Confirm sources and check references

To The Eagle:

I found Toni Below’s Feb. 23 letter to the editor to be full of dark humor, political irony and some gross factual errors.

The humor starts right away with The Eagle’s header of “Writer praises Trump.” I found faint praise indeed and deftly delivered irony such as Toni’s implication that the new Trump regime is just as likely to deliver this nation over to the Muslim Caliphate as Hillary Clinton might have been had she been elected, and that if we don’t believe that, then consider that no one believed either that Donald could ever be elected President!

To reinforce her assertion of the unlikely becoming commonplace Toni provides us with the example of the city of Hamtramck, Michigan having adopted Sharia law.

This statement compelled me to follow Toni’s advice and “keep (my) mind alert as to how the news is presented to us” and my research revealed that, according to SNOPES fact checker Daniel Mikkelson, the Hamtramck Sharia whopper “is an outrageously fabricated piece of clickbait “cheerfully delivered to us by the National Report, which has published such other gems as “Boy Scouts Announce Boobs Merit Badge.” The Report’s disclaimer page clearly states that “all articles within are fictional.”

Reading further about Hamtramck one finds that it is a small 2 sq. mi. city of 22,000 residents having a 60% Muslim population. Sharia may not be the law, but Islamic religious tradition seems to rule its Muslim residents as evidenced by photos of dark tent-like specters of burkah hidden women walking down its streets.

I found that a bit unnerving but not surprising. Conservative Islam has merely brought to our communities highly visible evidence of a hidden and oftentimes not so hidden tradition that has been at the roots of American culture long before Muslims arrived. The plague of misogyny.

Whether it be Islam, Judaism, Catholicism or a host of Protestant Christian denominations, an attitude at best casually dismissive and at worst actively hateful toward the female gender is one of the darker founding traditions of any religion whose basis of revealed truth is a Bible instructing it was first and foremost a woman who, seeking knowledge, introduced evil into the world and condemned “Mankind” along with her. The guy who wrote that story had a bit of an ax to grind. What a snake.

But I digress. So let’s talk about immigrants. Toni believes that the federal government would never harm a family in its relentless quest to purge our fine society of undesirable aliens. Sorry to disappoint, dear reader. Go to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.org website and read first person accounts of how the INS practices Selective Deportation which is tearing apart parents and children that have been in this country for years. A shame? Yes. Hogwash? No.

Finally, let’s talk about keeping an open mind, another of Toni’s recommendations. Internet scammers and political hucksters (no names, but his initials are D.T.) see your open mind as a convenient receptacle in which to dump their trash. Avoid being polluted. Confirm their sources and check their references. Keeping a closed mind can work for a while too, but then you end up with a shady real estate agent being voted into the Executive office.

Our national motto may be E Pluribus Unum but I think Caveat Emptor are going to be the watchwords of our new national situation.

J.B. Bouchard

Puget Island