Marian and I used to discuss the fact that the nation is coasting on the intellectual capital amassed by the previous regime, and we’re running low on reserves. Islam dominated Western intellectual thought for three hundred years, a period when Muslims were most open to the contributions of other faiths. This is the caliphate that should be restored, not some military-political autocracy.
In a Muslim America, there are not just fundamentalists but moderates and “moderns”, and, though the Islamic Republic is a land in decline, it’s not a totalitarian dystopia. Ferrigno is too artful to give us an “Islamophobic” rant. If you’re familiar with his earlier work, you’ll know he’s an efficient writer of lurid Californian crime novels full of porno stars, junkies and a decadent elite: in other words, everyday life in the Golden State. At one level, the Islamic future is a corrective to that present. “You were too young to remember what the country was like before, but let me tell you, it was grim,” a Catholic cop tells the young Muslim hero. “Man against man, black against white, and God against all – that was the joke, but I sure never got a laugh out of it… Your people are big on the punishment part of crime and punishment, and they don’t take to blasphemy. I like that. The old government actually paid a man to drop a crucifix into a jar of piss and take a picture of it. Don’t give me that look, I’m serious. He got paid money to take the picture, and people lined up around the block to look at it. So I’m not exactly pining for the good old days…”
It’s not an unprecedented arc: Hitler followed Weimar – or, for fans of Cabaret, prison camps followed transvestites in cutaway buttocks. There’s an extremely fine line between “boldly transgressive” and spiritually barren, and it’s foolish of secular western establishments to assume their own populations are immune to the strong-horse pitch. There’s a reason that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Europe and North America, while, say, the Anglicans are joining Broadway up a chi-chi gay dead end. In Europe, it’s demography that’s ushering in the Islamification of a continent. In America, Ferrigno posits conversion:
Jill Stanton’s proclamation of faith while accepting her second Academy Award would have been enough to interest tens of millions of Americans in the truth of Islam, but she had also chosen that moment in the international spotlight to announce her betrothal to Assan Rachman, power forward and MVP of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers. Celebrity conversions cascaded in the weeks after that Oscars night…
Ayatollah Khomeini’s designation of “the Great Satan” at least acknowledges that America is a seducer – which makes it considerably more sophisticated an insult than that of Canadians who sneer at the US as the Great Moron. What gives Prayers For The Assassin an unsettling compelling power is the premise behind that fictional Oscar speech. As that cop says, “Muslims were the only people with a clear plan and a helping hand.” If it’s a choice between the defeatism and self-loathing of the Piss Christified West and a stern unyielding eternal Allah, maybe it’s Islam that will prove the great seducer.
According to Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of Maclean’s Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia, the above is “Islamophobic” because of the following “assertions and implications”:
1. American will be an Islamic Republic by the year 2040 – there will be a Muslim / Islamist takeover
2. As a result of the Muslim takeover, there will be a break for prayers during the Super Bowl, the stadium will have a stereotypical Muslim name, and the fans will be forced to watch the game in a Muslim prayer posture
3. Due to the Muslim takeover, the US will have split into different countries and states. Much of the country will be destroyed, there will be a Christian state, there will be a Muslim state in which will be filled with ideas of Jihad, and Jews and other minorities will have to be smuggled into Canada to escape from the Muslims who will be out to eliminate them
4. As a result of the Muslim takeover there will an oppressive religious police enforcing Islamic/Muslim norms on the population, important US icons [such as the USS Ronald Reagan] will be renamed after Osama bin Laden, no females will be allowed to be cheerleaders, and popular American radio and television talk show hosts will have been replaced by Muslim imams
5. The Muslim takeover of American will occur in a violent way through a nuclear attack on the US. A copy of the Quran that will survive the nuclear attack will be placed in a War Museum hat will be built by the Muslims. On the whole this Muslim takeover will be like that of Hitler’s and the Third Reich’s takeovers Europe; Jews will be accused of various false conspiracies and will be massacred by the Muslims
6. Muslims and Islam are taking over Europe and North America; Europe is becoming “Islamified”.
7. As a result of the Muslim takeover, the star basketball player for an iconic American basketball team will be a Muslim. Further, a popular American actress, while accepting an Academy award will announce her conversion to Islam and announce her marriage to the Muslim star basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers. Her conversion and announcement will inspire tens of Millions of Americans to do the same furthering the Muslim takeover.
8. A Muslim takeover is quite feasible – Islam will prove to be the “great seducer” and will takeover the West. The West needs to return to its Christian roots in order to resist the Islam/Muslim takeover.
THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:
Er, no. I didn’t “assert” that any of the above will happen. They are aspects of the plot of Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers For The Assassin. A novel. A work of fiction. A creative art form. My column is a review of the novel. It is customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot, and usually without litigious Muslims taking you to court.
Or at least one had always assumed it was. Mr Ferrigno’s book is a “what if?” noveclass="underline" What if America became Muslim? It’s an established genre: As I mentioned in the column, my columnar confrere on The Daily Telegraph, Robert Harris, wrote a novel on the premise “What if Hitler had won the war?” And no over-sensitive Germans took him to court over it.
Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of this report, submitted it to the various “human rights” commissions on the grounds that Maclean’s exposed them to “hatred and contempt”. I certainly don’t hate them, but I do hold them in contempt. They don’t have the excuse, as many of the firebreathing imams of the west do, of being illiterate, at least in English and about anything other than the Koran. Yet Canada’s allegedly finest law school is turning out lawyers who believe that describing the plot of a novel should be actionable. I wonder how, say, Margaret Atwood feels about that. A few years back, she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, her own dystopian theocratic fantasy about an America renamed the Republic of Gilead and under the thumb of a Falwell-Schlaflyesque Christian tyranny. What’s to stop a Christian group taking a doting Atwood reviewer – or maybe the author herself – to a Canadian “human rights” kangaroo court? C’mon, you leftie novelists, what do you think there’ll be left for you to write about once the plot of a work of fiction becomes a recognized “hate crime”?