PrintMarch 27, 2008
NBC's Equivalence Even Less Moral than Obama's
Last week we witnessed a veritable doubletalk double feature when first a presidential candidate compared the incomparable to excuse rabid racism bordering sedition; then a major television network analogized reality with fiction to garner sympathy for homicidal Islamic extremists.
Second only to blaming America's "history of social injustice," false moral equivalence has become a favorite rhetorical device of the Left. Despite its often laughably transparent dishonesty, this little ruse, like the branding of all peoples and cultures equally good and equally bad, has facilitated the agendas of political apologists for generations.
At the Nuremburg war crimes trials, Nazi sympathizers actually argued that the atrocities of Germany's blueprinted Final Solution were no worse than some battlefield policies of the Allies. And throughout the ensuing Cold War, Marxist supporters in the press pitifully pointed to the United States internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as symmetrically contemptible to Stalin's Hitler-exceeding mass murder.
More recently, Ted Kennedy confirmed the tactic's inanity by comparing Abu Ghraib, where a small group of rogue guards forced a few prisoners to wear underwear on their heads, to "Saddam's torture chambers," within which hundreds of thousands were savagely killed or grotesquely mutilated.
Oddly, the outright imbalance or contextual incongruity of these equations would appear to be of little consequence to those predisposed to accept their implications. And, if the timing is just right, the misstated analogy's impression can prove quite viral. Case in point -- the Iraq prison name has become premium liberal talking point fodder.
Consequently, many have grown all but inured to hearing Palestinians annihilating busloads of innocent children likened to Israelis inadvertently killing human shields while destroying the sites from which missiles are launched against their civilians. Likewise the ignorant attempts to equate the vile actions of today's murderous Islamic madmen with the sins of Christian crusaders, last heard from almost 8 centuries ago.
Is it any wonder that the savvy Barack Obama sprinkled so much moral equivalence on top of his social injustice defense of Rev. Jeremiah Wright last Tuesday? The Black President Now crowd nodded predictably as the senator equated the words of a raving anti-American racist initially to those of a woman who merely pointed out the obvious contemporary political advantages an abundance of melanin enjoys over one of estrogen. And then to those of his "typical white person" grandmother "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street." As once, by the way, did Jesse Jackson.
And, talk about audacity -- Obama's own unbalanced moral equivalence was an attempt to excuse that of his pastor of 20 years - whose vile words included relating the 9/11 attacks to our bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, even two proportioned wrongs wouldn't make a Wright right. Truth be told and media hallelujahs aside, the purported "historic speech" failed miserably its mission to explain both the pastor's vile words and his most famous congregant family's 2 decade and continued audience.
Such evasive wordplay can't possibly help a nominee who lithely declares himself "post-racial" while his audience gushes over how wonderful it would be to have a black president.
But while Obama's yes he's bad but no worse than her effort was, unquestionably, shameless -- it would pale in comparison to what the following night had in store. That was when NBC executive producer Dick Wolf stooped to using an imaginary storyline to run interference for Islamic murderers, particularly the "honor killers" recently in all but the mainstream news.
But while Obama's yes he's bad but no worse than her effort was, unquestionably, shameless -- it would pale in comparison to what the following night had in store. That was when NBC executive producer Dick Wolf stooped to using an imaginary storyline to run interference for Islamic murderers, particularly the "honor killers" recently in all but the mainstream news.
You might recall the name Aqsa Parvez. She was the Canadian teenager murdered by her father last December after refusing to wear a hijab (head scarf). Or, perhaps, Yasser Abdul Said, who shot his own young daughters, Amina and Sarah, to death in Texas last New Years Day for dating non-Muslims.
These were but two of a growing number of cases sounding the alarm that honor killings are no longer the exclusive dominion of the Middle East and South Asia. Yet they do remain a barbarism isolated to Muslim (and, less often, Hindu) cultures - which makes Multi-cultists somewhat nervous that future religious murders might just put lie to their cries of Islamophobia whenever jihadists appear suspect.
And so, despite the absence of even a single case of such behavior by Christians on record, the TV program whose plots are often advertised as being "ripped from the headlines" simply created one.
True to its 18 season formula, last Wednesday's Law And Order opened with the discovery of a homicide victim in New York City - this time a Caucasian woman found stoned to death. Watching with family members, I had an immediate uneasy feeling of where the storyline might be headed. Hunch turned quickly to angry certainty when, no sooner did one of the detectives mention that he had witnessed a drug-addict so killed in Islamic Pakistan, than his Captain chimed in:
"I seem to remember some stonings in the bible, too."
My wife and both I reacted to that line with similar expressions, although hers also made clear that she wouldn't be sticking around to be insulted by the next one.
As the mystery unfolded, viewers were teased with the idea that the victim may have been killed by those outraged by her intent to feature paintings in her art show that challenged Islam's oppression of women. Wait -- did I say Islam's oppression? My mistake -- the writers, through the actor playing the artist, corrected me -- and the detectives in charge:
"It's not the religion -- it is men. Some ignorant men who twist the religion to keep women down."
Here we go. The old "few bad apples" play on top of the moral equivalence one.
But wait -- the plot thickened. We quickly learned that the bloody stoning was not at the hands of Islamic fanatics, but -- are you ready for this -- Christian ones.
The detectives' diligence uncovered evidence that the Muslim artist had been showing the deceased art dealer more than just his etchings. And that this tawdry interfaith affair incurred the wrath not of the Mullahs, but rather a lone fanatical Christian preacher. Our investigative heroes soon showed the District Attorney a videotape capturing the preacher inciting a spiritual army of youths indoctrinated through dogmatic speeches and "willing to die for Jesus" while "waging war against Muslim infidels."
Christian extremists? Yikes! Better check those Easter Baskets!
As luck would have it, within the ranks of "God's Army" there walked a "prophet" who just happened to be the son of the white blasphemer. He and a group of his fellow ‘believers" were apparently dispatched to "set his house in order."
And so, at the behest of his fanatical Christofascist superior and in the name of God, he and his acolytes stoned his adulterous mother who, by having sex with a Muslim was "defiled by his blasphemous seed." Of course, "Allah Akbar" would not have suited these particular holy warriors, so they stoned to the cries of "This Means War."
Oh, and just in case the moral of this completely fabricated fable somehow eluded its tolerance-seeking audience, the episode ended with a line crafted to not only minimize jihad as a fringe menace, but also to suggest that an identical fringe lurks here:
"Then our fanatics can fight their fanatics."
Disgraceful barely covers it.
After all -- the blatant inequality of the two sides the multi-cultists compare in this game of "well, everybody does it" is intellectually dishonest enough when both disproportionate offenses are at least based on actual events. As absurdly unsuitable for comparison their disputed words may be, both Wright and Ferraro did speak them.
But, of course, while Islamic honor killings are real -- Christian honor killings are not. And, while modern Islamic leaders regularly incite their followers to wage war against Christian and Jewish infidels in the name of Allah - their Christian counterparts do nothing of the sort.
Indeed, in their blind zeal to present an America equally guilty to the jihadists, NBC inadvertently exposed just what lengths were necessary to do so. Unable to produce any historic example with which to balance the bloody equation, they instead stacked the deck by simply creating Christian characters scripted to act like Islamists.
And, in the process, they reminded us that any time such proposed equivalence isn't clearly unequivalent -- it's just plain bull.
Either way, it's anything but moral.
Marc Sheppard is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and welcomes your feedback.
