On Islamophobia: A Phillippic

We must, before anything else, agree that “Islamophobia” is entirely the wrong term. Americans do not fear Islam (phobos [φόβος] means “fear” in Greek); rather, we despise it.

• We see women who are not allowed to show their faces in public, and we are disgusted.
• We see countries which make possession of the Bible a capital offense, and we are offended.
• We see women who have suffered clitoridectomies to ensure that they will never have any pleasure from the sexual act, and we are appalled.
• We see the casual mutilation of (alleged) criminals and the grotesquely cruel execution of others (by decapitation, crucifixion, stoning, throwing down from high places, burning) – always to the cheers of crowds of Muslims, and we are shocked.
• We see an entire religion, half of the adherents of which fervently believe that leaving that religion should be punished by death, and we are incensed.
• We see that the only countries which still countenance slavery – and slavery of black Africans, at that, in, e.g., Mauritania and the Boko Haram–controlled areas of Nigeria – are Muslim, and we are outraged.
• We see cultures which use Islam as the justification for men to sodomize young boys, and our anger is overwhelming.

And all these atrocities are committed in the name of Allah and his Prophet. So what else can we conclude but that this is the sum total of Islam? There is nothing else; nor can anyone deny it. Islam is based on nothing other than violence and sexual slavery (what Nietzsche called the “Will to Power”) – it has no, and never has had any, other claim to our attention: no metaphysics, no love, no mercy, no good works, no science (save that which they stole from Greeks and Hindus), no engineering (save that which they have been given by the West), no philosophy, no theology, no law, no justice, no economic successes (again, save the questionable gift of petroleum technology from the West); at best, a few acceptable works of poetry and some calligraphy – from the time of its (false) prophet, who raped a nine-year-old “wife,” Aisha, to the present.

Stated simply, there can be no faithful Muslim – that is, one who believes that the Koran is the infallible Word of Allah – who does not enthusiastically endorse all manner of sexual perversion and violence. Make no mistake: the horrific crimes perpetrated by Muslims in Rotherham and throughout the world – especially in areas controlled by ISIS and other “radical” Muslim groups, but even in the great cities of Western civilization – are exactly what every Muslim man wishes to do everywhere, and would, were it not for the fear of punishment, which our oh-so-enlightened and politically correct leaders – in America, in Europe, and throughout the world – work tirelessly to shield them from.

Am I wrong? I would like to be wrong. But there is no evidence that any Muslim anywhere speaks against these inhuman abuses in the languages of the people guilty of them. And who can blame them, really? Writing something like this phillippic in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, or Urdu would be a death sentence for anyone unfortunate enough to be a resident of a Muslim country. Some will point out that much lip service is paid to Western sensibilities in Western languages, and this is true, of course. But this can only be seen as a part of what Muslims call taqiyya: the idea that it is a moral good for Muslims to deceive the infidels. This is a fundamental part of the Muslim “faith,” if it can, indeed, be so called. And the prominence of taqiyya in Islamic thought does raise important questions for us – if we dare to face them – as we in the West deal with Islamic states and peoples.

But, nevertheless, we Americans are not afraid.

Instead, as John Sexton writes vis-à-vis ISIS, we long for a president, a government, and a culture which will make them afraid of us.

Solving ISIS

Dr. Ben Carson has been criticized (justly) for his opinion that ISIS could be destroyed “fairly easily.” President Obama went so far as to say that Dr. Carson “doesn't know much about” foreign policy. And if anyone knows a lot about not knowing much about foreign policy, it’s got to be Obama.

But I think Carson is correct. It is easy to come up with a strategy that would take out ISIS – especially if one is willing to dispense with the Western rules of war (which ISIS, like most Muslim groups and Muslim countries, doesn't abide by, anyway).

What would happen if a President Carson (or Cruz or Rubio or Fiorina or *shudder* Clinton) – ideally with the support of Hollande, Merkel, and Cameron – said this:

I address this statement to the Ummah, the world-wide community of Muslims.

We know that the majority of Muslims do not approve of the theology and actions of ISIS. But we also know that thousands of Muslims flock to their banner and wage a terroristic war against everyone, infidel and Muslim alike.

As “infidels,” it is not our place to solve religious disputes in the Dar al-Salam from our position in the Dar al-Harb.

But it is our place to ensure that our countries and our people are protected from unprovoked, vicious, and cowardly attacks.

It is your place to police the actions and beliefs of your co-religionists.

Therefore, I solemnly swear before the Ummah and before all the world, that if you do not destroy ISIS within the next year, we will drop nuclear weapons on Mecca and Medina, to provide an everlasting symbol and reminder of the abject failure of Islam.

