RUTHFULLY YOURS

We can never win this “civilizational conflict” if we keep on insisting that Islam itself is blameless.

The Trump campaign against radical Islam doesn’t pull any punches. And why should it? We’re talking about a religion which has tens of millions (or more) adherents who’d love to blow the United States off the map. (That’s after Israel, of course.)

However, according to Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post, it’s Trump and his advisers who believe in “civilizational conflict”. (Presumably after the analysis offered in Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations.)

Diehl says that Trump’s appointee, Stephen K. Bannon, speaks in terms of a “long history of the Judeo-Christian West’s struggle against Islam”. Michael T. Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, is also in favor of “a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people”.

Indeed, Flynn has got the measure of things. He once wrote:

“I don’t believe that all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think the West, and especially America, is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral.”

Jackson Diehl thinks that such “Islamophobic” words are counterproductive. That such words cause — rather than solve – problems. But is systematically lying about Islam a successful policy? Are there fewer Islamic terrorists today than there were twenty or even ten years ago? Are Muslims, as a whole, becoming more moderate? Is there a Muslim “reform movement” spreading across the world or even in Europe and the U.S.?

So let’s start telling the truth about Islam, as Flynn and millions of others are attempting to do.

Jackson Diehl lays his own cards on the table when he says that François Fillon’s book, Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism, is an example of what he calls “anti-Muslim rhetoric”. Diehl even has a problem with the suicidal Islamophile Angela Merkel. He said that she “felt obliged to strike an anti-Islamic pose last week, proposing a crackdown on the minuscule number of German women who wear a burqa”.

Jackson Diehl also has a big problem with Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, whom Trump supports. Did Diehl prefer the Muslim Brotherhood regime? You know, the movement that has traditionally persecuted and bombed the Christian Copts of Egypt?

To be published on the front page of your own newspaper, to open the news on your own television program, you must bring the “kill news”, the news that kills all others, and – more importantly – the news that all other media will copy and paste.

Journalists are obsessed with creating the hound pack of the day and then enjoying lead hound status. In hound-pack logic, there can be only ONE news item a day – repeated and reprinted infinitely.

Poverty can make a headline when data is officially released, but who cares about what poor people think?

The problem begins when people not on the radar screen become the majority of the population and when this majority of the population become “dissidents”. Then, when the invisible people (in the media sense of the term) engage themselves in the democratic process and protest with a vote, it sounds like a bomb: No one saw it coming! No one could have predicted it!

According to the media, the only poor who need help, support, audience are immigrants. Other people who are poor, especially the whites, do not, for the media, exist. And if they did protest, presumably they would have no right to….

“Representing the middle and working classes as “reactionary,” “fascist”, is very convenient. This avoids asking critical questions. When someone is diagnosed as fascist, the priority becomes to re-educate him, not to question the economic organization of the territory where he lives.” – Eric Guilluy, Le Point

Trump understood this disconnect [of the people from the media] well. During the campaign, in fact, Trump spoke to very few of the media: He made himself a media – tweeting every day, obliging mainstream media to amplify his words. The more the lying media treated him as a liar, the more he was trusted.

Sulzberger also launched an appeal to the “loyalty” of Times subscribers – because thousands of people abruptly cancelled their subscriptions. The disaffection with biased information is growing, and fewer and fewer people are ready to subscribe to propaganda, especially when the facts on the ground so visibly contradict it.

Do you know why Google is investing millions of dollars in perfecting a self-driving car? Not for safety, not for easier driving; they are doing it because it is stupid to let millions of people concentrate on a road instead of on surfing the internet.

It is a “zero sum” game: each second on Facebook is stolen from a newspaper or television station.

Democracy depends for its survival that journalists do correctly the job for which they are paid: reporting facts and not stigmatizing people who do not resemble themselves. It is not the “noble” duty of journalists to prevent things from happening. Just report facts and propose analyses, and let people think for themselves.

New media are appearing on the web: Breitbart in the US, Riposte Laïque in France and many dozens in Europe. Their audience consists of millions of readers.