An item posted by Howard Portnoy three days ago took MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry to task for calling Alton Nolen (aka Jah’Keem Yisrael) a “gentleman” and dismissing his barbarous act on a former coworker, whom he beheaded, as “workplace violence.” Yet, by focusing exclusively on Harris-Perry’s ravings and ignoring her guest panel, Howard left some quality material on the cutting room floor.
Among those guests were “comedians” Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah, who offered up some noteworthy gems of their own. At around the 1:31 mark in the video, which I’ve reposted below, Farsad notes that “we” (obviously meaning liberals) “need a counter-narrative” to the view (obviously confined to conservatives) that Muslims commit particularly bloodthirsty crimes — such as beheadings. The solution? She suggests the new “stereotype that “Muslims are funny. Muslims are hilarious.”
Funny and hilarious are not words that come to most people’s minds when the topic is a beheading — but then again most people aren’t MSNBC panelists, who make imbecilic statements like this as form of self-denial.
Dean Obeidallah is, and earlier in the clip he demonstrates a different sort of denial by actually stating that when he hears a story like the one in Oklahoma, he thinks, “Please don’t let them be Muslim.”
The unspoken wish in Obeidallah’s sentiment is “Please do let them be white and/or conservative.” We saw an example of this perverse wishful thinking in the Trayvon Martin case, in the media characterization of George Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic.”
We saw it again on MSNBC on several previous occasions. Newsbusters has a good compilation:
- During MSNBC’s live coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, Luke Russert blamed Obamacare opponents when he theorized, “This is the deepest fear that was in the back of everybody’s mind going through the health care debate. A lot of members were threatened… It looks sadly like it’s come to fruition today.”
- MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got into the blame game on the January 11, 2011 episode of “Hardball” when he pondered, “What’s been the role of talk radio in fueling the heated language?… People like Mark Levin, Michael Savage, for example, who every time you listen to them are furious, furious at the Left with anger that just builds and builds in their voice, and by the time they go to commercial, they’re just in some rage, every night, with ugly talk… And they use that language, when they talk about the other side, isn’t that part of the problem? And my question is doesn’t that give the moral license to people who have crazy minds to start with?”
- Salon’s Joan Walsh was on “Hardball” and linked Rush Limbaugh to the Holocaust Museum shooter when she blurted, “There is a very disturbing and disturbed element of political discourse. And I would, I would throw in Rush Limbaugh. Not blaming him, but when you say that our President is more dangerous than al Qaeda you’ve gone off into crazy nut job land. You are off the charts crazy. And you are, you are whipping people up.”
Cross-posted in altered form at the Mental Recession
