Hmm.
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:
1. Intolerance and homophobia against gays has grown in the Netherlands due to Muslims.
2. There will be a Muslim “conquest” in Europe as a result of the local Muslim population already in place
3. Due to the growing number of Muslims in Europe there will be a Muslim conquest of Europe and France. This conquest will be similar to that of the “Muslim march” on France 1300 years ago.
THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:
Well, let’s just take that first point, as Numbers 2 and 3 can only be known in the fullness of time. In the introduction to the paperback edition of America Alone, I returned to the subject of ‘homophobia’ in the Netherlands:
Gay-bashing is on the rise in the most famously ‘tolerant’ cities in Europe. Chris Crain, editor of the gay newspaper The Washington Blade, was beaten up by a gang of Muslim youth while visiting Amsterdam in 2005. As Der Spiegel reported, ‘With the number of homophobic attacks rising in the Dutch metropolis, Amsterdam officials are commissioning a study to determine why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays.’
Gee, whiz. That’s a toughie. Wonder what the reason could be. But don’t worry, the brains trust at the University of Amsterdam is on top of things:
Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder. Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity.
Bingo! Telling young Moroccan men they’re closeted gays seems certain to lessen tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of those Turks seem a bit light on their loafers, don’t you think?
One can debate the speed of transformation, but that that transformation is underway is indisputable.
EXHIBIT #3
What should I do, Imam?
The second half of the Super Bowl began right after midday prayers. The fans in Khomeini Stadium had performed their ablutions by rote, awkwardly prostrating themselves, heels splayed, foreheads not even touching the ground…
AT THE SPEED history’s moving right now, you gotta get your futuristic novels in fast, and Robert Ferrigno’s is the first in the potentially extensive genre of Islamotopian fiction. In Prayers For The Assassin, the fun starts on the inside cover: a map of the Islamic Republic of America in the year 2040. The nation extends over most of the north and west of the Lower 48. Chicago, Detroit and the East Coast cities are ruined and abandoned, Mount Rushmore is rubble, and Seattle is the new capital. Catholics remain as a subordinate class to their Muslim rulers. The evangelicals – the “peckerwoods” – are hunkered down in a breakaway state called “the Bible Belt” (the old Confederacy), where they still have the Second Amendment and the original Coca-Cola formula: up north, they have to make do with Jihad Cola, which sucks big time. South Florida is an “independent unaligned” area, the Mormon Territories have held out, and the Nevada Free State remains a den of gambling, alcohol and fornication. And in the most intriguing detail on the map, there’s a dotted line heading through Washington State to British Columbia marked “Rakkim’s route to Canada” – the new underground railroad along which he smuggles Jews, gays and other problematic identity groups to freedom across the 49th parallel. I can suspend almost all disbelief at the drop of a hat, but the notion of our already semi-dhimmified Dominion as a beacon of liberty is certainly among the harder conceits to swallow.
Every successful novelist has to convey the sense that his characters’ lives continue when they’re not on the page: An author has to know what grade school his middle-aged businessman went to even if it’s never mentioned in the book. In an invented world, that goes double. And in a “what if?” scenario, where you’re overlaying an unfamiliar pattern on the known map, it goes at least triple. Saying “Imagine the US under a Muslim regime” is the easy bit, creating the “State Security” apparatus and Mullah Oxley’s “Black Robes” – a Saudi-style religious police – is only marginally more difficult. It’s being able to conceive the look of a cul-de-sac in a suburban subdivision – what’s the same, what’s different – that determines whether the proposition works or not. Ferrigno has some obvious touches – the USS Ronald Reagan is now the Osama bin Laden – and some inspired ones – the Super Bowl cheerleaders are all male – but it’s the rich layers of detail that bring the world to life. In one scene, a character’s in the back of a cab and the driver’s listening to the radio: instead of Dr Laura and Dr Phil, it’s a popular advice show called “What Should I Do, Imam?” It doesn’t have any direct bearing on the plot but it reinforces the sense of a fully conceived landscape. There’s no scene set in 2028, but if you asked Ferrigno what Character A was doing that year he’d be able to tell you. If you said “What’s Dublin or Brussels like in this world?” he’d have a rough idea.
The Islamic Republic came into being 25 years earlier in the wake of simultaneous nuclear explosions in New York, Washington and Mecca: “5-19-2015 NEVER FORGET.” A simple Arabic edition of the Koran found undamaged in the dust of DC now has pride of place at the House of Martyrs War Museum. On the other hand, the peckerwoods retrieved from the wreckage the statue of Jefferson, whose scorched marble now graces the Bible Belt capital of Atlanta. But what really happened on that May 19th? Was it really a planet-wide “Zionist Betrayal”? Ferrigno’s story hinges on the dark secret at the heart of the state, which various parties have kept from the people all these years. Car-chase-wise, it’s not dissimilar to Fatherland, Robert Harris’ what-if-Hitler-won-the-war novel, in which a 1960s Third Reich is determined to keep its own conspiracy hidden. And in the sense that both plots involve the Jews, plus ça change – in life as in art.
The local colour is more compelling than either the plot or the characters: there’s a guy – maverick ex-fedayeen – and a girl – plucky, and dangerous with a chopstick – and a sinister old villain with the usual psycho subordinates. Standard fare, but in a curious way the routine American thriller elements lend the freaky landscape a verisimilitude it might not otherwise have had. Writing into the future, a novelist has to figure out what will have been invented in 35 years’ time. Projecting from, say, 1890 to 1925 takes some skilclass="underline" who’d foresee that telephones and automobiles would be everyday items and that nations would have things called “air forces”? By comparison, from 1970 to 2005, the look of our world has barely altered: the changes are significant but visually marginal – email and computers. Technologically, Ferrigno’s 2040 seems little different from today, but he has a persuasive explanation for it: Nothing works unless it’s foreign-made. American inventiveness has shrivelled and the country’s already mired in the entrepreneurial arthritis that afflicts most of the Muslim world. As one character says: