Islamophobobia and the Destruction of Hamtramck

Hamtramck, Michigan is a decrepit town of twenty-two thousand enveloped by Detroit. With forty-nine percent of its people below the poverty line, ancient, crumbling housing stock, and a crime rate that puts it at only 12% safer than all U.S. cities, why has it recently made the “We are the World” propagandists and virtue signalers so ecstatic? Here is a clue. Hamtramck in 2013, All the praises and thanks be to Allah, became the first majority Muslim city in the country with a majority Muslim city council. What better occasion for an edifying celebration of diversity (43 percent of residents born outside of the U.S. with twenty-seven languages in the public schools) and a stern rebuke for the naysayers and bigots who might wonder if the reproduction of Bangladesh and Yemen near the Motor City is a such a good idea?

But why not? Illuminati from the likes of The Nation, Politico and other champions of the voiceless and downtrodden over the past year or so have sojourned to this Mecca-in-the-making. They have seen the future, and have put their “diversity” stamp of glowing approval on it. After dispatching a few interviews, they report to their great relief that the locals are telling them that they are thrilled about this. The massive influx of Muslims, the erection of seven mosques (the most per capita in the U.S.)  and the call-to-prayer blasted out into the streets five times a day into what was once a ninety percent Polish Catholic community, is no big deal. 

Lianna Aghajanian of Teen Vogue (that’s right, Teen Vogue) tootled her way through Hamtramck last February and tells us that “[t]he city has been subject to a narrative full of inaccuracies, but the real story is just how quintessentially American it is.” Just when this crazy old world gets way too hard to understand, leave it to a savant from Teen Vogue to let us in on the “real story.” Now, when more of America becomes as “quintessentially American” as the new Hamtramck, Ms Aghajanian might want to pause a moment in her pursuit of the latest beach ware and think carefully about how the standard current fare in the hypersexualized fashion pages of Teen Vogue such as “Rihanna Responds to Fenty Beauty Fan’s Message About Trans Models” and, the monthly “Lovescope” will go down with the ascension of the Imams and the burka trendsetters.

A couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration a reporter from NPR interviewed some Hamtramck non-Muslim residents. Not everyone was gushing about the transformation of the city into “Hamtramistan,” the city’s new moniker.  “The Hamtramck they knew had changed. ‘It's now more like a Bangladeshi town, so, that's a different story,’ says [Alek] Fidler [a Polish American immigrant who came ten years ago]. ‘Seems like, you know, they were basically taking over.’ St. Florian's priest, Miroslaw Frankowski, recalls his first impression of this city when he arrived in Hamtramck about 10 years ago. ‘I’m almost like in Cairo,’ he says, ‘because you know, the call for the prayer — and people covered up under clothing typical for Middle East. Yeah, it seemed like I’m working in Middle East.’ In Hamtramck streets, it’s common now to see women fully veiled, with only their eyes exposed. The amplified Muslim call to prayer was a source of controversy here some years back, and still can raise hackles.” Religion invading the public square? Strangely, the lawyers from the ACLU are nowhere to be found. 

Tom Perkins, however, reporting for The Nation tells us that there is nothing much to report. “In reality, there’s not much tension worth mentioning in Hamtramck….  To the contrary, many of the city’s non-Muslim residents are proud to be a part of a historic first, and reports of tension and conflict are the work of those with an agenda or reporters capitalizing on a hostile national discourse.” Perkins, apparently, doesn’t think it is “worth mentioning” just why these non-Muslims are so proud, but we can take his word for it because we know that reporters from The Nation are far removed from “hostile national discourse” and never operate with “an agenda.”

Here, though, is the nub of Perkin’s non-agenda: “The Western world is experiencing a wave of Islamaphobia, and people want to know what life is like in an American city where Muslims are in charge. This is the first time in decades that the Polish Catholics haven’t run Hamtramck.” The Muslims haven’t been in charge here for very long, so let’s not jump to premature conclusions. Perhaps, however, it is not unreasonable to suggest that those inquiring minds who would like to know what life is like in any place where Muslims are in charge should look at what life is like in places like Mogadishu, Aden, and Dhaka where they have been in charge for a long time. These, I suspect, are not the sort of “model home” communities that exude tolerance, inclusivity and equality of women, the norms so prized by our betters at the Washington Post, NYT and Teen Vogue.

Let us grant for the moment that this wave of Islamophobia is washing over us (more on that in a bit), but does Mr. Perkins ever wonder, given this tsunami of fear and loathing experienced by Muslims in the Western world, why so many of them (by the millions) continue flocking to it? But let’s first get to the heart of his non-agenda, which is – a city in America, at last, “where Muslims are in charge.”   

