David Brooks on the current crisis

You've got to have Times $elect to read the column, but David Brooks has some sobering thoughts on this past week. He says, for one, that the international system is plainly broken, that while the Americans screw up, the Europeans live in their escapist fantasy land, and the Russians and Chinese indulge in greed, the nastiest people in the world are driving events. Given my interests, I was most struck by this point of Brooks's:

The third lesson [of the week] is that a huge gap is emerging between the way ordinary Americans see the ARab world and the way members of the political, media and intellectual elites see it.

Elite debate is restrained by a series of enlightened attitudes that amount to a code of political correctness: be tolerant of cultural differences, seek to understand the responses of people who feel oppressed, don't judge groups, never criticized somebody else's religion.

Brooks correctly notes that masses of ordinary people reject that head-in-the-sand mentality. "These millions of Americans believe the pope has nothing to apologize for," he writes.

What these Americans see is fanatical violence, a rampant culture of victimology and grievance, a tendency by many Arabs to blame anyone other than themselves for the problems they create. These Americans don't believe they should lower their standards of tolerable behavior merely for the sake of multicultural politeness, and they are growing ever more disgusted with commentators and leaders who are totally divorced from the reality they see on TV every night.

I suspect this is a guess on Brooks's part more than anything based on data, but I'd bet my wallet that he's right -- and I certainly hope he's right. If the American people are waiting on the news media to tell them what's really going on in the Muslim world, and to help them interpret events, they will remain ignorant. If people really are growing angry and mistrustful of the media and the politicians on this point, I can only congratulate them on their powers of observation and rationality. Seriously, there's not much more than depresses me about my profession than the p.c. rules we follow on reporting and commenting on Islamic matters. Without a doubt the emotional reaction I feel is driven in part by the personal trauma of 9/11, and seeing where Islamic extremism ends up. In the spring of 2003, I paid a visit to an Islamic bookstore a couple of doors down from the Al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, which was an al-Qaeda recruiting center in the 1990s. This was a year and a half after 9/11, and still I found books urging Muslims -- literally -- to hate Jews and Christians. One in particular advised Muslims to limit contact with Jews and Christians "because you might come to love them."

I feel a sense of personal urgency about all this when I see things like the Toronto cell of homegrown terrorists. How much of this Saudi junk is being taught at local mosques around the country, radicalizing young people? I honestly don't know. I don't think anybody does, really. But what makes me so angry, as I keep saying, is the willful incuriosity of my profession on this point. The thing too is that among the people hurt by this p.c. approach are the Muslims whose mosques don't welcome Salafism, and who in fact are considered apostates and suchlike by the Salafis. They're brought under suspicion by many in the public too, because the media doesn't try to investigate what's happening, and draw distinctions. I was talking last week to someone here who said he thought that all mosques were teaching this garbage. I told him he didn't know that, and neither did I. We just don't know a lot. And how else are we going to find out if the media don't get in there and find out and tell us?

I'll spare you the sermon. You know where I'm going with this. Just believe me when I tell you that David Brooks is right, and that the media elite cannot be trusted to be honest and thorough in this matter. And we in the media are going to have a lot to answer for one of these days.