We're living in Harry Potter's world

Some bright fellow going by the sobriquet Coffeeman recently composed a little pictorial essay to explain why people hate Dolores Umbridge (the officious power-hungry apparatchik in the Ministry of Magic) so much. It’s well worth reading. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The Real Reason You Hate Umbridge So Much

During the school year, hardly a day goes by without some new story of teachers and/or administrators doing something incredibly stupid: ordering a lockdown because some idiot thought an umbrella was a gun, forcing a child to change his clothes because of a politically incorrect slogan, expelling a child for biting his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, confiscating a child’s lunch because it doesn’t meet Federal standards, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Then there are all the sexual predators: The invaluable Instapundit regularly features stories of female teachers arrested for sexual relations with their charges (and just as regularly notes that their punishments [if any] are mere shadows of those meted out to men guilty of the same offenses).

Umbridges, one and all.

Then there are the busybodies who deem themselves qualified to override parental choices, even to the point of removing their children from their care for the offense of letting them walk through their neighborhood without Mommy hovering over their shoulders.

Umbridges, one and all.

Then there’s the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (or, more accurately, “Housing and Urban Decay”), which is using a new rule they concocted called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” the goal of which is to make every home and every neighborhood in the United States precisely like every other home and neighborhood. Because, after all, it’s unfair that people with more money have bigger homes than do people with less.

Umbridges, one and all.

In fact, Umbridgeousness is the natural condition of every government employee, and few indeed are those whose wages are paid by the taxes of their fellow citizens who do not arrive at the conviction that they are better, smarter, wiser people than those they work for and that they should by right have the power to regulate the lives of everyone else.

But Rowling’s Umbridge is not merely a petty tyrant, but a moral coward. She, like most of the rest of the Ministry of Magic, is unwilling to see the evil that threatens their world. Thus, instead of naming and facing the evil, she persecutes those who do.

Note that this is exactly the behavior of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry. They will not name the evils we face (Iran, Isis, and Jihadism in general); they will not face it; they will not do anything to prepare for the fight against it; they insult, belittle, and persecute those who can and do.

At bottom, then, the 2016 American election is not between Democrats and Republicans; it is between those who suffer from moral cowardice and the conviction that they know best (Cornelius Fudge and Dolores Umbridge) and those who have the moral strength to confront evil and the humility to know that they don’t know everything (Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore).

In our world, Dolores Umbridge wears a pantsuit.

Tolkien’s English

I recently answered a question on Quora, but latterly realized that my observation might well be unique ‒ and, indeed, a quick Googling did not reveal anyone else who had cottoned on to it.

When we were reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to our daughters while on our car trips, I came to the passages set in Rohan just after having read Beowulf in the bilingual edition of the Seamus Heaney translation ‒ of course, I am only slightly familiar with Anglo-Saxon, but enough to catch words now and then.

It is well known, I think, that Tolkien was an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and that he based the culture of the Rohirrim on that of the Anglo-Saxons.

What I realized, reading the dialogue aloud, was that Tolkien had expunged all traces of Greek and Latin from the words the Rohirrim speak. This is what gives their speech its unique flavor ‒ and is quite a difficult thing to do. If you read back through what I have written here, you will see many a word derived from those sources (usually via French, of course). Of course, I'm not trying ‒ but if I were, this post would take a couple of days to write rather than a few minutes.

An Especially Cruel Attack on American Liberalism

There’s an article on Salon (yeah, I get around) on how the evvvuuuul Rethuglicans are attacking the saintly Liz Warren.

You can read it if you wish ....

But my reaction is this:

Wait a minute: Paul Rosenberg’s^* thesis is that the Left had complete control of the media from the 60s through the creation of Fox (OK, “Faux”) News and complete control of academia from the 70s until the present (and for the foreseeable future) and the problem is that liberal ideas have yet to be “discovered, developed, articulated, explained and communicated”?

I cannot imagine even Rush Limbaugh writing a more insulting, devastating, and definitive condemnation of the Left.

*According to the Salon bio, he “is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English.” (Of course.)

A Strategy for Republicans

Various “psychological” “studies” – that is, experiments run by left-wing pyschology professors on their students – purport to show that Republicans have a pronounced bias toward obedience to authority. This is untrue, of course, as even a slight acquaintance with the climate-change debate should demonstrate. In fact, even the Huffington Post is willing to admit this.

Nevertheless, there may be something to it…

What is our first experience with authority outside the family? Why, school, of course. And most of us go to public schools, which means that those authorities are, by definition, government authorities.

And what is our experience of those authorities? That they are, one and all, without exception, unbelievably stupid, power-mad tinpot dictators.

Some might accuse me of hyberbole. You are invited to provide counterexamples in the comments: School administrators who are smarter, more knowledgeable, and more competent than I, a lowly B.A. in English.

