The snidely liberals won’t watch your back
by Scoop Shachtman, 6 October 2007
When Salman Rushdie was under threat, following the publication of Satanic Verses, the UK government moved to provide him protection - despite his habit of making critical comments about the UK. Not everyone was so keen about Salman though. Norman Tebbit said of him that his “public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality.” Nor, were all his critics of the right. Germaine Greer stated “I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles.” Some of this bile was regurgitated in the wake of Rushdie’s knighthood and subsequent Islamist “Rage Boy” gatherings.
Hirsi Ali is a similar figure who attracts scorn, though the extent of the criticism seems to be at the level of accusing her of being a trouble maker, rather than a detailed critique. Recently, Ali has returned from the US to Holland following the decision of the Dutch government to withdraw funding for her security. Leon de Winter in Spiegel Online makes the argument for protecting the woman.
Whether we think she is nice, kind or opportunist, we cannot afford anything happening to her. The Dutch government is making a problem out of something that shouldn’t be one, something that only causes chaos and sorrow.
[…]
The winners are the extremists who laugh about our inability to offer this courageous woman quiet and safety. You see, it’s too expensive. In fact, though, it makes you want to weep.
In the UK at the moment, we have a number of ex-Islamists bravely speaking out about the extremism they once espoused. Surprisingly, not all the criticism they have had has come from those they have “betrayed”. Some has arisen from the left, who accuse them of creating trouble, or toadying to Western interests. Perhaps it is a racist view that “brown people” shouldn’t speak out about their religion in the same way that white liberals feel free to do about their own religious backgrounds; perhaps it’s a fear of the extremists themselves; or perhaps it’s a loathing of their own society’s assumed hypocrises that leads to this sort of snidely remark from a liberal academic.
So a warning to Muslims who choose to criticize their religion or even extremist segments of it. Don’t expect to get away with the sort of thing white liberals get away with saying about Catholicism or the Church of England, because they won’t like you causing trouble.
Don’t expect solidarity or support, you will be seen as the authors of your own misfortune.
Most of all, don’t expect the snidely liberals to watch your backs.
They are so very tired of you.
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 0:59
Most of all, don’t expect the snidely liberals to watch your backs. They are so very tired of you.
Well, yes. But they are also totally ineffectual. The majority of snidely liberals claim to care passionately for the fate of the people of Darfur and Tibet but their concrete actions to prevent the fast/slow-motion genocides underway are equal to no action whatsoever.
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 1:04
“The snidely liberals won’t watch your back”
Of course they won’t. Cowards they are. It’s constituent of the ideology — it makes it so.
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 2:42
It is a bit odd for a woman, in the … how does Medved start his radio show … greatest country on God’s green earth, the world’s policeman, bringer of democracy to the world, should need Dutch coppers to protect a new citizen.
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 3:21
A most excellent commentary, Comrade Max.
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 11:26
Reading that thread, I noticed, not for the first time, that CT’s readership really are disgusting little turds. Puffed up turds. They are to shit what cheese puffs are to corn. I would go quite a distance to avoid being associated with such people.
It’s funny that the first few all agreed that those neocons must be refusing to pay (a million $/year) for Hirsi Ali’s body guards, because her death will be the excuse to bomb Iran.
They must react that way to Saturday morning cartoons. “The powerpuff girls glorify violence so that children will support the neocons when they bomb Iran,” goes the thinking, no doubt.
But it’s their bitter hatred that Ali doesn’t know her place, and makes trouble by arguing for freedom that really gets them spitting and knashing. One compared her to a holocaust denier. There ought to be a law, implying that her speech should be outlawed. Nice. Somehow multiculturalism has turned around into “brown women should know their place and shut up!”
But there’s no real contradiction, because the only thing CT’s “liberals” actually believe in is their own greed and convenience. It’s the sign that liberalism has become made it, when it attracts the same mass of pure, unprincipled greed-heads who would have been racists a generation ago. They’re in it for themselves and no one else. That pretending to care more than everyone else is the required rhetoric only makes the greed and contempt sweeter.
Ali = holocaust denier. Sweet.
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 12:20
I just came across this aphorism: “The fool hates what is good, and loves what is worthless. So, better the derision of the base man than the acclaim of millions…”
Saturday 6 October 2007 at 18:49
By the way:
Prime Minister: Hirsi Ali should leave the country!
