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Benidorm, Spain

 

May 7, 2008 (7:11 P.M., CET): In a New York Times obituary of Mildred Loving, of Loving v. Virginia fame, Douglas Martin quotes the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom." 

Martin also notes that "Mrs. Loving stopped giving interviews, but last year issued a statement on the 40th anniversary of the announcement of the Supreme Court ruling, urging that gay men and lesbians be allowed to marry."

Nine years ago today, my partner and I registered as legal partners in Norway.  On June 11 the Norwegian parliament will vote on whether to institute a gender-neutral marriage law, extending all marriage rights to same-sex couples. 

The measure is expected to pass.  If it does, we look forward to standing before yet another judge in the Oslo courthouse and exchanging our vows.  As a result we'll be recognized as spouses in several countries around the world. 

Alas, that list doesn't yet include my own country.
 

April 29, 2008 (11:29 P.M., CET): During the nine years and two weeks that I've lived in Oslo, I've seen the city change significantly -- for the worse.  I don't remember exactly when it started reminding me of New York in the 1970s and 80s, but by now the resemblance is undeniable.  Burglary, rape, gay-bashing, mugging, graffiti, vandalism: you name it, we've got it in spades, and it's still on the rise.  Public stabbings and gang fights have become routine.  Forget for a moment the Muslim youth gangs that are responsible for a wildly disproportionate number of the crimes here: it's now impossible to walk in broad daylight down Karl Johans Gate, the grand ceremonial thoroughfare that was once the kingdom's pride, without being accosted by aggressive gypsy beggars who want your money (they've been bussed in from Rumania specifically for this purpose) and by equally aggressive drug addicts (some of who are asking for handouts, others of whom are dealing).  At night, this unsavory crew is replaced by an even pushier brigade of Nigerian prostitutes, some of whom will follow you for a block or more, repeatedly (and often belligerently) demanding that you avail yourself of their services.  So insistent are they that it doesn't even help to scream: "I'm gay!"  Even the pre-Giuliani Times Square area was safer and more congenial.

The statistics are dire.  Last month came news that the rate of reported crimes in Oslo is now four times that of New York; last week it emerged that Oslo's rape figures reached an all-time high in 2007; today it was reported that over 99 percent of street robberies in the city go unsolved.  To any unblinkered individual who lives here, these statistics are no surprise.  Yet civic authorities, faced with the steady erosion of law and order, exude indifference and ineffectuality.  Alas, as illustrated by the vile comments made last October to a Muslim audience in Oslo by the head of Norway's security police -- who, as recounted by Rita Karlsen, bent over backwards to praise Muslims and decouple Islam from terrorism while maligning America and depicting ordinary Norwegians as ignorant, potentially violent anti-Muslim bigots -- Norwegian cops are hobbled by the same mindless multiculturalism that infects their counterparts elsewhere in the West.
 

April 27, 2008 (6:46 P.M., CET): I was just about to post a link to my City Journal piece about creeping jihad when a fine example of that very phenomenon popped up on TV.  On a program about the status of women today, Afshan Rafik, a (female) Muslim member of the Norwegian parliament for the Conservative Party, told TV2's interviewer that under Islam women enjoy the same rights as men. 

Now, any responsible journalist, of course, should know that this is an out-and-out untruth.  It's not a matter of opinion but of objective fact that a woman's testimony in a sharia court is given less weight than a man's, that a Muslim woman can't marry four husbands, etc., etc.  So what did the interviewer do when Rafik made this breathtakingly untrue statement?  Absolutely nothing.  Zilch.  Nada.  The beaming, approving smile on her face didn't waver in the slightest.  And the moment passed. 

Nothing new here, alas: nowadays, the mainstream journalist who actually challenges such outrageous lies about Islam is a rare bird indeed.
 

April 23, 2008 (2:00 P.M., CET):


April 17, 2008 (10:29 P.M., CET): Every so often, over the years, there have been reports that terrorist leader Mullah Krekar, who for years has been living in Oslo and collecting support payments from the Norwegian government, was finally about to be returned to his homeland of Iraq.  I never believed for a moment that it would happen, given the army of scholars, judges, lawyers, activists, public officials, and others -- not only in Norway but in the EU bureaucracy -- who have made a sacred cause of protecting the mullah from any possibility of harm.  (Never mind how much harm his continued presence in Norway may end up doing the people whose taxes pay for his upkeep.)  Now, sure enough, comes news that Norway's Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, has decided that efforts to deport Krekar are fruitless, and has thrown in the towel.

For years, the reason repeatedly given for not deporting Krekar to Iraq has been that if he was sent back, he might be put on trial and executed.  Norway doesn't believe in capital punishment, so Krekar stays.  This is a nice message to send to asylum seekers -- kill a few people in your homeland before you go to Norway, and you'll be  guaranteed a residency card (and generous government benefits).

Cecilie Hellestveit, an Iraq researcher at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Oslo, praises Hanssen's decision.  "Iraq is in a type of situation," she explains, "in which an individual with a complicated past and many enemies will be in an extremely vulnerable position."  The word Hellestveit actually used to describe Krekar's past was broket -- which can be translated not only as "complicated" but as "motley," "varied," "confused," "tangled," "difficult," or "intricate."  This, mind you, about a man who has hailed Osama bin Ladin as "the jewel in the crown of Islam," who called the Danish cartoons a declaration of war on Islam (and declared his readiness to fight that war), who has been designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a funder of terrorism, by the UN Security Council as an associate of Al-Qaeda, and by Norway's own Supreme Court as a national-security threat. And, oh yes, who ordered the torture and murder of children.  A "complicated past" indeed.


April 17, 2008 (3:56 A.M., CET): Some pictures of the new Norwegian Opera building in Oslo, which opened for business this week.


March 28, 2008 (2:23 A.M., CET): This editorial in De Volkskrant accuses Wilders of using totalitarian methods in his film - i.e.,  he's Leni Riefenstahl.  Right: he's living with armed guards round the clock because jihadists are out to do to him what's already been done to Fortuyn and van Gogh, and he's the totalitarian. 

The determination of so many members of the Dutch cultural elite to whitewash and legitimize the real totalitarians and to affix that label instead to truth-tellers and champions of freedom is as morally deplorable as it is socially irresponsible.

De Volkskrant sneers: "it's not 'five minutes to twelve,' as Wilders would have us believe."  Yet the editorial itself reflects the terrifying rapidity of that country's cowardly slide into submissiveness since the brief, hope-filled moment of Pim Fortuyn. 


March 28, 2008 (1:25 A.M., CET): Geert Wilders's film on Islam has been released.  It can be viewed here and here, among other places.

As Robert Spencer writes, "The film is accurate. Will Muslims rage against the truth?"
 