The thing about government is that nearly all government workers are precisely like those we first met in elementary school: power-mad morons. And the further up the organizational chart we go, the more true that is. Teachers, for instance, are noticeably more sane and less arbitrary than their principals and other administrators (and, sometimes, even smarter and more knowledgeable). In fact, it is their interaction with those power-mad morons that is most responsible for driving competent teachers out of the profession.

But Republicans are unwilling to point this out, apparently in the belief that is is important for children to show respect to their teachers and principals. This Republican, however, didn’t do that. Respect is to be earned, not given: and if teachers, principals, and administrators show themselves to be stupid, ignorant, and dictatorial, then they should not be given any.

My children learned early on that they should assume that their teachers are idiots; in their (mercifully brief) public-school careers, they encountered one intelligent, competent teacher. All the others were clearly uneducated, lamentably stupid, and ferociously incompetent. This is apparently normal in New Jersey, for our school district (Hamilton Township) consistently places right in the middle of various ratings: Not quite so bad as Newark and Camden and not quite so good as Princeton and Montclair.

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“But what does this have to do with Republican strategy?” you might ask.

Two new things have arrived to afflict public education: Common Core and its amazingly incompetent implementation, especially in mathematics; and Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which is bankrupting schools and starving children all over the country.

Aside on Common Core math: I've always liked math and am reasonably good at it (I was, as I like to say, the only English major in my class on partial differential equations). I understand what they’re trying to do to encourage an understanding of the structure of mathematics. But even I can be completely baffled by the poorly-posed problems petulant parents periodically post.

Both are perfect encapsulations of Progressive ideology and practice (or praxis, as good Progressives say). Both begin with laudable objectives – All children should be educated! All children should be fed! – and immediately deteriorate into ineptitude. All children are not alike: they have neither the same educational nor the same nutritional needs. I, for instance, was under 100 lbs for most of my high-school career (I hit 105 in my senior year). It is senseless to feed the same lunch both to me and to the offensive line of the football team. Yet that is what Progressives do: it’s one-size-fits-all for everyone, everywhere, except the Progressive elite themselves, who exempt themselves from the strictures they place, or wish to place, on hoi polloi. See, for instance, Al Gore and Robert Kennedy’s carbon footprints, the meals the Obama children get at Sidwell Friends School (and at the White House), the health care members of Congress get, etc., etc., etc.

No Progressive ever lived, lives, or will live in the fashion he wants to force on you.

And that should be the constant refrain of the Republicans, along with a promise that they will ensure that every law and regulation that applies to the citizenry will be applied with equal or greater force to members – whether elected, appointed, hired, or contracted – of the government.

Serving, Protecting, and the Duty to Die

Growing up, I was told the story of Mike McCoy, an Air Force pilot who died in 1957 in a crash near my eventual home in the Orlando suburb of College Park. The story, which ― alas! ― may not be completely true, was that he stayed with the plane to ensure that it would miss Robert E. Lee Junior High School at the cost of his life and the lives of his three crewmen. The only loss of life on the ground was a single cow. This is why Orlando’s airport was long known as McCoy International and still carries the airport abbreviation MCO.

I was thinking about the events in Ferguson, the tremendous changes in American policing, and the heroism of the police and firemen nearly 13 years ago on September 11th. And this called to mind an essay of John Ciardi’s from 1962.

If our police forces must be militarized, then let them be militarized like the pilots Ciardi describes. We should honor those who serve us; and we honor our policemen, firemen, soldiers, sailors, and marines because we believe that they are willing to die for us. When they put their own safety above that of the civilians they serve, they lose all claim to honor ― and should also lose such emoluments as salary and pension.

Ciardi is known today, if at all, as a translator of Dante. In the sixties, however, he was one of our pre-eminent men of letters. Among other things, he was the poetry editor and a columnist for the Saturday Review.

Here is his essay from October 6th, 1962 entitled “Ride a Hot Horse” (from Manner of Speaking, 1972, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ). I call this fair use, fwiw.

Note that Ciardi was a gunner on B-29s during WWII and flew 20 or so missions over Japan.

* * *

The opening of the Seattle World’s Fair was marred by an incident in which a disabled jet crashed into a row of houses, killing an elderly man and woman under their own roof while the pilot parachuted to safety miles away. A sad accident and one that is becoming sadly common as the jets fill the sky above and the housing developments fill the ground below.

But was it entirely an accident? It is possible, to be sure, that the plane was hopelessly out of control. But it is just as possible that the pilot, had he stayed with it all the way, could have managed to crash into an empty field rather than into those houses. I am asking if a pilot has the right to bail out of a disabled plane over thickly settled country, and I am moved to argue that he has not.

