I’ll stand by that, too. Whenever they turn up in court and we get to hear their stories, where invariably were these young western Muslim terrorists “radicalized”? At the local mosque. The objection of Dr Elmasry’s sock puppets is not that these assertions are false but that I shouldn’t be making them because they offend their tender sensibilities.
However, when they get specific, their “case study” turns plain wacky:
16. Muslims are attempting to colonize the West in a manner similar to that in which the “white man” colonized “Indian territory”, implying that Muslims could potentially do to Westerners what the “white man” did to the Aboriginal peoples.
Is that really what I said? For a start the “Indian Territory” comparison is not mine, but the impeccably mainstream analyst Robert Kaplan’s. Here’s the passage in fulclass="underline"
In Thomas P M Barnett’s book Blueprint For Action, Robert D Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as ‘Indian territory’. It’s a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.
Here’s another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland’s radical imams settle the metropolis.
And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today’s Indian territory, countries that can’t feed their own people have nuclear weapons.
But beyond that the very phrase ‘Indian territory’ presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s ‘Indian territory’ was relatively ordered a generation or two back — West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the Seventies, other swaths of the map have spiraled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favor the latter.
It requires a fairly fantastic interpretation to get that to mean what Elmo’s Sock Puppets claim in Assertion #16. But the geniuses of Osgoode Hall Law School are not done yet:
31. Japan will inevitably be taken over by Muslims
Really? Here again is the relevant passage:
So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios…
Actually, let’s just leave it there. For after all if there are “a couple of scenarios”, how can either of them be “inevitable”? And, as it happens, the Japanese section is nothing to do with Muslims: it’s about, er, the Japanese. As I put it, “Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It’s a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.” The boneheadedness of Assertion #31 alone should have been enough even for the PC drones at the “human rights” commissions to toss out this half-baked report. It’s a “case study” not of Maclean’s Islamophobia but of the basic cognitive skills of students at what purports to be one of Canada’s most elite institutions.
Once it became clear that my “hate crime” was nothing more than grotesque misrepresentation facilitated by the multicultural cringers of the PC establishment, I started getting a lot of letters along these lines:
What I don’t understand is why you are even bothering to acknowledge Canada’s human rights commission. You live in New Hampshire, right? So why don’t you just ignore them? No court in America is going to extradite you over this stupid Islamic Congress case.
Well, maybe not – although for a while it looked as if that Saudi sheik might have some success enforcing his English legal judgment against Rachel Ehrenfeld in a US court. But my reader was right in a broader sense: I live in the hills, I have an inexpensive lifestyle, I could afford to write off my Canadian business interests – and my British ones, or European ones, or Australian ones, or wherever the next of these legal assaults arises. But I’m not prepared to give up on free expression in one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet, simply because defending it is a pain in the neck and consumes way too much time and money.
And there’s another reason. The Sock Puppets’ fraudulent misrepresentations were subsequently recycled throughout the Canadian media with the usual carelessness. I found myself obliged to point out time and again that that line about Muslims “breeding like mosquitoes” was not mine but a direct quotation from Mullah Krekar. Four months after Jim Henley was forced to issue a correction, Naseem Mithoowani (in person, one of the most charming of the Socks) was interviewed on America’s National Public Radio and still somehow managed to attribute the mosquito crack to me rather than Mullah Krekar. If she’s that bugged by it, why not take it up with her coreligionist?
The man who interviewed Mullah Krekar was a journalist called Carsten Thomassen. On January 14th 2008, he was in Kabul covering the Norwegian Foreign Minister’s tour of Afghanistan. That day, he was in the lobby of the Serena Hotel waiting to meet with the minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, when two members of the Taliban killed the exterior guards, forced their way inside and opened fire. Carsten Thomassen died of his injuries at a Nato field hospital. The Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the terrorist murders an attack not only on Norway but on freedom of speech.
I didn’t know Carsten Thomassen, except as a skilled reporter who extracted devastating quotes from Mullah Krekar and others. But we owe it to his memory to insist on the truth about that mosquito line – not just because his murder reminds us of the difference between real “hate” and the pseudo-victims of the Canadian “human rights” circus, but because to allow Dr Emasry and his Osgoode Hall sock puppets to bully the media into going along with their misrepresentations is to collude in a lie. And no society that does that can be truly free. Mr Thomassen gave his life. The least I can do is stand up to a twerp like Elmasry and his enablers in the Canadian “human rights” racket.
Aside from my book excerpt, the Sock Puppets’ “case study” cited a bunch of other “flagrantly Islamophobic” Maclean’s columns, including reviews of novels and sitcoms. So here they come – the original articles, in all their Islamophobic glory, followed by the Socks’ forensic analysis of their offensiveness. Enjoy!
EXHIBIT #2
Is it already too late for Europe?
I’VE HAD A RECURRING experience in the last few months. I’ll be reading some geopolitical tract like Sands Of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards Of Global Ambition by Robert W Merry, and two-thirds of the way in I’ll stumble across:
With the onset of the Iraq War and European opposition, many Americans embraced a severe anti-European attitude. ‘To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history,’ wrote Mark Steyn in the Jewish World Review.
Or I’ll be slogging through Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership, edited by Tod Lindberg, and find that Timothy Garton Ash’s essay on “The New Anti-Europeanism In America” begins thus: