Here’s the Globe, doing its multicultural thing:
Nevertheless, there are all-too-familiar consequences of the anger that the murder of van Gogh has provoked. Surveys show a sharp rise in approval for right-wing politicians who preach the need to cut back on immigration from Morocco and Turkey, the countries from which most of the Muslims in Holland emigrated. One poll indicated that 47 percent of the Dutch feel less tolerant of the Muslims living among them since van Gogh was killed.
This syndrome — fear of a few violent extremists being transferred to the 1 million Muslims in Holland who are overwhelmingly peaceful — has a sorrowful history. It marks the recurrence of a fascistic will to play upon the insecurities of a people reputed to be among the most liberal and tolerant in Europe.
As in the past, racists and nationalists are appealing to the most primitive reflex of their own group: fear of the mysterious other. This pattern of anti-immigrant rabble-rousers manipulating anxieties about North African or Turkish communities is being replicated in nearly all the countries of Western Europe. It threatens to reawaken the dormant beast of European authoritarianism.
And here’s Hugh:
The Globe has outdone itself. Who wrote this idiotic thing? Martin Baron? Or was the “old Middle East hand,” who knows nothing about Islam, but a lot about how awful the Israelis are, H. D. S. Greenway, called in to provide his “expert” judgment?
If one had the sense that any of these people felt the slightest obligation to actually study what is in the khutbas (they can find plenty of them online at www.Memri.org), or tried to find out just what is in the Qur’an — they can get it online at www.usc.edu, with at least four different translations that can be compared side-by-side, and they can find relevant and reliable commentators), if one thought that they had taken the trouble to look at a few hundred hadith or even to begin to understand why the hadith are so important, if they had, further, consulted the sira (and the most detailed and scrupulous biography of Muhammad in English, that of Sir William Muir, can now be obtained — an abridged version, but still enormous — from Amazon), if one thought, in other words, that before commenting on what Muslims think of Infidels, of how they regard the Bilad al-kufr, of how likely it is that they will accept Infidel ways, Infidel moeurs, that at least one had did a good deal of investigation, had studied, had learned about dhimmitude, had even read a book or two by Bat Ye’or, or one or two by Ibn Warraq, had consulted the websites that are not those of the apologists — oh, if only one thought that this had happened, and that even so, one still spouted this nonsense, then at least the situation would not be so maddening.
It is the incredible arrogance of whoever wrote this editorial in The Globe — an assumption that this person “knows” all about Islam — oh, who helped him? Was it someone in the Middle Eastern Department at Harvard? A dinner-party conversation with Roy Mottahedeh? Diane Eck of the Pluralism Project? Seemingly tenured (but only his Department knows for sure) William Graham, Dean of the Divinity School and apologist a ses heures?
Bring back Uncle Dudley. Bring back people who know how to think, and how to express themselves.
The Globe, as they used to say about Pravda in the bad old Soviet days, goditsya na podtirku.(“is fit for wiping”). One knows what those scatological Muscovites meant — such examples of idiocy and ignorance help make the daily (and Sunday) Globe quite an absorbing — no, I mean absorbent — read.