March 19, 2008 (11:04 P.M., CET): I was no fan of the late Bill Buckley, but a piece by him in the current Commentary has proven surprisingly timely.  In it he describes how he and others, back in the 1960s, dealt with the huge and unwelcome influence in conservative circles of the John Birch Society, whose nutbag leader Robert Welch believed Eisenhower was a Communist agent.  What did Buckley do?  Give a speech in which he refused to disown Welch, explaining that Welch was a part of the big, complex picture of American conservatism and that he couldn't disown him any more than he could disown his grandmother?  No, Buckley sought, through the power of the pen, to weaken the Birch Society's influence and separate Welch from the bulk of his followers.  Others, too, took part in this effort.  And, over time, it worked.  It's called behaving responsibly.  It's called leadership


March 18, 2008 (11:48 P.M., CET): And now Arthur C. Clarke is dead.  I still remember being awed by the movie 2001 when I saw it on first release at age 11 or 12 - the very first time I remember being moved by a work of art even though I didn't fully understand what it was that was moving me.  Not too many years later, I read, and re-read, and was haunted by, his wonderful stories "The Star" and "The Nine Billion Names of God" - both of which impressed upon me that science fiction could be literature.


March 18, 2008 (11:15 P.M., CET): Alan Wolfe: "We have been asked to reflect in the most serious of ways about the role that race plays in the life of our country.  I cannot recall any leader or potential leader in the last two or three decades asking us to do that.  I hope we are up to the challenge."

Oh dear God, let us hope that we don't fail our Beloved Leader (to Be)!

Seriously, it's this kind of thinking about Obama that's really the scariest stuff of all.  He isn't even president yet, but when it comes out that he's spent the last twenty years exposing his children to racist bile, he makes a speech designed to exculpate himself and people like Alan Wolfe are suddenly wringing their hands feeling as if they've got something to prove to him.  This is not how America is supposed to work, people.  We're not here to prove anything to our leaders.  It's not their job to tell us when to reflect or not reflect on momentous social issues.  But Obama has already got so many people thinking otherwise.
 

March 18, 2008 (9:27 P.M., CET): Watching Obama's speech, I winced at his equation of unspecified remarks by his maternal grandmother ("on more than one occasion [she] has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe") with Wright's twenty years of wacko racist harangues.  "He's throwing his grandmother under the bus," I caught myself thinking.  Reading online comments about the speech, I've been struck by the number of times I've run across that exact metaphor: "He threw Grandma under the bus!"  This line from the speech has plainly resonated very strongly with a lot of people, and with good reason, for it says something important about his character - something that somehow managed to slip through all the painstakingly calculated image-mongering.

Think about it.  This woman adored him, helped raise him.  She's not a public figure.  She didn't yelp racist fantasies from a pulpit.  On the contrary, she was a white woman from Kansas who in the 1960s and 70s unhesitatingly embraced her half-black grandson and made real sacrifices for his sake.  Partly thanks to her selflessness, Obama went on to an extraordinary, magical career.  And his grandmother, in return for her years of loving devotion (a devotion Obama never received, by the way, from the Kenyan father whom he lionized in his memoir), has now been given her reward, her moment in the sun: she's been memorialized forever and ever in the most important speech of her grandson's career - a speech that will go down in American history - as a woman who said racist things.  Period.  All this as part of a cheap effort by him to justify his devotion to Jeremiah Wright.
 

March 18, 2008 (5:08 P.M., CET): God, what a beautifully written, beautifully put-together speech, and with a great deal of truth in it, to boot.  When has any politician in recent times spoken so thoughtfully and candidly, and with such broad sympathy and understanding, about race relations in America?  I didn't agree with every word, but I agreed with a hell of a lot of it, and was more moved than I expected to be.  In short, it was a terrific piece of work,  and nobody can deny that Obama can be truly superb at this sort of thing.  Yet it's impossible to get beyond the fact that it took the controversy over Jeremiah Wright's repulsive sermons to move Obama to write it.  Indeed, one of Obama's unintended accomplishments with this speech is to underscore the absurdity of the fact that a man capable of such an eloquent affirmation of America's founding principles could have spent twenty years' worth of Sunday mornings listening to the vile ravings of a boorish jackass.  In a sense, then, this speech didn't resolve the questions before us but only deepened them.

(Nor does it help that Obama continues to accuse commentators of caricaturing Wright when all they're doing is quoting him.) 
 

March 18, 2008 (3:42 P.M., CET): If Shelby Steele ran for president, I'd campaign for him.

* * *

Writer-director Anthony Minghella has died at a terribly young age.  I especially loved Truly, Madly, Deeply and The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Aside from making several terrific movies, Minghella was responsible for the most literate, illuminating, and articulate commentary track I've ever listened to on the DVD of a film, namely Ripley.

* * *

While the supposedly liberal New York Times is busy promoting sharia law, the supposedly reactionary Front Page Magazine responsibly addresses the brutal fact that sharia means, among much else, executing people for homosexual acts.  (Here's the only mention of this topic in the whole disgraceful Times article: "The prohibition on sodomy, though historically often unenforced, makes recognition of same-sex relationships [under sharia] difficult to contemplate."  Gee, ya think?)
 

March 18, 2008 (1:50 P.M., CET): On second thought, I shouldn't have referred to Jeremiah Wright as an Al Sharpton wannabe.  He makes Sharpton look like Norman Vincent Peale.
 

March 18, 2008 (12:15 P.M., CET): Some of the defenses in recent days of Obama's closeness to Jeremiah Wright have been eloquent and ingenious - but also thoroughly unconvincing and palpably born of desperation.

Yes, I've known gay people who have had a very rough time of it, and whose rejection and abuse by their parents, churches, teachers, and communities filled them with a rage and paranoia that they were unable to control - and the genesis of which was crystal clear.  In such cases, compassion and understanding are not out of order.  So I can understand a black person looking at a guy like Wright and thinking, "OK, this sort of psychopathology does exist in my community, and while this guy is saying reprehensible things, I know where it's coming from, and I don't have the heart to come down hard on him.

That doesn't mean you give him a pulpit.  That doesn't mean you join his church and cheer him on.  That doesn't mean you choose him, out of all the ministers in Chicago, as a "spiritual advisor."  That doesn't mean you drag your kids into his church every Sunday and force them to listen to his toxic oratory.  It's an insult to black Americans and to the black church to suggest that an intelligent black Christian in Chicago - especially one who claims to want to lead America beyond precisely this kind of poisonous rhetoric - couldn't have come up with a better "spiritual advisor" than Jeremiah Wright.

Obama has packaged himself as the very embodiment of moral leadership.  But it doesn't take a world-class leader to stand up and walk out of a church when a minister starts saying ugly, offensive, racist things.  All it requires is a modicum of decency.
 

