The Media, the NRA, and Islam
It's too bad the American left doesn't treat the NRA even half as fairly as it treats Islam.
- NRA members haven't committed any mass shootings.
- NRA members haven't hijacked airplanes and flown them into buildings.
- Thirteen percent of NRA members don't support mass murder as a legitimate way to defend the NRA or advance its ideological agenda.
That would refer to American Muslims, 13 percent of whom, according to the Pew Research Center, say they support suicide bombings and other violence against civilians in defense of Islam. (According to Pew, the percentage is considerably higher among foreign Muslims.)
Yet every time a jihadist goes on a killing spree, the American left, through its propaganda arm – otherwise known as the mainstream media – is quick to remind us that Islamic terrorism is an aberration and in no way reflective of the "religion of peace."
In fact, jihadist terror is so aberrant that countless talking heads, including the one who used to occupy the White House, have declared it un-Islamic, going so far as to claim that a vast terrorist army known by various names, but most conventionally as the Islamic State, has nothing to do with Islam.
That would actually be laughable – sort of like claiming that the National Rifle Association had nothing to do with guns – if thousands of people weren't being slaughtered.
Yet countless Islamic scholars, learned men (they're all men) who have done little other than study the Koran their entire lives, boldly contradict the leftist cadre of pundits and professional apologists, most of whom are not Muslim and have no expertise in the field of Quranic study (sort of like Dianne Feinstein defining an "assault rifle"), by saying that in their learned opinion, what terror networks like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are doing – visiting violent jihad upon the infidel – is exactly the duty of every true Muslim and that anyone who says differently is either an infidel or a heretic and should be killed. (How's that for the religion of peace and tolerance?)
So whom are you going to believe, Anderson Cooper, who knows as much about Islam as he knows about picking up girls in singles bars, or ten thousand imams who have literally memorized every verse in the Quran?
But does it even matter? Because regardless of who's right about the true tenets of Islam, millions of Muslims believe that killing innocent, unarmed civilians is their ticket to paradise.
How do I know? Because most of the time, they announce it by shouting "Allahu akbar!" right before they slaughter everyone in sight. Still, the American left and its lapdog media claim to have a hard time figuring out the motives behind such attacks.
Let us suppose that a card-carrying member of the NRA walked onto a U.S. military base, or into a gay nightclub, or a Christmas party with an AR-15 and shouted, "This is for the NRA!" and then proceeded to shoot everyone.
How long do you think it would take for the media to blame the NRA?
This situation isn't purely hypothetical, because the NRA has come under relentless attack since the Valentine's Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida. No less an authority on firearms and the NRA than documentary filmmaker Michael Moore labeled the entire NRA a "terrorist organization." Daniel Malloy, the Democratic governor of Connecticut, said the same thing. Ditto TV pundit Keith Olbermann and columnist Jessica Valenti, along with dozens of others.
This week, we witnessed a national school walkout to protest firearm violence, which is left-speak for protest the NRA. The signs on display were typical: "Abolish the NRA," "NRA = Terrorists," and "NRA blood on your hands."
Except, of course, the NRA had nothing to do with the school shooting in Parkland, or any other school or mass shooting or terrorist attack.
But just imagine if a group of conservatives – the Tea Party, for instance – took to the streets in cities all over the country after the next jihadist terror attack and waved around the exact same signs as the anti-gun left but replaced the initials "NRA" with the word "Islam," so that the signs read "Abolish Islam," "Islam = Terrorists," and "Islam blood on your hands."
Can you hear the left's screams of rage and its hysterical accusations of.. (take your pick, but "racism" is their favorite, despite the fact that Islam comprises members of all races and nationalities)?
If the left was even close to treating the NRA the way it treats Islam, millions of honest, law-abiding Americans, many of whom are military and law enforcement veterans, who are members of the NRA wouldn't be condemned as domestic terrorists and child-murderers. But then again, that's exactly what the left wants.