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BEWARE THE CHERRY-PICKER
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
Our culture is the predominance
of an idea
which draws after it this train of cities and institutions.
Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
a
man hears what he wants to hear,
and disregards the rest
Paul Simon
The
first cherry-pickers were instructed to pick only the ripe and
ready during the harvest season. Since then the appellative
has come to mean choosing the best from a group of things or
people. In op-ed or advocacy journalism, the designation is
usually accusative and/or pejorative, referring to “the
suppressing of evidence, or singling out data” that confirms
a particular position or point of view. When one journalist
accuses the other of cherry-picking, you can be near certain
that he/she is also a cherry-picker from the other side of the
fence.
Our opinion makers,
almost all of whom are quickly forgotten once their time has
passed, routinely resort to cherry-picking in stating their
case or argument. Where the greater truth lies, typically
lies outside their concern. For this reason, journalists are
often very clever, persuasive and influential, but rarely,
if ever, wise. If they were interested in the whole truth
and nothing but, they wouldn’t be journalists.
Unlike lawyers
who are hired to argue and defend behaviour with which they
might be personally opposed, cherry-pickers believe deeply
in the perceptions and positions they support and defend,
and where the means – cherry-picking – justify
the ends, their aim (in the pre-cloning age) is to convince
their readership to think and feel exactly as they do.
In the wide wake
of a quarter century’s worth of Islamic founded and
funded terrorism, journalists, en masse, have been
quoting (indicting) the Quran, arguing that it is –
at its essence -- a manual of war, especially compared to
the more ‘benign’ Christian, Jewish, Hindu and
Buddhist holy texts. That Christianity is responsible for
more
deaths than all other religions combined is a fact
that does not interest the cherry-picker.
No wonder many
Muslims regard the cherry-picking journalist with the same
suspicion and contempt many of us have for lawyers.
Joke:
What’s the difference between a dead snake and dead
lawyer on the highway? There are skid marks in front of
the snake.
Based on their
quotidian, Muslims know, as lived experience, that the Quran
is much more than the sum of its intolerance citations and
wrath directed towards the infidel. Having personally spent
ten months of my life traveling and living in Tunisia, Turkey
and Morocco, I can unreservedly state that Muslims are more
God-fearing (Ten Commandment bound) than Christians/Jews/Buddhists,
that, in times of peace, it is safer to travel in the above
three countries than any western country. If the measure of
worth of a religion is revealed in its ability to instill
the fear of God – the believer believes trespassing
entails very real theological consequences -- Islam is by
far and away the word’s most successful religion. Would
I rather that my car break down in a poor village in a Muslim
country than anywhere in Catholic Peru? Categorically, yes.
Should the cherry-picker,
for whom there is a direct link between the Quran and Islamic
terrorism, be made to account for the millions upon millions
of decent, well-intentioned Muslims who go about their day
with little else on their minds but paying the rent, raising
kids and dressing or undressing for inclement weather? If
we agree that good Muslims haven’t accidently lurched
or lucked into their goodness, their views must have been
shaped by other well-intentioned Muslims who cherry-picked
the Quran for good? Which means the Quran can serve both good
and evil, an assessment that surely approximates its truth
more than either one point of view or the other.
"the
taking of one innocent life is like taking all of Mankind
. . . and the saving of one life is like saving all of
Mankind" - Holy Qur'an, 5:33.
“Avoid
Cruelty and injustice . . . and guard yourselves against
miserliness, for this has ruined nations who lived before
you.”
“(God) has revealed to me that you should adopt
humility so that no one oppresses another.” Riyadh-us-Salaheen:1589
“All
mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority
over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over
an Arab. . . Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves.”
Prophet Muhammad (s), Last Sermon.
However
well-intended and anxious are those journalists railing against
the teachings of the Quran, accusing it in the court of public
opinion of being an accessory to terrorism, they are wittingly
(worrisomely) non-being (peripheralizing) millions of decent
Muslims who, no less than the twisted terrorist, have been informed
by the Quran.
According to Trevor
Phillips (What
British Muslims Really Think), and it
wasn’t so long ago the numbers approached 100%,
only
"39 per cent now think a woman should always obey her
husband; 18 per cent sympathize with people who take part
in violence against those who mock the Prophet; and 4 per
cent have sympathy for people who take part in suicide bombing
to fight injustice"
which leaves a
lot of very decent, law-abiding Muslims unaccounted for, especially
in North America where they are more efficiently integrated
into their communities than in class-divided, exclusionary
Europe.
