No sooner had VDARE.com praised Ann Coulter for pointing out that the U.S. could and perhaps should deport its Muslim immigrants than her column was dropped by Goldberg Review Online for being anti-Muslim. (They've changed the name from "National" Review because the Republican Goldberg Committee told them that "national" is redolent of nativism and hence Nazism and might hurt the Grand Old Panderers' chances in 2002.)
Hmmm.
Jonah Goldberg says he dropped her for being incoherently anti-Muslim, and you can believe him, if you like. I think the circumstances of the attack would justify a certain amount of incoherent rage, and Ms. Coulter had lost a close personal friend in the attack. Read the hilarious Washington Post account – Ann Coulter wields a very effective high-heeled shoe.
In 1095, the First Crusade took Western Civilization into the Middle East. At the end of the Eighth Crusade in 1270, Western Civ had been kicked out of the Middle East, and Jerusalem was a Muslim city again. The Crusaders had occupied an area the size of the modern State of Israel for less than 200 years.
In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks, who enslaved the Greek Christian population of the city, changed the name of the city, and turned all the churches into mosques. The difference between the Crusaders and the Muslim invaders? The Muslims are still there.
Now they're here. There are several million of them in the United States as I write. They have their own organization for responding to "slurs" against Islam.
You can imagine them chanting "We're here, we're multicultural and we want your country!"
It's important that readers realize that a "slur" against Islam is anything that puts Islam in a bad light, No matter how true it is.
For example, in 1999, James George Jatras wrote an article in Chronicles Magazine called "Insurgent Islam and American Collaboration," which was critical of Islam. (Jatras is member of the Orthodox Church, and thus is descended from some of Islam's many victims.)
Jatras said a number of things about Islam, past and present, but his most quoted line was
"In short, Islam is a self-evident outgrowth not of the Old and New Covenants but of the darkness of heathen Araby."
The heathenism he was referring to is what's known as "idolatry"; Muslims, while decrying idolatry, continue to worship a rock. (SPLC take note: The darkness he's referring to is purely spiritual.)
Both CAIR and the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee sent out action alerts, in which the juicier parts of his article were quoted without any attempt at refutation.
The AAADC did refer to them as "highly offensive and extremely inaccurate anti-Islamic statements," but didn't say anything that would refute any of them.
In CAIR's bulletin, attempting to get Jatras fired from his job with the Republican Senate Policy Committee, CAIR referred to "offensive and inaccurate comments about Islam and Muslims."
Again, no evidence that Jatras was wrong.
You see, most people "don't know much about history," and if you tell them something is a "stereotype", they stop asking if it's true, and merely assume it's a lie.
Everything Jatras said about Islam is true, and verifiable from Muslim documents.
I saw the same thing in the letter column in the February, 2001 issue of Commentary Magazine.
Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR wrote (responding to an article by Daniel Pipes), that CAIR was doing good work overcoming libels against Islam. He said
Mr. Pipes refers to one incident (again resolved with CAIR's intervention) in which a children's book offered what Mr. Pipes calls a "negative treatment" of the Prophet Muhammad, but he fails to tell his readers what that means. In World Religions: Great Lives, William Jay Jacobs offered the following description of the Prophet Muhammad:
During his lifetime he was a man who loved beautiful women, fine perfume, and tasty food. He took pleasure in seeing the heads of his enemies torn from their bodies by the swords of his soldiers. He hated Christians and Jews, poets and painters, and anyone who criticized him. Once he had a Jewish prisoner tortured in order to learn the location of the man's hidden treasure. Then, having uncovered the secret, he had his victim murdered and added the dead man's wife to the collection of women in his harem.
It seems easy to imagine why Muslims would find such a description of their prophet inaccurate and offensive.
I'd never heard that story about the torture, murder, and rape/marriage, so I took the trouble to look it up, with references to the Koran, the a'hadeetha, and the Life of Mohammed. It's all true.
But CAIR seems to have succeeded in having the book withdrawn by its publisher.
According to the Associated Press, "Simon & Schuster said [in May of 1997] that it is recalling all 4,000 copies of a children's book, agreeing with a Muslim group that the book unfairly portrays the prophet Mohammed as a bloodthirsty hatemonger."
Andrew Giangola , spokesman for Simon & Schuster said "We agreed that the book was unfairly negative and not properly balanced." Adding "While there is a fact-checking process, this one simply slipped through the cracks."
I doubt if they ever tried fact-checking, in their haste to surrender. But fact-checking would certainly show the truth of this unpleasant statement about Muhammad. The closest thing to an inaccuracy is that in describing the torture and murder of Kinana, and the enslavement of his widow, Jacobs neglected to describe the means of torture ("A fire was kindled on his chest with flint and steel until he was nearly dead.") possibly because he didn't want to give the 10-12 year-olds for whom the book was intended nightmares. The other problem was that by not mentioning Kinana and his wife by name, he might cause confusion with the very similar case of the capture and forcible marriage of Saffiya, (Sahih Muslim, book 8, 3329).
Simon & Schuster's abject surrender of four years ago is fairly typical of modern multiculturalism, but shouldn't there be a pause in the diversity industry to "assimilate" the events of September 11th?
You would think that 7,000 murders by people whose hatred of us is strong enough that they'll willingly die to kill some of us would cause a massive rethinking of "diversity" in America, and our relations to other cultures in our midst, but no.
In the Washington Post, a New York diversiticrat named Judith Rizzo is proclaiming
"Those people who said we don't need multiculturalism, that it's too touchy-feely, a pox on them," said Judith Rizzo, deputy chancellor for instruction in the New York City school system. "I think they've learned their lesson. We have to do more to teach habits of tolerance, knowledge and awareness of other cultures."
Knowledge of other cultures, yes. Know your enemy! But tolerance for people who practice slavery, torture and mass murder? No, thanks.
At Columbia University's Teachers College, it's just as bad:
Said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York: "Our notion of great books can't be Western anymore or wholly Western anymore. Is 'Middlemarch' [a 19th-century English novel by George Eliot] more important than the Koran in terms of the curriculum?"
The Koran is certainly a fitting object for study, although it would be nice if English literature was taught in schools to the point that the Washington Post didn't have to tell its readers what "Middlemarch" meant, but the Koran is not a great book. It's a bad book. Furthermore, it may be illegal to teach it in school. It's certainly illegal to teach the Bible. Further down we read:
Multicultural teaching in grades K-12 has taken hold in some areas of the country, especially those with large minority populations. But the depth varies.
Janet Myers has taught English for 26 years in Joplin, Mo., where the population is 45,500, with all but 3,895 white, according to the 2000 Census.
With few opportunities for multicultural experiences, she said, many of her colleagues have "frankly resented" the trend in education to teach some non-Western literature. It is time for an attitude change, she said.
It is in fact time for an attitude change; and the answer here is this: "No more apologies." None. Western civilization is better than the alternatives, so stop apologizing for it.
Silviu Berlusconi said that Western civilization was superior to Islam, and then spoiled it by apologizing and like Galileo, denying he said it.
Jatras didn't apologize for what he said. Ann Coulter shows no sign of apologizing for anything she said. VDARE.com never apologizes either.
I suggest that the Western World in general and America in particular stop apologizing until we receive an apology (accompanied by suitable reparations), for the fall of Constantinople.
Meanwhile, how about worrying about going back to a National Origins system for immigrants?
And backbone injections – or something - for what Ann Coulter memorably calls the "girly-boys" at Goldberg Review.
October 03, 2001
