memo from europe bruce bawer's blog
Benidorm, Spain
November 26, 2008 (11:25 P.M., CET): Martin Bosma, Member of Parliament
and spokesman for gay rights for the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, kindly
informs me that
the new study on gay-bashing in Amsterdam cited in the DutchNews.nl article I
quoted on Monday was actually a different study than the University of
Amsterdam study of the same subject. That's right, folks: there were
two different reports on antigay violence released in the Netherlands last
week.
Bosma notes that this other report, which was issued by the Ministry of
the Interior, inspired a slew of mainstream-media headlines, such as the one at
DutchNews.nl, claiming that most antigay attackers
were ethnic Dutch. But the headlines misrepresented what was
actually in the report: as the DutchNews.nl article
itself noted, 16% of the perpetrators were identified as "non-white," while 84%
of assaults were "committed by native Dutch
men or no attacker was listed [my emphasis]." In other
other words, it's absolutely false to say that a majority of antigay attackers
were ethnic Dutchmen or that only 16% were members of immigrant groups; even if
one takes these figures seriously, they by no means rule out the possibility
that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators were indeed Muslims.
The headlines that suggested otherwise seriously misrepresented the report's
contents, and did so in an apparent effort to shift blame for gay-bashing away
from Muslims.
But this isn't all. Bosma brings up a very important fact: that under Dutch law the grandchildren of immigrants - a category which would include many, if not most, of today's Moroccan-Dutch teens - would not be officially identified as "allochtoon," or immigrant, but as "autochtoon" - that is, as native Dutch men. This vital point didn't make it into the DutchNews.nl story at all.
In any event, apropos of both studies, Bosma writes: "I doubt all these figures." Citing Amsterdam police commissioner Bernhard Welten to the effect that antigay violence is mostly committed by non-Western immigrants, Bosma says: "The rest is damn lies and statistics." My own observations and experience, and the anecdotal evidence with which I am familiar, overwhelmingly incline me to agree with Welten and Bosma.
* * *
Bosma also sends along an article he's written for the gay
magazine Gay Krant about the website Marokko.nl, which, he writes, "contains
the most reprehensible texts not only about gays, but also about people who
apparently don't fit into the Islamic future: Jews, unbelievers, blacks, and
Westerners in general." The favorite subject of humor at the site, he
notes, is the death of Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan. Nonetheless,
Marokko.nl has received 160,000 euros in grants from the Dutch government.
Bosma's Freedom Party opposes these subsidies (the likes of which are par for
the course in Western Europe), but it's outnumbered in the Tweede Kamer by
legislators who seem to believe that throwing money at these haters will somehow
stem their hatred.
November 24, 2008 (6:59 P.M., CET): For years, gay-bashing has been on the rise in Amsterdam. It's well known among Dutch gays that young immigrant-group men are disproportionately responsible for these attacks (the great majority of which go unreported). There's no need for any study to prove this: the anecdotal evidence is immense. In the last couple of years, there have been several high-profile – and increasingly audacious – assaults on gay people, and routinely the perpetrators have been young Muslim men. It's obviously no coincidence that the perceived climb in gay-bashings over the last decade has seemed to track the increase in Amsterdam's Muslim population during the same period. (Meanwhile, the proportion of ethnic Dutch Amsterdammers has declined steadily.)
Police chiefs were asked to keep a record of instances of gay bashing following concerns that attacks were increasing and that young immigrants were largely to blame. There have been several high profile attacks on gay men over the past year, particularly in Amsterdam.
But in only 16% of the registered incidents between January and June was the attacker described as non-white, the figures show.
Meanwhile the aforementioned AP bulletin made no mention of race, religion or national origin, saying only that “most attacks were carried out spontaneously by poorly educated young men who feel their masculinity has been questioned.” Given that virtually all non-Muslim kids in the Netherlands attend good to excellent public schools and are, by their mid-teens, fluent in English, French, and German (it is not unusual to see Dutch fifteen-year-olds on trams reading authors like Camus and Thomas Mann in the original language), this bit about the perpetrators being “poorly educated” seemed irreconcilable with the claim that the attackers were mostly ethnic Dutchmen.
There are, of course, more than a few poorly educated young people in Amsterdam. They've grown up in homes where the only book is the Koran. They have fathers with brutal patriarchal values and home-bound mothers who can’t speak Dutch and are utterly unaware of their own rights as EU and Dutch citizens. Many of these young people have spent their childhoods largely in their parents’ homelands, being shielded from the Kingdom of the Netherlands' offensively liberal values. And many, rather than attending Dutch public schools, which teach sexual equality and acceptance of gay people, have been formed by religious schools that teach contempt for the West, for democracy, for women, for Jews, for non-Muslims generally, and – especially – for gays.
I wanted to see the researchers' report itself – which is entitled “As Long as They Keep Away From Me” – so I went to coc.nl, the site of the major gay-rights organization in the Netherlands, COC (which stands for Cultuur- en Ontspannings Centrum, or Culture and Recreation Center). Sure enough, the COC site had a pdf of the official report. I dove into it, and within a minute found the following on page six: “The suspects [in antigay attacks] are just as often native Dutch as of Moroccan descent (both 36%). Since 39% of all young people in Amsterdam under 24 years of age belong to the first group and 16% to the second, Moroccans are overrepresented among suspects in these kinds of violence.” Plus a fact, if 36% of suspects are native Dutch, that means 64% are not native Dutch. Most of those who aren't either Dutch or Moroccan presumably belong to the other major immigrant groups in the Netherlands – Turkish, Surinamese, Indonesian, and Dutch Antillean. (Based on my own experiences, observations, and overwhelming anecdotal evidence, I strongly believe that if full gay-bashing statistics for Amsterdam were available, these proportions would shift appreciably.)
I skimmed through the report. On page 17, the researchers admit that “relatively speaking, Turks and Moroccans have a lot of trouble accepting homosexuality." On page 24, they write that "criminologist Jan Dirk de Jong suggests that the cause of the deviant conduct of Moroccan delinquent boys lies not in Moroccan culture or education per se but is primarily connected to their street culture.” (So it's just a coincidence that the violent homophobia of that street culture is utterly consistent with Koranic values?)
The report finally confronts the Islam issue on page 25, noting that my book While Europe Slept “directly links” antigay violence in Amsterdam “to the ideas of Islam,” and that Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party considers the connection “self-evident.” I fully expected the researchers to dismiss both Wilders and me as Islamophobic; instead, I read the following: “Research shows that religion in general has a strong effect on having a gay-negative attitude, even if one corrects for such attributes as gender, age and educational level. This includes all religions, not only Muslims but also Christians and in particular people with an active religious life. Among religious groups in the Netherlands, however, negativity toward gays varies, with Muslims being conspicuous for their extreme views.”
This last observation, of course, could have received more emphasis; given, moreover, that Amsterdam is hardly overrun with violently antigay evangelical Christian youth, there's no logical reason to drag in Christianity here. Yet it’s obvious why the researchers did so: in academic circles nowadays, the only way you stand even a remote chance of getting away with any criticism of Islam, however tamely articulated and amply justified, is by tucking it snugly into a blanket criticism of all religions.
Nonetheless, given the equivocal manner in which Western academics tend to approach these topics nowadays, it's surprising that the report acknowledges Muslim homophobia as explicitly as it does. By contrast, it's not at all surprising that several major media organizations - apparently more concerned with protecting the reputation of Islam than with reporting the truth - felt compelled to serve up what appear to be serious misrepresentations of the study's findings.
* * *
I meant to post this on November 9:
American writer Anne Applebaum spells out an important point for British readers:
Here is something that may be hard for foreigners to understand: Americans desperately want to believe that their country stands for fairness, for equality, for democracy. They especially want to believe this at times like the present, when there is a good deal of evidence to the contrary. After the disasters and embarrassments of the past few years - the mistakes made in Iraq and Guantánamo, the terrible financial crisis, the embarrassment of Hurricane Katrina - a vote for Obama allowed Americans to believe, once again, that the United States is still a virtuous nation. It's not just about being liked abroad, though being liked is nice: it's about being certain that we still are, as we have often told ourselves, an example to other nations, a "city on a hill".
November 7, 2008 (9:06
P.M. CET): My old friend and agemate Terry Teachout puts it
beautifully.
November 5, 2008 (10:59 P.M., CET): I never met my maternal grandfather. He died several years before I was born. He was known in his South Carolina town as an eccentric. He was an eccentric because he was a white man with a black best friend, and because he was an evangelical singer who took his little daughter (my mother) along on Sunday mornings when he – to the revulsion of many of his town’s good white citizens – went to raise his beautiful tenor voice in praise as a guest soloist in black churches.
I spent much of every summer of my childhood in my mother’s hometown. My grandfather was long dead. But once each summer we would cross the street from my grandmother’s house to the house of my mother’s uncle, who was a very different sort of person. Neither my mother nor my grandmother could stand him, but my grandmother always insisted – acting, in her gentle way, according to the Southern social code – that we should at least go over there and pay him our respects, to use the term loosely.
Uncle John was not only the oldest man in town but a veteran of the Red Shirts. Every day he sat in a rocking chair on his front porch and smoked cheap cigars and yelled at any black man who dared to passed his house on the sidewalk: “Nigger! Walk in the street.”
Such images made an indelible impression on me. I knew early on what racism was. Despite my concerns about Obama’s experience and views, I have been deeply moved to see America elect its first black president.
At the same time it has been sobering to observe the victory of California’s Proposition 8, rescinding the right of same-sex couples to marry in that state. Apparently, two large populations groups voted overwhelmingly for the proposition: Catholics and blacks. Which means that a huge number of black Californians stepped into a voting booth, flipped a lever to elect the first black president of the United States – thus effecting a revolution in the history of American intolerance – then flipped another lever to take away the equal rights of gay people.
What would the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan from Texas have said? She was a great lady and a pioneering figure. She spoke eloquently about being black and a woman. But she never dared admit publicly that she was a lesbian. That, apparently, was a bridge too far.
Bayard Rustin was a leading architect of the civil-rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. King took a condescending attitude toward Rustin’s homosexuality, and ultimately betrayed him on account of it. Apparently it never occurred to him that all his eloquent rhetoric about equal rights might apply to gay human beings in the same way it did to black human beings. (This equivalence is something that King’s widow, Coretta, did later come to acknowledge, to her immense credit.)
On Election Night 2008 I watched the returns come in on a certain cable news network. One of the hosts was a journalist who everybody knows is gay but who has still not come out of the closet. One of the house "experts" is a woman who, speaking frequently on TV during the campaign, has been eloquent about being a black and a woman but whom I have not heard mention on the air the fact that she is a lesbian, even though she is supposedly openly gay. (To be fair, maybe she's mentioned it and I've missed it.)