Nobody wants to splash the boys over the landscape. If a pilot runs into trouble and bails out over a desert, who could blame him for that, even if his jet happens by freak chance to come down on the one house within range or on a passing automobile? But to bail out over an urban or a suburban area is another case, and there, I must insist, the pilot clearly funks if he fails to ride it all the way down. There is always that chance that he can at the last instant avoid visiting his disaster on those below. And even if he cannot, even if his death goes for nothing, it is his job to try.

It is his job for the simple reason that he asked for it. No one gets drafted into flying jets. The boys have to want to, they have to fight for the chance to try, and they have to buck hard to get through their training. How can a would-be pilot ask for the job ― and ask for it that hard ― without understanding that he has a moral contract to spend everything, including his own life, to avoid dumping his disabled buzzer on the people below? Suppose, to select a horrendous example, that house with the elderly couple in it had been a school building. How does the pilot walk away from his parachute after that?

It may be that we have entered the age of the final moral funk, wherein sentiment can justify all. The government certainly went a long way toward justifying the funk of pilot Powers in the U-2 incident. Our government, to be sure, is now imitating the Communists in handing out only that information it wants the people to have, and perhaps, therefore, the whole truth will never be known. It is on record, however, that Powers was drawing $30,000 a year [note: the equivalent of about $236,000 in 2013] for occasional flights over Russia, and that his equipment included a destruction button and a poisoned pin. What can one conclude but that the button and the pin were meant for use and that the $30,000 salary was jeopardy pay? And what can one then conclude but that Powers took the cash and then funked it?

The boys know what they are asking for when they buck for wings. They like the flying pay, they like the badges, and they like the glamour the badges bring. Perhaps, above all, they like the feel of the hot horse under them. The hottest horse of all is, of course, death, and so long as there are boys in this world, some of them will fall in love with the sensation of riding him. As Melville wrote, “All wars are boyish and are fought by boys.” That love affair with the hot horse is of the boyhood of the race. But once a boy is on that horse, then it is his man’s job to ride it all the way.

T. E. Shaw (Lawrence of Arabia) was such a boy-man. He lived with his itch to ride the hottest horse. He died, foolishly enough (if I recall correctly what I read years ago and have since forgotten where), of his passion for riding a motorcycle too fast. The motorcycle happened to be his hot horse of the moment. But if he was still boy enough to have to open it up all the way, he was man enough to know it was not a free ride. He died of a choice he had made within himself long before. Gunning his crazy machine down the road, he came to that instant when he must kill either an innocent pedestrian or himself. He swerved off the road and killed himself.

There is no need to grow romantic about the splendor of his choice. What was splendid about the man, finally, was his talent. What sent the boy hightailing down the road was no splendor but a problem for the psychiatrist’s couch. What remains is the fact that, between man and boy, Shaw made his choice clean.

The boys that fly the hot ones have the same choice to make. And like Shaw they have to make that choice in their own minds long before the moment of truth. It has to be made firmly beforehand, or their reflexes will make the wrong choice too late.

It may be a crazy choice to have forced upon oneself. Maybe they have to be a bit crazy to want to fly the hot ones. Maybe we are all crazy for having made a world in which we need a sky full of hot horses. But no boy ― and he has to be a boy, whatever bar, leaf, eagle, or star he wears on his collar ― can be allowed to go for crazy up to the time his buzzer runs into trouble, and then to dump his trouble on a row of houses while he floats sanely down in his parachute.

As the best, and least printable, of World War II’s flying songs starts off:

I wanted wings,
Now I’ve got the goddamn things.
Hell, I don’t want them anymore.

A lot of the hotshot boys, who had a high stateside fling flashing their wings for the girls, discovered in combat that they didn’t really want them anymore. But the fact remains that few of them broke and funked out. They had signed a contract with themselves. They had accepted the glamour, the flight pay, and the gravy-train freedom from all the nasty chores an ingrate army can dream up for noncrew members. They had asked for it and they had taken it. That adds up to a contract, and, like it or not, you keep that contract come flak, fighters, fire, or the heebie-jeebies. You may not want those wings anymore, but you’ve got them: they are tattooed on you. If you get killed flying, that’s tough, buddy, but nobody wrote out any special dispensation for your special skin. The contract itself was written on skin, on skin that was always of the most special kind ― the only kind there is.

If the boys in those jet cockpits do not have their contract clearly enough understood as a moral decision, it may be time to make it a court-martial decision. The gentle among us may cry out in horror against such a decision. It is no way to treat our dear boys, they will cry; the boys risk enough just in flying those ships to protect us.

But what we have to realize is that we cannot be protected by boys who risk enough. Nothing will cover us sufficiently until they risk everything. And, remember, the boys have not been forced. They asked for it. Every one of those bright badges has a piece of skin under it, and if the civilians insist on funking that fact, the boys had better get it clear, or clear out and go back to being civilians.