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Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan veers from promoting literary work to bashing freedom fighters

Nov 14, 2010 4:44 am By Robert Spencer

AslanNov102010.jpegAslan unhinged: We are always on his mind

On November 3, I wrote here about Islamic supremacist pseudo-moderate Reza Aslan’s emails to me (which I will publish once I’ve collected a few more of them) that Aslan “will not deal on the level of facts and discuss matters rationally, but instead works consistently from the gutter. It is the only refuge he has given his manifest and abject intellectual vacuity.”

Abject intellectual vacuity was an understatement. On October 30, I wrote here that “Islamic supremacist pseudo-moderate Reza Aslan is a clown.” And so on November 12, a report about an appearance Aslan made to promote his new literary anthology noted that he veered weirdly from the topic of the evening to call Pamela Geller and me “clowns.” I guess next he’ll be calling me an “Islamic supremacist pseudo-moderate.”

The diminutive Aslan is trying very hard to appear as the reasonable, fashionably liberal voice of Islam, but in this he is plainly deceptive: he is a Board member of the National Iranian American Council, a group that genuine Iranian pro-democracy forces regard as an apologetic vehicle for the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has also called on the U.S. Government to negotiate not only with Ahmadinejad but with Hamas — that is, with some of the most barbaric and genocidally-inclined adherents of Sharia.

And so it is in his interest, and in the interest of the forces he serves, to defame people who are standing up to the political and supremacist aspects of Islam in the name of human rights. But his desperation is showing when he has to go out of his way to bring us up at an event that was supposed to be about literary works, and had nothing to do with Sharia, or the resistance to it, at all. We seem to be a feature of every talk he gives lately, no matter what it’s supposed to be about. I gave two talks this week, one at Texas A & M and another at a wonderful event with Pamela Geller in Fort Worth, and in neither one did I mention Reza Aslan; in fact, I have given a great many talks over the years, and don’t remember every detail of them all, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Reza Aslan in any of them. Yet we seem to play on his mind so — he is showing the signs of a man who knows his deceptions are being exposed.

“Novels » Tablet and Pen: Humanizing the ‘other,'” from Palestine Voice, November 12:

Washington – Reza Aslan, reknowned [sic] Iranian-American scholar and author, appeared at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC Thursday night to promote his latest work, an anthology of modern literature from the Middle East entitled Tablet and Pen. […]

Aslan began by warming up the crowd with a few quips on anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. He sarcastically congratulated the anti-Sharia Oklahoma activists for their work to “finally” bring the state under the Constitution and lampooned other popular anti-Islam “clowns” like Sharron Angle, Pamela Gellar [sic], and Robert Spencer.

The subject of this satirical monologue, however, is not an integral part of Tablet and Pen. The anecdotes Aslan drew upon were to illustrate his point that Islam is becoming “other-ized”, and that the best way to combat this trend is to build relationships through a mutual appreciation of the “other’s” arts. […]

Yeah, a few good poems will make us forget all about the recent letter bomb jihad plot against synagogues in Chicago, the recent jihad mass-murder in a church in Baghdad, the Fort Hood jihad shooting, the Arkansas recruiting center jihad shooting, the Christmas underwear bomb jihad attempt, the Times Square jihad car bomb attempt, the Fort Dix jihad plot, the North Carolina jihad plot, the Seattle jihad shooting, the JFK Airport jihad plot, and on and on. See, the real problem here, folks, is that Islam is becoming “other-ized”!

Note that even in this literary anthology, the pathetically derivative Aslan drags out a tired theme of victimization vis-a-vis the West:

What really ties all the authors together is their common experience within their respective nationalisms in the face of Western colonialism and imperialism. It is this shared narrative, rather than what Aslan referred to as an “imaginary” construction of what constitutes the “Middle East”, that is at the heart of the book.

The anthology’s introduction makes note of revered scholar Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, in looking at the “Middle East” or the “Orient” as a symbol for what the West or the “Occident” is not. By using the classical definition of the “Orient”, Aslan is purposely both mocking and paying homage to an outdated worldview that still has a significant hold on contemporary East-West relations….

Ibn Warraq gave Said and Orientalism a debunking — or, as Aslan has said, a “bunking” — for the ages in this book.

Aslan continued:

“There’s been a lot of complaint that Americans don’t really ‘get’ the Palestinians. I’m hoping that this anthology could help change that,” he said….

Oh, we “get” them loud and clear, thanks.

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Filed Under: "Islamophobia", claiming victim status


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