I can only hope that President-elect Obama – who tacitly communicated his disapproval of Proposition 8 but never got around to speaking up forcefully against it (yet who admirably included a reference to gay Americans in his eloquent remarks on Election Night) – will make use of his extraordinarily rhetorical skills, after his inauguration, to explain to the 95+% of black Americans who voted for him that gays are people too, and thereby aid our progress toward the kind of civil-rights epiphany that his own election so movingly embodies.
In any case: three cheers for Dan Savage for writing
this.
November 5, 2008 (8:28 P.M., CET): The truth about "Biblical marriage":
“Vote Yes, Protecting Biblical Marriage.”
– “Protect
Biblical Marriage” website
“Fast and pray: for 8 million people to vote for traditional,
biblical marriage in California”
–
Terry Barone, Southern Baptist Convention
website
“Lamech [Noah’s father] married two women, one named Adah, the other Zillah.” (Genesis 4)
“Sarai brought her slave-girl, Hagar the Egyptian, to her husband and gave her to Abram as a a wife.” (Genesis 16)
“When [Rachel] gave [her husband Jacob] her slave-girl Bilhah as a wife, Jacob lay with her, and she conceived and bore him a son.” (Genesis 30)
“Esau took Canaanite women in marriage: Adah daughter of Elon the Hittite and Oholibamah daughter of Anah son of Zibeon the Horite, and Basemath, Ishmael’s daughter, sister of Nebaioth.” (Genesis 26)
“When a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, if they both bear him sons, and the son of the unloved wife is the elder, then, when the day comes for him to divide his property among his sons, he must not treat the sons of the loved wife as his firstborn in preference to his true firstborn, the son of the unloved wife.” (Deuteronomy 21)
“If, on the other hand, the accusation [by a newlywed man that his bride is not a virgin] turns out to be true…then they must bring her out to the door of her father’s house and the men of her town will stone her to death.” (Deuteronomy 22)
“When a virgin is pledged in marriage to a man, and another man encounters her in the town and lies with her, bring both of them out to the gate of that town and stone them to death; the girl because, although she was in the town, she did not cry out for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife: you must rid yourself of this wickedness.” (Deuteronomy 22)
“When brothers live together and one of them dies without leaving a son, his widow is not to marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother is to have intercourse with her; he should take her in marriage and do his duty by her as her husband’s brother.” (Deuteronomy 25)
“David’s two wives, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail widow of Nabal of Carmel, were among the captives.” (1 Samuel 30)
“Sons were born to David at Hebron. His eldest was Amnon,
whose mother was Ahinoam from Jezreel; his second Cileab, whose mother was
Abigail widow of Nabal from Carmel; the third Absalom, whose mother was Maacah
daughter of Talmai king of Geshur; the fourth Adonihah, whose mother was Haggith;
the fifth Shephatiah, whose mother was Abital; and the sixth Ithream, whose
mother was David’s wife Eglah.” (2 Samuel 3)
And that's just a scattering of items from the first quarter of the Bible;
we haven't even gotten around to Bathsheba yet, or to King Solomon's 700 wives
and 300 concubines....
November 3, 2008 (20:59 P.M., CET): I cast my first vote for president in 1976, when I was just a few days into my twenties. That was an easy choice: though I had been stunned by Gerald Ford’s now-famous debate flub about Poland not being under Russia’s thumb, I couldn’t bear Carter’s phony grin and sanctimony. (He was the first person whom I ever heard use the term “born again.”)
In 1980 I voted for Reagan (once again, I couldn’t support Carter); in 1984, for Mondale; in 1988, for Dukakis (I didn’t like Bush Sr.); for Clinton both times; and, most recently, for Gore and then Kerry (I didn't like either of them, but liked Bush Jr. even less). I’ve never been more excited to cast a vote than I was in 1992, when I stood in a long line in the rain to vote for Clinton – the first presidential candidate ever to talk about gay people as if we were actually human beings and Americans.
This year, deciding whom to vote for has been a bit more complicated than usual.
Long ago, at the dawn of this endless campaign season, I was eager to vote for Rudolph Giuliani. As someone who had lived in New York before, during, and after Giuliani’s mayoralty, I know what an extraordinary difference he had made for the city. Young people who live in New York now and love the city's energy and dynamism, but who were schoolkids in far-off cities or suburbs when Giuliani was in Gracie Mansion, can’t imagine how grungy Times Square was when he took over, how dangerous Central Park was, and how grungy and dangerous the subways were. Nor is it possible to sum up briefly the nature of the stranglehold that the Mafia had on New York City before Rudy came along. Lifelong New Yorkers never imagined anyone would be able vanquish them the way he did. Rarely has any politician’s impact been felt so strongly, and so positively.
Then came 9/11. Giuliani not only handled that day perfectly; his follow-through was also first-rate. While George W. Bush was busy arranging for bin Ladens to leave the country, scheduling friendly meetings with Islamists, and going out of his way to call Islam a religion of peace, Giuliani was turning down a $10 million donation offered to the city by a Saudi prince. To be sure, given the months Giuliani had spent as the house guest of a gay couple who took him in after he left his wife, I found his willingness to read from the GOP script on gay rights during the presidential campaign disheartening. But I was hardly shocked: he’s a politician, after all, not a saint. I was ready to vote for him. But his campaign went nowhere.
Where to turn? I didn’t consider the unbearably phony Edwards for a minute; nor did the GOP pack appeal. So I looked to Hillary Clinton. Her debate performances were highly impressive. She knew her stuff cold. She projected strength and determination and real commitment. And she spoke well. The more I listened to her, the more I felt she’d be stronger on the Islamist threat than many people might expect. But then she, too, fell by the wayside.
Which left Obama.
He was obviously intelligent. And what a pleasure it would be to have somebody so articulate in the White House after Bush! Yet I had read his memoir, and it disturbed me. Though he advertised himself as a post-racial politician, he seemed preoccupied with race, and the first of his two books seemed to suggest that the answer to his quest for identity lay not in America but in his father’s homeland, Kenya. The revelation of his longstanding relationship with the race-obsessed Reverend Jeremiah Wright only confirmed my concerns. And when he threw Grandma under the bus in an effort to justify his continued ties to Wright, I was appalled.
Then there was all the creepy cult-of-personality stuff – the profoundly un-American transformation of a politician into a savior figure. The use by Obama supporters of imagery reminiscent of Stalinist and Maoist iconography was deeply disturbing, as was the endless, empty repetition of the words "change" and "hope," which sounded less like political slogans than like mantras from some insipid religious cult.
So I tried to warm to McCain. I was still working on this when Sarah Palin entered the picture. She seemed to distill all the worst aspects of George W. Bush. Like him, she seemed not only ignorant and unreflective but proud of it. As with him, her utter unfamiliarity with and incuriosity about the world beyond America was combined with a habit of spouting categorical certainties about the outside world’s inferiority in every respect to the good old U.S.A. The enthusiasm of many Americans for Palin wasn’t just a matter of garden-variety American anti-intellectualism (which can be a healthy, sensible, and pragmatic-minded response to pretentious academic posturing) – it seemed to represent a hostility toward intelligence itself, and toward the very value of acquiring knowledge and developing competence. Given all the messes that America was now in, how could any responsible adult pretend to want this mediocrity in the White House?
A You Tube video showed Palin being prayed over by a preacher from (of all places) Kenya, who asked God to protect her from witchcraft. The apparent sincerity of Palin’s faith made the obvious expendiency of Obama’s association with Wright look, by contrast, appealing.
Nor did I ever hear either McCain or Palin say anything that reflected serious thought about the Islamist threat. McCain seemed to view the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan almost entirely through a military prism. The question, for him, was not why we were there, but how we could win. Palin, meanwhile, appeared to have no serious thoughts on the subject whatsoever. Even though she was sending her son to serve in Iraq, she seemed to have devoted no thought whatsoever to the question of America’s invasion and occupation of that country. In her mind, apparently, thinking about such things was someone else’s job.
At their best, modern American Republicanism and conservatism used to be about responsibility, maturity, competence – about learning from history, safeguarding constitutional traditions, and taking a cautious approach to change. But Palin gave no indication of knowing or caring anything about history, appeared to have only the most superficial and vulgar concept of tradition, and showed little sign of familiarity with or respect for the Constitution.
I seriously considered writing in Giuliani for president and Hillary Clinton for vice president. But that felt like a cop-out, even though my vote (I’m registered in New York) will almost certainly make no difference. So when I mailed my absentee ballot off to the States on October 14, it contained a vote for Obama.
No, I'm not sure I've done the right thing. But at least he has a mind and knows how to use it. At least he can form a thought and express it. And he is obviously capable of learning. His campaign shows that he has organizational skills (or was smart enough to hire people with organizational skills). It also shows that he’s a man of incredible equipoise and self-discipline. Several observers have noted that Justice Holmes’ famous comment about FDR’s “first-class temperament” applies equally well to Obama. It’s true. And it matters.
One of the things America needs most right now, moreover, is a president who can effectively articulate what’s at stake in the war on Islamism. This has been one of Bush’s major failings since 9/11. McCain couldn’t pull it off even if he understood what we’re up against, ideologically speaking – and there’s no sign that he does. There’s no sign, indeed, that either of these men does. But at least Obama knows something about Islam. He’s seen it close-up. His mother was married to two Muslims. His brother is a convert to the faith.
Yes, many of his allies and supporters are utter fools on the topic – rank appeaseniks. But Obama, while professing respect for Islam in pretty much the same sweeping, vapid, dishonest terms as Bush and McCain, hasn’t said the kinds of things one might expect an out-and-out appeasenik to say. His comments about the dangers of Pakistan have been promising. One has to hope that his intelligence and reflectiveness and sense of responsibility have led him, or will lead him, to recognize the threat that fundamentalist Islam – not just Islamist terrorism – represents to the free world, and act accordingly.
Yes, his record, such as it is, is considerably leftist. But he seems less an ideologue than a man who wants to succeed. And he won’t succeed (or win a second term) by being a diehard extremist – and he is smart enough to know that.
Many people on the left have argued that a vote for Obama would make people around the world like us again. That’s no good reason to vote for anybody. But Obama, unlike Bush or McCain, is somebody who could persuade our European allies to join us in a broad-based effort to repel the spread of Islamism in the West. There’s no guarantee, of course, that Obama would pursue such a policy. But at least there exists a possibility that he would, while McCain, in these matters, would be a non-starter.
This has been the most dispiriting presidential campaign in my memory. Americans – at least those who are politically active – have been divided into two very distinct camps. Most of the professional pundits on either side have seen it as their job to keep telling their readers that the guy on the other side is thoroughly incompetent, evil, and dangerous. And every day has brought a new wave of online articles about the election that have drawn a sea of comments by readers – most of them hiding behind fake names – who will brook no dissent. Any political writer who, out of sheer honesty, has dared to permit himself so much as a hint of recognition that his side (or what is perceived as his side) isn’t perfectly pure and the other side isn’t perfectly evil, has found himself branded an idiot, a liar, a coward, and a traitor by people who the day before yesterday were his diehard fans. It’s a chilling spectacle. It’s America at its worst. Instead of respecting intellectual honesty and moral responsibility, the pseudonymous enforcers of orthodoxy have celebrated insincere cheerleading. As a result, many political writers – who should feel free to use their minds – have been made to feel that they don’t dare step even an inch off the reservation lest they be isolated, fired, demonized, destroyed. It has been made clear to them that in the eyes of many readers, their job is not to think but to echo the party line.
