Over the last few days, the mainstream media has been howling with glee over Steve Emerson’s gaffe on Fox News. Emerson said that in Britain, “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” and “in parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound, seriously, anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.” Birmingham is not actually totally Muslim, and so Emerson apologized: “There was no excuse for making this mistake, and I owe an apology to every resident of Birmingham. I am not going to make any excuses. I made an inexcusable error. And I am obligated to openly acknowledge that mistake. I wish to apologize for all residents of that great city of Birmingham.”
The Leftist media and its Islamic supremacist allies are trying to use this to get all foes of jihad terror off the air: numerous mainstream media outlets used the incident to impugn the reliability not only of Emerson, but of all critics of terror and of Fox News as a whole. But as you might expect, their outrage and ridicule are selective. Emerson overstated his case, but he was talking about a problem that is real. “Muslim Patrols” that violently enforced Sharia in London were jailed late in 2013, and there are no-go areas for non-Muslims in Birmingham and elsewhere in Britain: commenters on a Daily Mail piece about Emerson’s gaffe stated: “Just shows Cameron doesn’t even know what is happening in this country, as the news presenter is totally correct, its a no go zone .” “Include parts of London in that too. Seen first hand.” “There ARE some parts of Birmingham where you darent or shouldn’t go !” “Is he far off the truth? Maybe it’s not true for Birmingham as a whole but there are certain areas where it is true. Certainly it is true of certain other Towns in the UK. Bradford, Leicester, Luton spring to mind.”
While ridiculing and excoriating Emerson, the mainstream media is enormously deferential to Reza Aslan, a barely literate charlatan who regularly makes egregious errors of fact. But as far as the mainstream media is concerned, he is on the correct side, and so he gets an endless free pass, no matter how wild and stupid his statements become. Aslan thinks Ethiopia and Eritrea are in Central Africa. He called Turkey the second most populous Muslim country, which was only about 100 million people off. He has also referred to “the reincarnation, which Christianity talks about” — although he later claimed that one was a “typo.” Aslan has claimed that Muhammad outlawed slavery (he actually owned slaves). He has asserted that Marx and Freud “gave birth to the Enlightenment” (both were born after it ended). He has insisted that the idea of resurrection “simply doesn’t exist in Judaism,” despite numerous passages to the contrary in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Aslan has also 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,” but the Jesuits were founded in 1534, and according to the California Catholic Conference, “the popular term ‘preferential option for the poor’ is relatively new. Its first use in a Church document is in 1968.” He invoked Pope Pius XI as an example of how “historically, Fascist ideology did infect corners of the Catholic world,” apparently ignorant of the fact that Pius XI issued the anti-fascist encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.
Similarly, Aslan has revealed that he can barely write English, indicating that his books are either ghostwritten or very heavily edited: he confuses “than” with “then"; apparently thinks the Latin word “et” is an abbreviation; and writes “clown’s” for “clowns.”
But to the mainstream media, Reza Aslan is a “renowned scholar,” while Steve Emerson, who has been on the front lines exposing the activities of jihad terrorists and Islamic supremacists for over twenty years, is a “self-proclaimed expert.” All you have to do is mouth the accepted establishment opinions, kids, and you, too, can be a renowned scholar!
