REZA ASLAN: A MUSLIM "WILL & GRACE" WILL CURE "ISLAMOPHOBIA"
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
“What changed people’s minds was ‘Will and Grace,’ was ‘Modern Family,’ was watching people who were gay on television being, you know, ‘normal,'” says the establishment propaganda media’s favorite Muslim, Reza Aslan, as he threatens to inflict upon us a self-righteous, fatuous, virtue-signaling Muslim family sitcom. Because, you see, “stories have the power to breakthrough the walls that separate us into different ethnicities, different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different religions.” And, apparently, forget about jihad terror. Because “bigotry is not a result of ignorance, it’s a result of fear.”
This is just another spurious claim of Muslim victimhood from someone who has made a tidy living in the Muslims-Are-Victims industry, Reza Aslan. And it is more muddled thinking from a spectacularly muddled thinker. The fallacy of his reasoning lies in the fact that when “Will & Grace” aired, there were no international gay terror groups mounting terror attacks in the U.S. and around the world, and boasting of their imminent conquest of the U.S. The suspicion that Americans have of Islam comes from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, not from bigotry, and Americans know this distinction, despite the best efforts of people like Reza Aslan to obscure it and make people feel guilty for opposing jihad terror. Some slick TV show depicting funny, warm, attractive, cuddly Muslims would not end jihad terror, or blunt concern about it — it would only serve to further the idea that resisting jihad violence was somehow “bigoted.”
This is not the first time Aslan has revealed his abject intellectual vacuity. He regularly makes howling errors of fact, including his ridiculous claim that the idea of resurrection “simply doesn’t exist in Judaism,” despite numerous passages to the contrary in the Hebrew Scriptures. He has also referred to “the reincarnation, which Christianity talks about” — although he later claimed that one was a “typo.” In yet another howler he later insisted was a “typo,” he claimed that the Biblical story of Noah was barely four verses long — which he then corrected to forty, but that was wrong again, as it is 89 verses long. Aslan claimed that the “founding philosophy of the Jesuits” was “the preferential option for the poor,” when in reality, that phrase wasn’t even coined until 1968. He called Turkey the second most populous Muslim country, when it is actually the eighth most populous Muslim country. He thinks Pope Pius XI, who issued the anti-fascist encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, was a fascist. He thinks Marx and Freud “gave birth to the Enlightenment,” when it ended in the late 18th century, before either of them were born. He claims that “the very first thing that Muhammad did was outlaw slavery,” when in fact Muhammad bought slaves, took female captives as sex slaves, and owned slaves until his death. He thinks Ethiopia and Eritrea are in Central Africa.
A “renowned religious scholar” such as Reza Aslan should not make such elementary mistakes. But this is, of course, the man who writes “than” for “then”; apparently thinks the Latin word “et” is an abbreviation; and writes “clown’s” for “clowns.” Aslan is less a “religious scholar” than he is a marginally literate, unevenly educated charlatan with a talent for telling the mainstream media what it wants to hear. And here is some more of it:
Writer Reza Aslan thinks a Muslim Will & Grace or Modern Family could truly change American perceptions of Islam.________________________________________________________
REZA ASLAN: You are, according to the FBI, more likely to die as the result of faulty furniture, than by an Islamic terrorist. So, you should really be scared of your La-Z-Boy. For a very long time, really the only Muslims that you saw on TV were the Muslim villain, Who would scream “Allahu Akbar” and then blow himself up….
After about ten years of being cable news’s favorite Muslim I’ve come to the realization that I don’t think it’s doing any good. Bigotry is not a result of ignorance, it’s a result of fear. And fear is impervious to data, fear is impervious to information. The only way that you’re gonna dissipate that fear is by getting people to know someone that they’re afraid of.
In this country, we went from overwhelming majorities who were against same-sex marriage to overwhelming majorities supporting same-sex marriage, within the span of a couple of years.
What changed people’s minds was “Will and Grace,” was “Modern Family,” was watching people who were gay on television being, you know, ‘normal.’
They’re struggling with the same issues that you’re struggling with.They are human beings.
And so for the last few years, I’ve decided that what I’m gonna do is try to change people’s minds through pop culture, through film and television. Stories have the power to breakthrough the walls that separate us into different ethnicities, different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different religions.Because they hit us at the human level.
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