So it is that intelligent, serious, and responsible-minded conservatives such as George Will, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, and David Frum have been treated as traitors simply for speaking their minds about McCain’s and/or Palin’s deficiencies. Frum replied as follows to blistering criticism from National Review readers:
Perhaps it is our job at NRO to tell our readers only what they want to hear, without much regard to whether it is true. Perhaps it is our duty just to keep smiling and to insist that everything is dandy - that John McCain's economic policies make sense, that his selection of Sarah Palin was an act of statesmanship, that she herself is the second coming of Anna Schwartz, and that nobody but an over-educated snob would ever suggest otherwise.
And then there's Christopher Hitchens. As someone who, like Hitchens, is a liberal whose views on the Islamist threat often lead me to be categorized as a conservative, I could have written every word of the following, from Hitchens’ October article “Vote for Obama”:
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.
No, neither Obama nor McCain has proven that he fully grasps the nature of the challenge we confront where our relationship to the Islamic world is concerned. But which of them seems more capable of getting it, given his background and smarts? Obama. Which would be more able to formulate and implement an effective approach to dealing with it? Obama. Which would be more likely to be able to get Democrats and Europeans on board with that policy? Obama.
Which is not to deny that I'm deeply torn. Despite the poisonous intensity with which people on both sides have been going after each other’s candidates, both Obama and McCain are in fact very complex combinations of admirable and not-so-admirable qualities. Each inspires considerable doubt and uncertainty. Each is also a very mixed bag, issues-wise. (Unlike many gays, I don’t see any reason to be certain that Obama would prove to be more kindly disposed toward gay rights than McCain would; at times it has seemed to me that McCain, deep down, may well be the more gay-friendly of the two. I hope that’s not true.) One clear difference, as I’ve said, is in temperament. Another is in age. And all other things, on balance, being not that far from equal, I’d prefer the young, unflappable candidate to the old, volatile one.
There’s also, of course, the difference of skin color. And, frankly, as someone who spent childhood summers in the 1960s in a small South Carolina town where the remnants of Jim Crow (including not-quite-faded “No Coloreds” signs) were still very much in evidence, and where I routinely heard white people who were supposedly good Christians saying incredibly ugly things about black people – when in fact the only black people I knew (who were the same black people they knew) were uniformly among the kindest, hardest-working, most uncomplaining, and most genuinely Christian people I had ever met – it means something to me, I will admit, to vote for the black guy.
No, I’m not sure I’ve made the right choice. I only hope I have. I hope we all have.
God bless
America.
September 26, 2008 (11:09 P.M., CET): It's fast becoming a new Norwegian tradition: the public stabbing of an immigrant woman who has tried to integrate herself by a husband who hates the idea. Yesterday, it happened again, at rush hour, at a busy bus stop outside a busy Oslo subway station. The man stabbed his wife several times in front of several witnesses, who - in a surprising, encouraging twist - actually subdued him and held him down until the cops came. Maybe people are actually starting to get sick of this stuff. Of course, just as usually happens on the rare occasions when Europeans bestir themselves to stand up for law and order, the police spokesperson felt obliged to issue a warning that "taking action yourself can often be dangerous." Yes - almost as dangerous as never doing anything.
The Dagbladet article linked to above doesn't mention anything about the religious or ethnic background of the parties involved; the last sentence says only that "the alleged perpetrator and the victim are originally from abroad." But it turns out they're of Somali origin. On the Human Rights Service website, my friend Rita Karlsen reports that according to her sources, news of the attack "met with approval" in Oslo's Somali community because the victim was "strong and independent" and had taken her three children and left her husband. He's lived in Norway for nearly twenty years but keeps his distance from Norwegians; she, by contrast, wants to be a full member of mainstream society. She also has a job, unlike many people in her community. "In parts of the Somali community that live in anti-Norwegian isolation," writes Karlsen, "the wounded woman is considered a poor example for other Norwegian-Somali women."
This latest assault comes on
the heels of the
publication in Norway of Se Oss (See Us), an explosive book by a
pseudonymous Norwegian-Somali woman whose graphic, eye-opening account of life
within the tyrannical, violent, woman-oppressing Somali community has made
headlines - and drawn predictable responses from the usual suspects on the P.C.
left, who have cynically cautioned against "generalizing" on the basis of this
one book. Of course, all this so-called "generalizing" has only come after
a very long series of horrible events of which yesterday's stabbing is only the
most recent.
September 26, 2008 (1:55
P.M., CET): The Daily Mail
reports that a daughter of the fire-breathing imam Sir Omar Bakri Mohammed -
oops, my mistake, he hasn't been knighted quite yet - is working as a pole
dancer in London. The Mail prints the name of the "troupe" she
belongs to, tells us that she "now lives in Catford in a ground-floor flat," and
even provides the helpful information that she "has dyed her hair blonde, has
several tattoos of her name on her ankle and a dragon on her back and changed
her Muslim name Youssra to Yasmin to try to conceal her identity." Gee,
why not just include a map of London with a target drawn over her house?
Does the Mail understand that this young woman has very good reasons for
wanting to "conceal her identity"?
September 25, 2008 (11:30 A.M., CET): Jyllands-Posten reports that yesterday, shortly after the opening ceremonies of a gay festival in Sarajevo - the first such event ever held in Bosnia - Muslim men fell upon participants and beat them up, shouting "Kill the gays" and "Allahu akbar." Some were dragged out of their cars. Among those assaulted were journalists; worst hurt was a visitor from Denmark. There is no mention of the number of victims or assailants, though the report indicates that it took a "massive" number of police to stop the violence.
The story has been picked up by VG in Norway, but I've looked for it in vain in several major American and British newspapers.
UPDATE (1:35 P.M.): Reports in English available here, here and here.
UPDATE (September 26, 2:14 A.M.): The Muslims have won: they've driven Sarajevo's gays back into the closet. Note that this AFP story identifies the thugs only as "hooligans," "protestors," and "attackers"; though it mentions (at the end) that this event was "particularly upsetting [to] the Muslim majority," it deftly avoids stating that the "hooligans" were indeed Muslims who shouted "Allahu akbar" as they pursued their holy task.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because most of the media that covered the Muslim riots in French cities - whose participants also shouted "Allahu akbar" - followed essentially the same M.O.
Anyway, I've made another
round of the websites of some major U.S. and U.K. dailies. Still no sign
that any of them has picked up this story. Indeed, most of the
coverage turned up by Google is at gay websites - as if these barbaric
developments could not possibly be of interest to anyone but gay people.
September 4, 2008 (1:35 P.M., CET): I don't watch the TV news networks very much these days. But last night I turned on CNN to watch the GOP shindig. It wasn't easy. Every time Wolf Blitzer reminded us that he's part of "the best team on television" (which he did every several minutes), it was all I could do not to throw my laptop at the TV screen. But I hung in there, though I did feel compelled to turn off the sound for long periods in order not to overdose on these slick hacks' preening self-regard.
Quick question: One of the CNN guys (the one who seems to use John Edwards' barber) did a report on the electoral map. He used the word "electoral" dozens of times. And he pronounced it "el-ec-TOR-al." Whassat? Has CNN decreed that this is the new, classier way of pronouncing it?
Early in the evening "the best team on television" took on the question: what does Sarah Palin have to accomplish in her speech? After several minutes of heavy lifting, they agreed that she had to make us like her. What would we do without them?
I turned off the sound for Huckabee and Romney, but listened to Giuliani, who should've been the nominee.
Then came Palin. After everything I've read these last few days about her positions on evolution and creationism, about the Jews for Jesus and Alaska Independence Party, about the brother-in-law flap and her apparent misrepresentation of her position on the Bridge to Nowhere, and about her visit to the library during her first days as mayor of Wasilla to look into the possibility of banning a few books, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of her being a heartbeat away from the presidency. I'm still not. If the New York Times account of her political beginnings in Wasilla is to be believed, she brought the ideological frictions of Gingrich-era Washington to a town in which members of the different parties had previously worked together in an easygoing, neighborly fashion. She also reportedly made religion an issue in a town where things just hadn't been done that way.
Yet during her speech it was really hard not to be charmed by her. As Howard Stern said a few minutes ago, her delivery was A+. What's so incredibly effective about her is that when you look at her alongside the other candidate in the presidential race who was also nationally obscure before this thing started and who is also a very skilled speaker - Obama, of course - she brings out, by contrast, his condescension, pomposity, and self-importance. He's an orator, lecturing at us, preaching at us; she talks to us conversationally, the way Reagan did. Obama presents himself as a living symbol, a historical inevitability; Palin addressed the nation as if she were a newcomer in town introducing herself to another mom at the grocery store. She's the only one of the four candidates whom you can imagine most Americans really identifying with at all. It's a sign of Beltway insularity that so many people in D.C. apparently either don't grasp the nature and breadth of her appeal or refuse to believe that she has appeal.
For me, her appeal was only enhanced by the effect of having watched "the best team on television" for the previous couple of hours. After that parade of posturing blowhards, how could somebody like her not seem a breath of fresh air?
That said...
I like her Wild West, self-reliant, small-government, live-and-let-live Goldwater libertarian side. But I'm deeply uneasy about the intrusive born-again "Bible believer" side that apparently sent her to that library to sniff out books to ban. It seems like a very long time ago that many of us expected a Giuliani-vs.-Clinton faceoff in November. Now we've got a disciple of Jeremiah Wright heading up one ticket and, on the other, a Rapture-believing Pentecostalist who apparently sought to paint her mayoral opponent back in Wasilla as unsaved and therefore unqualified. Somewhere Thomas Jefferson is throwing up.
August 14, 2008 (8:15 P.M., CET): Last month an Iranian man hunted
down and brutally murdered his estranged wife in Oslo.
Today
another Iranian man hunted down and brutally murdered his estranged wife
in Oslo. He also brutally murdered two small children between one and five
years old, apparently the couple's own children. All three victims were stabbed
to death, and the scene of the crime was reportedly a very bloody and disturbing
sight.
The husband is under arrest
and a police press conference is now underway. The suspect is 44 years old and
came to Norway in 1999 as an asylum seeker.
July 25, 2008 (12:19 P.M., CET): The police wouldn't say anything about
motive. Those in custody will be interrogated later today.
This violent episode, by the way, took place only hours after a couple of guys went driving around the west side of Oslo (i.e. the supposedly safe side) shooting at pedestrians with a luftpistol, which in English is apparently "soft gun" or "air soft gun." They hit five people.
