Mark Steyn recently described this disparity in perception among some as: “All jihad is local, but all “Islamophobia” is global.”
Now, I do not really blame the likes of the OIC *** for putting the world on notice that they use alternate legal definitions of words (words vsuch as “terrorism”) where they are defined according to Sharia rather than use the colloquial sense of such words. They are about advancing Sharia so we should simply expect them to put their thumbs on the proverbial scales of perception.
*** Organization for Islamic Cooperation, the largest intergovernmental organization after the UN.
Where I’ve umbrage is over those who put their thumbs on the same side of the scales as well but for reasons entirely unrelated to Islam or Sharia. One bunch that does this, and which can often play a larger role in reporting in the West than the OIC for being an inside group rather than an outside group are those who have accepted the ideas on which things like being Woke are based and which see much through the lens of some reputed imbalance of power between “the whites” or “European civilization” or even “Christians” (note: culturally influenced by Christianity is enough) which are assumed to have this mythic power and thus are the oppressors and put near everyone else that is assumed to not have this attribute and are therefore the oppressed.
In the service of an idea like this it has really been quite easy for folks to ignore centuries worth of facts about Islam and see them too as victims. Being a victim can give one an excuse in the eyes of such people if someone ever acts up. Thus we found, on the next day after 9/11, Ivy League nitwits who couldn’t bring themselves to describe what the terrorists had done as evil.
But on the other side of the coin anything that is done by anyone in a group that is reputed to have this mythic power is seen as validation of the whole proposition of that group as oppressors. The only escape for someone in such a group is to parrot correct thinking, and then they can pat themselves on the back that they aren’t the bad people.
So the same folks who can even go so far as to separate the Jihad from the Jihadi can have little difficulty using others to smear whole swaths of the population just because they have some tenuous and entirely involuntary association because of their race, ethnicity or their culture.
