Actually, the one post I had planned for the afternoon, I had begun out on the back of an envelope as I was eating my lunch. I have pretty much stopped following the controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque.” It seems every time I read a critique of the opponents of the mosque, the writers are ever eager to repeat their rote assumption that all opponents must be racist.
In the process, the reveal their own prejudices rather than (except in the eyes of their fellow travelers) succeeding in vilifying those who just wish the organizer would build it elsewhere.
So, given all the media cluck-clucking about the opponents’ supposed intolerance, is anyone aware (as per my previous post) of mainstream media reports of Imam Rauf’s radical statements? They would seem relevant to the current debate, given that he’s heading up the multi-million dollar project.
(I would be doing some googling on this, but the Mehlman story takes precedence right now and I only have limited time to devote to blogging today)
Note the code words of the mainstream media and the Administration. “Racist” for anti-Islamic. Last I knew, Islam was not a race. And not all anti-Islamists were anti-Islamic. Which does not mean there is anything wrong with being anti-Islamic.
What is the virtue of Islam, that puts it above criticism, unlike any other monotheistic religion? Evidently that it’s not felt to be Western and has got a strong anti-Western wing, and tends to get identified with the anti-Western cause in today’s world.
Actual meaning of the code words: the West is guilty, the non-West is its victim, and all appropriate defamation follows from this.
Anti-Western westerners are partially exempt from defamation, but pro-Western people are guilty to the core, and all the defamatory isms of political correctness – racism, fascism, imperialism – are to be attached to them, along with all the derogatory terms of political snobbery — prejudice, intolerance, ignorance, stupidity.
It follows also that anti-Western movements deserve understanding and sympathy. Any harsh criticism of them is intolerance, ignorance, prejudice, unfair, oversimplification …
This is how opposition to Islamist anti-Westernism, and to Islamist promotion of intolerance and obscurantism, can end up getting pegged — habitually, repeatedly, in all our major mainstream media, without batting an eye — as “racist”, “ignorant”, and “intolerant”. How opposition to the Westophobia of the Islamists — or just the trivially obvious statement that Islam is more likely to promote violence in this era than other religions — gets pegged as “Islamophobia”. How the accusation of “Islamophobia” can come to trump and defect the charge of “Islamism”, no matter how obviously true the latter, or how much more serious the danger from it; just as the charge of “McCarthyism” came to regularly trump the charge, no matter how true, of “Communism”.
The social-snob dumping on “Americans” as ignorant, prejudiced, etc., is another use of code words. The actual meaning is “Westerners”, or at least, non-self-hating Westerners, with America simply as the standardbearer and symbol of Western power in the world. Europeans get dumped on, too, nowadays, when they are trying to roll back Islamist influence after the riots and political murders, matters on which European views generally go much farther than American views nowadays, but it doesn’t stop people from dumping on America as the symbol of resistance. Europeans and Americans, stupidly, dump on one another for supposedly prejudiced and supposedly self-defeating attitudes and policies on Islam; it amounts to letting themselves get used against each other, to the benefit of anti-Western purposes.
The Side to be dumped on with all this verbiage, in any dispute, is invariably the one that is felt to be the Western-leaning side. Everything else flows from this.