All together now: Summertime, and the living is easy...
July 25, 2008 (12:06 P.M., CET): The police are now holding a press
conference about the refugee-center attack. They've arrested five Chechens,
none of them residents of the center. The number of people sent to the hospital
is twenty-one.
July 25, 2008 (11:37 A.M., CET): Early this morning, 40 to 50 Chechens stormed an asylum center south of Oslo, dragged Kurds out of their rooms and beat them up "with steel bars and other weapons," according to a source cited in this Reuters report. (Both VG and Dagbladet also mention machetes.) According to most reports, either twenty-two or twenty-three people (depending on which report you're reading) were sent to the hospital or E.R., though VG reports that 22 were hurt but only nine sent to the hospital. So far no reports on whether any of the perpetrators have been apprehended.
The motive for the attack? According to Reuters, the head of the asylum center, Ole Morten Lyng, told the Norwegian news agency NTB that it was a "minor dispute...that got blown out of proportion." VG says that Lyng attributes the episode to "a fight between two residents." Dagbladet notes that three years ago a series of violent incidents took place because Chechens wanted to introduce sharia law at the center. In an interview with Dagbladet, however, Lyng insists that this morning's incident had nothing to do with sharia and that it was, rather, the result of "a small family conflict" over some kids who were making noise at the center the day before yesterday. Sounds pretty implausible to me, but we'll see. We'll also see whether anybody ends up being deported for this. I'm not holding my breath.
July 18, 2008 (1:14 P.M., CET): The other day came the
news
that Albania has better roads than Norway. Today Dagbladet
reports
that in the last two weeks, eighteen tourist buses in Oslo have been set upon by
thieves and vandals.
"My company sends buses all over Europe, but we've never experienced similar
conditions anywhere," a Spanish bus driver said. "If I talked about this on
Spanish TV, people would think I was in Africa."
The driver added: "Oslo isn't a beautiful city like Rome and Paris. The only reason we come here is that it's the capital of Norway....If this continues, we'll stop coming here." Indeed, two Spanish tour operators, according to Dagbladet, are considering removing Oslo from their list of destinations.
Official reactions to this latest development only serve to underscore where the roots of the problem lie. You can almost see the spokesman for the Agency for Road and Transport shrugging and yawning as he tells Dagbladet that, well, this sort of this happens every summer, and hey, don't worry, there's more and more tourist buses coming to Norway. And the cops? They say that they "can't see any connection among the events of recent weeks." A police spokesman told Dagbladet that they hadn't put the case materials together yet - they'll get around to that on, oh, Monday.
No, Oslo isn't Rome or Paris. But not long ago, it was at least a safe, clean city. It's now rapidly declining into a maelstrom of chaos, crime, and filth under politicians who've essentially handed it over to armies of Nigerian prostitutes, gypsy beggars, and Muslim gangsters; who ordered street work that should have been wrapped up months ago but that continues to keep much of the downtown area looking like Berlin in 1946; and who blithely hike subsidies to groups like the Islamic Council while letting the police and military go chronically underfunded.
Tourist tip: Copenhagen!
July 18, 2008 (10:45 A.M.,
CET): Congratulations to Kay Ryan, the new Poet Laureate. Terrific poet. I
wrote about her here.
July 13, 2008 (5:59 P.M., CET): For reasons I've made clear on this blog, I'm no fan of Obama's. Nor can I easily imagine myself eagerly voting for McCain after reading this statement in today's New York Times: "I don't believe in gay adoption." To flatly oppose the very possibility of adoption by any gay individual or same-sex couple is a position that is at odds with current policy in 49 of the 50 states. As Dale Carpenter aptly puts it, "it's a terrible, thoughtless quote."
If you think otherwise, I suggest you put aside ugly prejudices about gays and ridiculously idealized images of "the family" and look at real families. When I run through my mental Rolodex of the families I've known well in my life, beginning with the those who lived on the block I grew up on, I can't avoid recognizing that a significant percentage of families are headed by alcoholics and wife-beaters, by people too selfish or immature to be good parents, and by bullies and sickos who abuse their children in a variety of horrific ways. When I went around the country giving readings from my book on Christian fundamentalism, Stealing Jesus, I met countless people who had been psychologically damaged for life by fundamentalist parents - all of them heterosexual.
Meanwhile, some of the happiest and most emotionally healthy families I've ever encountered have been families with gay parents. The very fact that a gay couple is willing to go through the adoption process means they're serious about raising a family - which automatically puts them ahead of millions of couples who have kids only because they were careless about birth control. If all parents had to be subjected to the kind of scrunity that same-sex male couples have to undergo in order to be parents, all children would be better off. I have yet to meet a pair of gay parents who don't have a powerful awareness of the responsibilities they've taken on - and an equally powerful appreciation for the privilege of parenthood that's often missing in people to whom it came easily or even accidentally.
Anyway, I had expected better
of McCain.
July 13, 2008 (4:59 P.M., CET): I'm sorry if this blog seems to be turning into one long series of obituaries, but if people will just stop dying, I'll promise to stop writing about it.
When I read yesterday that Tony Snow had died, I somehow didn't remember that I'd met him. Then, today, I read Mark Steyn's comment that his "own Tony Snow story" is "the same as so many others - that of meeting the guy when you're an obscure peripheral fellow of no consequence and being amazed that he's familiar with your work and is gracious and affable and collegial and full of generous advice." Reading this, I suddenly recalled that I'd had a similar experience. And at once all the details came flooding back in a Proustian rush.
Snow interviewed me on Fox News during (I'm almost certain) a book tour for A Place at the Table. When you're running around the country pushing a book, it's not unusual to meet interviewers - whether at national TV networks or at small-town radio stations - who are tired, bored, distracted, irritable, and condescending, and who seem to view the prospect of interviewing yet another visiting author as a dreary chore. Snow was the very opposite of all this. When we met before our interview, he was alert, energetic, and remarkably congenial. He made me feel welcome, made me feel he was honored to have me there, and made it clear he was familiar not just with the book I was promoting but also with my previous work, or at the very least with the general outlines of my career. I was impressed.
When the interview started, he shifted gears. The gracious host became an inquisitor - and a first-rate one. He had plainly read the book and appeared to be genuinely engaged by its arguments, and he asked strong, tough questions about it, which he shot at me one after the other like Andy Roddick slamming tennis balls over the net. The experience was intense and exhilarating - easily the best workout I had on that whole book tour. I had already reached the point (which eventually arrives in any book tour) at which I felt I'd already heard every possible question several times, had worked out my answers to all of them, and could do the whole interview on auto-pilot. But Snow's questions were totally new - sharp, challenging. And when I answered them, he actually listened and instantly shot back just the right follow-ups, which were equally sharp and challenging. I was in awe.
When it was over, he grinned and said something like "That was fun." He made it clear he was pleased with the results - and I was pleased, too: he'd kept me on my toes, made me think, and helped me get my message across far more effectively, I suspected, than some of the more softball interviewers had done. I experienced his toughness as an act of respect. Unlike some interviewers, he didn't come across as antagonistic or give me the slightest impression that he was out to "win" or to "get me"; on the contrary, he plainly enjoyed the fact that I was able to hold my own and speak my piece - and thereby provide his viewers with a few minutes of engaging, thought-provoking give-and-take.
In short: a real pro, and a
real gentleman.
July 11, 2008 (12:22 A.M., CET): When I woke up on Tuesday morning I had a weird feeling that I should check the obituaries in the New York Times. That was how I found out that my friend Tom Disch had died on July 4 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I've been in shock ever since. I've been trying to write something about Tom, because I feel I owe it to him and because I'm having trouble thinking of anything else. But I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that he did this, and my own thoughts and feelings are all over the place, so it's been hard to try to get something down.
All I can say for now is this. Tom (who published fiction and criticism as Thomas M. Disch and poetry as Tom Disch) was not only a widely respected - revered, even - writer of what he called speculative fiction but also a first-rate poet and critic. Few writers in our time have managed as successfully as he did to combine being deeply, meaningfully, and darkly serious with being laugh-out-loud hilarious.
As a poet he was outrageously underappreciated, mainly because he swam against the poetic currents of the day. Like Swift and Pope, who aren't exactly role models for many poets today, he served up acidly witty commentary on humankind's flaws and foibles - usually in perfect rhyme and meter. And he made it look effortless - which doubtless helps explain why his poetry is less well known than it should be.
As for his criticism, I've read certain reviews of his again and again just for the sheer pleasure of reading his prose. There are some individual lines that I savor. Only a few days ago (it may even have been the day he died), I was sitting in my apartment and my eyes fastened on the spine of David Laskin's Partisans, a history of the midcentury New York intellectuals. And I immediately recalled Tom's passing reference, in his review of it, to the last surviving member of that crowd as "tontine winner Elizabeth Hardwick." Who else but Tom would have thought to call her that? His reviews were full of such inspired tidbits - which for him were just throwaway lines, but which made his prose a joy to read.
In person Tom was as witty as on paper, with a quick mind and a first-rate delivery. And he was a very sweet guy. A publicity picture for one of his novels, in which he glares demonically down into the camera - formidable, bald, muscular, his powerful arms crossed - makes him look like the scariest dude in the world: the bouncer from hell, the biker bully from Central Casting. In fact he was the bullies' enemy. His whole body of work is a cry against man's inhumanity to man, against tyrannical orthodoxies and deadening groupthink, against all those who seek to dehumanize or destroy their fellow human beings for the sake of power or a buck or an ego boost. He believed in the individual, and in the individual mind.
And he was a true original - a man who, no matter what he was writing about, and in what genre, invariably had fresh, unpredictable, provocative, and perceptive things to say. He always spoke his mind fully, no matter whose feathers might get ruffled. Indeed, he seemed fearless - which is why it's incredible to imagine that a landlord with an eviction notice could push him over the edge, as seems to have been the case. But then that's the nature of depression. It was clear that the 2005 death of his partner, Charlie, knocked the struts out from under him. Certainly neither of the setbacks mentioned in the Times obituary - the flooded house, the landlord problems - would have destroyed him had Charlie still been alive and well.
I didn't know Charlie well - or at all, really. He was a deeply private person. But I knew that Tom was devoted to him. All told, they were together for 35 years. They didn't go in for public displays of affection - far from it - but just to see these two big, bearlike men together was to recognize immediately the depth of their mutual devotion. When I learned that Charlie had died, my first thought was: how can Tom go on without him?
Tom wasn't quite like any other gay man I've ever known. Even back in 1985, when we met, he was quietly matter-of-fact - with everyone - about being gay. When he introduced me to Charlie, Tom referred to him as "my husband." Never before had I heard, or heard of, any gay man using the word "husband" to describe his partner. That was how I found out that Tom was gay. I don't remember him ever showing the slightest interest in gay politics or the gay scene, and I couldn't ever have imagined him talking (at least to me) about even superficially intimate aspects of his relationship with Charlie: in that sense, he was an exceedingly private man. But he was anything but a closet case. Back in a time when such candor was not par for the course even in New York literary circles, he was - quite simply - open about his life in precisely the same way that any straight person would be. No more, no less. It was a matter of integrity, and of self-respect.
