[Reader-list] Eliot Weinberger at the LRB

[Vivek Narayanan]

I should mention that the source for this link was Eliot Weinberger's 
post, "Agog", at the LRB:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/author/eliot-weinberger/

Weinberger is a very astute commentator and he has been writing some 
hilarious and cutting posts, including on the current mainstreaming of 
Islamophobia. Here below are two:

**********

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/08/04/eliot-weinberger/muslim-shark-alert/

Muslim Shark Alert!
4 August 2009
Eliot Weinberger

Tags: america, islamophobia, obama, reviews

It’s been a slow summer for shark attacks in Florida, so American cable 
TV news has had to content itself by filling its hours with the 
‘birther’ movement, which is less organic than it sounds: the belief 
that Barack Obama was not born in the USA, and is therefore ineligible 
to serve as president. Despite some evidence to the contrary – such as a 
birth certificate validated by the Republican governor of Hawaii and its 
Department of Health, as well as birth announcements in two Honolulu 
newspapers – the birthers have managed, according to the latest poll, to 
convince a majority of Republicans that Obama is as foreign as his name, 
and part of some Kenyan (or something) conspiracy to turn the White 
House red.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is strangely preoccupied with a more 
metaphorical conjunction of sharks and foreign takeover: the scary 
Muslims now lurking by the canals and lakes of placid Old Europe. In the 
last week alone, Stephen Pollard’s review of the ‘unquestionably 
correct’ Bruce Bawer (the subject of a previous blog) was followed by a 
tribute to Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in 
Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West by daily reviewer Dwight Garner, 
which in turn led to a front-page review of the Caldwell book in the 
Sunday Book Review by Fouad Ajami, Dick Cheney’s favorite Muslim. (Ajami 
was the one who predicted that the streets of Baghdad would ‘erupt in 
joy’ at the arrival of the American troops, and whose book on the Iraq 
war has the priceless title The Foreigner’s Gift.)

Garner, normally a literary critic with eclectic interests, finds 
‘lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit’ in Caldwell’s 
‘well-researched, fervently argued and morally serious book’. As an 
example, he cites this dizzying sentence:

The Islamic world is an economic and intellectual basket case, the part 
of the potentially civilised world most left behind by progress.

It is difficult to know what Caldwell means by ‘the part of the 
potentially civilised world’. Is the whole world either civilised or 
potentially civilised; or is the world divided in three: the civilised, 
the potentially civilised and the never-will-be-civilised? Whatever 
‘civilised’ and ‘progress’ mean, the former is absurd (many Islamic 
nations are more developed than other countries); the latter carries 
colonial disdain to an extreme.

It is equally difficult to see how the phrase ‘economic basket case’ 
applies to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, unless it refers to their 
notoriously overflowing shopping baskets. As for the intellectual 
poverty of the ‘Islamic world’, one can only begin to make the basket 
case if one excludes the cafés and publishing houses of Cairo and Beirut 
and Karachi and Delhi, the Iranian cinema, the countless Muslim 
intellectuals in the West, the art scene in Dubai, and on and on. (A few 
months ago, in the space of two weeks, I visited the Tunis Book Fair, 
which was packed with around 100,000 visitors, and the similarly sized 
BookExpo in New York, whose aisles were largely empty.)

Garner uncritically repeats the claim that Muslims are ‘swamping Europe 
demographically’ and multiplying like bunnies. A few minutes research 
would have revealed that there are two sets of population statistics: 
those of the Islamophobes and those of everyone else. Bruce Bawer states 
that 20 per cent of Switzerland is now Muslim; everyone else says it’s 4 
per cent. (No doubt he has mistaken yodelling for ululation.) The 
general consensus is that Muslims now make up merely 3.6 per cent of the 
population of Western Europe, and the fertility rate of European Muslims 
is a fraction of 1 per cent higher than that of Christians. Allowing 
that second and third and fourth generations of immigrants tend to be 
better educated and have higher incomes, and thus have less children, 
and that intermarriage is common, it doesn’t seem likely there will be 
ever be a muzzein at the top of the Eiffel Tower, let alone, as the 
I-phobes warn, Sharia law in Denmark and Britain. But dull statistics, 
alas, cannot compete with an ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ scenario.

For his contribution, Fouad Ajami mainly gargles a few thousand words, 
without saying much of anything at all. He does, however, go on 
autopilot for the requisite references to the expulsion of the Moors 
from Spain, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, the inevitable 
Danish cartoons, burqas on the streets of Paris, the buzzword ‘Eurabia’ 
and that perennial bogeyman, the ‘Islamofascist’ Sayyid Qutb. What 
matters is not the content of the review, but its placement at the front 
of the Book Review.

