November 21, 2002 -- Of all the lies told during the PBS series recently aired on Oregon PublicBroadcasting, Islam - Empire of Faith, the greatest is the one told tonight.  In a series created as a seeming defense for the faith -- a noble educational effort designed to fight ignorance-based religious bigotry via reaction to the perpetrators of ground zero -- PBS has once more proved me wrong.  With each of their abortions of truth, I say, "They can't top this lie."  Yet, every time, they do. 

As this (third, I think it was) episode opens we are told of the miraculous expansion of Islam from a desert epiphany in a cave near Mecca to an empire that stretched from the middle-east all the way across the Mediterranean to southern Spain.  Only one true reference to the manner of this expansion was made.  One sentence in the text of the program.  But it was done quickly, in passing, and dismissed as irrelevant.   The reason for the expansion promoted here was the brilliance of the idea of Islam.  The essence of Islam.  Its genius, tolerance and enlightened attitude toward the exploration of knowledge.

(I'll give you a hint, here.  A great deal of technological progress was made during the golden age of the Nazis.  Ideas from the Volkswagen to modern rocketry and the fundamentals of atomic physics evolved inside that warm and enlightened atmosphere.) 

While Europe was eating rats and living in barely more than filthy caves, the Renaissance, it seems, was beginning in the marvelous empire of Islam.  While Medieval German monks wrote their few books on crude parchment, the eager academics of Islam were building libraries made of paper. (Presented in such a way that the audience was left with the impression that Islam invented paper, which is not the case.  While the word "paper" comes from "papyrus" which is Egyptian, and those ancient people did pound papyrus reed mats into sheets for writing on, paper as we know it was invented in 105 A.D. by Ts'ai Lun, a Chinese court official.  This was hundreds of years before the birth of Mohammed, and thus, Islam.)

But that is just a little lie.  Nothing compared to the Great Lie.

And, during this program, we were told of the great tolerance of other religions by the enlightened Islamic world.  No mention was made of the precedent that by half a thousand years predated this purported Islamic tolerance.  You may recall that Pontius Pilate  refused to condemn Christ.  This, in spite of what Hollywood has told you, was typical of the empire that preceded the Islamic expansion -- Rome.  And, it was typical of the one that defeated the Persian (Iranian) Empire on the plains of Marathon.  That of the Age of the Greek city states.  (The Greeks built temples to every God they ran across, including one to the "Unknown God," who they realized they might have missed.)

There is, honest to God, no worse source of information on the planet than PBS.  Even when they get some of the facts straight, they filter them through progressive fantasy, spinning the true meaning of events off into the wilderness.  Here's another example from this program.  Not the gigantic lie, but rather just another little one.

The Arab city of Cordoba in southern Spain, the program told us, was a miracle of modernity when Parisians lived in shabby shacks on the fouled, muddy banks of the Seine.  That's true.  In the words of King Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia, "There were miles of street lighting in Cordoba when London was a village."  In rapturous text, the narrator and "Islamic experts" featured on PBS told us of the great gardens and magnificent palaces and mansions of this most enlightened and prosperous city on the verge of filthy, Christian Europe.

As I watched this rhapsody of academic admiration, I kept waiting for these "scholars"  to do what they usually do when speaking about wealth -- condemn the obviously Dickensian upper class excesses of Islamic Cordoba.  Palaces?  Wealth, as we all know from watching (and listening to)  public broadcasting, is bad.  Quite obviously the difference in pay scale between top management and the workers must have been astronomical.  The city had many thousands of citizens, and there were no more than a hundred mansions and castles.  The gap between the rich and the poor was titanic!  Yet, this was not mentioned.  To the modern American Left, it seems, whether an income gap is good or bad depends on just who the rich are -- at least in terms of the needs of the propaganda moment.  The Cordoban slave trade, like the modern African slave trade, also failed to warrant notice, here.

But, that is just another little lie, in this case one of omission.  Just a break in normal practice for convenience. To condemn Islam like they condemn American business would have taken the impact from their intended victim in this program.  No diversion could be allowed.  The end justifies the means.

The end they were protecting?  Vilification of Christianity, of course. 

In essays, I have written of the history of Jerusalem and the difference between the Islamic mythos and Arthurian legend.  Some readers found information there which they had not before seen, and which gave them a new perspective on the topic.  I'm not bragging, here.  All one has to do to generate reader gratitude these days is include the information academia and the Leftist mainstream media leaves out.  It's child's play to be startlingly fresh when compared to those duds.

In one tract, I discussed  the PBS love of groups, and of their use of group manipulation in a divide and conquer process that over recent decades has partially gutted the U.S. Constitution and damaged the culture created by Christian-based mores -- the culture that created the greatest, most free, most noble, most generous, most inventive, most dynamic superpower in  history.   Most of the good conservative talk show hosts and columnists have covered this subject, as well -- and did it before me.

