Camille Paglia’s Leftist credentials are impeccable, so she can say things like this in pro-jihad, pro-Sharia Leftist Salon. If Pamela Geller or Nonie Darwish or I had written exactly the same paragraph below, Salon would have rejected it, or if it had appeared elsewhere, Salon would have vilified the writer as a racist, bigoted Islamophobe, fear-mongering for profit by talking about a mythical clash of cultures.
However, as Sam Harris, Joyce Carol Oates, and Richard Dawkins have recently learned, Camille Paglia will not be exempt. If she keeps talking about a “clash of cultures” that the secular West might lose, she, too, will be tarred as a “racist, bigoted Islamophobe,” impeccable Leftist credentials notwithstanding.
No one who dares speak out against jihad violence and Islamic supremacism is spared. Last night PBS aired a BBC documentary about the life of Muhammad for which I was interviewed, and a small part of the interview briefly appears in the documentary, amid an avalanche of material about how Muhammad was essentially a modern-day Gandhi. This led to a small uproar on Twitter, with Leftists and Islamic supremacists tweeting angrily to PBS asking how they could dare to air the views (even for just a few seconds) of a hate-filled bigot like me. How do they know that I am a hate-filled bigot? Most, if not all, of the angry Tweeters probably never read a line I have ever written, and even if they have, wouldn’t be able to find any actual hatred or bigotry in it. But they have been told again and again and again that that is what I am about, and the people who tell them are people they trust, so they know it must be true.
Once I am completely demonized, marginalized, and out of the way, they will start in on the next target, until there will be no one left to say the smallest critical word about jihad violence, Sharia oppression, and Islamic supremacism. Camille Paglia may well find this out.
“Camille Paglia: ‘It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton is our party”s best chance,” by Tracy Clark-Flory for Salon, August 21 (thanks to Enrique):
Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even a key motif in “King Lear.” As far as I”m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, “What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?” Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood. The escalating instability not just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more to resolve “” and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win.