Who Appointed The Media To Judge Who Is A Muslim Moderate?

By now you have to be willfully blind not to know that the imam in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is the moderate Muslim we have allegedly been yearning for.
Maureen Dowd

What is it that makes the media such experts on who is a Muslim moderate?
And why are we so ready to believe their pronouncements on such issues?

Back in 2003, when ZOA sponsored a poll by John McLaughlin and Associates they found that:

64% believe that world leaders should refuse to meet with Arafat’s number two man, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), since he has claimed that the Nazis did not murder six million Jews—just as world leaders have refused to meet with others who have denied or distorted the Holocaust.

Americans knew where Abbas stood on that issue and realized that Abbas was simply not the kind of person the worlds leaders should be meeting with.

Today things are different.
We are now told that Abbas is both a moderate and a peace partner that Israel should be sitting down with.
How do we know--because the media says so.
What is their proof--because the media says so, using the 'moderate' label over and over and over.

The fact that Abbas has been inciting hatred of Israel--the sort of thing that one might expect from a Holocaust denier--does not change the media's mind. Actually, they don't even mention it.

When it comes to Feisal Abdul Rauf and his Ground Zero Mosque, the media again tells us he is a moderate. Rauf himself is a denier--he denies that Hamas is a terrorist group and claims that the US bears some responsibility for 9/11.

Daniel Greenfield writes about the eagerness of the media to apply the 'moderate' label to Muslims:

After 9/11 the media did multiple interviews with a kindly and friendly Imam, by the name of Anwar Al-Awlaki. Anwar explained to every media outlet that would listen that Islam is opposed to terrorism and anyone who thinks otherwise misunderstood one of those 12,000 “You Shall Smite the Infidel” verses in the Koran. After doing enough interviews on NPR and PBS, Anwar Al-Awlaki is hiding from US drones somewhere in Yemen, and has been linked to both the Fort Hood Massacre and the Times Square Bomber.

You might think that Anwar Al-Awlaki snapped after enough appearances on PBS and NPR, whose soft calming music and lobotomized hosts could turn anyone into a terrorist, but Al-Awlaki was actually advising the 9/11 hijackers, even before the attacks happened. So when Anwar Al-Awlaki was telling the press that Islam is opposed to terrorism, he was asking them to ignore everything the FBI and CounterJihadi sites had found. Which they happily did.

What that all adds up to is that the media’s proven ability to handicap who is or isn’t a Muslim terrorist is about as good as Crazy Blind Louie’s ability to handicap horse races in China, when he doesn’t speak Chinese and has been trapped in a coma for the last 3 years. At this point if the media tells you that someone isn’t a Muslim terrorist, the Vegas odds are on the side of him being Osama bin Laden’s right hand man. If the media tells you that an Imam is moderate, run to within 50 feet away to avoid the shrapnel.

That is not to say there are no moderate Muslims--of course there are. However, by automatically calling every Muslim leader who does not publicly and repeatedly condemn the US a moderate, the media is lowering the bar and making it more difficult for the real Muslim moderates. After all, how can Muslim moderates repudiate the extremists when the media gives those very same extremists their lavish approval?

In the meantime, the media--and the government--is lavishing on Rauf the kind of praise that makes it that much more difficult to discuss the actual issues.

Technorati Tag: Ground Zero Mosque and Feisal Abdul Rauf.