Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:05 pm
Conservative pundits make little sense at the best of times, but their full court press against Islam reveals how desperate they are to control the debate about the volatile mix of readily available assault rifles and hate. To say their logic is convoluted is to understate the case.
We’ve already seen Sarah Palin looking in the mirror and mistaking her reflection as Obama. She was right about the special kind of stupid, though. I don’t know why she wants an assault rifle so badly; she’s already proven she can’t hit anything with it.
And we had Michael Savage, who on Thursday said that President Obama is inviting a “barbaric invasion†– the barbarians, of course, being Muslim refugees. And these Muslims are not invaders, but people fleeing from a war caused by a destabilization of a region we caused by toppling Saddam Hussein. According to Savage, Obama needs to be impeached, and his logic is at least as inscrutable than Palin’s:
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“My instincts are intact with regard to the barbaric invasion and my instincts tell me that Obama is doing it on purpose. My instincts tell me that Obama wants to harm America forever. My instincts tell me he’s a madman and he’s very evil and must be impeached immediately.â€
Thank the Enlightenment the very liberal Constitution does not make Michael Savage’s instincts the law of the land.
Cranky old televangelist Pat Robertson’s solution is to let Muslims and gays kill each other, following some absurd logic understood only by conservatives, that Islamists and gays are natural allies:
“The left is having a dilemma of major proportions and I think for those of us who disagree with some of their policies, the best thing to do is to sit on the sidelines and let them kill themselves.â€
Well, actually, we are being killed by conservatives who demand everybody, including terrorists, have the opportunity to be armed with assault rifles. If anything, we could say we should sit on the sidelines and watch conservatives be killed by their kids wielding unsecured weapons.
And that brings us to Fox News’ Mike Gallagher, who announced Friday on The Real Story that, “It’s ridiculous to say Muslims are assimilating. You’re painting with a broad brush and you can’t make that kind of a generalization.”
Yes, the guy working for the network that makes hay off generalizations based on false premises and faked scientific studies, says “you can’t make that kind of generalization.” Here’s how that conversation went:
HEATHER NAUERT: Donald Trump saying basically “our leaders gave up on battling ISIS.” Have they? Has the president?
MIKE GALLAGHER: It feels like it because if they haven’t then they would be identifying ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism as the core reason that these poor people were slaughtered in Orlando. It’s unbelievable, you’ve got to give the left credit. They’ve figured out a way to shift the attention from the problem with radical Islamic terrorism to gun control. They’ve done this over and over again, and to their credit, they’ve pulled it off because the mainstream media is complying.
NAUERT: Alan, this has gone from what would normally be a debate about a terror attack on the United States to something about gun control and LGBT issues and fairness so have the Democrats won on this so to speak?
ALAN COLMES: There’s more to it than that. The president in his speech the other day said that it’s not just guns, it’s not just terrorism, we have to address both. As a matter of fact Donald Trump is fearmongering, he’s saying “Muslims aren’t assimilating, Muslims aren’t telling on each other when they’re extremist.”
NAUERT: Many would argue that that would be part of the problem in places like Minnesota where you have boys go off and join terror organizations in Somalia.
COLMES: If I could just achieve closure on my sentence which is that James Comey, he said — the head of the FBI — that that’s not true. That in fact, Muslims are going to authorities. So he is fearmongering and he’s not telling the truth about what’s going on. Muslims are assimilating and they are active in terms of dealing with authorities.
GALLAGHER: It’s ridiculous to say Muslims are assimilating. You’re painting with a broad brush and you can’t make that kind of a generalization.
Here again we see Gallagher pushing the execrable logic that if we don’t call terrorists names, we’ve given up on fighting terrorism. Shooting at them, bombing them, nailing their leaders with drones, apparently that’s not enough. You have to really get under their skin.
Colmes is right: Trump is fearmongering. In that, he’s certainly no different that Fox News itself. And we’re back to the whole issue of collective guilt here as well, in that if you’re not white, you’re expected to turn each other into authorities or you’re all guilty. We don’t see that standard applied to white Europeans. We never have, as Native Americans discovered to their dismay.
Moreover, think about the absurd logic of ghettoizing Muslims and then complaining that they refuse to assimilate. The same thing was done, it scarce needs be said, to the Jews by a Europe also dominated by white male Christians.
Gallagher is lying. It isn’t Democrats attempting to shift attention from terrorism to gun control, but rather Republicans turning attention away from gun control to “Islamic terrorism.” The one constant in all mass shootings is the one Republicans refuse to talk about is guns, and of those guns, assault rifles cause the highest casualty rates.
How can Islam be the problem when there are just over 3 million Muslims in the United States, but over 5 million assault rifles?
Most shooters are not Muslims. They are white Americans. The victims in a church were black; the victims in a nightclub were gay. There are all sorts of things we should be talking about here but you won’t hear any of them addressed by Republicans.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
