Feminists: Latter-Day Belly-Dancers

"I am woman, hear me roar"...? All I hear is a deafening silence.

Indeed, Western feminists, by and large (with exceptions that prove the rule), don't care about the abuse of women when that abuse is part of the "cultural tapestry" of non-white, non-Western cultures -- but when abuse of women happens in the context of white Western societies, that is where you will find Western women assiduously busy churning out their own Leftist subculture of anti-American and by extension anti-Western (and by extension anti-white male) propaganda.

It didn't seem all that long ago when Western feminists were indulging in a kind of covert crypto-Imperialist paternalism (or, rather, maternalism) with regard to those preciously ethnic Third World peoples who forever remain children to be "saved" -- advocating aggressive ways to change what they considered regressive practices (hence Planned Parenthood sticking its nose in the business of women around the world): now when it comes to Muslims, those Poster Children of the Third World today whose culture is interwoven with such forms of hostility to women as domestic abuse; child abuse in the form of corporal punishment; female genital mutilation, honor killings; virtual pedophilia in terms of child marriage with ages of consent way below the modern norm; arranged marriages; and polygamy -- feminists are by and large curiously silent.

Or sometimes the exception that proves the rule is worse yet, as when they do express themselves on this, they will either blame the West (a tried and true formula of the Left), or they will try to bend over backwards in belly-dancer flexibility, in order to "respect" the culture of this oriental "Other", for, to withhold our "respect" is to begin to "judge", and that is a crime worse than murder for politically correct multi-culturalism.

House, and the House of Islam

Were the curmudgeonly atheistic Dr. House of House to show, on an upcoming episode, as much of his characteristically sardonic, witty and politically incorrect disdain for Islam as he has already shown towards Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism, I would credit the show with cojones. As it stands, its studied avoidance of the I word -- underscored by its demonstrated ability to tilt at other religions -- renders the daring free-thinker's cynicism it claims to present rather hollow.

The Great Brown Hope

Reading through the comments in this Dhimmi Watch article, one gets the dismaying sense that most civilians in the anti-Islam movement still believe in the "Great Brown Hope" -- i.e., that one major factor (if not the most important factor) in our salvation from the problem of Islam will (or must) come from Muslims themselves reforming their Islam and/or apostasizing en masse.

Not only is this hope naive, I maintain it has great potential to be positively dangerous in the various ways it will serve to inhibit necessarily ruthless measures against Muslims which we must steel ourselves to taking in the coming decades.

Unlikely Leftists of history

Not only has the essential Leftism of these three figures been culturally suppressed by the PC MC-dominated West, these three figures have been used by Leftists as examples of variously flavored right-wing pathology:

Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, and Jim Jones.

On Hitler, there is an excellent, albeit formidably long, essay on his Leftist nature.

On Jim Jones, a good essay on his Leftism has been published today on frontpage.com.

On Timothy McVeigh, as far as I know, the relevant materials are scattered and have yet to be collected into a single essay. Perhaps I will do so in the near future.

Blog and discussion forum comments

The owner of the blog Mangan's Miscellany, Dennis Mangan, has announced he is closing the comments down that were triggered primarily by an article critical of Lawrence Auster (into which Auster had to chime to anxiously set the record straight), and secondarily by a para-topical dispute between Auster and me.

Apparently, this flurry of comments was unprecedented for that blog. The blog owner at one point described himself as "basking" in the uncommon attention his blog was receiving.

I see no reason why a blog should shut down comments. It's not like another 100 comments will damage his main articles in any way. The comments field of Mangan's blog -- as the coments fields of all blogs and discussion forums I have ever seen -- do not visually impede upon the visual territory of the main articles or on other comments fields. So what's the problem? That Auster comments field could attract another thousand comments, and it would still be cyber-physically and visually contained in a field that does not impinge on anything else within the blog. It's not like an additional 1000 comments will cause electrical short-outs to occur or put any drain on the loading and reading experience of readers who ignore that comments field and instead sample other parts of the blog. So what's the big deal?

Joe Lieberman and Diana West: more asymptoticists confused as holists

As I observed in a previous essay on my The Hesperado blog, "no asymptotic deed goes unpunished". In that essay, I was talking specificially about Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes.

Now we see that Diana West, another asymptotic analyst (as she herself, in other terms, avows in her letter to the editor who announced his intention to discontinue her column in his paper), gets mistaken for a holistic analyst (she "never met a Muslim she didn't hate" is the charge by this obtusely PC MC editor of a Pennsylvania newspaper), even though she has been careful all these years to delimit the problem down from all Muslims. She is closer to the holistic epipany than some of her asymptotic colleagues (she does not flinch from identifying "Islam" as the main problem), but her scrupulous avoidance of "all Muslims" did not satisfy this newspaper editor. Ms. West might as well have been saying "all Muslims" all along.

As for Senator Joe Lieberman -- whom I would peg as considerably farther from the holistic epiphany than a Diana West (note Spencer's anecdote about the anti-holistic anxiety of the Senator's aides) -- he too has been branded as practically a holist by that very influential Democratic islamochristian, James Zogby, who as an Arab-American Christian dhimmi, heads up the Arab American Institute.

Another asymptotic Muslim on frontpage, more nougaty center to Islam

By the term "asymptotic Muslim" I mean the Muslim who is extremely critical of Islam, but never quite goes all the way to the logical conclusion: that Mohammed himself was evil, unjust and dangerous, and that the Islam he spawned, the essential Islam and the Islam of history for the last 1400 years into our present, is also irredeemably evil, unjust and dangerous.

Thus Mahmud writes: "Mawdudi, the founding father of modern Political Islam, claims that even if all the world’s Muslims together wanted to make the slightest change in these laws, they would not be allowed to do so."

For asymptotic Muslims like Mahmud, Islam is not the problem, Mohammed is not the problem: Mawdudi (or Sayyid Qutb, or "Wahhabism", or "Salafism", any number of other modern "Isms") is the problem. Mahmud might extend his critique into the distant past of Islamic history and blame this or that political ruler or cleric or fiqh scholar for "hijacking" Islam, but he can never bring himself to take a cold hard look at Islam itself and see the problem there, at its heart. No: for asymptotic Muslims like Mahmud, Islam forever has a harmless, nutritious, sweet nougaty center, and all the problems we see throughout its history and into our present -- all the horrible, evil, unjust, grotesque, ghoulish deformities we see in Islam, must be forever tangential and peripheral, for asymptotic Muslims like Mahmud. For an analysis on another asymptotic Muslim recently featured on frontpage, see my essay on my blog:

http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/11/chewy-sweet-nougaty-center-to-islam.html