidence, perhaps? – also the main host for Ann Coulter last year when she too was invited to Canada by the free-speech-loving IFPSC where she too freely spread contempt for Muslims, as she so relishes doing. Ms. Coulter believes that Muslims, whom she calls “ragheads,” are “absolutely insane savages” with a “predilection for violence” who “react to bad news by immediately engaging in acts of violence.” When in 2009 a Muslim army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan ran amok and murdered 12 people at Fort Hood, Texas, Ms. Coulter had no doubt that “the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism.”
Mr. Breivik is a different story, however. Even though he calls himself a Christian and considered himself a “warrior fighting for the preservation of European Christendom,” Ms. Coulter informs us that “he does not mean ‘Christian’ as most Americans understand the term. … He uses the word as a handy moniker to mean ‘European, non-Islamic’.” Ann Coulter: a real Christian.
Canada, to be fair, is only a bit player among those dedicated to inflaming hatred against Muslims. Interested readers might want to know, as Mr. Breivik very much did, about the self-styled American “counterjihadists,” a group of influential crackpots advocating a crusade against a global Islamic movement that, apparently, threatens the very foundations of what’s now called Judeo-Christian society since anti-Semitism, after 2,000-odd years, went out of fashion among mainstream Christians.
Among the remarkable inventions of the counterjihadists is the non-existent threat that Muslim sharia law poses to the United States. It appears that American Muslims, less than 1 per cent of the population, are conspiring to impose sharia law across America. The campaign to stop this menace from happening, even though it’s already not happening, has achieved remarkable support from everyone from Republican presidential candidates to local political hacks promoting anti-sharia legislation.
Such proposed legislation is the same in each instance. It’s the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Brooklyn by an otherwise obscure Hasidic Jew, zealous anti-black racist and sick Muslim-hater named David Yerushalmi. Supported by conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, Mr. Yerushalmi has successfully elevated a harebrained paranoid fantasy into a lethal threat to American freedom. Readers may want to check out the assessment of Mr. Yerushalmi and his associates by the mainstream American organization the Anti-Defamation League.
The goal of the Muslim-haters is surely clear enough. By lumping all Muslims together as terrorists, by equating a violence-prone Muslim lunatic fringe with all Muslims, by insulting the hundreds of millions of moderate Muslims everywhere, they alienate all Muslims and create among non-Muslims an irrational fear of and hostility to all Muslims. What purpose can this serve other than to provoke a clash, possibly a violent one, between Muslims and the rest? Anders Breivik didn’t come from nowhere, nor will the next Breivik.
But what’s the interest of certain media in enabling these haters to spread their gospel, to fan the flames of intolerance? What audience are they after? What do they expect their audiences to make of all this sympathetic exposure to rabid anti-Muslim feelings? Why are they inciting ordinary people to hate other ordinary people? Why?
