Apologies excepted
by Tom Sullivan
News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch tweeted this on Friday about the Charlie Hebdo attacks:
Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 10, 2015
Murdoch’s sweeping indictment of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims drew its own round of apologies for Murdoch from other Australian men, conveniently aggregated by the Independent, including this none-too-subtle rebuke:
As a human being living on planet earth, I must apologise to the Universe for not throwing @rupertmurdoch into the mouth of a Volcano.— Christopher McBean (@MrMcBean) January 11, 2015
As Vox observed, a ritual apology is expected of the Muslim world after every incident resembling the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris:
Here is what Muslims and Muslim organizations are expected to say: “As a Muslim, I condemn this attack and terrorism in any form.”
The demand, writes Max Fisher, is “Islamophobic and bigoted,” making every Muslim a monster in the closet unless he/she says otherwise, and not even then.
Katie Halper explains at Raw Story how this works:
Every time an extremist who is Muslim commits an act of terrorism, people ask where the moderate Muslim voices condemning violence are. (Interestingly, as a Jew, I don’t usually get asked to condemn extremism when it is perpetuated by Jewish fundamentalists like Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 praying Muslims do death, and injured 125, at the Cave of the Patriarchs, or Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin.) And the same thing is happening following this week’s deplorable, pathetic, and tragic killing of 12 people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Not surprisingly, much of the “where is the Muslim outrage” outrage is coming from… Fox News, as Media Matters notes. Fox’s own Monica Crowley, for example, said that Muslims “should be condemning” the attack and that she hadn’t “heard any condemnation… from any groups.” Fox News’ America’s Newsroom guest Steve Emerson complained, “you don’t see denunciations of radical Islam, by name, by mainstream Islamic groups.” Bob Beckel, a host of Fox News’ The Five host said Muslims were “being quiet” about the shooting and accused the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of keeping “their mouth shut when things happen.”
For the edification of Fox News’ talking heads, Halper compiled 46 examples of Muslim outrage at the attacks that Murdoch’s crack news team had trouble finding.
Lest we think Halper’s view is slanted by her religious views, Mark Steel observes how Norway’s Christians were not asked to apologize after Anders Breivik slaughtered over 70 people in 2011. Nor America’s Christians after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people and injured over 600, Fisher adds.
Arifa Akbar, literary editor at the Independent, after recounting a string of condemnations by Muslim faith leaders, responded to the Murdoch tweet this way:
For Muslims to apologise is for them to admit that they – we – harboured these men, we invited them to our mosques and listened to their bile and hatred, and perhaps even their planning. How many of us were and are complicit in this? I’m not, and the majority of Britain’s 2.8 million Muslims aren’t either. After 9/11, I spoke to the brother of a Muslim victim. Who should apologise to him? The policeman shot dead in the line of duty was a Muslim. Who should apologise for Ahmed Merabet’s death? Me?
How far do ripples of responsibility extend? Should an imam in Southall apologise for the actions of these men in Paris? France has a significant Muslim minority with its own tensions – the ban on the veil and high levels of disenchantment among this largely banlieue-dwelling minority. It is all rather more complex than can be smoothed over with an apology.
As noted, Christians are exempt from calls for these ritual apologies expected from the Muslim community. No quantity or quality of them would be accepted or even acknowledged by the Murdochs of the world anyway. Because what they really want from the world’s uppity, second-largest religion is the kind of supplication Muslims perform in the Salat each day, only in acknowledgment that Christianity is Number One. Because this is not about terrorists or any brand of religious extremism. As with minorities of every other type, Muslims are expected to know their place.