March 15, 2008 (8:59 P.M., CET): There's a right way to be a Jeremiah, but this ain't it.

Obama wants us to believe that he's belonged to Trinity for some twenty years but has never heard Wright preach crap like this - or perhaps has only heard a teeny bit of it.  Or something like that.  Do you buy this?  I don't - not for a second.  And it's deeply insulting for Obama to expect us to.  This is the candidate who is supposed to be changing American presidential politics with his refreshing candor and integrity?

 Just look at Trinity's "About Us" page - this nonsense is completely of a piece with Wright's stupid, hateful, race-obsessed ranting.  For Obama to pretend that these incendiary sermons by Wright come as a surprise to him is a lie, pure and simple.  I would never set foot, not as a worshipper anyway (for research purposes, yes) in a church that defined itself in such a twisted, narrow, exclusionary way and that had such a creep at the helm; Obama not only set foot in Trinity but spent twenty years there listening to this jerk preach.  He let him perform his marriage and baptize his children.  It's disgusting, period.

For several years, I belonged to a church in New York which I joined partly because the music was glorious but also, and far more importantly, because the rector's sermons did a wonderful job of explaining, in a way that made sense to me, what it meant to be a Christian.  This, according to Obama, is exactly why he joined Trinity: Wright's sermons spoke to him.  Now, the rector whose sermons drew me to church every Sunday (and sometimes several times a week) was an eloquent and brilliant exponent of the Anglican tradition.  From time to time I also dropped in at plenty of other Episcopal parishes in Manhattan to see what was on offer, and found that the sermons varied radically from place to place - varied in theology, politics, intelligence, style.  And quality.  One rector's sermons were so wonderful (and in an entirely different way than the sermons at my own parish) that I started going to her church regularly just to hear her preach.

Anyway, my point here is simply that Chicago may not be quite as big as New York, but it's no sleepy little burg either, and it doubtless offers ministers and churches to appeal to a wide array of theological and homiletical preferences.  Briefly put, Obama could've joined any one of a number of churches - but he chose Jeremiah Wright's.  And he chose it because of Jeremiah Wright.  He was drawn to the dude, moved by him, inspired by him. Wright isn't (as Obama has suggested) some beloved avuncular figure whose flaky opinions Obama has tried to overlook out of affection.  Nor is he just a guy who happened to run a church which Obama happened to attended because it happened, for example, to be around the corner from where he lived.  No, he chose Trinity because of Wright's views - and those views have strongly influenced the way he thinks about Christianity, race, America, politics.  Yet Wright's preaching, and the "About Us" material on the Trinity website, are the absolute opposite of the post-racial line Obama has been running on.  What gives?

Millions have been drawn to Obama because he has seemed to them to be something more than a politician.  Alas, it seems increasingly clear that in fact he's the best, the slickest, politician of them all - one who makes even Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton look like rank amateurs.  Listening to the Gipper and Slick Willie, even their most fervent supporters never forgot they were politicians; to scads of Obama's followers, by contrast, he's no mere politician but something closer to a prophet - and when something like this Jeremiah Wright business comes along, they're appalled not by his long-term, intimate association with this Al Sharpton wannabe but rather by the spectacle of their incorruptible hero being subjected to the indignity of grilling by the press, as if he were just some ordinary glad-handing party hack.

I had hoped that as this race progressed, my suspicions about Obama would melt away.  I would have loved to help elect the first black president of the United States.  Instead, I've seen my suspicions increasingly confirmed.  I don't know what's scarier - that someone who found a mentor in Jeremiah Wright has come this close to the White House or that he's won the support of so many intelligent, principled people who, it seems, are so determined to preserve their belief in his destiny as America's redeemer that they've chosen to look away from the truth.

* * *

In college I took a writing course taught by Richard Price, who had just published his first novel, The Wanderers, based on his teenage years in a tough neighborhood in the Bronx, and whose latest book is reviewed in tomorrow's Times.  Still in his early twenties then, he always showed up late for class, disheveled and hung over.  He didn't do much actual teaching.  He had us read our stories aloud, then commented briefly.  Once I read a story about a day I'd spent with my grandmother when I was fifteen.  Our family lived in Queens and my grandmother lived on the Lower East Side, and though she spent every second or third weekend with us, it wasn't until that day I spent with my grandmother that I really got a good picture of her world.  I still remember following her up and down First Avenue that day, in and out of the butcher shop, bakery, and so forth, in each of which she chatted and haggled and laughed with the people behind the counter, sometimes in Polish, sometimes in English, sometimes in a combination of the two.  By the end of the day I realized that in all my fifteen years I hadn't had any idea what her life was like - and hadn't even realized it!  In any event, that was the gist of the story I read to Richard Price.  And when I was finished, all he had to say was this: "Isn't fifteen a little old to be spending a day with your grandmother?"

One day he had to give a reading in the faculty lounge.  When the appointed hour came, Price slouched in, sat facing the assembled professoriate, and started reading from his book.  The part he read was all dialogue.  And it was dull as hell - just a bunch of kids in a Bronx gang jabbering away to no apparent plot purpose.  It seemed to go on forever.  Finally even Price himself had had enough.  Looking up from the book, he said: "Who wrote this shit?" 

He wasn't invited back to teach for a second term.  A couple of years later he was a successful screenwriter in Hollywood.


March 13, 2008 (5:25 P.M., CET): I angered a lot of people when I wrote in a PJM piece, posted in December, that Obama, in his memoirs, comes across as overly race-centered.  Since then a number of facts about his parish church in Chicago and its minister, Jeremiah Wright, have come out, and it's become clear that Obama, who has packaged himself as a post-racial politician, has for two decades been a devoted member of a house of worship that is the very embodiment of race fixation.  I've attended a number of churches with majority black congregations, but I've never seen one that's as obsessed with race as Obama's church would appear to be, judging by its website.  On the page headed "About Us," for example, the text starts out as follows:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... [ellipsis in original] Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain "true to our native land," the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

When I looked at the Trinity website a few weeks ago, after the first stories had come out about Wright's connection to Farrakhan, it not only confirmed for me every suspicion I'd had about Obama from his memoirs; this stuff was even worse than I would have expected.  Now ABC News has an informative piece about Wright's sermons, which at this point come as no surprise.  The response from Obama's camp is utterly inadequate, just as was the case when the Farrakhan story came out.  It's important to keep in mind here that Wright doesn't just happen to be the minister of a church that Obama nominally belongs to or occasionally attends; Wright and his church, as Obama himself has made clear, have played a central role in shaping Obama theology and politics.  To him Wright has been a mentor, a role model, a hero.  Wright makes a cameo appearance in Obama's first book and provided the title for the second.  To try to leave the impression (as Obama's camp appears to be doing) that the views on 9/11 and other topics in the sermons dug up by ABC News are somehow incidental or peripheral to Wright's thought or irrelevant to Obama's admiration for him is absurd; these despicable opinions are of a piece with Wright's entire ideology.  They raise immense questions about what Obama really stands for.  Even a wholesale personal repudiation of them, and of Wright, would not be sufficient: Obama owes the electorate a convincing explanation of how it is that a man with such attitudes can be his mentor.
 

