Palestinian Hamas supporters march during a demonstration against the re-publication of drawings of the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers, in Jebaliya, northern Gaza Strip, Friday, Feb. 15, 2008. (Hamas are a fascist organisation responsible for the deaths of many Palestinians and Israelis)
After reading posts about Rowan Williams’ recent musings over the role of religious laws in the UK at Butterflies and Wheels and Shuggy’s Place, and the associated comments, it strikes me that something malodorous squats over the heart of the liberal left. Both comment threads have rants which appear to be more interested in scoring points against other liberals/leftists, rather than reasoned debate. Butterflies and Wheels is smeared in a particularly obnoxious posting, like so:
The terrible Muslims are on the march, taking over everything, and the weak-minded liberals are blind to the Muslim danger. So-called “tolerance” is actually a weakness of the spirit which will see our treasured society ground down by the feared outsiders. That’s definitely what’s happening. See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya.
Over at Shuggy’s another commentator leaps to the defense of Rowan Williams, with a bizarre rant about that “fucking speech” and how everybody didn’t understand it, except him of course. While he is able to understand Williams’ dense prose, he completely misses the point of Shuggy’s entirely reasonable, and clearly written, post. The author of that particular comment is behind a website that:
Aims “to bring together and re-invigorate the liberal-left in Britain”
Wishes to constantly ask “what should the liberal-left position be on this issue?”
It strikes me that point one is going to be rather difficult if there are a significant number of those self-proclaimed liberals attempting to argue that people that disagree with them are anti-intellectual and stupid. Furthermore, point 2 is superfluous, since the owner of that site hardly needs to ask what the liberal-left position is. It is quite clear that his superior knowledge and intellect allows him to judge what the correct position should be.
I have a suspicion that there is something other than the debate about Williams’ speech and interview on the BBC motivating the animus in these comments.
I can’t put my finger on it though. What could it possibly be?
Although Charlie Brooker is commonly considered a ‘TV critic’, in reality he is a keenly observant analyst of the interplay of social forces. Here he is in magisterial form, in today’s Guardian:
Is there a single worse force in the universe than swaggering, cocksure, stupid young men? Because I’m struggling to think of one.
You see them everywhere: lurching around in messy haircuts and idiot trousers, thinking about cars, or babes, or babes in cars, laughing too loudly and blaring things like “classic!” or “quality!” or “genius!” or “mental!” and every one of them, without exception, is a cee to the yoo to the enn to the tee of towering, awful proportions.
And the thing is, the real ones aren’t even real, so to speak. The archetypal swaggering, cocksure young man is an insulting media construct, designed to star in beer commercials. Some 90% of their real-life equivalents are merely emulating these idealised buffoons in the tragic belief that this is what the world requires of them […] The remaining 10% are authentic wankers who’d do that anyway, of course - but there are probably some decent people lost among the ill-advised majority: trapped inside their shallow, posturing cocoons, yearning to break out but too scared to try. We should pity them. And when that fails, attack them with hammers.
You can tell a fair bit about the audience for a book by going to Amazon and checking what other books purchasers have bought–which is how, after looking up a book with the Hitlerian title The Host and the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America, I came to be looking at the entry for Luther’s poisonous antisemitic diatribe, The Jews and Their Lies.
Amazon has another helpful feature which prompts shoppers to buy companion books–in this case, for those whose antisemitic bookshelf may not yet be complete, purchasers of The Jews and Their Lies are offered a volume of that classic of American Jew hatred, Henry Ford’s The International Jew: Jewish Activities In The United States. Click the link (at Amazon–not the screencap below) and scroll down and you can see the categories with which the book is associated: ‘aipac’, ‘hard truths’, ‘israel lobby’, ‘jews’, ‘necons’ [sic - hahaha], ‘neocon’, ‘zionism’–the world has gone mental.
