Snark attack

Deborah Solomon's interviews in the Times' magazine are typically lively and entertaining, often for the way she can manage to slip in tricky, difficult questions. It's fun to see coddled celebrities squirm.

But at the tail end of today's interview with Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, Solomon wields a very clumsy ideological axe and insists that for Mr. Islam to be considered a "moderate" Muslim, he "denounce" "the extremist fringe" of the Muslims religion. Islam handles the ham-handed--and frankly racist--questioning with exemplary grace, but that doesn't excuse it.

How do you support yourself these days — off your old hits?

I think we sell about 1.5 million albums a year.

Which is how much in royalties? About a dollar an album?

Probably more.

For all your devotion to education and good deeds, government officials in various countries have tried to link you to extremist groups, including Hamas. What do you think of Hamas?

That’s an extremely loaded question.

Can you try to answer it?

I have never supported a terrorist group or any group that did other than charity and good to humankind.

O.K., but many of us here in the States would like to see moderate Muslims make more of an effort to denounce the extremist fringe of the faith. Very few mainstream Muslims have publicly criticized their radical brethren.

If I am not an example of that, then tell me, Who is?

So would you say you have contempt for a terrorist group like Hamas?

I wouldn’t put those words in my mouth. I wouldn’t say anything on that issue. I’m here to talk about peace. I’m a man who does want peace for this world, and I don’t think you will achieve that by putting people into corners and asking them very, very difficult questions about very contentious issues.

"Many of us here in the states would like to see moderate Muslims make more of an effort to denounce the extremist fringe of the faith." Anyone with any sophistication could see that that sentence contains the assumption that Muslims are uniquely violent. And Solomon further compounds her ignorance by stating that Americans as a group --"many of us here in the States"--share this prejudice. It just ain't so.

Which brings to mind Jennifer L. Pozner's article that ran in the aftermath of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Our media preserves the "terrorist" word for a small subset of terrorists, the foreign born ones. Historically, in terms of frequency and distribution of murderous attacks, domestic terrorists, (most of them intensely Christian-identified), have been a much greater danger to Americans, especially those who ever find themselves in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. But you'd never know that by reading most newspapers.

On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.

No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.

Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.

Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.

By Solomon's line of thinking, all Christians --or Jews, or Hindus--should be called upon to denounce the actions of their more radical brethren. Somehow, I don't see that happening.

Look, I understand Solomon's basically paid to be a bit of a bitch, but here her stereotyping in dangerous and inflammatory. A quick look at the right-wing blog response confirms that Yusuf Islam has failed the reactionary's favorite litmus test: "Cat Stevens REFUSES to denounce Hamas." [Name's not Cat Stevens, dude. Shades of the late sixties: it's a lot like the sportswriters who persisted in calling Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay].

Callling Hamas a terrorist organization, and leaving it at that, is typical of the oversimplifications that permeate the pages of the Times. I hadn't realized that this dumbed-down conventional wisdom had penetrated to what's supposed to be one of the most lighthearted features in that that publication. For a much more sophisticated view of what Hamas actually is, I'd suggest starting with this post from Tony Karon's Rootless Cosmopolitan.