When Muslims rule the world

Osama bin Laden is not dead. There is good reason why his body was cremated and tossed into the ocean. As we all know, or should know, this was not only to insult devotees of certain segments of the broader Islamic faith; it was to ensure there was no DNA trace. No proof.

What was or is the world’s most wanted man may very well be dead in the flesh. But he lives on in the hearts and minds of his followers. He smoulders deep in their burning, zealot souls. With the removal of one head, others heads appear. The war has barely just begun.

Notice the inflammatory nature of my wording above, and of course, my headline. This is the language of too much current news: to stir up negative emotions in readers. Fear. Anger. Contempt for others. In this case, of Muslims or, at least, a certain kind of Muslim.

A recent video clip was doing the email and Facebook rounds showing how Muslims are apparently taking over Paris. The panning and stills and angles of the camera are carefully exploited. The women in their black garb and niqabs are scarily mysterious; the camera lenses brush them with a deathly, eerie air. There is something sinister about the celebrants as they genuflect towards Allah (bless His holy name). The Muslims are thoroughly othered. The pictures and the commentary tell us: Muslims are slowly and stealthily taking over the world.

Though on the surface the video seems to be giving bald facts, it is enormously biased. As is too much news, particularly the visual media. The producer of the film clip is CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Society. Its stated goal is: “CBN is a global ministry committed to preparing the nations of the world for the coming of Jesus Christ through mass media.” This is not exactly an independent, objective source for newsworthy information. The source is malevolently prejudiced, if not fanatical. And therefore utterly irresponsible. It, like many news reports, as television and the internet have evolved over the last few decades, is designed to manipulate people’s mindsets and make them see particular groups (or who to vote for, obviously) in a certain way. Who is the agency?

The agencies are those who wish to market products. Any product. Including dread. Today’s news is dangerous. The atrophying of information from actual event to its final “realignment”, so the skewed or re-created information can play with people’s minds, evinces in the manipulators, and creates in the viewers, a shallow, unexamined bigotry. Hence racism or the idea of racism as accusation and defensive distancing from others (“othering” them, “playing the race card”), continues to keep too many South Africans apart. Yes: apart, like that word and its baggage we all thought would be behind us: apartheid. A good book to read on the broad subject of news and manipulation is James Fenton’s aptly titled “Bad News”.

The “Islamic expert” quoted in the Paris Muslims video, Radu Stoenescu, has no solid background, academic or otherwise, in theology and Islamic thought. He says that all Muslims wish to institute sharia law in France. This is utterly unsubstantiated, from what I can see. Could any Muslim readers, particularly those well-versed in Islamic thinking, comment on this and the video please?

One also has to grimace at the kind of “headlines” which accompany news like this. “A MUST SEE!” (Ummm … the new Avatar movie?) “THIS CAN HAPPEN HERE!”

Where is here? Here is everywhere. Sigh. So Muslims are now taking over everywhere. Just as Jews were (and are) painted by Nazis. Innocently genuflecting people going about the rituals of their faith suddenly become the new, feared, rulers-to-be of the world. And indeed, the followers of Islam may just become the new world despots (arguably already so along with China, economically speaking). This is because the mystifying, frightening nature of the ongoing stream of news and information overload is that it creates events in advance to become what it is “warning” us about, what it is proleptically portraying as already “here”. In simple terms: a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It never ceases to amaze me how anything can be twisted into being a marketable product. Even dread. For example, a recent trilogy of novels appeared, Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers for the Assassin (the title of the first book in the series). In these gritty, grungy thrillers, the premise is that Muslims have taken over large portions of the US, which collapsed under — apparently — Zionist nuclear attacks in 2015. This, it turns out, is an elaborate conspiracy theory constructed by fundamentalist Islamic groups all too reminiscent of al-Qaeda.

Quite ballsy. The US is now known as The Islam Republic in Ferrigno’s novels. It does give one food for thought and makes one think, “what if … ?”

One “buy me” blurb about the Assassin series on one of the online bookshops goes: “Every once in a while, a novel comes along that is so dazzling, so audacious, that it seizes you by the scruff of your neck and forces you to sit up and take notice.”

Take notice of … what? That you should be reinforcing your subconscious mental tapes of fear of the “other”? That Islam is insidiously infiltrating the US and the rest of the world? Is that dreadful possibility what we are supposed to sit up and take notice of? Fascinatingly, dread is the key to getting you to buy these novels and its “edge-of your-seat” premises about a post-US, post-nuclear holocaust terrain. In the Assassin trilogy, people utterly believe, again as a result of distorted news coverage and re-aligned history, that the Zionists caused the overthrow of the US. Enter Ricky, or Rakkim, along with his sexy girlfriend (what else?). He is a Muslim believer who is a deadly assassin with skills that are virtually superhuman. He is something of an X-Man, a Wolverine, as he seeks to find out the truth and take on an assassin even more dangerous than him (what else to rivet the reader?). It is indeed discovered that the Zionist overthrow was a cunning conspiracy seeded many decades ago by a mysterious, shadowy figure, the Old One (with obvious reference to Bin Laden) and his deadly, secret assassins. The Assassin trilogy is on the whole a great read if you love quasi-science fiction and novels that deal with intricate conspiracy theories that border on the “truths” suggested by the stream of news coming at us from every which way and angle on the internet and television and also through
Hollywood.

However, my readers by now know I prefer writing about grass-roots stuff. I am not a religious person at all. The thing is, the Muslims I know on the ground are normal, peace-loving people. There are two grinning young male Muslims who sell us the most delicious fresh bread straight off the griddle here in the village we live in, in Suzhou, China. They are so friendly and love cracking jokes. It is striking for me to hear Mandarin spoken in a singsong Indian-Tibetan kind of accent. According to their particular tradition within the broader Islamic faith, they won’t touch money and trust us to put our bucks in a small bucket and take out the change ourselves. A close business associate of mine, a Muslim, recently suffered the loss of his sister and father in separate incidents. In his emails to me, his faith, and the comfort he takes in that, clearly shines through. He is also a down-to-earth family man and father with strong morals and values.

Another Muslim I knew helped me sort out a repair job to my car in which I had been thoroughly screwed by a mechanic. He replaced the parts himself and told me to just take back the parts to that con artist mechanic and cancel my cheque. I did.

When Muslims rule the world? For the most part they just want to get on with their lives, just like the rest of us. The juggernaut “news” of today has developed a virtual sentience of its own, but no conscience. Its sentience is almost purely based on the exploitation of people’s minds for marketable products.

This article first appeared on Rod’s “The Mocking Truth” column on NewsTime