February 21, 2008 (2:13 P.M., CET): It is reported today that Imbera, a Norwegian firm that hosts the website of Human Rights Service, removed three items from that site without notice because two of them were illustrated with Kurt Westergaard's famous Muhammed cartoon from Jyllands-Posten and one was illustrated with a Muhammed drawing by Lars Vilks.  Imbera claimed to be acting in accordance with the EU directive on electronic commerce, and law professor Jon Bing says that Imbera had not only a right but a legal obligation to do what it did.  But Nils Øy of the Association of Norwegian Editors disagrees, while Per Edgar Kokkvold, head of the Norwegian Press Association, calls Imbera's action "unacceptable," noting that if Internet hosting services can do this to HRS they can do it to newspapers, too.

The good news is that HRS has already received an offer from Linpro AS, which hosts Jyllands-Posten, to take over its site for three years free of charge.  ("Freedom of speech is important to us," writes Linpro head Per Andreas Buer.)  The bad news is that Imbera's action is just one more sign of the ongoing erosion of free expression in Europe.  As HRS observes today on its site, Norwegians are now living in a "threat culture....The government, bishops, and others don't see that they have capitulated to this threat culture, but prefer to define it as a dialogue.  But where the threats begin, the dialogue stops."


February 10, 2008 (6:45 P.M., CET): Today Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest newspaper, contains a piece by Andreas Malm about While Europe Slept, Bat Yeor's Eurabia, Walter Laqueur's Last Days of Europe, and Mark Steyn's America Alone.  (But mostly about While Europe Slept.)  It's more of the usual mischief: instead of seriously addressing the facts and analyses in these books, Malm is regally dismissive and derisive, relentlessly mocking the authors and caricaturing their arguments, his tone implying throughout that any concern whatsoever about the Islamization of Europe is an obvious sign of Islamophobia - period.  "Bruce Bawer," he writes, "rejoices when he reads about how the general public's hostility toward Muslims is rising."  Just to make sure readers get the point, he links me and the other authors to far-right politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen and Filip Dewinter and the far-right Sweden Democrats.  He does note that our books have variously been praised by people like Niall Ferguson and Christopher Hitchens and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award - but for him it's all just a sign that Islamophobia, that dread affliction, is spreading like wildfire.

Who is this guy?  According to Wikipedia, he's a former member of Syndicalist Youth (no, it's not a Swedish boy band), a regular contributor to a syndicalist weekly called Arbetaren, and a founder of the Swedish branch of the International Solidarity Movement.  A couple of years ago he wrote a piece for Expressen explaining why he supports Hizbollah.  In this corner of the world, it's only par for the course for a major newspaper to invite a person with such a résumé to write about books like While Europe Slept - for as far as the Scandinavian media elite is concerned, Malm is the mainstream guy; it's people like me, Ye'or, Laqueur, and Steyn who are the dangerous radicals.

(Malm's piece wasn't online when I checked, but here is a pdf file of today's DN.  The piece is on pages 4 and 5.)
 

February  8, 2008 (11:45 P.M., CET): Britain already has a blasphemy law plus its infamous let's-not-be-beastly-to-the-Muslims law, but neither of these is enough for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who last month recommended legislation that would “keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting.”  It was baffling that any British citizen, let alone the successor to Thomas Becket, could be so enthusiastic about giving the government such sweeping (and vague) powers and could be so indifferent to the effect of such powers on the individual freedom for which Britain, in its finest hour, stood alone against just the kind of totalitarianism that Williams and his ilk seem at present so eager to appease...sorry, “accommodate.”

For it now turns out that Williams thinks that it would be just dandy to institute a parallel system of sharia law in Britain.  Of course, the Islamic Sharia Council has already been adjudicating Muslim marriages and divorces in the Disunited Kingdom for years, so what Williams is proposing is, as he put it in a lecture yesterday, “a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resources.”  The flavor of Rowan +'s lecture, a masterly six thousand-word exercise in euphemism and circumlocution, is suggested by the following passage:

 

It would be a pity if the immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law’s function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society.

 

What the Not-Always-Right Reverend seems to be saying here is that he finds it more attractive to see a human being as a submissive member of a group than as a free individual.  Language like the archbishop’s, which reduces a brutal and violent human reality to a comforting academic blandness, effectively removes the sting from the fact that, for example, as the Telegraph reported a couple of weeks ago, “36 per cent of young British Muslims believ[e] that a Muslim who converted to another religion should be ‘punished by death.’”  That’s sharia for you, folks, but you’d never know it from perusing Williams’ reassuringly gray, depersonalized prose, which Orwell himself might well have been describing when, in “Politics and the English Language,” he imagined

 

some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism.  He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.”  Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

 

“While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

 

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism.  A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.  The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.  Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms….

 

If you ask me, I much prefer the other Rowan, i.e. Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean and Blackadder, who to his everlasting credit was one of the few public figures in the U.K. to raise a holy stink a few years back about the proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Act, writing the following in a letter to the Times of London: “For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.”

All this comes on the heels of the news that Britain will henceforth give enhanced welfare benefits to men with two wives, provided the marriages took place in countries where polygamy is permitted.  (Non- Muslim bigamy, of course, will still be punishable by law.)  Sharia, in short, is breaking out all over the scepter’d isle, and it's being ushered in by the very same people who, not that long ago, would eagerly have called you a racist for daring to suggest that such developments were just over the horizon. 


January 30, 2008 (12:50 P.M., CET):  According to a new study by the think tank Civita, "two of three young Norwegians between 14 and 20 years old have not heard of Pol Pot and the Gulag."  Also, 34.5% "believe Communism has contributed to increased prosperity in some places in the world."

Aftenposten probed the historical knowledge of four 17-year-olds from Foss upper secondary school in Oslo.  Some highlights:

The problem here, suggests the article, is that schools devote too little time to history.  But this isn't why these kids think Communism is cool and don't know about the Gulag and connect Bush with Hitler.  Obviously teachers are using history classes as opportunities to serve up pro-Communist and anti-U.S. propaganda.  Will anyone do anything about this?  Like who, for instance?  These teachers' views are standard issue among the Norwegian cultural elite.

(By the way, I blogged about a similar study in Sweden last May 10.)


January 29, 2008 (11:03 A.M., CET): In 2007, the most popular name for newborn boys in Oslo, if you combine all the possible spellings, was Muhammed.


