Murdoch says Muslims must be held responsible for France terror attacks

Rupert Murdoch has been strongly criticised after tweeting that “most Moslems” – even if peaceful – must be held responsible for the religion’s “growing jihadist cancer” in the wake of the terror attacks in France.

The News Corp boss added his influential voice to the global discussion on terror that has convulsed social media since gunmen slaughtered 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday.

Murdoch’s tweet on Saturday morning – which came in the wake of the killing of five more civilians at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday – was retweeted more than 1,500 times, and favourited by more than 767 people.

But the tweet angered many who criticised Murdoch for holding a religion of billions of peaceful people responsible for the actions of a minority of extremists.

One Twitter user referenced Murdoch’s own responsiblity in the case of the News Corp phone-hacking scandal, while the Australian comedian Adam Hills was sceptical about the media mogul’s contribution to the debate.

Murdoch followed up his earlier tweet by claiming that “political correctness makes for denial and hypocrisy”.

In the US, outspoken satirist Bill Maher hosted the 13th season premiere of his HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night. Flanked by political commentator Paul Begala, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and author and activist Salman Rushdie, Maher claimed “hundreds of millions of [Muslims] support an attack like [Charlie Hebdo].”

“What we’ve said all along, and have been called bigots for it, is when there’s this many bad apples, there’s something wrong with the orchard,” Maher said.

Maher addressed the Ben Affleck on-air fracas that went viral in October last year, when author Sam Harris said “Islam [is] the motherlode of bad ideas”. Affleck hit back, saying such generalised criticisms of Islam were “gross” and “racist,” and likening them to someone calling Maher “a shifty Jew”.

“Obviously, the vast majority of Muslims would never do anything like this,” said Maher. “But they share bad ideas. This is the thing that caused the big ruckus when Ben Affleck was here. Sam Harris said, ‘Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas,’ and everyone went fuckin’ nuts on this side of the panel. But it is. These two guys who shot up the cartoonists the other day, they were avenging the prophet, they said? A bad idea. Martyrdom? A bad idea. Women as second-class citizens? A bad idea. And unfortunately, the terrorists and the mainstream share a lot of these bad ideas.”

The British Indian author Salman Rushdie, who was placed under a fatwa in 1989 following the publication of his book The Satanic Verses, said there had been “a deadly mutation in the middle of Islam”.

“This is not a random mutation… This has been a mutation that a lot of work has been put into. Governments, from the Sunni side the Saudi government, on the Shia side the Iranian government, have been putting fortunes of money into making sure that extremist mullahs are preaching in mosques around the world, and in building and developing schools in which a whole generation is being educated in extremism — and trying to prevent other forms of education.”