Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [14]
The last act of the drama occurred just ten days after it started, when he held a Truth Tellers panel debate on the topic, bringing in participants from across the political spectrum. The debate was civil until Jack asked a simple rhetorical question:
“How would you feel if Muslim extremists got hold of a nuclear weapon?”
There was a momentary chill in the air, then one of the panelists—a supercilious professor of legal studies named Aldrich—said, “You’re assuming that’s even likely.”
“You’re naïve if you think it isn’t,” Jack told him. “And let’s not forget what Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid told us. That while it’s true that not all Muslims are terrorists, the majority of terrorists are Muslim.”
“All right, but considering there are approximately one billion Muslims in the world, how exactly do you propose to stop them?”
“When you factor in the laissez-faire attitude of much of our country,” Jack said, “the odds against us aren’t good. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that just ten percent of those one billion Muslims are fanatic haters who would kill all of us at the blink of an eye. A matter of us versus them.”
“And?”
“If it came down to it, would you rather see a hundred million of us killed, or kill a hundred million Muslims?”
Murmurs rose from the panel and Aldrich just stared at him with a self-satisfied grin. Within hours, a smear campaign was carefully orchestrated by a radical watchdog group called Media Wire, which spared no effort to grind Jack’s reputation into the dust beneath its jackbooted heel.
HOST OF TRUTH TELLERS WOULD KILL A HUNDRED MILLION MUSLIMS! was the headline tossed into the echo chamber, bolstered by an edited clip of the show that isolated his last words and removed all context. The distinction between true Muslims and those who perverted their faith to justify their violence—a distinction Jack always tried to make—was completely ignored by the media.
The man behind this campaign was a reclusive, Austrian-born billionaire named Lawrence Soren. The eighty-one-year-old had made his fortune by betting against national currencies. He profited almost a billion dollars on the British pound alone. Just after the catastrophic Japanese earthquake of March 2011 and the disasters in their nuclear power plants, he had shorted Tokyo Electric and made hundreds of millions on the tragedy. No government would stop this rapacious beast because he owned their leaders. He also had a controlling financial interest in several major news organizations in the U.S. and much of the world, including the recent acquisition of the company that controlled the majority of GNT’s stock. By the time Soren was done, Truth Tellers had not only lost half of its sponsors but Jack was being told by the network that he had to apologize on air to the Muslim community or face immediate termination.
Because he felt he was innocent, not because he was afraid, Jack reluctantly tried an on-air explanation. It was exactly fifteen words long:
“It was not my intention to discredit all Muslims,” he said, “only those who seek to harm us.”
Before the night was out—before the show was over, in fact—he found himself as jobless as if he’d eaten apple pie off a map of Mecca. Trapped in a contract that kept him from moving his show to another network. Time magazine listed this sudden fall as one of the twenty biggest blunders in television history—a massive chunk of hyperbole if there ever was one. Anyway, to Jack’s mind, standing up for his principles wasn’t a blunder at all. He would lose sight of that for a while afterward, as he looked for a place to put his key, but that’s the beauty about the truth: however long you turn away from it, it’s still the truth and still there.
The final twist of the knife came three weeks later, when the British Home Office released a list of terrorists and criminals who were banned from traveling to