On Tuesday, ESPN suspended former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling for tweeting a meme comparing radical Muslims to Nazis. Here’s a snapshot of the offending tweet:
Unfortunately, Schilling caved to his politically correct employer and deleted the tweet. ESPN released a statement after suspending Schilling:
Curt’s tweet was completely unacceptable, and in no way represents our company’s perspective. We made that point very strongly to Curt and have removed him from his current Little League assignment pending further consideration.”
In a Breitbart story on the situation, Ben Shapiro shows us why ESPN was wrong and Schilling was right:
Factually speaking, there were approximately 6.5 million formal members of the Nazi Party in 1940, out of a total German population of well over 80 million — a little over 8 percent. That number of members did not fully represent the level of support for the Nazi regime in Germany in 1940, of course.
The same is true in the radicalized Muslim community. A very small percentage of Muslims globally are formal members of terror groups; it is difficult to estimate precise numbers due to secrecy, although their total membership runs into the hundreds of thousands (the Iranian Revolutionary Guard alone has 120,000 members, and some estimates have placed the ISIS membership at above 200,000).
However, as Shapiro goes on to show us, these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg:
(In reality), a huge percentage of worldwide Muslims are radicalized. If you calculate the number Muslims globally who (1) believe that 9/11 was not committed by Muslims; (2) think that sharia law ought to be implemented; (3) support terrorists attacks; or (4) have a positive or neutral attitude toward ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Osama Bin Laden or any other terrorist group or terrorist, the number calculates out to well above 800 million radicalized Muslims.
Even an attempt by Politifact to counter these calculations with hand-picked standards of radicalization led them to the awkward position that 19 percent of Muslims in various countries, including the West, are radicalized (approximately 182 million Muslims worldwide).
But ESPN has no interest in true numbers, because true numbers are awkward. Unsurprisingly, ESPN refused to explain why Schilling’s tweet was unacceptable. Is it because radicalized Muslims are somehow better than Germans who weren’t formal Nazi Party members? Is it because the genocidal Iranian regime or the barbarians of ISIS are somehow less objectionable than the Nazis themselves?
This isn’t ESPN’s first rodeo in the world of political-correctness. They are the same people who fired two employees in 2012 for using the phrase “chink in the armor” when discussing a weakness in the play of Jeremy Lin when he was playing for the New York Knicks.
For those who don’t know, Lin is Asian — Taiwanese to be exact. So it didn’t matter that the phrase has been around for centuries and means “a weak spot in one’s protection or plan.” It sounded bad, and in the world of political-correctness, how something sounds is much more important than what something actually means.
Schilling didn’t lump all Muslims into one big “terrorist” category. The point of his tweet was to show how a group of extremists, even if they are a small percentage of a larger group, can do incredible harm.
The letters ESPN stand for: Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. But I think they should consider changing it with the addition of another letter:
ESPCN – Entertainment and Sports Politically Correct Network
David Leach is the owner and publisher of The Strident Conservative where he is proudly politically-incorrect and always “right.” He is also a frequent contributor at RedState.com.
His political commentaries can be heard daily on KLZ560 AM and other Crawford Broadcasting stations.
Contact him at david@stridentconservative.com
