Tim Murray by

Media bias

L

Generalize Away Islamic Terrorism

Blame the Internet, Not Imams

Misguided But Not Malicious

Play the Victim Card

Remove Islam From the Equation

Relativize the Threat

Multiculturalism

ike Chinese Water Torture, HBO TV continues to insinuate its liberal message into the public consciousness drip by drip. It does so with Hollywood movies, and with documentaries such as the one that recently aired concerning home-grown jihadist terrorism, "Counter Terror Dilemma". As any good liberal movie producer or journalist knows, the best way to deliver propaganda is to make it a human interest story. By focusing on the plight of one person or one family, by putting a "human face" on a complex problem of vast magnitude, a propagandist knows that he can hit on the right emotional keys that over-ride rational thought.This documentary followed the classic formula. It goes something like this. First introduce the audience to Muslims as they want us to see them. Plain folks like you and me. Good Americans who just happen to wear different clothes and hold different religious beliefs. The Muslims in this film were the grieving relatives of a young man who simply expressed pro-ISIS statements on the Internet and conversed with ISIS members. As a result, he was apprehended and sentenced to a very long jail sentence.Enter good guy Phillip Mudd, analyst for Homeland Security. Mudd reached out to these relatives and invited them to his home with the object of explaining why federal authorities had no option but to incarcerate their son or brother because they could not afford to take the chance that he might be recruited as a terrorist. Mudd bled for them, but he couldn't help them. Sorry.But then Mudd, in other segments, brandishing his credentials as a cool-headed analyst, recited the usual clichés designed to throw cold water over smouldering 'Islamophobic' prejudices. Another man, presumably an Americanized Muslim teacher, complemented Mudd's conclusions with similar observations of his own. The following is more or less an amalgamation and summation of their points. Stop me if you have heard them before:Terrorists come in different shapes and sizes and adhere to different ideologies. Muslim terrorists are not the only kid on the block. Timothy McVeigh was not a Muslim. Dylan Roof was not a Muslim. The Columbine shooter was not a Muslim. So let's not talk about Islamic terrorism. Let's just say "terrorism". The generic kind.These young American-born 'terrorists' were not radicalized by anything they heard in a mosque, but from what they learned on the Internet. And what they learned was a perverse and highly toxic interpretation of Islam, a compound of cherry-picked verses designed to justify an assault on America and the West. So don't go blaming raving imams or Saudi-funded mosques. Blame the Internet — or the man who invented it, Al Gore.Rather than focus on the ideology of a terrorist, look at his personal life, look at the psychological make-up of the individual. Extreme political movements can simply be explained as a function of unbalanced minds. Forget about the ideology that guides and inspires them. Forget underlying socio-economic factors that this ideology taps into. These young men made the wrong choice, they took a dark road. What they needed — what all such young men need to this day — is a good shrink and an imam who will tell them what Islam is really all about. Peace and good will.To buttress this line of thinking, it was revealed that before he hooked up with ISIS, the young man who served as the starting point of this documentary broke up with his girlfriend. Ah, you see! We told you so. It is not about Islam, it is about young people who feel alienated, rejected, insignificant and without a purpose. And why many of them find that purpose in a murderous cause. Radical Islam just happens to be the flavour of the month.Best then to delete any reference to Islam, Islamism, or Muslim when discussing domestic terrorism. Strike those hateful words from all the training manuals will you? Do that and the MSM will eventually follow suit. So repeat after me, the twin towers were not taken down by Muslims. They were taken down by psychopaths.People have a right to worry about anything they want, but the current fear about ISIS terrorist attacks are way out of proportion to their likelihood or impact. If they must worry, Americans would have better justification to worry about obesity, cancer and drunk driving than "Islamic" terrorism. Good point. Don't you think, in retrospect, that 7th century Christians in northern Africa and Spain should have paid more attention to their diet and hygiene rather than worry about the rumours of an approaching army of Muslim cut-throats bent on mass slaughter, rape and enslavement? I guess some people have their priorities all screwed up. That's what xenophobia does to you, I guess.So you see, this ISIS thing is overblown. Instead of focusing on a jihadist boogeyman, we should follow Justin Trudeau's prescription after the Boston bombings: Reach out to these poor, young alienated outsiders and "include" them . Which makes me think, perhaps if someone in Mecca, a Big Brother perhaps, had reached out to Mohammed during his teenage years, gave him a hug and built up his self-esteem, he wouldn't have grown up to be a pedophile Prophet Warrior who launched a totalitarian movement that continues to threaten us 14 centuries later. Perhaps if at a crucial moment in the boy's development a brotherly mentor could have interested the young Mohammed in golf or basketball...or perhaps if a girlfriend hadn't spurned him — history would have been different.Pity that there wasn't a Justin Trudeau back then. He would have nipped violent jihad in the bud simply by waving everyone in the region into Canada, unscreened. By "including" them, by showcasing our famous Canadian compassion, we would have surely melted their hearts. With apologies to Ignatius Loyola, if you are a Liberal Prime Minister or a Liberal Premier of Ontario and you give a warm welcome to Muslim refugee at the airport, he's yours for life. A Liberal supporter until the day he dies. A certified member of the world's "first post-national state" But all of this is to say:Good work, HBO! We can always count on you to make sense of the world. You and the CBC make a great tag team.