In the US, nearly a decade has passed since 9/11, and the media still haven’t seriously examined the paramount ideological and organizational role the hardline Muslim Brotherhood plays in institutional U.S. Islam.

In “Why Anders Breivik’s Manifesto Mentions Me,” commentator Rod Dreher, laments that “we journalists should pay more attention to the role of Western imams in radicalizing Muslim youth.” He is responding to a colleague who complains that journalists “focus on Islamic leaders and terrorism” too much.

Dreher replies: “It was a stupid point made by a man whose cultural matrix required the enemy to always and everywhere be right-wing Christians. When it comes to reporting on the complex reality of contemporary Islam and violent extremism, this is a mindset one finds far too often in American journalism.

“My jaundiced view, informed by 20 years of newsroom experiences, is that journalists see their job more as managing the story to protect Muslims from imaginary redneck lynch mobs than to report with critical intelligence on the world as it is. “It’s not hard to imagine the vindication many of these mainstream journalists must feel because of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Bering Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto. …

“When details of Breivik’s motives emerged last Friday, a headline on the New York Times’s website trumpeted that the killer was a ‘Christian extremist’ (it was shortly changed to ‘Right-wing extremist’). [NYT staff writer] Andrew Sullivan, eager to tie Breivik’s ideology around the necks of American Christian conservatives, quickly took to calling Breivik a ‘Christianist’ – Sullivan’s term of opprobrium for politically engaged conservative Christians. And so it goes.

“But readers of Breivik’s manifesto will see that he is not a Christian in any meaningful theological sense. Rather, he sees the faith much as the Nazi leadership did: as a European tribal religion that can be instrumentalized to provide the basis for an ethno-cultural war against the Other – in this case, Muslims. …

Breivik writes: “If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.”

“It is unlikely that the ‘blame Christianity’ meme will survive for long in the mainstream media, as it’s difficult to argue credibly that it’s the fault of a religion that the killer himself rejects, except in an eccentric, non-theological way. But the ‘blame Islamophobia’ canard will be far more durable – and, in the long run, more harmful.

“‘Islamophobia’ is a weasel word designed not to enhance understanding, but to prevent it. It implies that skepticism or criticism of Islam or its followers derives from irrational fear. … The problem with the term Islamophobia, as with its companion term homophobia, is that they are intended to disarm critical discussion by stigmatizing it as a mental disorder.

Read the whole article from Real Clear Religion here.