A Conversion of Convenience

While I was happy to see Fox News crewmen Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig released from their Palestinian kidnappers, there were many things about that whole incident that were troubling, none the least of which was the forced "conversion" to Islam. I can't help but think how many people have been martyred over the centuries for refusing to renounce their faith - whatever faith that might be - and how easily Centanni and Wiig seemed to join in the little Islamic game. I can't help but think that these men must have been without faith, or else such a conversion would not have come so easily.

Mark Steyn address that issue in a column today in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they'd converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism....

It's striking how, for all this alleged multiculti sensitivity, we're mostly entirely insensitive to other cultures: We find it all but impossible to imagine how differently they view the world. Go back to that video in which Fox's Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig announced their conversion to Islam. The moment the men were released, the Western media and their colleagues wrote off the scene as a stunt, a cunning ruse, of no more consequence than yelling "Behind you! He's got a gun!" and then kicking your distracted kidnapper in the teeth. Indeed, a few Web sites seemed to see the Islamic conversion routine as a useful get-out-of-jail-free card.

And the key sentence concerning their "conversion" from the end of the piece:

It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

Read the whole thing.