Every summer, in the middle of shark fever, there’s always some killjoy 
marine biologist who points out that sharks almost never kill anyone 
without provocation, and are generally getting a bum rap. So perhaps 
it’s worth stating the obvious: the rhetoric and the specific 
fearmongering details of the Islamophobes are identical to those used 
against the Jews in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the United 
States against every large immigrant group – Irish, Italians, Poles, 
Jews, Chinese – since the 1880s. Most of these dire warnings issued from 
scholars with impeccable credentials. It’s a good habit nowadays to 
replace the words ‘Muslim’, ‘Islam’, ‘radical Islam’ etc. with the words 
‘the Jews’. Bawer’s book, for example, then becomes: While Europe Slept: 
How the Jews Are Destroying the West from Within – a not unfamiliar 
sentiment in the 20th century.

And isn’t it time we had a similar survey of the ‘Christian world’? It 
could begin, like Caldwell, in 1492: the Inquisition! Instead of the 
London bombings, Oklahoma City; instead of a poor imitation, Sayyid 
Qutb, we could have the real thing, Hitler; instead of Theo van Gogh, 
the murder of Dr George Tiller last May; instead of a few wacko imams in 
storefront mosques, there’s no end of much more visible television 
evangelists and Fox News pundits deranged by intolerance. And, of 
course, a wide geographical selection of current economic and 
intellectual backwaters with their paramilitary groups, gay-bashers, 
book-banners, misogynists, racists, anti-Semites, bomb-builders, 
child-molesting priests and science-deniers.

Moreover, it is rather well known that the Christian world has been 
dedicated to global domination, mass conversion and holy war against the 
infidels ever since their founder said:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send 
peace, but a sword.

I am come to send fire on the earth… Suppose ye that I am come to give 
peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.

And instructed his followers:

He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

*************

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/07/28/eliot-weinberger/unquestionable-political-correctness/

Unquestionable Political Correctness
28 July 2009
Eliot Weinberger

Tags: islamophobia, media, politics, reviews

The New York Times Book Review prides itself on its objectivity: no 
known lovers or sworn enemies are allowed to review each other. In 
actual practice, this means that the author of a novel about getting 
divorced in Pennsylvania will extravagantly praise the author of a novel 
about getting divorced in Connecticut. A political ‘moderate’ will air 
and then dismiss the ideas in a book by a left-winger; a right-winger 
will express some mild reservations about an ultra-right-winger; and a 
left-winger will only be asked to review something without contemporary 
content (e.g. a feminist on the biography of a suffragette).

Edited by Sam Tanenhaus (biographer of Whittaker Chambers and, in 
progress, William F. Buckley), the NYTBR is predictably softcore 
right-of-centre. So it was something of a surprise that they assigned 
noted anti-Muslim hatemonger Stephen Pollard to review the latest book – 
Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom – by noted anti-Muslim 
hatemonger Bruce Bawer. (In 2006, Bawer published While Europe Slept: 
How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, which may help 
explain why Western Civilisation now lies in ruins.)

Pollard’s review begins:

There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, 
Islamofascism or — to use yet another label — radical Islam.

Indeed. As apparently more threatening than global warming, nuclear 
proliferation or the recession, Pollard cites Tariq Ramadan, the 
reaction to the Danish cartoons and Ken Livingstone’s conference 
invitation to Yusuf al-Qaradawi. (In a happier bit of news, however, 
Pollard implies that it was that single sinister encounter that led an 
alarmed London to throw Livingstone out.)

Further promoting Bawer’s book, the Times includes an excerpt on its 
website:

The pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism, which teaches free people 
to belittle their own liberties while bending their knees to tyrants, 
and which, as we shall see, has proven to be so useful to the new brand 
of cultural jihadists that it might have been invented by Osama bin 
Laden himself.

(One imagines the scene in a cave somewhere in the mountain fastnesses 
of Afghanistan: ‘Zawahiri, my friend, I’ve got it! We will destroy the 
Great Satan with a single word: diversity!’)

Pollard’s review ends:

Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply terrifying.

It’s true. One quite simply longs for the days when things were 
unquestionably correct, when Joseph Stalin could write:

Is Lenin’s thesis that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the ‘root 
content of the proletarian revolution’ correct? It is unquestionably 
correct.

Or when the 1969 Draft Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party could 
state:

It is unquestionably correct that on a general historical scale 
imperialism is heading towards total collapse while Socialism is heading 
towards worldwide victory.


Kshmendra Kaul wrote:
> The article "AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED" by Robert Draper accompanying the 
> slideshow http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret
> is at http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_9217
>
> --- On *Fri, 8/14/09, Vivek Narayanan /<vivek at sarai.net>/* wrote:
>
> From: Vivek Narayanan <vivek at sarai.net>
> Subject: [Reader-list] Onward Christian Soldiers
> To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Date: Friday, August 14, 2009, 8:48 AM
> Utterly terrifying, but at least now we know for sure that Bush was no
> pseudo-secularist:
> http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret
>
>