Letters to the Editor
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Loathing of Sharia?
the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs.
Read the above. They may fear Sharia. But I believe they also secretly long for it.
OT--GG, I posted here not long ago about the manipulation of "Chatter". Quote below is from NYT, cited by Spencer Ackerman at TPM:
“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan. ...
Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, said the White House “very skillfully played the fear card.”
“With the chatter up in August,” Ms. Harman said, “the issue of FISA reform got traction. Then they ran out the clock.”
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Ah, a distraction, and arguably the shortest Greenwald post of all time.
And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an acutal fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
Perhaps you should consider the prospect that Swedish politicians are estimating that country to be majority Muslim in their lifetime. How about Dutch authorities that repress "native" riots but not Islamic ones. Doesn't the Islamization of the UK affect you at all or even the call for the Islamization of Indonesia and the Conference for Caliphate?
But putting that all aside for the moment, Simon's point about how the gay, feminist, and secular, factions of the left are either supporting or remaining silent regarding their ideological opposites remains. Why are you supporting people that would kill you for being gay? Why remain silent? Do gays have no sense of self-preservation, or is BDS syndrome so overpowering as to make gays, feminists, and secularists, insensate. It is way past time for the left to stand up to the ultimate bigots of the world.
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New generational enemy of America
Mr Greenwald
Those bombastic bastards are blood thirsty,needing a perceived or real enemy to continue their thinking. 4 years ago gay marriage was eroding America standing today we must fight Islam to make gay marriage a possibilty.If you look back at their position during the cold war. they are saying the same things about existential threats just take out the word communism and sub Islam presto you have the recipe
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They are merely different sides of the same coin
"Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us."
And in their haste to stop such a pressing catastrophe, these same folks are more than happy to attempt to establish a right-wing, religious totalitarian state. Neither, I'm afraid, are acceptable to me. Nor should the choice between Sharia law and the law of the Right be the only 2 options.
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the need for an Enemy
It's only starting to become clear to me what a widespread belief this is, and how detailed its fantasy world has become.
As noted in the accounts of the NRO cruise, they have already written off Europe. The faux-scholarly air these guys take on would be laughable if it were not so pernicious:
I’m not sure whether most of Europe, even all of Western Europe, will fall to Islam in the end. Worst case scenario: Muslims will create several smaller Pakistans or Kosovos, for instance one stretching from parts of France via Belgium to the Netherlands, one in regions of England and another one in southern Sweden.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/08/west-in-21st-century-developed-or.html
Other times it's just laughable:
People like me, of European ethnicity, will have no home, no nation. We will live like the Jews as elites in other people’s nations (preferably a non-Muslim nation).
http://conswede.blogspot.com/2007/08/im-island.html
Of course, it's easy (and fun!) to laugh at other people's blogs, but as you correctly note, this is not a fringe belief any more, if indeed it ever was. It's really not clear in which direction the contagion has spread, from the blogs to the pundits or vice versa. But these people are so invested in the Terror War that they have become the Terrorized, almost as if they needed to have the Terrorists be their constant foils.
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This is a little different
than what my father, a staunch conservative and life-long Republican believes. He's convinced that Al Qaida is intent on wiping the U.S. from the face of the earth via nuclar weapons (just like the Soviets were, back in the day, I presume). Therefore, the War on Terror is a race against time--with us trying to wipe them from the face of the earth before they can try do the same to us. In his mind, it's as simple as that. He's not one of those crazy people who thinks they want to take over our country, oh no. He just thinks they want to obliterate us, that's all.
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I'm perfused
I call on my friends on the Left –- straight or gay -– to help defend that real source of liberalism the Enlightenment, because if we lose and fall under religious law, there not only will be no gay marriage, there will be no women's rights, no freedom of the press, no basic human rights, not even – as in the case of Iran – any music.
I thought that's what we on the Left were doing. I thought we were already doing everything we can (excluding the Democratic Congress of course) to protect minority rights, women's rights, public speech, in fact, all individual rights and freedoms described in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, from the assault by the Republican party in its unrelenting effort to destroy nearly everything that is democratic in this country. I thought one of the primary goals of the Republican party was to place this country under religious law.
I think the bigger threat is not Islam, but Republican party dogma. Look what it's done to us so far.
Besides, I'm not worried about the music. I listen to a lot of Sufi music. I also used to listen to everything from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan that I could get my hands on. It's awesome. I highly recommend it.