All weekend, while I hung out in the hotel at Denver…

I endured watching TV pundits scratching the $200 haircuts on their 88 cent heads and pondering the question of whether their might be some remote connection between Islamic belief and a guy who praises Muslim suicide bombers as heros and martyrs, uses his authority as a psychiatrist to proselytize vulnerable patiences with Islam, and dresses in traditional Muslim garb in preparation for bursting into a room full of defenseless people and shouting “Allahu ackbar!” as he guns them down.

It was a spectacular display of deliberate willed stupidity by a culture that does not want to acknowledge that Islam tends to breed such acts of terror with startling frequency.

Of course, that same media culture has absolutely no trouble painting Christians as dangerous fanatics (no doubt due to the roving gangs of gun-toting Methodists who shouts “Jesus is Lord” as they blast away at defenseless people.

Meanwhile, Roland Emmerich does a stand up job making clear what motivates so much of the willed stupidity from our Chattering Classes who refuse to ever notice the bleedin’ obvious. It’s all about the cowardice:

For “2012,” Emmerich set his sites on destroying the some biggest landmarks around the world, from Rome to Rio. But there’s one place that Emmerich wanted to demolish but didn’t: the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure located in the center of Mecca. It’s the focus of prayers and the site of the Hajj, the biggest, most important pilgrimage in Islam.

“Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” the filmmaker told scifiwire.com. “But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, ‘I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.’ And he was right.”

Emmerich went on: “We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have … a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”

Note the passive voice. Emmerich doesn’t acknowledge that he is a coward afraid of offending Bronze Age Bullies with thin skin. Instead, he blabbers something about “that state the world is in.”

Meanwhile, the Religion That Can’t Grow Up behold the carnage wrought by another Son of the Prophet and naturally blames… somebody else while feeling sorry for itself. Boo hoo. Somebody made fun of the shooter. Poor him. Boy, I’m sure lucky that nobody in our culture ever mocks us mackerel snappers. If they did, I guess we’d be perfectly justified in opening fire on innocent civilians.

And speaking of us mackerel snappers, some particularly ingenious thinkers found a way to blame 400 year old English Catholics for the crime:

There simply is no information yet about what Hasan’s motives were, or whether Hasan is indeed muslim or not. Of course, that last bit of information is the one that everyone will want to know about the most, even though in a fundamental sense it matters the least. (…)

However, something disquieting about the date… It should be noted (as others like Ali Eteraz already have) that today is Guy Fawkes Day – the anniversary of a plot by a Catholic dissident to blow up the English Parliament then dominated by Protestants).

If the shootings were motivated by some sense of grievance against US foreign/military policy, then the date is surely significant.

I’m all for not leaping to conclusions. What drives me crazy about our media is that they constantly make the pre-emptive leap to definitively declaring that acts of evil committed by Muslims have nothing to do with their Muslim faith, when any fool can see that’s *exactly* what inspired them.

No. That’s doesn’t mean all Muslims are terrorists (duh)! But it does mean we are absolute idiots to go on ignoring the fact that Islam a) has plenty of room in its body of teaching for this sort of brutal violence, b) has plenty of people in the broad spectrum of Islamic interpretation who approve of this kind of violence and are in various stages of readiness to commit it; and c) we are fools to ignore the often glaring warning signals for the sake of “sensitivity”. We are even greater fools to tiptoe around Muslims whose first reaction to such crimes is to blame everybody else but their tradition and to demand victimhood for themselves.