Scholars

Moslem scholars. That’s what these imams and ayatollahs and mullahs are called, such as Sadr, who delight in urging their adherents on to not quite fratricidal, not quite internecine genocide, but certainly genocide from across the aisle. Well, I am a petty man, and I love to quibble -- especially over the mere and incidental meaning of words. Take “scholar” for example.

Scholars are scientists of already discovered knowledge. They must carry within themselves both a passion for their field and a dispassionate commitment to accuracy. There is something of dust, that accrues to the word. This something transcends mere cliché in the fact that however full-blooded a man might be, his intellectual pursuits have to do with archives and catalogues, rather than rifles and microphones. It’s like Michael Dukakis riding in a tank. It’s like John Kerry chopping wood. No.

There have been Christian and Buddhist warrior-monks -- but there is nothing in the meaning of “monk” that precludes a martial doctrine. Scholarship, however, requires a capacity for temperate and disciplined thought, fair-minded and capable of evaluating evidence. As an intellectual endeavor, it must aspire to speak not simply to the moment with its distractions and infatuations, but to posterity.

This is theory of course. In the real world we can expect no surety of admirable behaviour from any profession. But what we must expect is a standard. And when spittle-spraying demagogues harangue the mob with the most vile of vitriolic and incendiary incitations to mass-hatred -- that is, when Moslem scholars preach on America or the Jews (same thing, to them) -- we must expect such lumpen fuehrers to be described in the media as hate-speechers, not as scholars.

So this has turned into another one of my isn’t the MSM corrupt and biased scribblings. You see, professions must have standards. And journalists must rise to a certain level of accuracy and impartiality, or else they are mere propagandists. In what cause might such propagandists be laboring? Well, both sides of the aisle have their apparatchiks. But the pews on the left are full to overflowing, and their attitude about the sermons wafting to their ears from out of the east -- which they seem to be believing and amen-ing and mm-hmm-ing -- has everything to do with passive crypto-self-loathing and with a smirking contempt for the ancient values of America.

Consider the Pied Piper, who played an enticing melody and lured what was most precious away to we know not where. I do not care about motives or rationalizations. I don’t care about the failures of the town fathers. I care about the theft of innocence. Integrity requires that those who hold the microphone be committed to something like human values. Integrity demands that those who listen and report do so with objectivity and accuracy. Otherwise there is a conspiracy of result, if not intent, by which human values are lost. I think that just about says it all. School's out.

J