After I moved to Europe in 1998, we fell out of touch. Then last year, out of the blue, he wrote to me care of the Hudson and we caught up. It was clear he was profoundly depressed:
I have little news except disasters. Charlie is dead, my landlord in the city is trying to have me evicted, and I've spend a fortune on my legal defense, and the house in the country was destroyed by mildew with everything in it. Plus, my health is rotten.
Given that Tom had lived in his Union Square apartment for decades, how could his landlord throw him out? Here's why, according to a friend of Tom's who identifies himself as Eric S., and who has posted this moving account of Tom's last couple of years: the lease was in Charlie's name. Apparently, as soon as Charlie died, the landlord started proceedings to kick Tom out. If he had been a grieving widow, the law would have been on his side. Indeed, under New York City law, a grandson who's never even set foot in his grandmother's rental apartment can inherit her lease. But Tom, under New York law, was no relation to Charlie. None. They had made a life together in that apartment for a third of a century, but in the law's eyes, he had no claim on it whatsoever.
His e-mails to me painted a grim picture. He had always been a black humorist - and, yes, the humor was still very much there. But it used to be that when you read his work or talked to him, you could tell that he positively exulted in the ability and opportunity to confront the world's tyrants and fools and clowns and deflate them with words. For all his cynicism about human nature, he had immense joie de vivre and a superabundance of creative energy; in fact, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that he was a sort of Auntie Mame, a veritable embodiment of the conviction that life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death - and that he could make you wonder whether you yourself, his fellow writer and critic, were embracing your own role in this absurd cosmos with a sufficient measure of glee. Indeed, when I was first introduced to Tom (by Dana Gioia) his face lit up, quite gloriously, at the sound of my name, because I'd just published a review that he'd agreed with. Everybody who knew Tom knew that look. It was a frequent sight and it was thoroughly authentic. My point here is that despite his dark literary vision, he was a merry soul.
But now, after Charlie's death, that was gone. What humor there was in the e-mails he sent to me last year was mirthless. His joie de vivre, his energy, his delight in the whole mad circus of life was gone. It was distressing to witness this transformation in a writer whose work - and whose entire being - had always seemed a triumphant confirmation of the redemptive power of wit and art.
The same tone reigned in the blog (which, in a typically macabre touch, he called "Endzone") that Tom kept during the last couple of years. Death had always been a major theme of his work, but now it seemed more pervasive than ever. On January 1, 2008, he posted a list of people he'd like to see die during the year. Later he posted irreverent poems occasioned by the deaths of Heath Ledger and Steve Irwin. (The blog poems aren't as polished as his published poems; they're basically journal entries in verse.) One poem - which feels uncharacterically, uncomfortably confessional (and, in retrospect, prophetic) - paid tribute to the Second Amendment. Another imagined Death leaving messages on his answering machine ("Hello, Tom") confirming and then postponing their rendezvous. The last entry, posted two days before he died, gives the impression that his suicide was not something he had long planned, but was rather a spontaneous act. But if so, where did the gun come from?
The reader comments following Tom's final blog posting give a sense of how deeply, and in what way, his work touched the lives of many people who had never met him. The best tribute any of us could pay to Tom's memory would be to go online and buy one or more of his books. A greater bargain cannot easily be had.
Anyway, here are a couple of
pictures I found and scanned today. I took them at the Hudson Review's
40th-anniversary dinner in 1998. In the first, that's Tom facing the camera,
aware that he's being photographed and, with tongue in cheek, assuming an
Important Literary Man pose. (Charles Martin and Lori Allen are in the
foreground.) The second picture shows Tom (left) with Dick Allen.
July 6, 2008 (10:32 A.M., CET):
This is
the most encouraging story I've seen in a while: a British teacher pushes a
dhimmi exercise on her class - forcing the kids (aged 11 and 12) to pray Muslim
style, supposedly as a way of learning about Islam - and two boys refuse to
take part.
Wow. In a country where not only teachers but professors, politicians, police officers, government bureaucrats, Lord Chief Justices and Archbishops of Canterbury are proud to show off their utter lack of spine in such matters, how did these kids even recognize that there was something terribly wrong here, that their teacher's stratagem needed to be resisted, that there was a moral imperative to stand up and say no, even if it meant getting detention? How did they summon the courage, the character, in a society that, during their brief lifetimes, has provided them with so few examples thereof?
July 4, 2008 (11:18 A.M., CET): I will
never really get it. Is it simple fear? Is it pure naivete? Is it the
glue seeping down from the wig?
England gave the world a tradition of laws that is a cornerstone of modernity. Yet its highest magistrate smiles on the idea of making more room in Britain for a system of laws that is premodern in the most pejorative of senses - inflexibly irrational, brutally patriarchal, utterly inimical to the concept of individual freedom.
This comes, of course, on the heels of similar malarkey from the supreme head of the country's established church.
Somebody explain this to me. How can a man reach such a position without having more of a sense of responsibility to the system of laws he has sworn to uphold? How is it that a country which committed itself to fight the Nazis on the seas and oceans, in the air, on the beaches, on the landing grounds, and in the fields and streets, can give in to jihadist Islam in the courtrooms without so much as an uneasy clearing of the throat?
Happy Independence Day.
July 3, 2008 (2:47 A.M., CET): Oslo's Gay Pride Parade took place on Saturday. A couple of days earlier, I heard that, for the first time in Norway, several gay Muslims would be marching - though, for obvious reasons, they would be concealing their identities by wearing niqab, those Muslim garments that cover everything except the eyes.
Early Saturday morning a friend told me something even more spectacular: during the parade, as a protest against Islamic oppression of women and sexuality, Sara Azmeh Rasmussen - a gutsy Syrian-born lesbian whom I met for the first time a couple of weeks ago, but whom I've long admired from afar - was going to burn a niqab. As it turned out, however, Sara was prevented from setting fire to the niqab - not by Muslim radicals, mind you, but by Norwegian police. This two-minute report by TV2's all-news channel was surprisingly frank about things that the Norwegian press doesn't usually like being frank about. Here's my translation:
Reporter: The traditional gay parade in Oslo today. A colorful fireworks display with thousands of liberated gay people.
But not all of them are equally liberated. Among the participants are covered Muslim gays, who wish to show that they do, in fact, exist.
Sara Azmeh Rasmussen is one of them. She is a social commentator and writer. Today the plan is to take the statements one step further.
Sara: Right now I'm very nervous. That I must say.
Reporter: Rasmussen will cover herself, equipped with lighter fluid and a lighter. Her goal is to burn the niqab in a personal statement during the parade.
Sara: It is a harsh criticism of a symbol of the oppression of women, first and foremost. Plus in this context, where gay Muslims don't dare show their faces, it's also to say that we refuse to let ourselves be governed by fear.
Reporter: Many Muslim gays experience threats and violence, forced marriage, harassment and ridicule, both from Muslim leaders and their own families.
Woman in niqab: I have no problem showing my face but it's the consequences we're scared of, and we want to show that we’re here.
Sara: This is above all a way of supporting freedom of speech, which is now under pressure from radical forces.
Reporter: Rasmussen says expression was effectively put a stop to today – not by radical forces but by Norwegian police.
Sara (to police): ...we don't dare show our identity openly. It is this context in which you hinder this…(inaudible)…
Sara (to reporter): I think it is totally unreasonable that burning an oppressive item of clothing should be illegal when it is legal for fundamentalist Muslims to burn a Norwegian flag. I feel, actually, unfree right now.
In short: the police stopped her from burning the niqab - this in a city where I've seen the police stand by while members of the far-left group Blitz defaced with spray paint the front of a government office building with anti-Israeli slogans.
It's
breathtaking: while any number of privileged, high-profile Norwegian writers,
journalists, editors, politicians, etc., are finding very slick, slippery, and
self-flattering ways to make their own cowardice in the face of Islamic bullying
and intolerance look like courage, this small, solitary woman is out there on
the front lines saying and doing the very things that they should be
saying and doing. Can they actually look at a videotape like this and not be
profoundly ashamed of themselves?
July 2, 2008 (11:53 P.M., CET): Late this afternoon, in a schoolyard in the Norwegian town of Bygland, a 31-year-old mother of four was stabbed to death by her husband. She had left him, and found a new male companion, and her husband had consequently threatened to kill her; accordingly, she had been given shelter at a crisis center and outfitted with a body alarm. Yet it was to no avail; her husband tracked her down (according to Fedrelandsvennen she, her male companion, and her four children were attending a meeting at the school at the time), and stabbed her, and when she tried to run away he chased her and caught her and stabbed her some more and she died. And he did all this, reportedly, in the near vicinity of, and perhaps in full view of, the woman's male companion and her four children.
With stories like this - which, alas, are increasingly commonplace in Scandinavia - the only mystery is: how far down in the article (if at all) will the reporter mention the salient fact? In VG, we don't learn till the sixth paragraph that the woman was "of Iranian origin" and that her new lover was Norwegian; in Dagbladet, this info is stuck in the last paragraph, along with the fact that the husband (surprise!) was also Iranian; Fedrelandsvennen puts these details in paragraph three. In Aftenposten, Norway's closest thing to a newspaper of record, the national origins of the murderer and victim aren't mentioned at all. Nope, just an isolated incident, a jealous husband (after all, husbands get jealous everywhere in the world, don't they?), a family tragedy - no cultural lessons here, folks! Then again, perhaps the editors at Aftenposten figured that nobody in Norway needed to be told that these people were from a Muslim country: so many of these brutal "honor"-driven butcherings have occurred on Norwegian soil in recent years that by this point anyone can figure out what's going on just from the headline (and meanwhile Aftenposten doesn't take any risk of offending anybody else who might own a knife...).
June 30, 2008 (2:13 P.M., CET): A
glimpse at the perverse pecuniary priorities of official Norway. Tax levels
here are sky-high; the government takes in huge amounts of dough. Yet though it
has enough cash to subsidize all kinds of dubious (and worse) individuals,
activities, and organizations that shouldn't be state-supported in the first
place - such as, say, the Islamic Council - the things they should be
paying for are dying on the vine for lack of funding. Recently there's been
much discussion in the media about how the government's chronic refusal to
budget enough money for the military has led to a scandalous level of
unpreparedness. (This
article by Kristoffer Gustavsen is subheaded "Norway's Defense Is Falling to
Pieces.") And today comes yet another story reflecting the well-known fact that
the police are in a similar bind: a woman who took her 21-year-old daughter to
an Oslo police station to report a rape says that they were made to wait for
four hours and then sent home without filing a report: "we were told to come
back in a few days or a week, since they didn't have enough people to deal with
the matter."
