Islam in a New Media Age

The eighth most emailed article on the New York Times yesterday was a column by Ross Douthat in which he laments the "cowering" of American institutions before (well you guessed it if you read Douthat before) the threat of Islamic violence. Douthat believes the recent South Park death threat is another example of how "Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all." By listing a few examples of censored journalists, intellectuals and politicians who are brave enough "to give offense to Islam", Douthat thinks the Muslim problem is the last frontier in American/Western public discourse which retreats before nothing else, but the fear to offend Muslims. This is the same Douthat who wrote extensively in the blog of the Atlantic and in the pages of the New York Times about Islam as the enduring enemy of the West, the greatest threat to the very existence of Christianity (a very Huntingtonesque view of the world, indeed.) What I find striking is not only Douthat's predictable anti-Islam rhetoric which guarantees a prominent spot in the New York Times, but also his lazy intellectualism which fails to look for counter examples, and I thought a minimum requirement for NYT's columnists was to consider and account for all facts!). Here's an excellent reaction to Douthat's myopic view of the world in which he lives. Had he done some minimal research without leaving the NYT's website , he would have come across a March 28th article on a "Corpus Christi" class production at Texas University featuring a gay Jesus which was canceled after the university received threatening calls and emails. Why wasn't there as much media scrutiny about that or about Kathy Griffith's provocative Jesus comment which was cut from the 2007 broadcast of the Emmy Awards, or about the University of Colorado biology professors who in 2007 received death threats from a Christian extremist for teaching evolution, or about the death threats which forced the removal of a billboard sponsored by an atheist group in Cincinnati this past November,without talking about those who acted on their death threats against abortion doctors.

The point here is not that Islam should be off bounds to critics, but to say that Muslims are the only ones threatening because that's what their religion teaches them is pure fantasy. Threatening anyone with death for things they said is not only cruel but barbaric and should always be met with scorn, but to single out one faith in a coward act of deliberate amnesia about the excesses in the name of one's own faith as Douthat does in his column is dishonest and irresponsible given the times in which we live. Douthat should be able to express his thoughts against Islam however he wishes to, but if the New York Times is willing to put up with his all too frequent diatribes, it owes it to its readers to impose a minimum requirement of fact-checking and constructive editorializing.