January 29, 2008 (10:28 P.M., CET): Which is more impressive: a presidential candidate helping a rival out with a whispered word in the midst of heated debate, or an actor drawing your attention away from himself to the brilliance of another, just deceased actor while accepting an award?


January 29, 2008 (2:05 A.M., CET): I watched a very moving documentary tonight on Norway’s TV2.  It traced the first three years in Norway of a refugee family from the Congo, and was narrated in Norwegian by the family’s eight-year-old son, Lolo.  The documentary showed the family being interviewed by Norwegian immigration authorities at a refugee camp, showed their thrill at receiving the news that their application had been approved, and showed their awe at the bounty that awaited them in their new northern home – the free apartment, the regular payouts from the welfare office, all the stuff in the stores. 

 

But then we saw their gradual disillusionment.  They’re nice, presentable people who want to integrate – but their neighbors won’t even talk to them.  Their kids go to school, clean and neatly dressed and eager to make friends – only to be told by the other kids that blacks are dirty.  Both parents are eager to work – they’re proud and hate taking handouts (a real man, the father says urgently, earns his own living) – but nobody will give them a job.  Both take courses in Norwegian and work hard to learn the language, and are given month-long temp jobs as part of the courses (him on a farm, her at an old-folks’ home).  The effect of the jobs on them is visible – they feel whole again, human again.  But when they ask to be kept on at these jobs after the month is over, they get turned down flat.

 

Along the way, the mother sinks into depression, has a breakdown, and is hospitalized.  Meanwhile the father, plainly overwhelmed and all but robbed of his sense of manhood, keeps trying to hold up his head.  What is impressive is that even with all the disappointment and abuse, they continue to try to fit in.  On May 17, they dress up and go downtown, the kids excitedly waving Norwegian flags, and try to take part in the Constitution Day celebrations – but even people they know from the neighborhood cross the street to avoid them.

 

The point of the documentary was obviously to win sympathy for immigrants.  And this was one family that deserved sympathy.  The documentary makers did a wonderful job at picking their subjects.  They chose an extremely charming, decent, photogenic, and empathic family.  And they chose a family of, ahem, Christians – a family eager (as most immigrants to Norway are not) to integrate, to work, to learn the language, to befriend their neighbors, to see their kids playing with Norwegian kids, to become Norwegians themselves.  The spectacle of Norwegians refusing to let them do this is heartbreaking.

 

Europe desperately needs immigrants to augment its dwindling work force.  Over the last generation it has taken in millions of people who won't or can't work.  Both the husband and wife in this family are good, solid, intelligent people who are eager to put in a day's labor and pull their own weight.  Any country would be lucky to get them.  It’s immigrants like these who made America what it is.  But while the Norwegian government, like others in Europe, is willing to keep shoving money at people like this for the rest of their lives, employers don’t want to hire them and their neighbors don’t want to be friends with them.

 

Norwegians are constantly congratulating themselves on how wonderfully free of racism they are, especially compared to you-know-who.  I’m not an Obama supporter, but one of the pleasures of seeing him succeed in the last few days (especially his overwhelming support among young whites in South Carolina) has been watching Norwegians trying to figure out how the hell this could happen.  Obama’s triumph violates their most cherished stereotypes about the U.S.  It must be forcing a lot of them to look inward, with discomfort.  For however non-racist they may like to think they are, a black prime minister of Norway is something they can't even conceive of.

 

Thanks to the TV2 documentary, that family from the Congo will most likely be OK now.  Now they’re celebrities.  They’ll get job offers.  Their neighbors will suddenly want to be their friends.  It's a nice thought.  But it would be nice, too, if the documentary brought about a shift in Norwegian immigration policy generally.  For what Norwegians should take away from this program, if they don’t already realize it, is that that the problems they’ve witnessed with immigrants over the last couple of decades aren't problems of race – they're problems of religion.


December 24, 2007 (10:30 A.M., CET): Early one morning during my recent visit to Rome, I answered my wake-up call, put on CNN at low volume, and was about to drift back to sleep when the anchorwoman jolted me fully awake by mentioning the name of a friend of mine, Terry Teachout. 

I looked at the TV.  There was a still picture of Terry onscreen, and the anchorwoman was quoting him about something having to do with North Korea.  By the time I figured out how to turn up the sound they'd moved on to the next item.

I've since caught up with the story, which is this: in an effort to help improve U.S. relations with Kim Jong-Il, the New York Philharmonic has agreed to perform in Pyongyang.  Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill says of the planned concert, “I hope it will be looked back upon as an event that helped bring that country back into the world.”  Plenty of folks with political power and cultural influence apparently share Hill's enthusiasm.  Terry doesn't.  Neither do I.  I agree with every word of this.

Should our goal, after all, be simply to bring North Korea "back into the world" – presumably meaning, among other things, opening up the dictator's realm to tourists and thereby helping to prop up his regime with foreign cash – or to do everything possible to hasten the end of the dictator's rule?  It seems to me that the major achievement of cultural exchanges with the USSR was to legitimize the Soviet system in the eyes of people in the West.  Why should it be any different in this case? 

* * *

Norwegian blogger Jan Haugland writes that he never heard of "brutalist" architecture before reading this article.  I'm not sure I ever heard of it either, but as soon as I saw the word I thought immediately of my alma mater, Stony Brook, where several structures, including dormitories I lived in, were ugly concrete monstrosities that seemed to scream out: "Life sucks!  Beauty is a lie!"  Living, eating, studying, and attending classes in these bunkers – which, it turns out, are indeed products of brutalism (the aptest name ever) – one felt one was being given a big, undeserved daily "fuck you" by some architect who'd designed these things, cashed the check, and then gone off to live in pleasanter surroundings.

Then again, some of the buildings depicted on Wikipedia's brutalism page look downright cozy compared to this neo-Stalinist charmer here in Oslo, where the Labor Party (appropriately enough) has its headquarters...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, but only just now found out that it took place in a building I once lived in.  I remember the doorman.  Very nice guy.  I don't recall him having bad breath, but then again I never got close.


December 21, 2007 (1:45 A.M., CET): I like Dan Blatt's list of holiday books for gay readers, partly for reasons that are obvious....


December 19, 2007 (8:30 A.M., CET): Mark Steyn is being hauled before two different human-rights panels in Canada - one a "commission," the other a "tribunal" - for expressing opinions about Islam.

I can't find any mention of this chilling assault on free speech in either the New York Times or Washington Post.  Why isn't it front-page news in both papers, as well as all the other major dailies in North America?  The reason is obvious: with few exceptions, the "respectable" media don't want to admit that this sort of thing is happening in Western democracies.  The party line is that it's Islam's adherents who are being harassed, not its critics - and they're sticking to it, dammit.