* * *
I just took the party-preference test here and got the following results:
Progress 60%
Conservative 48%
Christian Democrats 28%
Labor 27%
Reds 25%
Liberal 24%
Socialist Left 22%
Center 16%
Note, however, that while the quiz includes questions about day care, the EU, oil drilling, carbon emissions, the state church, forest preservation, and township consolidation, there's nothing (aside from a single question about asylum seekers) related to the major problems facing Norway and Europe today: the utter failure of integration policies, the continued massive levels of Muslim immigration (mostly through family reunification, not asylum), and the continent's ongoing Islamization. This omission is, of course, no surprise: while the media here are preoccupied with the issues mentioned in the quiz, they sit back in silence, for the most part, as the real crisis rolls on.
June 27, 2008 (6:16 P.M., CET): Earlier this month, Tariq Ramadan was
invited to Oslo to spread the love. Thank God I didn't know about it beforehand,
or I would've felt obliged to go. It's bad enough watching this stuff on
video;
being there would've been torture. But this stuff is still worth a look,
because, mind-numbing though it may be, it's highly instructive to see Ramadan
in action.
Look, for example, how he spends the whole first eight-minute You Tube chunk saying...absolutely nothing. Nothing! His purpose is partly to talk out the clock (saying nothing in as many ways as possible is, after all, safer than being explicit about his own beliefs) and partly to create an image of himself as reasonable, restrained, careful, meticulous, scholarly, unthreatening - the better, of course, to obscure the brutality, violence, irrationality, and intolerance of the ideological confrères for whom he's fronting.
So repetitive is he that when I finished watching the first part and started playing the second, my partner, who was elsewhere in the room half-listening, said: "Did you put on the first part again by mistake?"
The brilliance of Ramadan's method is this: he does an incredible job of implying that he basically shares the liberal sympathies of the non-Muslims in the audience and that his entire project is about getting his fellow Muslims to think this way, too - all the while never explicitly saying anything of the kind. Yes, he critically engages some traditional Muslim views, but for the most part he does so in an exceedingly vague manner, repeatedly referring to ideas that should be discussed more thoroughly, attitudes that require further study, interpretations that need to be re-examined, re-evaluated, and re-thought, etc., etc., etc. After a while it's like listening to one of those recordings of the sounds of the ocean that are supposed to lull you to sleep.
Want to wake up? Just read Paul Berman's definitive article on Ramadan. You'll see exactly where he's coming from and exactly what kind of "re-thinking" he has in mind.
June 27, 2008 (4:23 P.M., CET): In the latest issue of
Standpoint, mentioning Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad's recent attack on
freedom of expression, I noted that "Solstad’s colleagues offered polite
demurrals." In fact, since I filed that piece several highly placed members of
Norway's cultural elite have essentially seconded Solstad's thumbs-down on free
speech.
For example, Andreas Skartveit, who has been director-general of NRK (the powerful state-owned Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) and chairman of Gyldendal, a major publishing house, complained the other day in an op-ed that Per Edgar Kokkvold, head of the Norwegian Press Association, calls free speech "sacred." This, Skartveit argued, is the problem: we've made free speech holy, and are clinging to this new "religion" in an unhealthy way. Skartveit argued for what he plainly saw as a more historically sophisticated view: "The world is changing. It always has been. Sacred things come and go...Once it was the kings who fought for our faith, as the Swedish Gustavus Adolphus, the lion of the North, fought for Protestantism. Now it is prime ministers, such as Denmark's Fogh Rasmussen, today's lion of the North, who fight for our new faith, freedom of expression."
Skartveit called this determination to fight for free speech "scary." No, what's scary is that Fogh Rasmussen is essentially alone among European prime ministers in taking responsible steps against the gradual closing down of liberty. What's scary is that the head of a major publishing house can draw a fatuous moral equivalence between a so-called "religion" founded on individual freedom - the "religion," that is, of the Enlightenment, the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and oppressive faiths that restrict expression, subordinate women, and demand the execution of apostates. As Hans Rustad points out, this isn't the first time recently that we've heard somebody in Norway complain that freedom of expression has become a secular religion - Muhammed Usman Rana, the Muslim student leader who refuses to reject the death penalty for gay people, has made the same argument.
Solstad, Skartveit, and Rana aren't alone. Apropos of the Danish cartoons and other such actions, Janne Haaland Matlary, a politician and author whom I've long considered an intelligent, well-informed contrarian voice in Norway, argued in a recent op-ed that "it is both stupid and dangerous to challenge others by insulting them." And Anders Giæver, the newly anointed U.S. correspondent for Norway's largest paper, VG, made a similar argument in a magazine piece last weekend (no link).
I assume there'll be more of this sort of thing down the line. At this point, however, I must say that it's striking, if in an altogether gruesome and dispiriting way, to see one member after another of a free country's elite rise up and, as it were, declare - proudly, firmly, defiantly - "I'm not Spartacus!"
June 25, 2008 (23:16 P.M., CET): I wrote on Sunday night about a brutal
gay-bashing that took place here in Oslo on Saturday night. It now turns out
that there was another brutal gay-bashing the night before. Two guys left the
gay bar London Pub at around 2:30 AM on Friday night. On their way home, they
were assaulted outside another gay bar, Naken, by two guys who looked Middle
Eastern. One of the two victims, whose name is Cengiz, is himself a gay Muslim.
"They said nothing to us," Cengiz tells Gaysir. They just punched him and his friend in the face multiple times and kicked the friend. "This happened," notes Cengiz, "in the street" (a busy street, by the way) "so all of us could have been run over." There were several patrons from Naken on the sidewalk nearby; none intervened.
After the assailants left, a badly battered Cengiz and his friend headed for the E.R., where a doctor, also a "foreigner" (in Oslo, this generally means a Muslim), was less interested in what had been done to Cengiz than in Cengiz's ethnicity. The doctor asked "where I was from 'originally.' I felt that the doctor was condescending."
"I don't know what their motivation was," Cengiz says about his assailants. Readers' comments on the story make it clear that at least some gay people understand very well what the motivation was. "This is what happens when one imports hundreds of thousands [sic] of intolerant Muslims!" one commenter writes. More typically, another commenter - who identifies himself as a gay Muslim and a friend of Cengiz - warns against generalizing about Muslims. (Thus do many gay Muslims themselves deny the violent antigay sentiments with which their coreligionists are infected.) Other PC commenters nag that the article (simply by reporting on an assault!) "stigmatizes...Muslims" and that "there are homophobes in all groups."
This story appears at Gaysir, the main Norwegian gay website; I haven't seen mention of it elsewhere. The reporter, Bjørn Lecomte, writes that there have been several other cases in Oslo "this summer" of gay people being beat up, but that the victims haven't made a point of coming forward in the media. I might add that without such aggressiveness on the part of victims of gay-bashing, the major media here certainly aren't about to make a big story out of these assaults.
As I mentioned, these two guys were beaten up outside Naken after leaving London Pub at 2:30 AM. That night my partner and I were at London Pub, too. We left at 3:00 AM, and we walked past Naken on our way home.
June 22, 2008 (23:49 P.M., CET): Last night saw yet another brutal
gay-bashing in Oslo by "two people of foreign origin," which doesn't mean
Swedes. Before the assault, the two victims - one of whom, Knut Øyvind Hagen,
has participated three times, as singer and songwriter, in the Norwegian finals
of the Eurovision Song Contest - met the "two people of foreign origin" in a
kebab joint in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Grønland. The TPOFO
represented themselves as being gay and asked Hagen and his friend about being
gay. They had what Hagen describes as a "nice conversation." Then Hagen and
his friend left. The TPOFO followed them out and beat the hell out of them. "There
was blood everywhere," said Hagen, "and at first I thought my friend was dead."
Hey, let's fly in Noah
Feldman to explain to Hagen and his friend that (as he wrote in his Times
piece today) "a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be
respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures - even
intolerant ones."
June 22, 2008 (6:22 P.M., CET): Thanks to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, websites like Jihad Watch and Little Green Footballs, a handful of mainstream journalists and editors who (unlike many of their colleagues) believe in telling even highly uncomfortable truths, and (if I may say so) books like my own While Europe Slept, more and more Americans have a very good understanding of what's going on in Europe today vis-à-vis Islam. Yet even now, in the wake of the Madrid and London bombings, the van Gogh murder, the Danish cartoon riots, etc., etc., the New York Times is still in there pushing the outrageously transparent, thousand-times-discredited lie that the rising discomfort of many Europeans over the growth of Islam in their midst is entirely a product of irrational bigotry.
Noah Feldman's argument rests entirely on the brazen suppression of mountains of evidence. Nor does he add anything new to the tattered old argument he's recycling. It's especially bizarre, moreover, to see this meretricious nonsense in the same magazine that last summer ran a piece by Mark Lilla acknowledging that Islam does indeed represent a major challenge to Western values - but arguing that, if we wish to live in peace with its adherents, we have no choice other than to compromise our post-Enlightenment heritage in profound ways.
The Times, then, will give a prominent platform to those, like Feldman, who paint European Muslims as victims of bigotry, pure and simple. It will also provide space to those, like Lilla, who recognize the growth of Islam in the West as a genuine threat to liberty - but who counsel appeasement. What the Gray Lady has no room for, however, is those who agree with Lilla that Islam is a threat - but who, unlike him, believe that our hard-won legacy of freedom is precious and worth fighting for and that the cultural jihad we're now facing should therefore be resisted at all costs.
June 18, 2008 (5:45 P.M., CET): They don't make movie stars like
Cyd anymore.
In all of Hollywood history,
is there a more elegant three minutes and sixteen seconds than
this?
June 15, 2008 (7:20 P.M., CET): Reading the long, affectionate profile of Norway's own resident terrorist, Ansar al-Islam founder Mullah Krekar, by Inger Anne Olsen in this weekend's A-magasinet (a regular supplement to Friday's Aftenposten), I was constantly reminded of Andrea Elliott's Pulitzer-winning New York Times profile of "American imam" Reba Shata, in which she did a great job of making a hard-core Islamist preacher in New York look like a Muslim version of Father O'Malley in Going My Way. Though Shata was no terrorist (only a big supporter of Hamas), Olson's portrait of Krekar is - in style, tone, and strategy - of a piece with Elliott's three-parter on Shata, turning the mullah (whom even the U.N. recognizes as a security threat) into a harmless, lovable guy whom we're apparently meant to view as having been terribly wronged and misunderstood.
Not to oversell the similarities, but it's interesting to compare the way the two pieces begin. Here's how Elliott opened her profile of Shata:
The imam begins his trek before dawn, his long robe billowing like a ghost through empty streets. In this dark, quiet hour, his thoughts sometimes drift back to the Egyptian farming village where he was born.
But as the sun rises over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Sheik Reda Shata's new world comes to life. The R train rattles beneath a littered stretch of sidewalk, where Mexican workers huddle in the cold. An electric Santa dances in a doughnut shop window. Neon signs beckon. Gypsy cabs blare their horns.
