Is NPR Getting It?
Today I donated to my local NPR affiliate, KUHF, specifically to buy scolding rights. I wanted to tell them that their reporting on Iraq was so appallingly slanted I no longer trusted them.
I got the email acknowledgement, and opened an email to begin lambasting and pleading.
And then Joe Loconte came on the radio, and said:
There seems to be less talk these days about the political grievances of terrorists, and more talk about their murderous ambitions.
What the hell?
There are fewer voices demanding greater empathy for Islamist rage, and more calling for recruits to overcome it. And these voices are coming from inside and outside the Islamic tradition.
I kept waiting for the debunking of this Roveist fantasy. Instead:
President Bush [is] linking the theology of militant Islam to that of fascism and communism. His national security strategy says America faces a totalitarian ideology that thrives on terror, enslavement, and murder.
Loconte does not debunk this. No, indeed. He gets it.
It’s critical for politicians and public intellectuals to warn us about the nature of new international threats. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and philosopher Lewis Mumford did much the same in the 1930s during the rise of Nazism….[Mumford] rejected the view that Nazi aggression could be explained by political injustices, and he pleaded for U.S. military intervention. Mumford’s description of fascism, its glorification of war, its hatred of democracy, its delight in physical cruelty, reads like a playbook for Osama bin Laden and his loyalists. More public thinkers are facing the possibility that Islam is being transformed into a new strain of the fascist disease….The barbarians, it seems, have returned. Their brooding racism, their genocidal ambitions, their corrupted spirituality: we’ve seen their likes before. And like their predecessors, they will not be appeased. We may disagree over how to defeat them, but let’s have no more debate over what this fight is really about.
[Emphasis, and any transcription errors, are mine.]
Without question, this is the sanest, and most important thing I have heard on NPR since the original attack on Baghdad.
It’s been said that we lost Vietnam when we lost Cronkite. I’m hoping now that if we’ve won NPR, we’ve won the war in the Middle East.
If NPR keeps this up, I might go back, and increase my donation.
Please, even if you are on dialup, and it will take a long time to download, go here, click the “Listen” button under the title, and hear what I have been trying to say for three years now from a voice many of you trust, and that I may begin to trust again.
If the Democratic leadership gets this, I might even not have to vote Republican next election.
(Joe Loconte is with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.)