As the New York Post's editorial points out, this attempt to silence criticism of Islam only demonstrates the validity of the very arguments for which Steyn is being persecuted.
 

December 16, 2007 (3:30 A.M., CET): If you're stumped for gift ideas, here's a reminder: While Europe Slept is out in paperback.

Also just out, from Ibn Warraq - author of the classic Why I Am Not a Muslim - is the monumental Defending the West, in which Warraq definitively decimates what he rightly calls ”the totally pernicious influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism.”  As he explains, Said’s book.

taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity…encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being labeled ”Orientalist.”  The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called “intellectual terrorism,” since it seeks to convince not by arguments or historical analysis, but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism from a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has had insult heaped upon him.

And boy, has it worked like a charm.  But if anything can put a dent in Said's lamentable legacy, it's this.

Speaking of legacies, coming out in January is The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, edited by Andrew G. Bostom.  His splendid earlier book, The Legacy of Jihad, put the lie to those who reflexively explain terrorist acts as responses to Western actions, rather than as part of a centuries-long attempt to conquer the world for Islam.  Bostom's new book - which is as exhaustively researched and definitive as its predecessor - does the same for those who insist that anti-Semitism is historically alien to Islam and was imported wholesale from Europe in modern times.

In a time when many high-profile academic "experts" in Islam (whether for ideological or careerist reasons, or both) have chosen to tell pretty lies, Warraq and Bostom - who work outside the Islamologist establishment (Bostom is an associate professor of medicine at Brown) - are invaluable truths-tellers.

I've been meaning for months to post about Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up, in which she absorbingly anatomizes the "arrested development" that has rendered so many Americans incapable of acknowledging the reality of - let alone responding responsibly to - the challenge that Islam poses to the free West.  Faced with the fact of jihad in the post-9/11 era, all too many Americans (and Europeans) in positions of authority and influence are behaving like terrified children pulling the covers up over their eyes.  "The civilization that forever dodges maturity," West unarguably concludes, "will never live to a ripe old age."


December 13, 2007 (11:20 P.M., CET): I just got back from Rome, where I participated in a conference called Fighting for Democracy in the Islamic World.  Brave dissidents from several Muslim countries took part.  So did Natan Sharansky, who awed me with his tireless dedication to freedom, his off-the-cuff eloquence, and his no-nonsense insistence on calling a spade a spade.

In my talk, I discussed how the multicultural mentality - which teaches purported liberals to turn a blind eye to even the most brutally illiberal aspects of foreign cultures - led European politicians to encourage the development on their continent of patriarchal sharia enclaves.  I further noted that many European pols remain incapable of responsibly addressing or even acknowledging what they've wrought - including the gradual spread of sharia and its baleful consequences to European society at large.  ("Permit tyranny in your midst," I said in my talk, "and you'll end up tyrannized yourself.")

As if to illustrate my point, British pol Lord David Trimble, on a panel immediately following my talk, waved away my concerns with a combination of condescension and insouciance that you have to have a name like Lord David Trimble to be able to carry off.  There, there, chap!  No reason to worry.  We've got things in hand.  On your way, now!  Cheerio!

Back at the hotel, I phoned my partner in Oslo - only to learn that moments earlier he'd been confronted at our local bus stop by two Muslim "youths."  "Are you gay?" one of them asked.  When my partner confirmed that he was, the "youth" pulled a carpet knife partway out of his pocket.  At this point the bus pulled up and my partner boarded it - but not before the "youth" managed to give him a powerful kick in the leg.

Europe's condescending, insouciant politicians have a hell of a lot to answer for.  And it's only just begun.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


December 9, 2007 (3:55 A.M., CET):  "Jostein Gaarder recommends the Children's Book Club."  That's what it says on the ad above,* which is over six feet high and adorns the side of a bus shelter on Akersgata in downtown Oslo.  This ad, which can be seen on public transport and in subway stations all over town, is yet more evidence that novelist Gaarder's staggeringly anti-Semitic op-ed last year, far from ruining his rep in his homeland, made him more popular than ever.  Implicit in the op-ed was not only that Israel is the most evil nation on earth but the Jews a uniquely vile people.  ("We do not believe in the concept of God's chosen people," wrote Gaarder, author of Sophie's World.  "We laugh at this people's caprices and weep over their misdeeds.")  Two blocks from the spot where I took this picture is the building (Møllergata 19) that served during World War II as the Gestapo's main prison in Norway and as a site of torture. 

* Note (March 13, 2008): This originally read "to the right," not "above": I've just now moved the picture for technical reasons.
 

December 5, 2007 (3:35 P.M., CET): When I stayed at the Djerassi artists' colony in rural northern California in 1987, one of the other artists in residence was Paul Brach.  He was a witty raconteur, full of self-irony and entertaining art-scene anecdotes.  He talked about how he had the perfect artist's name - Brach as in Braque, Paul as in Cézanne and Gaughin and Klee.

Part of the program was that after a few weeks together we were supposed to put on brief presentations for one another of the work we'd been doing there.  When it was Paul's turn, he showed us three paintings he'd done at the colony, the first two of which consisted essentially of a single curved line reaching from one side of the canvas to the other, suggestive of the rolling landscape around us, while the third showed a line that split in two halfway across the canvas, as if to suggest one line of rolling hills half hidden behind another.  But he didn't just show us the pictures - he gave us an energetic, spellbinding account of their inspiration, conception, and creation, of the choices and challenges he'd encountered during the creative process.  At strategic points during this spiel he dramatically unveiled each painting in turn, in such a way as to make them seem nothing less than revelatory.  It was quite a show.  Whatever one ultimately made of the works themselves, his fluent description of their genesis provided fascinating insights into the artist at work.  He was a classic example of the artist as New York intellectual - Delmore Schwartz in an atelier.

When it was my turn to share my work, I read a poem or two plus a long, enthusiastic essay about the novelist Glenway Wescott, which probably took the better part of an hour to read.  When I finally got to the end of it there was silence, which Paul finally broke with a single dry comment: "I read The Pilgrim Hawk.  Hated it.  It was lapidary."
 

December 5, 2007 (6:25 A.M., CET): In Amsterdam on Monday, I read several newspapers' accounts of the latest on Geert Wilders.  It can sometimes seem that Wilders is the only prominent Dutchman still alive and non-exiled who dares criticize his country's Islamization.  Now he's the target of a broad-based effort at exclusion by members of the Dutch political and cultural establishment.  Response by the public is mixed.

This effort was kicked off by Doekle Terpstra, chairman of the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Science, who in a Friday piece in the newspaper Trouw accused Wilders of "misusing his position and freedom of speech" to divide Dutch society and called on "reasonable people" to oppose this "dangerous" creature.  Terpstra has also said, "Wilders is the evil, and that evil must be stopped." 

