NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE: Is Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security? No, but now that the war has begun, I worry about her, and here's why.
The nation cannot afford the naive illusions that have given many Americans comfort in peacetime. Chief among them is the notion, repeated ad nauseam by our leaders and the media, that Islam is a religion of peace. This may not be an outright lie, but it is so far from the full truth as to approach falsehood.
Americans have been told that they shouldn't attack the Muslims among us, and only the lowest of the low would disagree.
The American people, with very few exceptions, have risen to the challenge to be humane, decent, and loving toward Muslims in this country. Well and good.
Americans by nature want to think the best of those from other cultures. But we run the risk of blinding ourselves to the nature of the threat facing our country and our civilization. In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington warned us of deluding ourselves about the true nature of the Islamic threat.
"Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists," Huntington wrote. "Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise."
We can sit around making diversity quilts and thinking happy thoughts, or we can, with charity, commit ourselves to soberly assessing the historical and present-day reality of "peaceful" Islam, and its relations with non-Muslims.
Which brings us to Oprah. Last Friday [this article appeared on October 8, 2001], she devoted her program to "Islam 101," purportedly a crash course in the Mohammedan faith for her vast television audience of clueless Americans. It was grossly imbalanced and extremely dishonest. In fact, given how many Christians and other non-Muslims are horrifically persecuted today by Muslims in the name of Islam, it amounted to offensive propaganda.
Oprah called Islam "the most misunderstood of the three major religions" — yet did her best to add to the confusion by candy-coating the complicated truth about the Muslim faith. If you were to take Oprah's show as your guide to Islam, you would think Muslims were basically Episcopalians in veils and turbans.
Take her interview with Queen Rania of Jordan, a lovely, modern young woman who looks more at home in the pages of Vogue than in a hijab. The queen said that Islam "doesn't impose anything" on people — an absurd lie. Oprah asked her about the so-called "honor killings" of women in Jordan, murders committed by men against women in their families who are believed to have shamed the clan. For example, some young women who have been raped are in turn murdered by their male relatives for having stained the family's honor. Islam according to Oprah: Is Oprah a threat to national security? >>> By Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post
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