WHY ARE WE HOLDING MUSLIMS TO A DIFFERENT STANDARD?

By Carlo Baldino
Telegram & Gazette
December 08, 2015

http://www.telegram.com/article/20151208/blogs/312089872

We hear this all the time. Muslims who claim to be members of a religion of peace don't do enough to vocally condemn the terrorists who have hijacked the faith and commit mass murder using their own twisted interpretations of the Koran.

With regard to fairness and consistency, this constant invective is quite baffling.

For example, when Republican conservatives are accused of being racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic they vehemently protest being generally profiled. They claim they're all not like that. They say they have gay friends, Black friends, Latino friends, they're not racist or sexist, and they like Mexican food (OK, I made that last one up).

But these same people support a political party that includes in its platform the passing of a constitutional amendment to make marriage between a man and a woman and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, i.e., a woman's right to choose. Next year they'll vote for GOP presidential candidates who promise to achieve these goals.

They don't condemn the hate speech of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and other members of the cast of clowns who make up the list of GOP contenders.

No Republican dares to criticize them because it might offend the many voters who support everything these haters say. They're good team players who follow Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment: 'Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.'

In 2004 when the pedophile priest scandal in the Catholic Church made national news, there was no condemnation of those priests by good Catholics, and no punishments inflicted on them by church officials. Devout Catholics would get up and leave the room in a huff when someone brought up the topic. The Holy Mother Church covered up for these priests and stonewalled investigations. They transferred the guilty clerics from parish to parish with the hope they'd stop raping young boys. Donald Trump called the Mexicans 'rapists.' He was addressing the wrong group of individuals. Anyone who criticized these pedophiles was accused of being 'anti-Catholic.'

Every week another unarmed Black man—sometimes a woman, sometimes a child—is murdered by a psychopathic white police officer. There is never any condemnation by the 80% of good cops who are professional and worthy of wearing a badge. They put the Mafia to shame with their police omerta, their blue wall of silence, their refusal to call out the 20% of officers who are racist and display out of control brutality. They cover for their fellow officers by writing false reports and withholding evidence. The latest murder in Chicago of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald featured a video of the police murder being buried for 13 months as well as contradictory reports written by officers on the scene that attempted to exonerate the murderous police officer.

Any criticisms of police are met with the 'anti-police' card. Police departments cause their cities and towns to pay out millions of dollars in settlements, but they never admit they're at fault. That's part of the agreement, a condition of the hush money.

Republicans, Catholics, and police don't want all their members tarred with the same brush, but they have no problem smearing all 1.2 billion Muslims as terrorists.

Republicans, Catholics, and police departments all over America never condemn the terrible acts committed by their groups, but they demand that Muslims make loud and vocal declarations against other Muslims.

The kicker is that Muslims do that. Every time there's a terrorist attack anywhere in the world Muslim groups condemn those practices and insist they're perpetrated by people who aren't real Muslims and who don't follow the edicts in the Koran.

But Islamophobes never hear their condemnation. That's due either to willful ignorance or because it interrupts the narrative that fits their agenda.

The hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

They have no shame.