Maz Jobrani, Naif Anthony Brooks, And Those "Three Muslims murdered in Chapel Hill"

At WBUR, if we are to listen to Anthony Brooks’ introduction to Maz Jobrani, who has a line, supposedly humorous (I found nothing he said funny) about the situation of those he demurely calls “Middle Easterners” in America, by which I think he meant “Muslims,” and as we look around at the observable behavior of so many Muslims, in and out of the Middle East, there is nothing funny about them. And if in addition we happen to know what  gives rise to the atmospherrics of Muslim peoples and polities — that is, Islam itself, which is based on the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira — we will find Maz Jobrani unfunnier still.

What infuriates is the way in which Anthony Brooks, and Maz Jobrani, casually referred to the “Chapel Hill murders of three Musilms” without giving any hint that they were aware that there was 1) no evidence at all that Mr. Hicks, in his lapsus, was motivated by anti-Muslimi animus (Jobrani finds it apparently hard to believe that any Muslim, anywhere, could be attacked without “anti-Muslim” animus somewhere in the picture and that 2) there is plenty of evidence, already easily obtainable, that shows that Hicks was an “equal opportunity” complainer to all of his neighbors, about parking and noise, and that so alarming was his behavior that the neighbors had a few months ago held a meeting to discuss that very matter, and on his Facebook page, Hicks expresses strong feellings against all religions but also states that he finds Muslims less offensive than Christians. This was surely all available to that naif Anthony Brooks, who always follows what he thinks is a party line — that is, he thinks what he thinks everyone else thinks, and gives no sign of having a mind of his own. Yet Brooks opened the program by referring to those “three Muslims murdered in Chapel Hill.” And that theme was later picked up by Maz Jobrani, who might have done the decent thing and rejected that description, and pointed out all of the other factors that indicate quite other considerations prompted the murderous rage, hardly unknown in modern America, over access to parking spots, of dim Mr. Hicks.

And at the webpage of WBUR, you can find, again, that reference to the “murdered Muslims of Chapel Hill” — which is clearly meant to indicate not that the victiims of a madman’s fury happened, in this case, to be Muslims, but could just as easily have been any non-Muslim near neighbors wiith whom he had a repeated parking problem, and simply pushes the line that the relatives, the Barakats and the Abu–Salhas, and CAIR, and the Muslim Student Association (with its own associations), want to push, in order, not for the first time, to present Muslims as victims in this society, when the only real victims involving Muslims and non-Musliims in the West, so far, have been non-Muslims, and not leading to one or three or a hundred, but rather to many thoiusands of victims, in terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, London and Paris, Madrid and Rome, Moscow and Beslan, Amsterdam and Bruseels, Toulouse and Copenhagen.

If you need one more reason not to contribute to WBUR,or to NPR,  this is it.