Today Dutch prime minister Jan Peter “Balkenende has Dutch citizen Ayaan Hirsi Ali advised to leave the country and go back to the United States. He said that she shouldn’t come back to The Netherlands for protection. She has long enough known that the Dutch government wanted to stop her protection. Earlier Dutch justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin wrote Ayaan Hirsi Ali that she is safe and does not need protection.”
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 1:39
Today Dutch prime minister Jan Peter “Balkenende has Dutch citizen Ayaan Hirsi Ali advised to leave the country and go back to the United States. He said that she shouldn’t come back to The Netherlands for protection.”
Question: How many Dutch collaborated with the Nazis to make sure they’d be “safe and [did] not need protection?”
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 1:44
John in Cincinnati asked, “It is a bit odd for a woman, in the … how does Medved start his radio show … greatest country on God’s green earth, the world’s policeman, bringer of democracy to the world, should need Dutch coppers to protect a new citizen.”
I believe it is illegal for the US Government to provide security for foreign nationals (she is not a citizen) in the US. I don’t know the details, does someone else know? If the government can’t do it, then the citizens should pay for it.
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 2:40
Protecting her should fall into the same category as protecting Norman Mailer, Rushdie, or any other writer, speaker, or personality that annoys the public. It shouldn’t matter if they annoy a group we support or a group we oppose… It’s called Freedom of Speech… Do we defend it or do we wait for violence to stifle it-?
The principle is not the individual. The principles are our stand on violence as a method of discourse and when is Free Speech free from threat-?
Do we allow anyone to be silenced by violence-? Where does the -ENTIRE- Western culture stand on those two issues-? It’s not just the cowboy-naive-depraved-etc USA that must choose. It’s the enlightened- Social-safety- net-health- insurance-for-all-smug-and- superior nations as well…
Do we cavil before violence? Do we let thugs, brigands and murders tell us what speech is “free”-? . What will we do when it’s Russia that sends thugs and murders -or-China -or-…. Fill in in your own scary scenario
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 2:55
Keith
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 1:44
You’re right she can’t qualify for protection using tax dollars under U.S. law. But that wasn’t John’s point actually. He’s just snearing at Americans who think their country is great and who are unapologetic about it. Like most who share his contempt, his snear is founded on and flounders in his ignorance and his trust in MSM reporting.
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 2:57
The comments at “Crooked Timber” really are quite disturbing: these people seem to positively like clerical fascism and hate those who oppose it. Yet they appear to be quite articulate, educated, western people, who have no excuses. Who, exactly, are they?
Sunday 7 October 2007 at 4:42
Jim Denham said: “The comments at ‘Crooked Timber’ really are quite disturbing: these people seem to positively like clerical fascism and hate those who oppose it. Yet they appear to be quite articulate, educated, western people, who have no excuses. Who, exactly, are they?”
Angry tots. Their position is really quite simple: The enemy of my daddy is my friend.
That’s as deep as it goes. They overlook murderous homophobia, murderous misogyny, murderous religious fanaticism, murderous wars of conquest, murderous racism, murderous pedophelia–everything liberals profess to hate. Why?
Because Islamofascists are putting their thumbs in Daddy-Bush’s eye. Take that, Dad! For telling me what to do!
We’re living in a Freudian-Orwellian nightmare.
Monday 8 October 2007 at 0:00
Jim D: Actually, they are the very opposite of what they “appear to be quite articulate, educated, western people, who have no excuses.”
So “Who, exactly, are they?”
They’re the same articulate, educated, western people who served Stalin and Hitler and those that came before and after.
It’s time to stop pretending.
They DO NOT “overlook murderous homophobia, murderous misogyny, murderous religious fanaticism, murderous wars of conquest, murderous racism, murderous pedophelia–everything liberals profess to hate. Why?”
Because they ARE NOT liberals. They are what they have always been. (See above.)
Monday 8 October 2007 at 6:01
Europe has merely moved to cheap immigrant labor for their religiously inspired executions. Immigrants do the jobs that native Europeans won’t do!
Monday 8 October 2007 at 16:09
“We’re living in a Freudian-Orwellian nightmare.”
Well said, Tom. And I’d add that I’ve always found it highly ironic that these Daddy-government-hating (and -fearing) fools are also quite eager to forcibly drive us all into Mommy-government’s smothering embrace when she’s the one making the decisions.