Islam dominates the news

If this website seems to be dominated by stories related to Islam, it’s not alone. The Associated Press’s ten top stories of 2006 include six that directly relate to Islam and the Mideast (Iraq; nuclear standoff with Iran and N. Korea; conviction of Saddam Hussein; the Israel-Hezbollah war; the British airliner plot; and the war in Darfur), while two others (the U.S. election and the Rumsfeld resignation) were largely influenced by Mideast events. That’s eight out of ten. (Of course it’s possible that the famously biased AP deliberately is pushing the Mideast angle so as to make Bush look even worse than he really deserves.) As Daniel Pipes points out, it’s not that “the Middle East and Muslims are more important than other regions and peoples, but that they are more in ferment.” That’s right, the bloody borders of Islam. That’s why we’ve got to keep the Muslims confined to a smaller part of the world, rather than letting them keep spreading themselves to new parts of the world. The more contact Muslims have with non-Muslims, whether in the Mideast or in the West or elsewhere, the more preoccupied we will be with Islamic-related conflict. If we don’t want ourselves and our posterity to be thinking about Islam all the time, we must isolate and contain the Muslims in their own world, as even a hyper-liberal like Thomas Friedman has begun inchoately to realize.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2007 03:45 PM | Send