New in PJ Media:
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been engaging in a bit of damage control since the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, affectionately known as “The Butcher of Baghdad,” is set to come to New York to address the United Nations, and the Iranians don’t want to make the possibility that Old Joe Biden’s ultra-woke handlers would ban him from entering the country any less remote than it is now. And so Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Monday: “We categorically deny” any connection to the attack. “No one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
This being Iran, however, damage control is not always as smooth as we’re used to in the West. On Thursday, Iran’s state-controlled Press TV featured an American professor who said that the stabbing attack on Rushdie was the fault of…the Jews. The Press TV article was entitled “Rushdie attack might be Israeli plot to spread Islamophobia: Scholar.” Of course! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
Press TV’s scholar was Kevin Barrett, whom it described variously as “an American writer and political analyst” and “an American author, journalist, and radio host.” Whatever else Barrett may be, he is a conspiracy-minded man who believes that he has been a victim of one himself. The bio he supplied to Amazon.com states that “From 1991 through 2006 Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris and Wisconsin.” But then he fell victim to the wicked conservatives: “In summer 2006 Dr. Barrett was attacked by a group of Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007 Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities.”
Yeah, sure, because we all know how much American colleges and universities hate harsh critics of the U.S. government, and that Kevin Barrett certainly is. He is the author of, among other classics, a book entitled Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie. A convert to Islam, he is also no fan of the freedom of speech; one of his other books is We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo!
In all that, Barrett sounds like a fairly typical far-Left academic, but on Press TV Thursday, he dived happily off the deep end, saying: “The obscene blasphemy in Rushdie’s book is actually much worse than just calling the Prophet (PBUH) insulting names. It is way over the top, and raises the question, why did he write such a book?”
There is more. Read the rest here.
Namer says
Isnt the muslims rejecting that a muslim stabed Rushdie the same thing as rejecting Islam?
gravenimage says
Namer, if something makes Muslims look bad, then if must have been done by Jews. This is how pious Muslims can both celebrate Jihad terror attacks like 9/11 *and* blame it on the Jews and Americans and other infidels.
I first ran into this bizarre phenomenon not long after 9/11. A journalist in Indonesia–I think he was with CNN–was interviewing a group of Muslim men, all of whom claimed that 9/11 was done by Infidels. But I noticed that one of the men was wearing one of those sickening t-shirts with an image of bin Laden looming over the twin towers–celebrating this being an Islamic Jihad terror attack. Sadly, the journalist didn’t mention this at all, although he couldn’t possibly have missed it.
gravenimage says
Iranian State Media Features American Prof With a New Theory on Rushdie Stabbing: The Jews Did It
……………………………..
Ah…right. That’s why a Muslim with links to Iran who bemoaned not having had a stricter Islamic upbringing stabbed a man who had a Fatwa out on him for having insulted Islam–so it must have been Jews who did it! Really, Muslims are not even trying these days…