Ripping the Veil Off NPR's Burqa
A recent conservative “sting” operation taped National Public Radio fund-raising executive Ron Schiller maligning members of the Tea Party as “white,” “gun-toting” and “seriously racist.” (This would be news to the chief Tea Partier I know, a black friend at my church who owns his own jewelery store chain and despises Barack Obama.) Schiller also slandered the paramount conservative movement of our time as "fundamentalist Christian" and "xenophobic" and claimed that it has “hijacked” the GOP. As fatuous and unmoored from reality as these statements are, Schiller has in fact received more attention for stating that NPR would be better off sans federal funding. But in my opinion, neither Schiller’s leftist dementia nor his surprising financial candor is the most remarkable revelation from this tape; rather, the most revealing and disheartening aspect of Schiller’s uncoerced confession is that he confided it to what he thought were Muslims.
NPR Reporters Headed to Staff Meeting
One should perhaps not be surprised, considering Schiller is educated not in history or religion or even political science, but in music—well, that’s what Philistines like me call “conducting, composition and arranging.” I doubt that Schiller has ever actually met a practicing Christian at places like Cornell or NPR, much less a “fundamentalist” one; likewise, he’s probably never seen anyone “gun-toting” outside of a movie screen. Schiller, who has a male partner according to his NPR bio, would seem to one of the ranks of gay liberals who detest Christians far more than Muslims, for reasons that, while they might be emotionally satisfying, are quite simply devoid of logic. (When I was still working as a college professor, a gay colleague remarked to me once that he “was more scared of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson than Usama bin Ladin.” When I pointed out that Southern Baptists did not fly planes into buildings, he somewhat backtracked but refused to recant his idiocy.) For in Schiller’s view of the world, like that of my former colleague, Baptists and other Christians who take the Bible literally are the real enemy—this despite the fact that the New Testament nowhere calls for any punishment of homosexuality (although it does, of course, list it as a sin in Romans 1:18ff, I Corinthians 6:9ff and I Timothy 1:8ff); on the other hand Muslims, whose Qur’an (especially Sura al-Nisa’ [4]:15) and shari`ah (Islamic law) still prescribe punishment—including death—for homosexuality, are seen as fellow misunderstood victims and thus potential political allies against the real oppressors, Christians and conservatives. NPR will brook no dissension from this line of dhimmitude (a dhimmi is, in Islamic law, a second-class Jew or Christian under Islamic rule and supervision), as Juan Williams discovered. But at least this sting operation has ripped the veil off NPR’s anti-Christian burqa.