That the western
leaning, secularized Muslim should be lumped together with
the jihadist is not only simplistic, it is counterproductive
and exposes western journalism at its reductive nadir. There
are millions of Muslims, like Christians, who identify as
Muslim or Christian, but are thoroughly secular (code for
heathen) in their behaviour. Surely the West can do better
than alienate millions of like-minded, potential allies simply
because they are Muslim? You don’t cut off an arm to
relieve a finger infection. Which isn’t to say that
immigration policy, in the name of political correctness,
shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the innate incompatibility
between Christianity and Islam. But in respect to the growing
number of Muslims who are no longer there for their holy texts,
for whom the law, and not God, is the ultimate authority,
they should be embraced and their members made to increase.
The Islam of the Hadith and Sura is on its way out: in the
Muslim heartland, in desert communities and along camel routes
the traders’ first and second priorities are water and
an Internet connection. In the cities, especially among the
young, jeans are replacing the djellaba,
and the voice of the second sex is no longer an inaudible
whisper in the winds of change. The writing is on their Wailing
Wall, just as the war ISIS and jihadists are waging against
modernity is more of a Last Stand than any offensive.
Normal, decent
cherry-picking Muslim parents, looking to instill the equivalent
of the Ten Commandments in their children, merely have to
open the Quran or look to the speeches of The Prophet for
confirmation of their private beliefs and guiding principles
in raising their families. Which begs the question: Since
the Quran can be used for both good and evil, how should we
receive the basket of goods offered up by the cherry-picking
journalist? With consideration skepticism because by the nature
of his mandate the positions he stakes out take precedent
over according the truth the respect and disinterested coverage
that is its due.
In this same vein,
not only the Quran but the Bible can be mined for all sorts
of defective, tendentious thinking. If you believe in women’s
natural inferiority, the cherry-picker will find a bumper
crop of edibles throughout the Bible:
Ephesians
6:9: Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you
do to the Lord . . . as the church submits to Christ, so
also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
If you’re
an indignant Cypriot Turk or Athenian with a long memory looking
to shape your children’s view of the nation of Zorba,
how about this:
Titus 1:7: Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.
And before we
sanctimoniously indict Islamic law, where the thief must relinquish
the hand that has stolen, we should pay heed to the wisdom
of,
Matthew
5:21: And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut
it off and throw it away.
In respect to
injunctions regarding the child’s obedience towards
a parent, and every demographers' secret wish, the Bible doesn’t
mince its words:
Matthew
15:19: Anyone who curses their father and mother is to be
put to death.”
There are of course
instances where we wish the cherry-picker had been able to
make a more effective case. The totally discredited, pedophile
wracked and wounded Catholic Church would be in seventh heaven
had the following injunction been implemented:
I Corinthians 7:16: Now to the unmarried . . . if they cannot
control themselves, they should marry, for it is better
to marry than to burn with passion.
From its humble
beginnings until the 12th century (the 1139 Second Lateran
Council) -- the golden years of Catholicism -- celibacy wasn’t
a condition for the priesthood. Since then more than a million
children (conservative estimate) have been sexually abused
by pedophile priests. Pope Francis was alleged to have said
that 2%
of all priests (the leprosy within the church)
are pedophiles.
With all due respect
to the sum of facts and arguments eloquently laid out by the
cherry-picker, the very existence of jihadism and ISIS tells
more about human nature than the Quran. The real issue driving
the clash of civilizations is power. Islam is on the wane,
and the old guard, comprised of literalists and androcentrics,
are desperately trying to cling to power: the Em-pyre Strikes
Back.
Does it not reflect
poorly on the cognitively challenged West if it can’t
distinguish between good and bad Muslims, between ally and
enemy? We are not at war with the world’s billion Muslims,
but with a fringe group of frustrated, renegade misfits looking
for a cause. The ISIS declaration of establishing a world
wide Caliphate is fatuous if not outright delusional, and
the witless West has bought into this narrative, into ISIS’s
megalomaniacal terms of reference even though not an inch
of western territory has been ceded, and never will. Empowered
by the Internet and social media (western inventions), ISIS
fomented terrorism is doubtlessly lethal, costly and psychologically
destabilizing but it is not waging war in any real sense.
If the pleasure
principle remains the great predictor of human behaviour,
Islam cannot compete with secularism, western hedonism. With
instant electronic access to the pleasure zones of the world,
fewer and fewer Muslims are there for their holy texts. Holy
writs and rules notwithstanding, freedom is the pain no one
can refuse, and once enjoyed cannot be wished away. “Although
everybody knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one
was quite sure what else Westernization was good for,”
writes Ohran Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City.