I've linked these topics above, as you can see, so you may explore them in more depth, if you wish.  But for our purposes here, I will condense the last one.  A socialist, which is the same as a communist or a fascist or a progressive or a liberal -- all of those flags flap in the same wind -- divides to conquer.  During the last century, they set labor against management, black against white, rich against poor and male against female, to name a few examples.  By this, I mean, they used these pairings, enhanced any problems found in them, magnified and distorted these problems, invented new problems that didn't and don't exist, belittled progress made, denied progress made, drove their crowbar ever deeper and pushed on the handle to widen, ever widen, the gaps.

America is a nation based on Christian values.  That is why it from time to time admits it has sinned and then takes action to heal the wounds created by that sin, and to correct the processes that allowed it.  The only reason it can do this is because its supreme legal document, the U.S. Constitution, is based on individual rights and freedoms -- not on group rights and freedoms.  By writing it that way, for example, the founding fathers rang the eventual death knell for the slavery on which their very national economy was based -- and they knew exactly what they were doing.  Unlike modern graduates of our public school system, they were well read in classic thought, and knew the meanings of words.

So, you say (if you haven't guessed it, already) what the Hell am I talking about, here?  What is the Great Big Lie PBS told, or Great Big Truth they didn't tell, in this program?  And, how is it being used to divide and conquer America?

The lie is the almost total dismissal of the reason why Islam created an empire in record time.  Islam is the religious empire of the sword.  It was created by invasion.  By the butchery of other peoples in other lands.   It's quite logical when you consider that in the Koran, Moslems are instructed to kill those who stand against the righteous -- the "righteous" being defined as Islam, of course.  And, in fact, the founder of the faith, the prophet, Mohammed, began the process.  He took an army to Mecca and destroyed the ancient gods of the Arabs.  His first act upon gaining military strength was identical to Christian missionaries, backed by the American military, who forced American tribal members, Indians, to cease the worship of their animal spirits and bend their knees to the God of the Bible. 
 

American Indian spiritualism was virtually identical to the animal spirit worship of the pre-Islamic practitioners at Mecca and throughout the Arab world.  For the present needs of PBS, the same act they denounce as evil in historic America they fail to criticize in historic Islam.  As you watch the Robert Redford production of Skinwalker on PBS, or any of the many vignettes and segments featuring "native Americans" talking about the recapture of their suppressed ancient beliefs, reflect on what you have just read.  Ask yourself why there are no programs, segments or vignettes about how Islam suppressed the ancient beliefs of the "native Arab tribes."

The lie rests, also, in the portrayal of an "Egyptian" ruler of Jerusalem. (Egypt, at that time was, of course, a nation upon which Islam had been propagated by the sword.)  This "madman,"  as the program called him, cannot be considered to have reflected the true and noble values of Islam.  He destroyed the most holy site in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher -- the structure built by the Roman emperor, Constantine, over the reputed burial place of Jesus Christ.   Islam, of course, never stood for that kind of thing.

(Tell that to the victims who in the times following the advent of Mohammed lived in the lands by the Mediterranean and by the sword became "converts" of the Islamic Empire of Faith -- the fastest "growing" religion in history.  Tell that to the Jews who until a military victory within living memory were by tolerant Islam, the mullahs of Palestinian Islam!, denied access to their holiest of places. Tell it, in fact, to the present day slaves which are bought and sold by the Islamic traders of North Africa's Sudan. And, tell it to the little girl child who looked out the airplane window at the approaching tower of the World Trade center as her new pilot in an Arabic tongue cried "God is great!"  --  the very words assigned to Islam by its founding icon.)

In spite of the fact that Moslems rulers after the "madman" rebuilt a nice new Church of the Sepulcher for the Christians, the evil Crusaders came from filthy white Europe and butchered the peace loving, gentle, kind, Islamic people, sacking the city and taking power.  Bad Christian Crusaders.  Bad.

The program didn't mention anything other than this about the history of Jerusalem during its description of these events, by the way.  If you use the Jerusalem link up above, you will discover why.  The truth about Jerusalem isn't convenient to the present purposes of the Left.

The hypocrisy of PBS here is on a galactic scale.

Why in the world would they do something like this?

Simple.  America is a prosperous and free nation.  Christian values are very compatible with capitalism.  Capitalism flourishes in Christian nations.  Freedom flourishes in Christian nations. Christianity is philosophically unique in that it contains a special and indissoluble focus on the individual. This idea as it relates to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, is formulated in a way that generates a consanguinity with the Western idea.  As pointed out above, that is why the founding fathers designed the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights the way they did.  Most of them were what today would be called Christian conservatives.  Rights come, they believed, from God to the individual.  Their basic legal structure, as a result, did something no governmental document in history had done -- protected the rights of the common citizen, one citizen at a time.  (Even from his own government!  A revolutionary concept whose basis is founded on a "group" of one person, and not found in a single Islamic theocracy which presently exists in the world.)

The liberals of PBS despise Christians other than those who belong to sects within the National Council of Churches, which they and their fellow socialists control. The sects of the NCC support a woman's right to have a physician stick a scissors in the back of her half-born child's skull, then insert a tube in the gash and vacuum its living brains from its skull.  The child's head is out of the body of the mother, and still it is not to them a human being with rights!  The sects of the NCC brought the father of Elian Gonzales to America in a private jet and when Clinton's Reichsmarshall, Reno, used the Justice Dept. (the SS in her hands) to take the boy from his uncle's home, returned him to the utopian socialist state of Cuba. Where were the rights of that small individual? 