The imam slips into a plain brick building, nothing like the golden-domed mosque of his youth.
And here's the opening of Olsen's portrait of Krekar:
Once a week Norway's most deported man leaves his home. Mullah Krekar hurries along the streets of Grønland. Exhaust fumes drift over from Nylandsveien, where a line of Norwegians [in their cars] are eager to get home for the weekend. It is after 1:30, and it's Friday. Krekar walks, fast, to get to Friday prayers in time.
He stops in front of a shut-down paint store. Above the windows hangs an advertisement for Strax and Drygolin. Krekar takes a white skullcap out of his pocket and covers his head. Ready for prayer. Just a piece of paper on the door tells what's inside: "Mescid." A transcription of the Arabic word for mosque. This is where the Badi-ul-Zaman congregation worships.
Like Shata, Krekar has a long line of Muslims waiting to ask him questions about how to live life in accordance with Islamic scriptures. In his case, he receives and answers the questions online, at home. When Olsen asks him whether his answers are "fatwas," Krekar laughs and explains, "I don't call them fatwas, because after Rushdie the West still thinks that fatwa is a synonym for death sentence. But yes, I issue fatwas." (Nothing like a little Rushdie humor from a terrorist.)
In Elliott's piece, she summed up Shata's (scary) beliefs and politics as briefly and innocuously as possible, while devoting lots of space to cozy material that was plainly meant to humanize the guy. Olsen does precisely the same with Krekar, serving up one item after another designed to play on reader sympathy. For example, she tells us that though Krekar loves his faith and strives (in her words) "to help those who already believe to find their way back to the narrow path," Krekar's own mosque recently asked him to stop speaking at Friday services - the indignity! - supposedly because they don't want to "mix politics and religion." (There's a first.) Another source of humiliation: Krekar has no work permit, so his wife has to support him. (She works - where else? - at a day-care center.) "She must be both the woman and the man," Krekar says. He's not allowed to use the national health-care system, except in emergencies. And unlike his wife and kids, he has no Norwegian passport.
Like Elliott, Olsen piles on the family-man stuff. When the efforts to deport Krekar were making headlines in Norway, she writes, things got really tough for his youngest kid, but the folks at his school helped a lot: "The father speaks long and warmly about how Hersleb [School] has protected and supported the boy." This whole passage is written in such a way as to make Krekar seem like a victim - poor guy, just trying to live in peace with his family! - when the responsible journalistic approach would have been to remind readers of the crimes against humanity, committed by poor old Krekar himself, that were ultimately responsible for the headline blitz that disrupted his son's life.
Also like Elliott, Olsen goes out of her way to depict her subject's family as integrated (the wife works! the older son shakes women's hands!). We're plainly meant to get the message that his kids are all good students - but reading about how the three older ones are studying pharmacy, medicine, and Arabic, all I could think was: well, they're sure luckier than the children in the old country whom their dad ordered beaten, tortured, and killed.
None of which is mentioned by Olsen, of course. Though, like Elliott, she glancingly sums up the dicier stuff - enough, at least, to be able to point to the relevant passages and say: "See, I wrote about that!" - she shares Elliott's skill at euphemizing, minimizing, and putting the sunniest possible spin on things. Hence the main point she makes about Krekar's past is that he's a patriot: "His concern is Kurdistan, Kurdistan, Kurdistan." (Just to make sure we get it, she repeats this triple refrain later in the piece.) Yet for all his love for his homeland, Olsen tells us, Krekar has also developed an affection for Norway - so much affection, he says, that he personally ordered that a planned terrorist attack on Norway be called off. He declines to offer any details. Olsen, who shows no sign of doubting this or anything else he tells her, doesn't seem to grasp that Krekar's claim to be privy to terrorist plans - and to be in a position to quash them - rather undermines her own effort to paint him as a harmless retiree. (She appears to accept without question his much disputed claim to have quit Ansar al-Islam years ago.) No, Olsen serves this tidbit up not to demonstrate that Krekar still wields power - just as the U.S. claims - but to show how much he loves Norway.
Olsen, in short, waxes extraordinarily sympathetic throughout. But she really breaks out the violins when she gets around to the topic of Krekar's "self-imposed house arrest" (he supposedly fears kidnapping or assassination). In an apparent paraphrase of his plaints, she tells us that
neither his need for air nor for physical movement [is] satisfied. That he lacks a community, lacks freedom from anxiety and fear. That he seeks human dignity, which he has lost. That he fled [Iraq] in order to be able to fly, but now sits here, with his wings clipped.
Well, this is a tad irritating. Of course you'd never know it from reading Aftenposten, or from pretty much any other Norwegian newspaper, but across Europe, an increasing number of writers, journalists, and politicians - such as Fiamma Nirenstein in Italy and Robert Redeker in France - have bravely stood up for freedom against jihadist bullying, have been targeted as a result with death threats from Krekar's ideological confrères, and now must be accompanied everywhere they go by armed guards. What Norwegian newspaper has profiled any of these valiant defenders of liberty with the detail and sympathy that Olsen lavishes on this terrorist?
Olsen even has the audacity to quote, without comment, Krekar's complaint that "It looks as if I even have lost my right to speak freely." Never mind that the Norwegian news media and book industry have, all along, been obscenely eager to provide Krekar with a forum. In fact Olsen's article is only the very latest example of what has become a distinctive Norwegian literary genre - the journalistic sob story about poor old Mullah Krekar. Though Aschehoug, a respected publishing house, issued Krekar's memoirs in 2004 (and gave it a great PR push, too), Norwegian publishers have yet to bring out a translation of any of the books by critics of Islam that have come out in English in the last few years.
Olsen also wants us to know that for all his burdens, Krekar is full of good humor:
He laughs...
He gives a little laugh...
Krekar smiles...
He smiles at the two of us who have come from Aftenposten...
...with a smile, [he] admonishes the photographer: "Please don't take pictures of me from below. My wife gets so upset when I have such a big nose in all the pictures."
....[he] laughs heartily...
He laughs, yet again.
Finally, there's Krekar's take on 9/11 - in the course of which we also get a taste of Olsen's take on Fallujah, which is (surprise!) completely consistent with that of the most virulently anti-American, pro-insurgent propagandists:
Can Krekar understand the West's reaction to September 11? "I can." But for Krekar, September 11 is only one of several dates when mass murders of civilians took place. Many were killed on the three days in November 2004 when the U.S. set in motion Operation Phantom Fury against the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy (SCHRD) in Fallujah estimates between 4000 and 6000 killed, most of them civilians. Krekar goes further, and thinks that 22,000 died. "Wouldn't it be a normal reaction for 22,000 brave men from Falluja to come now and take down 22,000 more towers in the U.S.?" he asks.
In short, more of the same from the Norwegian media.
June 13, 2008 (2:49 P.M., CET): This morning the winners of the design
competition for a new main railroad station for Oslo were announced. Here is an
artist's rendering of the
planned building. The reporter who wrote the article raised the issue of
influence, and got this reply from one of the architects:
What are you inspired by?
The station hall itself has an arch theme and is inspired by classical railway stations. We want a modern expression in traditional dress.
For many readers, however,
the first thing that came to mind on seeing the picture was not Gare du Nord or
Waterloo Station. "I was in Dubai last year and I have to say that [this] would
have fit in well there," one reader writes in the comments field. Another asks:
"Will the towers point toward Mecca? Will women be allowed in?"
June 11, 2008 (6:22 P.M.,
CET): Moments ago the Norwegian Parliament approved full same-sex marriage.
Gratulerer med dagen!
June 10, 2008 (3:05 P.M., CET): I've exchanged a few e-mails today with Jennifer Delano, the organizer of that Queen's Day fashion show in Amsterdam. She's been very gracious about answering my questions, and allowing me to share some of her comments.
I asked if there were any new
developments in the case. No, there aren't. The police are looking for
witnesses but "nothing has happened so far."
In reply to my reference to the Queen's Day "incident," she said "I wish it was
just an incident," meaning that it wasn't an isolated instance. She quoted Mike
as saying that he was glad that he had been attacked while walking on a catwalk
because now at least "someone listens to me" when he talks about anti-gay
violence.
Apropos of the fact that only one guy had stood up for Mike, I asked how many
people had been present at the show. She said that a lot of people had been
present, "and I mean a lot! But in Holland a lot of violence has to
happen before someone takes action."
She told me that after Queen's Day the Amsterdam police, government, and COC (the
Dutch gay organisation) "got a lot of criticism" and "changed the way they
handle antigay violence. From now on they will work harder when it comes to
violence and the protection of people who could be threatened by antigay
violence.”
Finally, I asked how Mike is doing. She replied: "Mike is doing kind of okay.
His nose was broken and they tried twice to put it back like it was before, but
it is still not okay. He has had to quit his modeling career for more than half
a year and hopes that he will be back one day."
Reading about Jennifer in the last day or so, I can see what a busy woman she is, and so I'm especially impressed by the efforts she made in the days after the assault, and is continuing to make, to get the news out about this assault and about the broader issue of antigay violence. May her numbers increase in that troubled city.
June 10, 2008 (10:10 A.M., CET): Yesterday I searched the websites of all
the major Dutch newspapers for any coverage of the Queen's Day assault, finding
nothing. But since I happened to have exchanged e-mails in the last few days
with a reporter for NRC Handelsblad, which is a major paper, I
asked him if NRC had run anything on the incident. He sent me an
300-word article that doesn't appear on the NRC site. I don't know
anything about its placement in that day's paper. But anyway, here it is, with
my rough translation (and bracketed comments) in red:
Opstootje bij show homo 's
in A'dam
Door een onzer redacteuren
Amsterdam, 2 mei.
Street disturbance at a gay show in Amsterdam
By one of our editors
Amsterdam, 2 May
Tijdens een modeshow voor homotolerantie in Amsterdam hebben allochtone jongeren op Koninginnedag een mannelijk model geslagen en onzedelijk betast.
During a Queen's Day fashion show for gay tolerance in Amsterdam, immigrant youths beat and indecently touched a male model.
Het 19-jarige slachtoffer is gisteravond in het ziekenhuis behandeld voor een gebroken neus. Dit heeft de organisator van de modeshow, Jennifer Delano, vanmorgen gezegd.
Last evening the 19-year-old victim was treated in the hospital for a broken nose, Jennifer Delano, the organizer of the fashion show, said this morning.
Het slachtoffer zou vandaag aangifte doen bij de Amsterdamse politie. De politie is al een onderzoek begonnen. "Wij treden hard op tegen geweld tegen homoseksuelen", zegt een woordvoerder.
The victim made a statement today to the Amsterdam police. The police have begun an investigation. "We act fast against violence against gays," said a spokesperson.
