Time piece claims "Radical Islam...may no longer exist"

A piece by the former World Editor for Time in the August 18th online issue of the mag claims "Islamic extremism...may no longer exist."

Yes, Time has escalated the liberals' war to disarm America to a new level by claiming not just that 1) any beheadings, suicide bombings, aircraft hijackings, schoolgirl burnings, acid-throwing or similar, uh, acts of misdirected anger management (or whatever the fuck the libs have most recently tried to tell you is the "nuanced" term for this crap) have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam; or 2) that any of those things you thought you'd read about were merely "bad optics with little real harm" (that's a quote from a Kos diarist about 9/11); or that 3) if any of those things did happen, it's really the victims' fault because they were dressed provocatively or insulting the Prophet by...existing.

No, Time's latest claim is that the whole "Islamic extremism" thing "may no longer exist." So if you're concerned about that, you're paranoid or some other variant of crazy.

Of course this is not a shocker coming from a rag as far Left as Time.

What's interesting are the techniques used by the author to frame the discussion, to marginalize opponents and paint them as unreasonable bigots, and to portray the project as the very essence of sweetness and inclusion. It's absolutely classic propaganda. Let's take a look:

Should Muslims be allowed to build a mosque at Ground Zero? Merely posing the question is an act of deliberate distortion...

So according to the author, even asking the question is a "deliberate" distortion, thus proof that anyone asking the question has sinister objectives. And here's the "distortion:"

...[because] the Community Center at Park51 will occupy not a solitary inch of the 16-block site on which the Twin Towers stood.

Beautifully done: The statement is true. But it's very artfully crafted to appear to imply that the term "ground zero mosque" used by opponents of building on the proposed site is a lie. But it's a fact that a chunk of debris the size of a Volkswagen hit the building in question. Seems to me that rational people would agree that anyplace within range of debris large enough to kill you is considered part of "ground zero."

And did you notice the author's comparison, "not a solitary inch of the 16-block site"? That's a classic technique used to dismiss any predicted negative effect of a proposal or program by showing that it is mathematically insignificant.

As in, "There are 1.3 Billion Muslims in the world, but only 19 actually hijacked the jets. That's a vanishingly small percentage, so why be alarmed?"

Many opponents of the Park51 project claim that the mosque itself isn't the problem; it's the idea of building it so close to the World Trade Center. Such misgivings have some validity. But the heat the mosque controversy has generated...is unhealthy, misplaced and ultimately self-defeating. It reflects our tendency to exaggerate the real threat posed by Islamic extremism and what America should do about it.

So those who oppose building a mosque at ground zero are "exaggerat[ing] the threat" posed by fanatics who flew passenger jets into a pair of 110-story buildings and killed 2,800 people? How is it even possible to "exaggerate" such a threat?

Nine years after 9/11, the fight over the mosque near Ground Zero shows how obsessed we remain with an enemy that may no longer exist.

An amazing assertion. The first support the author uses for it is a poll taken in Pakistan:

The story of the past decade in the Muslim world is that of the widespread rejection...of terrorism. A study by the Pew Research Center earlier this year found that...one-third of Pakistanis believed terrorism was justified in 2002; now just 8% do.

Great. If we assume this 8% result is typical of Muslims worldwide, that's only 100 million folks in the "terrorism is justified" camp. Hey, problem solved!

The next bit of support claimed by the author is this:

...though some militant Muslims surely wish us harm, their ability to actually inflict it has eroded; it has been more than five years since the last successful al-Qaeda attack in the West.

But have "militant Muslims" been trying to "inflict harm" on the West during that time? Let's see: There was the Muslim airline passenger with the bomb in his underwear last December. Fortunately it burned instead of detonating. And of course there was the van stuffed with explosives and propane bottles in Times Square. Again a fizzle, but not for want of trying.

There have been another 17 foiled plots from 2005 to the present. But hey, no biggie.

The author's phrasing implies that attempted attacks are no big deal--as long as they fail. But of course he can't actually say such a goofy thing, because to do so would reveal him as either a propagandist or someone not to be taken seriously by sane adults. So he uses the positive (and true) phrasing: no successful attacks... in the West... in the last five years.

(Wait...do you think you remember an "incident" at Fort Hood, Texas, in which a Muslim army officer shot and killed 16 American troops? No, citizen, we have no record of such an incident here at Time. Or perhaps the author doesn't consider this "incident" as a "successful attack." Or the final, all-saving loophole: The shooter was not a card-carrying member of al-Qaeda! Yeh, dat's it!)

(See, you stupid, bigoted American, al-Qaeda had nothing whatsoever to do with this example of Islamic extremism. So when I (Ramesh Ratnesar) write that "it has been more than five years since the last successful al-Qaeda attack in the West," you should be completely reassured.)

Nice. This guy must have been one of the MSM's vaunted "layers upon layers of fact-checkers" when he was employed as a Time editor.

BTW, the article's author, Romesh Ratnesar, was Deputy Managing Editor for Time until earlier this year, and is now a "contributing Editor-at-Large." He resigned earlier this year to join the New America Foundation. One of the foundation's goals is "universal health care based on an individual mandate." That last term seems to translate as "compulsion by totalitarian state." So he seems to be a garden-variety leftist.

No surprise, then, that he supports the victory mosque, and totally dismisses any significant threat to the U.S. from radical Islam.