These are the same sects, along with the ACLU, which are today trying to block Bush administration attempts to protect you from Islamic terrorists by "profiling."  (It is, they say, a violation of constitutional rights to inspect the baggage and person of someone named Mohammed from Syria, and not the person and baggage of someone named Mary from Boston.  The creators of rights for groups, it seems, do not believe also in responsibilities for groups.)

Many of you do not believe what I am saying here, of course.  You say, "The man who writes this is a crackpot.  An extremist."  Then, six days later, on the evening of November 27, 2002,  when PBS runs its totally speculative "Great Fire in Rome," an American journalistic abortion if there ever was one, you are told that the famed madman, Nero, did not burn Rome.  You hear the narrator tell you that Christians were fed to lions as a standard criminal punishment for responding to prophecies in the Old Testament and becoming revolutionary arsonists.with burning crosses.  Rome's attutude toward Christians was understandable. (As is the modern Islamic attitude toward the Zionist Jews which have stolen Jerusalem from its rightful heirs, just like the Christian Crusaders -- and in fact who did it the last time, in 1948, with the help of the descendants of those very Crusaders!)

Socialism is a philosophy that subsumes the individual into a large group known as "the State."  The State, if controlled by socialists, will approve of the proper things and disapprove of improper things.  We will have the correct kind of free speech and the correct kind of religion (a state-approved religion, secularist worship of the State, which feeds the politically incorrect to the lions) and the correct distribution of income and the correct kind of free press.

And, so, we come to the close of this essay.  Secularism (anti-religion) is the faith of socialism.  Religion, like capitalism and free speech, is just one of the things about America that socialists have long labored to distort and eventually destroy.  The fiction about Islam they created in this program series was designed specifically to drive another wedge in America.  They are using one religion to attack another religion.  Which one they are using to attack which other one is unimportant.  Socialists actually despise Islam only slightly less than they despise Christianity.

Whether done by conscious intent or, as I believe, by a kind of learned instinct, that this series was created at this time is no accident.  It is socialist methodology to use current events to drive wedges.  Opportunism is a Marxist byword.  Read the Communist Manifesto if you don't believe me.  The instructions for this sort of activity are written there as directly, as plainly and as clearly as the instructions on a matchbook.  (Photo: Karl Marx)

Close cover before striking.

The blaze they are trying to ignite in the name of understanding is the very flame they claim they wish to quench.  Ignorance.  They stand foursquare for Orwellian misinformation, as this biased, distorted program series proves.  Their defense of Islam is intended to encourage extremists by way of pulling the teeth of the American response to tyrannical Islamist theology, for as their manifesto clearly states, it is from societal weakness that their revolution will arise.  A society in dispute is a weak society.  Disruption generates a vacuum into which socialist theology can rush, for the proletariat is that which suffers the most from instability, and so is that which will accept chains as the price of cessation of turmoil.

Marx is dead, the Soviet Union has collapsed, Mao's Red Guards are ever so slowly trading their caps in for suits and ties, France is facing massive labor demonstrations as it begins to slowly privatize its industrial structure and the Republicans are about to appoint judges who will treat the U.S. Constitution as something more than a document to be ignored in the name of progressivism. 

Hell, even Siggy Freud's puerile ejaculations blaming Victorian sexual attitudes for dysfunctionality have fallen before the actual deviancy statistics in cultures [ours for one] which adopted his theology.  Chastity before marriage is a rising movement in America!!  PBS may still wish to celebrate him, but to the rational members of the modern world of psychology as well as those everyday citizens participating in the resurgence of traditional religion in America, he is just a liberal jerkoff.  His philosophy led to teachers taking American students to homosexual nightclubs in support of multiculturalist dogma.  It was a great way, they thought, to rip the guts out of morality.  Too bad for them it has generated revulsion for "modern" American education because  the decline of traditional moral standards methods like these generate is directly related to the decline in the viability of the traditional American family.

And that, in the end, is the final target.  The piece discussed here is just one of the facets of the jewell of socialism.  The final one, the key one, is the destruction of the traditional American family -- in it's most virlulent form presented by Norman Rockwell.  It's all part of the same thing.  Traditional values which have supported the evil American republic must be destroyed. Control cannot be achieved until the State becomes the parent of all. 

This is socialism's hour of greatest need.  Every liberal's greatest effort is required if the disaster of freedom from government domination is to be avoided.

Under no circumstances give a red cent to these people.  Don't send them a check and don't leave them part of your estate.  If your time is no more valuable than that of the American patriots who died at Lexington and Concord, drop a note to your political representatives and tell them to remove all financial support from this monster known as public broadcasting.  Vote for candidates who look with suspicion on PBS, and in Oregon, on OPB.

(LL)

© 2002 Oregon Magazine  Photos are hotlinks to their source, where known.