In 1946, Colonel William Eddy, the first US minister to Saudi Arabia, was told by the country’s founder, Ibn Saud: “We will use your iron, but you will leave our faith alone.” William Tayler might have questioned whether that was such a great deal. The House of Saud used the Americans’ “iron” to enrich themselves and export the hardest, most unyielding form of Islam to the Balkans and Indonesia and Britain and North America.
This resurgent Islam – promoted by a malign alliance between Europe and the Saudis – is a much better example of globalization than McDonald’s. In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it’s put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office in Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of antitrust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom’n’pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis’ Burqa King version of globalization. If a 21st-century William Tayler is unlikely, perhaps Naomi Klein could step into the breach.
According to Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of Macleans Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia, the above is “Islamophobic” because of the following assertions:
1. Mosques are a “one-stop shop” for Muslims looking to wage a “Jihad” against the West.
2. Mosques generally and commonly promote the killing of Jews.
3. Muslims commonly threaten to kill innocents; violence and threats have come to be recognized as part of the Muslim “cultural tradition” and are therefore accepted by Western society under the guise of diversity.
4. Oriana Fallaci is really a fearless and heroic figure who is being harassed by law enforcement for no good reason.
5. Oriana Fallaci is wanted in several European countries for the promotion of hatred and racism against Muslims only because Muslims have ganged up on her and are exploiting the legal system to their advantage.
6. Laws have been made in Europe in order to permit Muslims to win lawsuits by invoking bogus claims of religious and racial discrimination.
7. Muslims routinely launch meritless lawsuits against writers.
THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:
From The Globe And Mail, April 15th 2008:
Dear Sir,
In his letter, Imam Delic of the Canadian Islamic Congress says that, in my Maclean’s columns, I ‘allege’ that ‘Muslims believe in drinking their enemies’ blood’ and that ‘contemporary Islam condones sex with minors and animals’.
Er, no. It was not I who ‘alleged’ that. The latter ‘allegation’ was made in the 1980s by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, a quite famous Muslim in his day, and the former ‘allegation’ was made by Sheikh Omar Brooks, a British Muslim, in a well reported debate at Trinity College, Dublin, the oldest debating society in the world.
Imam Delic says these articles were ‘scurrilous’. If by ‘scurrilous’ he means ‘the crime of accurately quoting prominent Muslims’, then I plead guilty – though I confess I am surprised to discover this is apparently a crime in Canada. But if the imam disputes these and other characterizations, he should surely take them up with the Islamic scholars who made them rather than attempting to eliminate the middle man.
Incidentally, perhaps I might take this opportunity to extend an invitation to Imam Delic and his boss, Dr Mohamed Elmasry, to be my guests at this year’s World Press Freedom Awards in Ottawa on May 2nd.
The sheep-shaggery was to become a persistent motif of my year in the vise-like grip of the thought police. Despite the above, the tireless “human rights” apparatchik Pearl Eliadis, pushing back against what she saw as a threat to the entire racket, revived the matter of ovine fornication in a long snoozeroo of a piece in Maisonneuve called “The Controversy Entrepreneurs” – a not-quite-good-enough concept she spent many months attempting to plant in the zeitgeist, presumably in hopes of landing a book deal. “The Controversy Entrepreneur” is meant to be me, frantically milking my notoriety, although dear old Pearl seems to be the one who can’t let go of the udders. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:
In December, Awan, Mithoowani and Sheikh – a fourth complainant has since dropped out – filed human rights complaints against Maclean’s with the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). The complaints singled out Steyn’s article ‘The Future Belongs to Islam’, which predicts a Muslim global takeover, and Maclean’s refusal to provide space for a rebuttal, as discriminatory. (Steyn clarified that he was not trying to say that ‘the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers.’)
The sheep-shagging bit sounded a bit odd to the blogger Scaramouche, who went looking for the source. It’s not a “clarification” of “The Future Belongs To Islam” or anything to do with that piece at all, but, as Scaramouche discovered, comes from the entirely separate column above:
So it appears that it was that late, great holy rollah, Khomeini, who brought up the subject of sheep-shtupping and whether or not, having had one’s way with lambikins, it was appropriate to then ingest him/her for lunch. The idea was not, as Pearl Eliadis would have you believe, something that suddenly popped into Steyn’s mind, ‘flagrantly Islamophobic’ though she and the Sockies may consider that mind to be. Steyn was merely riffing (and goofing) on the Ayatollah. In which case, maybe the Socky triad should consider hauling the late Ayatollah’s mouldering carcass in front of the HRCs, since, clearly, he’s the one who had the “dangerous” ideas.
I’d go a little further. Pearl Eliadis’ idea of a “diverse” “multicultural” society is one in which it’s okay for ayatollahs to riff on sheep-shagging but not okay for others – and she and her fellow “human rights” hacks will be the arbiters of which persons are permitted to raise the subject. Sorry, but that’s the death of liberty.
Ayatollah Khomeini was the single most influential Muslim of the last four decades. He was a murderous thug, but at another level he was a ridiculous figure, as any man who issues rulings on when it’s appropriate to eat one’s ovine concubine must surely be to any civilized society. I reserve the right to make what gags I want to about the Ayatollah, and I reject the jurisdiction of a self-important third-rate plonker like Pearl Eliadis over the jokes of a free people.
One of the pathetic aspects of Canada’s “human rights” regime is its prostration before identity politics. At the eventual trial in Vancouver in June 2008, the “expert witness” called by the absent Dr Elmasry’s mouthpiece was a Muslim professor flown in from Philadelphia. He testified that he didn’t think the Muslim youths rioting in France were motivated by Islam because that wasn’t the impression he’d got from reading the papers – presumably The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News, maybe The New York Times or The Washington Post.
I’ve been to the Muslim ghettoes of Paris. I know well what role institutional Islam plays in the local power structure. He’s never set foot in those places. In real courtrooms, repeating what he’d read in the papers or someone had told him would be “hearsay”, not “expert testimony”. But, under the ersatz justice of Canada’s “human rights” commissions, because he’s a Muslim he’s the “expert” on the French riots, and because I’m not a Muslim I can’t be, and shouldn’t be commenting on it. Just like the Ayatollah can do the sheep shtick, but I can’t.