With secularism
in full ascendency (all toll roads lead to the bacchanalia),
this turning away from God to the gods, for the Muslim and
not the Christian, will be necessarily fraught with peril,
and there will be casualties, some of whom will be vulnerable
to radicalization. In the West, this turning away -- that
began with the separation of Church and state -- was very
gradual, when authority was incrementally devolved from God
to “the law,” at which point if there was no hiding
from God you could always circumvent or rewrite the law. In
Islam, religion and law have always been intricately intertwined,
and there is no avoiding the inner turmoil and dislocation
that ensue when abruptly confronted with (by consent) a radically
dissimilar value system. In the wake of this tectonic collision
between East and West, a huge nowhere zone must arise, where
the nowhere men (the rootless and disenfranchised) gather,
sandwiched between the past and modernity, torn between the
call of the muezzin during the day and Happy Hour
at night. Coming to their rescue, their succour, providing
them with purpose, self-esteem and community, is the cherry-picking
jihadist for whom the Quran is merely a means to an end, the
birth of nation, the noble struggle for survival in the face
of insurmountable odds.
Be chary of cherry-pickers
from both sides of the aisle; 82%
of all terrorist victims are Muslims.
COMMENTS
stocasti@rogers.com
Very impressed with your very objective
and well reasoned article.
user-submission@feedback.com
This will definitely
get you on the goods with the Muslim. However, I disagree
with many of your tenets.
The measure of a religion is NOT FEAR OF GOD. (Certainly
not of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism). Though it is absolutely
the measure of the Muslim religion.
Deaths? Yes many. But why blame the religion for man’s
obtuseness and pride.
(Nothing in the Gospels, which few nowadays bother reading,
incites/preaches ‘hatred’). And so, for example,
the Spanish Inquisition was State sponsored and not Vatican
backed. The Papacy was against it from the get-go. But,
the times being what they were, try as they might, Spain
being a mighty power, weak Popes – not all popes --
to protect their own (yes, Vatican had its state interests
as well . . . it wasn’t all squeaky clean) yielded
to the butcheries, but certainly did not fuel the horrors,
encourage the massacres from the pulpit.
The Spanish State persecuted Lutherans and other non-Catholic
groups as well as converted Muslims and Jews. (I say converted
as non-converted groups, non-Christians, i.e. Jews and Muslims
could not be persecuted. I suspect few know this fact).
It persecuted all militant, unrecanting dissidents in order
to instil fear of the state, maintain power which would
later bring them to the Americas. So no, not fear of God
but fear of the state. Catholicism was the glue used to
keep the Spanish state together. And do you really think
Hitler did what he did on ‘religious’ grounds?
Do you think he was an altar boy? Do you think he gave a
care about Christianity? No. He was a racist. That he was
born Catholic is incidental to his being. Christianity was
a means to that end.
In Ireland, North and South killings were the result of
political allegiances. North went with Britain, South wanted
independence. It just so happens the South is Catholic,
north Protestant, but the fighting is not, as many seem
to suggest, the result of religious ideological differences.
Religion is just a way to identify the other guys. If you’re
Catholic your a Paddy, and that is that.
My point being that comparing Islam and Christianity on
death counts is misleading. Compare the ‘theology’
and the ‘teaching.’
The cherry-picking reader will not be inconvenienced by
your views.
also by Robert J. Lewis:
Once
Were Animal
Islam
is Smarter Than the West
Islam
Divided by Two
Pedophiling
Innocence
Grappling
with Revenge
Hit
Me With That Music
The
Sinking of the Friendship
Om:
The Great Escape
Actor
on a Hot Tin Roof
Being
& Self-Consciousness
Giacometti:
A Line in the Wilderness
The
Jazz Solo
Chat
Rooms & Infidels
Music
Fatigue
Understanding
Rape
Have
Idea Will Travel
Bikini
Jihad
The
Reader Feedback Manifesto
Caste the First
Stone
Let's Get Cultured
Being & Baggage
Robert Mapplethorpe
1-800-Philosophy
The Eclectic Switch
Philosophical Time
What is Beauty?
In Defense of Heidegger
Hijackers, Hookers
and Paradise Now
Death Wish 7 Billion
My Gypsy Wife Tonight
On the Origins of
Love & Hate
Divine Right and
the Unrevolted Masses
Cycle Hype or Genotype
The Genocide Gene
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