De homomodeshow vond plaats in de Utrechtsestraat. Volgens Delano brachten
'blanke jongeren' de Hitlergroet, toen een donker model voorbij kwam. Daarna
begon een "urban groepje Surinaamse of Antilliaanse" jongens te schelden, zegt
Delano.
The gay fashion show took place in Utrechtsestraat.
[OK, I was wrong about it being on Halvemaansteeg. Makes sense: Utrechtsestraat, at the opposite corner of Rembrandtplein from Halvemaansteeg, is a wider street, with more room for a catwalk and spectators. There's one gay bar there, a drag bar called Lellebel.] According to Delano, "'white boys' made a Hitler salute when a dark-skinned model went by. [Well, this is a new detail.] Then an "urban group of Surinamese or Antillean" boys started cursing," said Delano.
Het liep uit de hand toen het slachtoffer aan het einde van de catwalk kwam. Ongeveer tien jongens "uit Noord-Afrika of het Midden-Oosten" gaven hem klappen. Toen de belaagde zich verweerde, werd hij aan een arm van de catwalk getrokken. Een man, de vriend van een van de modellen, schoot hem te hulp.
Things got
out of hand when the victim reached the end of the catwalk. Approximately ten
boys "from North Africa or the Middle East" hit him. When the beleaguered young
man defended himself, he was pulled off the catwalk by an arm. A man, a friend
of one of the models, tried to help him.
In de vechtpartij die daarop ontstond, zo zegt Delano, werd er tegen het model aangereden en werd hij betast. Uiteindelijk sloegen de deelnemers aan de modeshow op de vlucht. Gisteravond bleek dat het slachtoffer, die vanmorgen niet bereikbaar was voor commentaar, een gebroken neus heeft.
In the brawl that ensued, says Delano, the model was [the next word, "aangereden," usually means run over by a vehicle] and groped. Finally the participants in the fashion show took flight. Last evening it turned out that the victim, who was not available this morning for comment, had a broken nose.
De politie heeft vanmorgen getuigen opgeroepen zich te melden. "We hopen vooral
dat mensen beelden hebben gemaakt van de vechtpartij", zegt een woordvoerder. De
PVV heeft Kamervragen gesteld aan minister Plasterk (Emancipatie, PvdA).
This morning the police have summoned witnesses to file reports. "We hope that people have formed images of the brawl," said a spokesperson. The Freedom Party [i.e. Geert Wilders's party] has formally raised this issue with Minister Plasterk [Ronald Plasterk, a Labor Party minister whose portfolio includes gay issues].
De politie heeft op Koninginnedag in diverse steden aanhoudingen verricht. In Amsterdam waren het er ruim honderd, in Rotterdam rond de honderd. In Utrecht verrichtte de politie zeker tien aanhoudingen, en in Arnhem 26.
The police made arrests on Queen’s Day in several cities. In Amsterdam there were over a hundred, in Rotterdam around a hundred. In Utrecht the police made scarcely 10 arrests, in Arnhem 26.
De aangehouden personen
maakten zich volgens de politie schuldig aan onder meer openlijke geweldpleging,
wildplassen, openbare dronkenschap, belediging, mishandeling, het bekladden van
een auto, het vernielen van meerdere lantaarnpalen en drugsbezit.
The crimes of which the arrested persons were found guilty, according to the police, included overt violence, public urination, public drunkenness, insult, abuse, the vandalizing of a car, the destruction of several telephone poles, and drug possession.
De politie zegt desondanks dat het een "rustige Koninginnedag" is geweest.
The police said, however, that it had been a "quiet Queen's Day." [!]
UPDATE, June 10, 2008 (11:35 A.M. CET): Looking again at Jennifer Delano's website, I see that I missed part of her assemblage of media coverage of the Queen's Day assault because I didn't notice the teeny little arrows at the bottom of this page. They link to this page, which contains more news reports from the same week, including very brief items about the assault from the major dailies Telegraaf and NRC and the free urban paper Metro. At the bottom of this page, in turn, there's another arrow linking to this page, on which Delano has posted a brief item from another leading daily, Trouw, and an article from Het Parool. So I owe Het Parool an apology for saying that they didn't cover the original assault. Then again, their reporter gives prominent attention to the Hitler salute and seems eager to imply a connection between it and the beating -- a spin that seems to jibe interestingly with that of the same newspaper's article, which I cited yesterday, about the "peaceful" fashion show that took place at the Homomonument a few days later.
Bottom line: I was wrong to suggest that all of the mainstream Dutch media ignored the du Pree assault. In fact, while some of them apparently did ignore it, almost all of the rest appear to have accorded it a level of coverage that could fairly be called dismissive. In addition to being extremely brief (and perhaps this brevity explains why they don't turn up in online searches of the newspapers' contents), all the articles mentioned above appear to have been marginally placed, tucked away in a corner of a page or between other stories. None of them gives the assault anything remotely resembling the kind of attention I believe it should have received.
And what about follow-up? What we seem to have here is yet another example of a horrific event that was dutifully (under)reported one day and then dropped down the memory hole the next. This was the kind of incident that should not only have made major headlines but should have occasioned vigorous follow-up reporting -- not to mention thoughtful editorial commentary and op-ed debate in the days that followed. If there was any such discussion in the major Dutch papers, I haven't yet seen it. But I'll keep looking.
June 10, 2008 (2:00 A.M., CET): In Oslo the weather isn't often as beautiful
as it was on Saturday. It was a perfect day to be out and about. As it
happened, it was also the day of Musikkfest
Oslo. At a couple of dozen different outdoor sites around town, various
musical acts performed from noon through 11 P.M. At 6 P.M.,
Einar Stenseng, a terrific songwriter and
performer, did four songs with his
band at Birkelunden, a
park in the Grünerløkka neighborhood:
Walking back downtown, we caught two groups at Schous Plass and Arbeidersamfunnetsplass, which, if the schedule is correct, were respectively Manatee Racket and Zacharias:
At the ever charming Youngstorget,
we heard the last 20 minutes or so of a set by electronic musician Binärpilot, who was surprisingly interesting:
At Pløens Gate, we listened to a bit of the 8:00 act, Helostratos:
And then we walked up Grensen toward the declining sun and found our way to the backyard of the rock club Garage, where at 9 P.M. Charlotte & The Co-Stars did their thing:
June 9, 2008 (10:00 P.M., CET):
On April 30, Queen's Day in the Netherlands
(a major holiday), a gay fashion
show on "a side street of Rembrandt Square" was disrupted in an alarming
way. Ten young Muslim men dragged a model named Mike du Pree
down from the catwalk and beat him severely, breaking his nose.
As horrible as the story itself is the fact that it only came to many people's attention, including mine, in the last few days, and only because Dan Blatt of Gay Patriot happened to meet a Dutch lesbian, Evelyn Markus, who told him about the incident and translated for him a couple of articles about it. They had not appeared in major newspapers in the Netherlands. One of them appeared in a publication I never read. The other was in Gay Krant, which I look at when I'm in Amsterdam (there are always copies in every gay establishment) but which I never seek out on the Internet.
Dan
headlines his posting "Gay Bashing in Amsterdam Goes Unnoticed in the US." But
apparently it also went unnoticed in the Netherlands, except by the gay
community. Did the mainstream media even hear about this? Is it their attitude
that such things are only of interest or importance to gay people?
Another appalling fact here is this: according to one of the
stories, Mike du Pree was defended by "another model." There is no mention of
anyone else rushing to defend him. I don't get it. On no
day of the year is Amsterdam more crowded with people than it is on Queen's
Day. This is especially true of Rembrandtplein and the streets leading into
it. I suspect the side street on which this event took place was Halvemaansteeg,
a little alley that is lined with gay bars and that connects Rembrandtplein to
the river Amstel. For one thing, I can't imagine
why the cops couldn't get there in time -- on days like Queen's Day
there's always cops staked out on Rembrandtplein (usually
right at the end of Halvemaansteeg, in fact) to deal with rowdies and such.
But forget the cops. How come the story only mentions du Pree being defended by "another model"? How many gay guys were at that fashion show? How many dozens or hundreds of men, on this most crowded of all days in Amsterdam, were within shouting distance of this atrocity? Did any of them do anything? Dan links to du Pree’s web page, on which he describes himself as being between 170 and 175 cm (5'7"-5'9") tall and as weighing between 50 and 55 kg (110-120 pounds). In a country where the average guy is over six feet tall, that's a little guy. It's likely there were gay guys at that show who were a foot taller than du Pree. Did they actually stand there and watch him get his ass kicked without trying to do anything? Certainly the gay guys must have outnumbered the Muslim gangsters. Where's the solidarity? Where's the initiative? This is just plain chilling.
I hope it turns out there was some resistance. But there's no indication in the Dutch articles that there was. And that's the scariest part of all this, the sheer passivity. It's like when Anna Lindh was murdered in Stockholm. People just stood there, waiting for somebody else to do something. Somebody whose job it was. Hayek was right: the capacity for resistance -- the capacity of even conceiving of resistance -- is bred out of people in social democracies. And it's not as if gays in Amsterdam can say they were taken by surprise. In the last decade, conditions for gay people in that city have been heading steadily south. It was just about time for something like this to happen. Amsterdam gays should have been prepared.
And they should be angry. Very angry. For gay people around
the world, Amsterdam once stood for equality of rights and freedom from fear.
For any gay person in the world who's paying
attention, the city is now the international symbol of
the closing down of gay freedom in the name of Islam.
UPDATE, June 10, 2008 (1:58 A.M., CET): I see that Jennifer Delano, the
organizer of the fashion show, included on her blog
screen captures of a half-dozen or so media reports on the attack. Most are
from marginal publications; none are from top-level national media.
It appears from a report posted on the site that the person who tried to help the model was not a fellow model but an audience member.
On the next page of Delano's blog, one finally sees a clip from a major newspaper, Het Parool. But it's not a story about the attack on du Pree; it's a story about another fashion show, a week later, which also had tolerance of gay people as its theme. The event was apparently uneventful - which of course is why it was safe to report on. To be sure, the assault on du Pree is mentioned in a subordinate clause in the last sentence of the piece: "Whereas Mike du Pree less than a week ago - during a fashion show for gay tolerance on Queen's Day - was dragged by immigrant youths from the catwalk on the Rembrandtplein, the models yesterday were welcomed by a dancing crowd." See? A happy ending. Nothing to worry about! That's the most one can expect from the mainstream Dutch media when something like this happens - a passing reference, days later, in a story framed in such a way as to suggest that the event was a minor fluke and that everything's all right again.
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.jpg)
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:
Aksel: "I saw a film in which Bush's and Hitler's speeches were compared. Frighteningly similar."
Anette, on her middle-school visit to Auschwitz: "I don't think we got one single sentence of fact during the whole visit."
Astrid: "At our school, a lot of kids wear Communist symbols on their bags. Nobody says anything negative about Communism, including the teachers." The kids' image of Communism is positive, though it "went a little wrong because Stalin was a jerk."
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?