If this comment sounds familiar, perhaps it's because politicians and journalists talked in precisely this way about Pim Fortuyn before his murder - and Fortuyn's murderer echoed their remarks in explaining his crime.  Similarly, Dagbladet opinion editor Marte Michelet said recently that "it is absolutely crucial that [Norwegian human-rights activist] Hege Storhaug’s campaign to undermine the Muslim religious minority’s rights in Norway be stopped."  Stopped how?  She didn't say.

The iniquity of some members of Europe's cultural elite knows no bounds.

* * *

On the plane back from Amsterdam, I turned from an article about Wilders in NRC Handelsblad to yet another Dagbladet assault on Storhaug.  Nothing new - just one more piece (this time by a Norwegian who's studying for his Ph.D. in philosophy at the New School, of all places) that demonizes Hege by accusing her of demonizing Muslims.  The author, Morten Lyngeng, explicitly compares her to the Nazis - for her view of Muslims, you see, strongly resembles the Nazis' view of Jews - and sees her as exemplifying many Norwegians' deep-seated need for an evil "other" by means of which to identify their own virtue.

In short, a typical piece of academic bilge (complete with a quotation from Jacques Lacan and pretentious lines like "The Muslim's presence becomes an illness; his absence becomes a cure") that has no connection whatsoever to the reality of Norway's Muslim communities or of Hege's heroic efforts to secure human rights for the women and girls living in them.  Lyngeng's piece is utterly inane - but no doubt will be a feather in his cap when he comes back home with his degree looking for a university job.


November 19, 2007 (4:55 A.M., CET): It is endlessly amazing what ideology can do to men’s hearts and minds – endlessly amazing that a person who considers himself intelligent and civilized can look at a picture of two boys about to be hanged for being gay and write the following:

When is the West going to learn not to meddle in other nations' affairs? It is none of our business what they do. It is their country, their culture. How do you justify our arrogance? As long as human rights violations in Germany, France, Canada (and they are absolutely stunning!) and the massive crimes committed by Israel are left unmentioned, are even tolerated and encouraged, who the hell are we to point fingers?

Or:

We may not agree with Iran's attitude and eventually it will change if the people want it to but it is none of our business.

To all those pontificating about how things were in our past (Christian, Jew or otherwise), it took us a long time to learn so why not allow other countries to make their own decisions.

Yes, why not indeed?  I can't think of a single reason why, can you?

Ideologues like this constantly insist that critics of Islamism are preoccupied with “us” and “them.”  On the contrary, they're the ones who are obsessed with “us” and “them.”  It’s “their business.”  It’s “their country.”  It’s “their decision.”  If they want to execute their children for being gay, hey, that’s up to them.

(N.B.: I’ve corrected spelling and punctuation to make these postings easier to read.)


November 19, 2007 (4:30 A.M., CET): Scott was a small, wiry Jewish guy from Long Island who wore his curly hair in a sort of Afro.  I first met him when he ran a session about "sex on campus," or something like that, at my freshmen college orientation and shocked me by casually telling the group he was gay.  (This was the 1970s.) 

By coincidence, we ended up living on the same dormitory hall.  There were 15 rooms, housing 30 guys altogether (after de-tripling), and I spent my freshman and sophomore years there.  Scott and I never became close friends - I don't remember us ever having anything other than casual conversation - but often, when I was alone in the evening banging something out on my typewriter, Scott would come into my room after taking a shower, sit on my roommate's bed wrapped in a towel, and chat with me as he dried his hair with a blow dryer.  He was funny, gentle, sensitive, intelligent, considerate.  Nothing remotely sensual ever happened between us, and I never asked why, of all the rooms on the hall, he always came into mine.  At the time I just figured it was because my door was open and there was somebody there to talk to while he dried his hair.  It was only years later that I realized he'd made a habit of coming to my room because he knew I was gay, too - knew it, in fact, even before I did - and for that reason felt comfortable with me.

At that time and place, Scott's apparent self-assurance about his sexual orientation was remarkable - especially given how short and slightly built he was and how utterly defenseless he looked.  It was also remarkable - to me, anyway - that even though he was gay, he was well liked by all the guys on the hall.  Even the jocks. 

But not everybody accepted him.  One night I was in my room when I heard noises in the hall - scuffling, a cry for help.  I jumped up, rushed out.  So did several other guys on the hall.  By the time I got there Scott had already been separated from the bully who'd pegged him as a gay guy and tried to beat him up.  I'd never seen the bully before, and I don't remember, or never knew, what he was doing on our hall that night.  What I remember is the angry, battle-ready looks on my hallmates' faces - how prepared they were, at a moment's notice, to protect Scott.  The memory still moves me to tears.

I don't know for sure that that incident played a part in what happened next, but I always felt it did.  What happened was this: Scott fell into a depression.  First he disappeared.  We heard he was staying at home with his folks, a half-hour or so away.  Weeks went by.  Then one night in February a phone call came.  He'd killed himself.  The funeral was the next morning.

That morning we awoke early to a campus blanketed with the thickest fog I've ever seen.  It was unreal.  Everything was unreal.  Two or three of us had cars, and we piled into them, six or seven guys per vehicle, and drove to the funeral home.  We were numb.  We were young, and nothing like this had ever happened to most of us.  And to top off the weirdness of it all, when we left the funeral home the heavy fog had been burned away by a bright, glorious, unseasonably warm sun.  In fact it had turned out to be by far the warmest February day I'd ever seen in New York.  Or have seen since.

And so we drove back to campus in the freakishly warm sunshine, exchanging wordless glances, unable to think of anything to say.  Then one of the guys in the front seat (I was in the back) broke the silence: "All I can say," he said, "is I'm glad it's a beautiful day."  And, weirdly, a melody and lyric immediately began to take shape in my head.  By the time we arrived back at the dorm, the song was complete.  I guess I must have stopped off at my dorm room to grab some music paper before going to the Fine Arts Center, where I found an unlocked practice room, sat down at the piano, and scratched out a rough lead sheet.  Some time thereafter, at my parents' piano, I recorded it onto a cheap cassette.  This is that same recording, with the background noise as cleaned-up as possible.  It's dedicated to Scott's memory, and it's presented through a technology that none of us then foresaw, in a time when sexual orientation - at least in the little corner of the world where Scott lived and died - is, to more people than he could then have imagined, a matter of indifference.


November 15, 2007 (12:50 A.M., CET): I was thinking just now that I could make a long list of contemporary writers, both literary and not-so-literary, whose novels I've enjoyed more than Norman Mailer's but who, because they didn't stab their wives or get into fights on the Dick Cavett Show, have never received a fraction of the attention he has, either in life or death.  Then I saw that Ira Levin had passed away.  He wasn't Tolstoy but, hey, Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives show more storytelling skill, and are far more successful on their own terms, than any fiction Mailer ever produced.  
 

