Her article begins:
The AP [Associated Press] Stylebook has opened a new chapter on the non-"offensive" Engllsh-language lexicon to parse the war on the world waged by Islam. The wire service bible (can I say that?) has decreed that "Islamist" is out as a "a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals."
Well, if you are 'Islamophobic,' then, given that a phobia is an irrational fear, you have an irrational fear of Islam or of certain Muslims. Is that really what you want to say? Do you really want to announce to the world that you are proud to have a phobia? I should think that fear of radical Islam and of those who promote radical Islam, whether Muslims or non-Muslim leftists, is entirely rational.
But I know what you mean. My suggestion is that you say what you mean.
'Islamophobic,' like 'homophobic,' is a coinage of liberals/leftists. It is their word. It is foolish for a conservative to use it. If you are a conservative, why are you talking like a liberal? Why are you allowing them to frame the debate in terms they have invented for their own advantage? Is that not foolish? You should insist on standard, ideologically-neutral language.
Compare 'social justice.' That is leftist code. Why then does Bill O'Reilly use it? Because, like too many conservatives, he is not good at properly articulating and properly defending conservative positions.
Once again: Language matters!
Related: Anti-Intellectualism on the Right
Why Are Conservatives Inarticulate?
Here is an important interview with Lars Hedegaard, Denmark's Salman Rushdie, whose life is in danger because he speaks the truth as he sees it. Hedegaard is a man of the Left, but do they come to his defense? Excerpt:
DP: Where are the attacks on you being racist coming from? What part of the ideological spectrum?
LH: I would say almost exclusively from the left. (Of course, also from Muslims. Not all Muslims, but some.) I seem to be very unpopular with my old friends. I think the problem is that I know what it's all about to be left-wing; I used to be a leading Marxist in this country. But I've held to the opinion that we first of all have to fight for free speech and freedom and equality between the sexes and the rule of law; and also, that we should not bow before religious fanatics of any type, regardless of where they come from. This seems to me what was the essence of being left-wing back in the days. No longer.
The left now seems to have reverence for fanatics — as long as they are Muslim. Of course, they can criticize Christianity all they want. But when somebody threatens with violence — if you criticize me, I'll come and kill you — then all of a sudden they become soft. They become understanding. They talk about tolerance; we have to show respect. I don't want to show respect for people who say that men are worth more than women, that women can be killed if they are adulterers; that apostates from Islam should be killed; that people should be stoned, etc. I mean, I don't like that. I want to fight that. I want to describe it. And I don't think the left does.
For too many Catholics and other Christians, their leftism is their real 'religion.' This from The Thinking Housewife:
ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and “lectured [her] on the superiority of Muslims to Christians.”
The principles of ecumenism put forth at Vatican II lead with irrevocable logic to teaching Catholics how to be good Muslims.
I agree with something in the vicinity of the point the Housewife makes here. But her last sentence illustrates the slippery slope fallacy. If the logic is "irrevocable," then it is deductively valid; but slippery slope argumentation, if intended to be deductive, is always invalid. What should she have said? Something like this: 'The ecumenism of Vatican II set the stage for, and made likely, the sort of absurdities that Anny Yenny complains of."
Surely there was no logical necessity that the principles of Vatican II eventuate in the absurdity in question.
What follows is a slightly redacted post from three years ago whose message bears repeating, especially since Barack the Appeaser, Barack the Bower-and-Scraper, has been reelected.
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Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,
. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)
And just as we ought not tolerate intolerance, especially the murderous intolerance of radical Muslims, we ought not try to appease the intolerant. Appeasement is never the way to genuine peace. The New York Time's call for Benedict XVI to apologize for quoting the remarks of a Byzantine emperor is
a particularly abject example of appeasement.
One should not miss the double-standard in play. The Pope is held to a very high standard: he must not employ any words, not even in oratio obliqua, that could be perceived as offensive by any Muslim who might be hanging around a theology conference in Germany, words uttered in a talk that is only tangentially about Islam, but Muslims can say anything they want about Jews and Christians no matter how vile. The tolerant must tiptoe around the rabidly intolerant lest they give offense.
Has there been a NYT editorial censuring Ahmadinejad for his repeated calls for the destruction of the sovereign state of Israel?
The attitude of liberals towards Muslims is similar to their attitude toward blacks and other minorities: they don't demand much of them. For example, liberals expect that blacks in significant numbers will lack photo ID and will therefore be 'disenfranchised' if asked to present such at the polling place as common sense requires. Such a low opinion do liberals have of blacks!
I now hand off to that national treasure, Victor Davis Hanson, whose piece The Neurotic Middle East begins like this:
Let us confess it: Many of the things that are bothersome in the world today originate in the Middle East. Billions of air passengers each year take off their belts and shoes at the airport, not because of fears of terrorism from the slums of Johannesburg or because the grandsons of displaced East Prussians are blowing up Polish diplomats. We put up with such burdens because a Saudi multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden, and his unhinged band of Arab religious extremists began ramming airliners into buildings and murdering thousands.
The Olympics have become an armed camp, not because the Cold War Soviets once stormed Montreal or the Chinese have threatened Australia, but largely because Palestinian terrorists butchered Israelis in Munich 40 years ago and established the precedent that international arenas were ideal occasions for political mass murder.
There is no corn or wheat cartel. There are no cell-phone monopolies. Coal prices are not controlled by global price-fixers. Yet OPEC adjusts the supply of oil in the Middle East to ensure high prices, mostly for the benefit of Gulf sheikhdoms and assorted other authoritarian governments.
Catholics don’t assassinate movie directors or artists who treat Jesus Christ with contempt. Jewish mobs will not murder cartoonists should they ridicule the Torah. Buddhists are not calling for global blasphemy laws. But radical Muslims, mostly in the Middle East, have warned the world that Islam alone is not to be caricatured — or else. Right-wing fascists and red Communists have not done as much damage to the First Amendment as have the threats from the Arab Street.
Mike Liccione's name came up over dinner with John Farrell, who has met Mike. Small world. (It also turns out that John now lives on the same street only a few doors down from where I lived for part of my time in Boston. Small world again.) Mention of Mike put me in mind of an old post from 6 November 2009 in which I link to him, a post that is particularly relevant in the light of recent events. The post follows.
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Something that has long puzzled me also puzzles Michael Liccione. Mike puts it like this:
Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and
orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows.
Substantially correct. But if I may quibble, 'Islamic fundamentalism' may not be the right term. Better would be 'militant Islam' or 'radical Islam' or 'Islamism.' A fundamentalist, as I understand the word, is one who interprets the scriptures of his religion literally, as God's own inerrant word. Thus Islam, if I am not mistaken, holds that the Koran was literally dictated by God to Muhammad in Arabic. Whatever one
thinks of fundamentalists in this sense, it seems obvious that they should not be confused with militants or terrorists. Although fundamentalists and terrorists are sets with a non-null intersection, there are fundamentalists who are not terrorists and terrorists who are not fundamentalists.
It is important to try to think as clearly and precisely as one can about these issues, distinguishing the
different, and forging one's terminology in the the teeth of these differences. And the more 'hot-button' the issue, the more necessary is clear and precise thinking.
Addendum 19 September 2012: I have always been careful to speak of 'militant Islam' or 'radical Islam' or 'Islamism' as opposed to 'Islam.' But now I am wondering whether this distinction is not perhaps a snare and a delusion. The problem may well be with Islam itself and its basic values or lack of values. See Diana West's post to which I linked yesterday.
It is becoming painfully obvious that the values of Muslims qua Muslims are simply incompatible with our Western values, and that to allow them to immigrate is a recipe for suicide. Islamic culture is inferior to ours, the proof being the sad state of the countries Muslims come from – which is of course why they don't stay in their own countries.
Liberals of course support wide-open immigration, legal and illegal, along the lines of 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.' These liberal fools hate Christians and conservatives more than they hate the enemies of their own liberal values. I call that contemptible stupidity, stupidity that is morally censurable.
Bill K. comments:
I think it is far more pathological than simply the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I believe the kind of liberal that wants the government to control everything (as opposed to the fuzzy-headed do-gooders that simply want problems to go away and people to be happy) actually admires and approves of Islam, because of its program of total control. They also fail to understand that they will be the first to go when the Umma arrives. They are so used to talking their way into what they want, that they won’t understand the use of force even when they face the beheading sword. Look at our foreign policy. BO actually thought he could talk the Muslims into world peace.
I suspect that our delusional leftist pals think that they can use Islamism to beat back conservatism and Christianity and then dismiss the Islamists once the job is done. But they are pussies compared to the Islamists and they may be in for a big surprise.
It’s important to realize sharia’s prohibition of criticism of Islam is basic Islam: There is nothing “radical” about it. Indeed, it is this basic Islamic censorship that is at the crux of why Islam itself — not “Islamism,” not “radical Islam,” not “Islamists,” but Islam — is an existential threat to the survival of any free society. It is why free societies, once penetrated by a Muslim demographic over 1 percent, begin to lose their liberties as a means of “accommodating” — appeasing — their new Islamic populations.
Charles Krauthammer gives three reasons:
(1) The nature of the regime.
Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombing is routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation, from the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012. Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.
For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”
It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.
The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.
(2) The nature of the grievance.
The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.
(3) The nature of the target.
America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.
In U.S.-Soviet deterrence, both sides knew that a nuclear war would destroy them mutually. The mullahs have thought the unthinkable to a different conclusion. They know about the Israeli arsenal. They also know, as Rafsanjani said, that in any exchange Israel would be destroyed instantly and forever, whereas the ummah — the Muslim world of 1.8 billion people whose redemption is the ultimate purpose of the Iranian revolution — would survive damaged but almost entirely intact.
This is one of the statues of Buddha that the Taliban dynamited in 2001:
Will the Pyramids of Egypt meet the same fate at the hands of similar miscreants? See Victor Davis Hanson, Blowing Up History.
Of the world religions, "the religion of peace" is uniquely violent.
Having said that, I must be an 'Islamophobe' right?
Wrong. My fear of radical Islam is entirely rational.
A phobia is by definition an irrational fear. Leftists introduced 'Islamophobia' as a semantic bludgeon to silence their opponents and prevent honest debate. That is why it is utterly stupid for any conservative to use this word. If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal! Language matters.
By Diana West. Excerpt, emphas is added:
Behold what is perhaps the most advanced state of dhimmitude. Here we see the dhimmi — Jan Kubis and the UN hierarchy — mimic perfectly the perpetual aggrievement of Islam. Islam's aggrievement becomes their own aggrievement, indeed, becomes even more important than any by now atavistic concept of Western justice and reason, as they draw power from the obviously more kinetic Islamic position. Because this whole affair is, and must be understood as, a barely concealed power play. It is a power play thinly disguised by the Islamic pose of victimhood. Such feigned victimhood becomes a trap for the " perpetrator" of the perceived aggrievement — in this case, the US military. Falling for the trap, as we in the West do time and time again, means accepting these intemperate, immoral and murderous manifestations of Islamic dementia in the same way that a "co-dependent" family member accepts and accommodates a mentally sick relative's manifestations of dementia in the home in order to create or preserve some measure of family peace or quiet; in order to stop the outburst, to tamp down the rage and violence, to make it all better — even if "better" is always just a lull before the next demented power play.
Here:
Perhaps you have heard of taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances, primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority. Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances—including to fellow Muslims and by swearing to Allah—provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is true to him.
[. . .]
As a doctrine, "double-entendre" best describes tawriya's function. According to past and present Muslim scholars (several documented below), tawriya is when a speaker says something that means one thing to the listener, though the speaker means something else, and his words technically support this alternate meaning.
For example, if someone declares "I don't have a penny in my pocket," most listeners will assume the speaker has no money on him—though he might have dollar bills, just literally no pennies. Likewise, say a friend asks you, "Do you know where Mike is?" You do, but prefer not to divulge. So you say "No, I don't know"—but you keep in mind another Mike, whose whereabouts you really do not know.
An excellent column by Dennis Prager. We conservatives need to 'make jihad' (in a manner of speaking) against the religion-bashing shysters of the ACLU. Ever wonder about the etymology of 'shyster'? I have an answer for you. No, I don't think that every lawyer is a shyster.
In this video clip, Horowitz gets a Muslim Jew-hater to show her true colors.
Here he is on the Dennis Prager show discussing his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next.
This is good news: "SAN'A, Yemen—Al Qaeda figure Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the most wanted terrorists on a U.S. target list, has been killed in Yemen, according to a statement issued by the country's defense ministry."
