Mind Reading for Fun and Profit: The Joys of Excusing the Obvious
9th October 2023
During the first Christmas holiday break that followed 9/11, I cracked open a copy of the Koran and read it through. I was well and truly thunderstruck by what I found there. The contents were, of course, appalling, what with their explicit anti-Semitism, genocidal ideation, and the thoroughgoing denial of the deity of Christ. But what I found more shocking than any of those things was the extent to which the text of the Koran, easily found by anyone with even a smidgen of curiosity, was so starkly at odds with everything then being said about Islam by the political class and the media. It was so shocking to me — just how divorced the “official pronouncements” were from what was staring anyone in the face who bothered to look.