November 13, 2007 (12:45 A.M., CET): Here's sixteen-year-old Claus – yet another European whose harrowing experiences people like Simon Kuper (see entry below) don't want to hear about. 

At the train station in Odense, Denmark, Claus was confronted by a group of young "immigrant" men. 

"Are you gay?" they asked.  "Yes," replied this brave kid.

They beat him up.

Welcome to the New Europe.  On the one hand, there's a generation of openly gay teenagers whose families and friends have never made them feel that their homosexuality was an impediment to living full, happy, loving, and honest lives, and who are thus blessed with a self-knowledge, a self-confidence, a matter-of-factness about their sexual orientation, and a degree of emotional and spiritual wholeness that most gay people a generation or more ago would hardly have been able to imagine.

On the other hand, there's an ever-expanding army of (as Hans Rustad puts it at document.no) "moral police" consisting of belligerent young Muslims who are determined to terrify these gay kids into the closet – to force them to live the kind of scared, constricted lives that gay people used to live.

Denmark has no national statistics on gay-bashing, but a study undertaken in Århus by the Danish National Association of Gays and Lesbians (LBL) shows that there's a high risk of being attacked or harassed in that city (Denmark's second largest) if you're gay. 

The problem isn't restricted, of course, to Århus.  It's Europe-wide. 

LBL's spokesman speaks of "a growing problem with [anti-gay] intolerance" in Denmark.  Unsurprisingly, the article delicately steers clear of the fact that the people causing this problem are overwhelmingly Muslim males – though the picture caption (perhaps through an editorial oversight?) does mention that the culprits are "immigrants."
 

November 12, 2007 (11:15 P.M., CET): Two words: Richard Adan.

Here's what I wrote about Norman Mailer a few years back.
 

November 12, 2007 (12:40 P.M. CET):  I’m back.  Sorry for the long silence (due to computer problems and overwork).  Anyhow, here we go again...

* * *

While Europe Slept (just out in paperback) has finally been reviewed, or at least kicked around a bit, in the Financial Times – only twenty-one months after its appearance in hardcover.  Reviewer Simon Kuper’s premise is a familiar one – that my book, and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, and Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, and Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe are all sheer nonsense, that Europe is doing just dandy, that all this hand-wringing about Islamization is just a load of nonsense cooked up by a bunch of bigots. 

To show just how big a bigot I am, Kuper quotes (or, actually, slightly misquotes) this sentence from page 109 of While Europe Slept: “For these beurs – the universal term for the French- born progeny of North African immigrants – the meaning of life is derived from their hatred of French society.”  Kuper plainly wishes to leave the impression that I’m speaking here about all beurs.  In fact the sentence is part of a summary of a compelling essay by Theodore Dalrymple about the dispiriting conditions in immigrant suburbs in France.  The sentence in my book that precedes the one quoted by Kuper reads as follows: “Few tourists notice them on the way in from the airport, but they’re terrifying places where young men on government handouts loiter in the streets, returning one’s gaze without ‘a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity.’”  (The last eight words are Dalrymple’s.)  It’s then that I write: “For these beurs,” etc.  In other words, it’s absolutely obvious in context that I’m not talking about all North African immigrants – I’m talking about those unemployed young loiterers with the heartless stares.

Later Kuper (whom Wikipedia, by the way, identifies as a sports columnist) sneers that the books under review “are polemics, not reports, and any source will do: Bawer cites Ye’or, an Amsterdam taxi driver, a woman in a Swedish bar or often no source at all.”  Huh?  My exchange with the taxi driver (page 5) is part of an account of my visit to Amsterdam after the murder of Theo van Gogh; my conversation with woman in the Swedish bar (footnote, page 44) is part of an account of Swedish political attitudes.  It would be bizarre for a writer of a book about what’s going on in Europe today not to include anecdotes of this sort.  Is this the best a mendacious sports columnist out to destroy a book can come up with?

Kuper has read four books that demonstrate incontrovertibly that Europe is in a mess of trouble.  But he isn’t about to serve up a frank account of their contents, because to do so would be to make it crystal clear that Europe is in trouble.  So instead he misrepresents their contents, smears their authors, and heaps on the scorn – all in an effort to convince readers that these books are built on “hysteria” and serve up “dystopias” and hence don't deserve a serious reading. 

Thus do four sober books crammed with hard facts about the present state of Europe get turned, with breathtaking dishonesty, into frenzied fantasies of the future.

Kuper isn’t just kicking around a few books here.  By dismissing their contents so magisterially, he’s turning his back on the countless European Muslim girls who live in fear of being forced by their fathers to marry.  And on France's Jewish children, who, according to an official report, can’t get an education because of relentless harassment by Muslim classmates.  And on the millions of ordinary Europeans who’ve seen their corners of the world transformed in ways that their elected officials and news media refuse to acknowledge, let alone address responsibly.

Not until after I’d skimmed Kuper’s review did his name suddenly ring a bell.  I grabbed a copy of While Europe Slept and turned to the index.  Yep, there he was: “Kuper, Simon, 195-96.”  I turned to page 195 – an account of responses to the murder of Theo van Gogh:

Dutch journalist Simon Kuper sought valiantly to hold the old establishment line – and demonstrated just how feeble that line now sounded.  Posthumously slandering Fortuyn as the instigator of Dutch “Muslim-bashing” and “racist politics” and van Gogh as “a minor filmmaker on the make,” Kuper played down his country’s grave new problems (“a few Dutch Moroccans beat up gay men….Some Muslim pupils wouldn’t listen to lessons on the Holocaust”) and dismissed Dutch concern about these matters as hypocritical: “The Netherlands had been inhabited for centuries by people who believed men and women were unequal, and that homosexuality was a sin, but it was now decided that Muslims holding such views were at odds with ‘Dutch values.’”  Presumably Kuper expected Dutch women and gay men to quietly accept the erosion of their liberties as the clock turned back – and not to the seventeenth century, either, but to the seventh. 

Kuper, writing in the Financial Times, characterized criticism of fundamentalist Islam as “bashing” – a curious choice of words, given that literal bashing (of women, gays, Jews) was among the problems in question.  He sneered at immigration minister Verdonk for wanting “to make all immigrants learn ‘Dutchness,’ though no one is clear what this is” – when in fact nobody who took a spin through Amsterdam’s Oud West could fail to understand exactly what Verdonk meant.  Kuper counseled that the Dutch should accept a level of street crime and a certain “risk of Islamic fundamentalist violence” (after all, “smoking still kills thousands of times more Dutch people than Islamic fundamentalism”); presumably he felt they should accept a certain level of gay-bashing, wife beating, and honor killing, too.

 Need I say more?