Letters to the Editor
-Mona-
Published Letters: 915 Editor's Choice: 1
-
@Golden Boy
[Read the article: The Islamists are coming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Right, the creeping exceptionalism and demands for superiority by Islam is all made up to scare people, and is officially an invention of the Evil Loony Corporate Big Money Tinhat Right Wing. Sure.
Actualy, this is where I strongly part ways with you. The right-wing noise machine actually is promoting nonsense about Muslims intended to terrify people. Here in the U.S., we have almost no problems with our Muslim citizens, certainly not more so than the right-wing nutjobs who bomb abortion clinics and the like.
Nor is any frenzied language issuing from this or that imam about the coming Glorious Caliphate anything to take seriously. The GOP and Bush boosters however glom onto that rhetoric as a reason to Fight to Save Civilization and start wars with various Muslim countries, which is evil as well as counterproductive.
The issue with intolerant and/or violent Muslims living in Western democracies and chilling speech via violence and threats of same, is a domestic immigration problem not particularly implicating foreign policy. But the Bushites won't accept that, and do everything possible to depict these Islamic extremists as the latest Nazi threat, which is beyond absurd.
-
@Denning
[Read the article: The Islamists are coming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let's see: [Rushdie's] just as not dead as the NYT reporter but now he is rich, famous and married to a super-model. "decimated" is an exaggeration. Granted, fame & fortune may not be worth the trouble of looking over one's shoulder, but he got more: a chance to defend his professional freedoms. He became a symbol of freedom of speech. His life had/has a purpose.
How glib and cute of you. Now the picture of the man and how he suffered that emerges from an interview he gave not long ago to Reason magazine:
For years the fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding in London. It cost him his marriage and isolated him from his young son. The book was banned in India and he was barred from his homeland. Desperate to resume normal life, Rushdie apologized to Muslims and even formally converted to Islam, a move that he later repudiated.
An iconoclast's soul cannot come to terms with tyranny. In Rushdie's case, the ordeal of being hunted and censored heightened the tension between his political and literary sensibilities, sparking--to use the Marxist term--an inner dialectic. That experience has brought him around to a fundamental libertarian concern: freedom.
....
Rushdie: ... One of the things that was interesting was that on both sides of that argument [whether he had brought the fatwa on himself, as some leftists claimed] there were people who wanted to describe this as an exceptional event. People who were on my side wished to say that this was an exceptionally horrible attack on a writer and therefore required exceptional resources to defend it. People who were not on my side said that I had done something so exceptionally horrible that the rules of free speech didn't apply. But on both sides of the argument, there was a desire not to make it typical of anything. It didn't prove that Islam was against free speech. It was just against this horrible abuse of it. It didn't prove that there was a large problem of this sort. It just proved that a particularly insane dying religious leader had made a particularly insane fanatical threat.
And when I tried to say that this is not just me, that it is happening in a lot of places to a lot of writers and you need to look at that larger phenomenon, it was often seen as special pleading. This was seen as me trying to attach my case to others to justify myself. It was very difficult to get anyone to see that there was a growing phenomenon that needed to be taken seriously: the attempt to control thought.
This is at the front line of Islamic radicalism. There are all kinds of things that come behind it. You know what [Iranian sociologist] Ali Shariati called the "revolt against history." That's the project of tyranny and unreason which wishes to freeze a certain view of Islamic culture in time and silence the progressive voices in the Muslim world calling for a free and prosperous future.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/33120.html
-
@Golden Boy
[Read the article: The Islamists are coming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And still very few people have taken me up on my question about why the Danish cartoons insulting the vile pedophilic warlord Mohammed
Do me a favor, please, and stop invoking me or agreeing with anything I say. You are a bigot, and I don't like those. I could launch a lengthy discussion of the actual history of Mohammed, and his marriage to a pre-pubescent girl, which was not unheard of in that culture. Know please that I have a Muslim friend (actually, like me she is an atheist, but her lovely Iraqi-American family are devout Sunnis.) You don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Islam and Muslims per se.
-
@Denning
[Read the article: The Islamists are coming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But, when you make your points about the trouble with Islam, you should make your distinctions between Islam and radical Islam clearer. You don't have to, but it would be help. (as evidenced by shooter having mistaken you for one of his ilk).
Rest assured shooter does not mistake me for being of "his ilk." I've been commenting at Glenn's blog virtually since its inception at blogspot, and after only a few rounds with shooter there declared him a troll, and haven't replied to any of his imbecilities in something like a year.
We had a discussion of the Danish Cartoons back at Glenn's old blog, and my position then was as it is now, namely, that just because of the deranged rhetoric from the Professional Islamophobes, that does not diminish the fact that there really and actually is a problem with radical Islam. Those extremists kill people in order to, among other things, chill Western speech. But that is no reason at all to start wars all over the Middle East, and will only manufacture yet more Muslim extremists.