Foxy Lazy

Via Owen Greaves.
The Fox News religion correspondent, Lauren Green, stared with suspicious bewilderment at her interview subject, the historian Reza Aslan, on their air to promote his new book, Zealot, a study of the historical Jesus. "Why," she said, "would a Muslim want to write a book about Jesus?" As if it were an inexplicable perversity, something he couldn't possibly have thought up on his own.

He immediately went a little prickly but maintained his kind smile and even tone of voice, informing her that he was actually not simply a Muslim but a qualified scholar, with several degrees and an intimate familiarity with New Testament Greek, etc., etc., and that it [jump]
was his job to perform such tasks. But for the next ten minutes he could not budge her from her deep stupidity. "But isn't your interpretation different?" she said accusingly, and so on, for nearly ten minutes, although she had clearly scarcely looked at the book or its hundred-odd pages of endnotes. "Shouldn't you acknowledge your religion?" she wondered. Apparently he does, on page 2, or ii.

It's an extraordinary piece of video, embarrassing and compelling.


I fired off some outraged Tweets:


Dr. Aslan generously retweeted, and before long I was starting to feel like a Thing, as we twitterates call it. Note that the one that got the most attention was the least satirically pointed. By this afternoon there really was a Thing, with its own hashtag #foxnewslitcrit:




Alas, my own efforts had stopped really taking off. So I'm recycling them here, if you don't mind.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...