Here exposed is the foundational premise of the cultural Marxism which is, of course, all about who should be in power (“in charge”) and who should not. The Polish Catholics, Perkins gloats, don’t get to “run Hamtramck” anymore. They might be unhappy about it, but who cares? Get over it! As Chuck Berry would put it: “Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Out with the old; in with the new. Polish Catholics were part of the problem – the old, oppressive, white, Eurocentric, Christian order – and the historically oppressed Muslims, so stylishly multi-cultural, now in charge, are the solution, the future. Diversity has arrived in rustbelt America, and it is where there is a mosque on every street corner, and all you are allowed to see of the ladies are their eyes.

Hamtramck is the picture of what today’s proud progressives call progress. Presumably, they would be happy to see America increasingly resemble Hamtramck and eager to celebrate the disappearance of an America that took its cultural heritage from Europe and worshipped at Christian altars. A couple of more Hamtramcks in Michigan would likely have put the state in Hillary’s electoral column last November.

As we are now supposed to understand, one form of resistance to “progress” is a pathology known as “Islamophobia” discovered by newspaper columnists, cable-TV talking heads, sociology professors, and Democrat politicians. Phobias, as we know, are diseases of the psyche, irrational thoughts, fears and impulses that turn those who harbor them into disordered and dysfunctional personalities. The consensus of the cognoscenti that “Islamophobia” is now a great affliction of the Western world would suggest that we all now must admit that the West itself is a diseased, pathological entity, and that the only acceptable moral future for West must be a surrender to the “Other,” the East, a Hegelian sort of historical moment. Hamtramck would seem to be a surrender in the miniature, but, certainly emblematic of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, portending the triumph of the crescent over the cross.

But not so fast. We are grappling with agitprop, not psychology. “Islamophobia” does not refer to a real disease or anything real for that matter, but is just a word with a clinical ring to it, contrived by the traducing ideologues firmly entrenched in our opinion-shaping institutions. It is a Shimpfwort, a word of abuse. Its purpose is to rationalize and dramatize their moral outrage and to demonize the subjects of that outrage. After a period of sufficient repetition by the right people, it firmly entrenches itself in the expanding vocabulary of victimhood (“transphobia” has recently made its debut) and sustains the orthodoxy of egalitarian politics with its relentless aggression against hierarchy and Christianity.  

How, in general terms, this “wave of Islamophobia” game of pin the bigot’s tail on the white Christian donkey is played was brilliantly described by the political philosopher, the late Kenneth Minogue over thirty years ago. “In ideological criticism … [there is] a kind of perverse-reverse logic, i.e., condemnation goes before explanation, or, rather the moral precedes the factual. A sort of intellectual show trial. Censure leads to theory rather than theory to censure. But then, of course this is problematic because it is better to discover something that brings condemnation, than to shop around for a theory to support your moral outrage.” (Kenneth Minogue: Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, St. Martin’s Press, 1985, 58) Stalin’s chief hit-man, Lavrenti Beria, put this concept in the most succinct of terms: “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Tell Beria who you want to be put in the dock, and he invents the charges. “Islamophobia” is another invention of our contemporary Berias, the “theory” they shopped around for that bolsters their moral outrage with the sins of the West, condemns the unrepentant (the “unredeemables”) and seeks their extinction.

The response to the Islamization of once Polish Catholic Hamtramck – ho-hum by much of America and hip-hip-hooray by the Social Justice Mafioso.  It is a very bad omen.

   

Democrats, Pronouns, and Muslim Immigrants

 

 “We go forward together. And we go forward stronger than ever. We're not going to let them win...We'll go about our business. Be New Yorkers. Live your life. Don't let them change us.”

Crocodile tears, Andrew Cuomo style. This was the New York Governor at a news conference shortly after Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant who came in 2010 on a lottery “diversity” visa from Uzbekistan, killed eight people and injured 14 others with his rented truck on bike path in the Big Apple.  It was no surprise to learn from ABC News that he was quite proud of it all.

                 

How well does your gag-reflex work these days? This is the sort of ass-covering drivel one expects from the likes of Cuomo, the kind that comes out when suddenly he has to interrupt his daily glad-handing, smiley shakedown routines, fake a somber visage for the cameras and reporters, and do a “Show’s over, folks – time to move along” shtick. It was a bizarre concoction of insult, misdirection and non-sequiturs, not to mention a curious display of the contempt Cuomo must hold for the intelligence of the New Yorkers who elected him.

 “We... we...we...” the Governor with this fake, weasel pronoun hoping to make the echoes of “Allahu Akbar” quickly disappear. So, who exactly is the “we ” going “forward together...stronger than ever”?   What “forward” means for eight of the “us,” the audience for this disgusting, patronizing riff, is a slab in the morgue and a cemetery plot, plus the grief and sadness that will long engulf the lives of their friends and families betrayed by the multi-culturalists who launched this on-going train wreck and then have to pretend that they care about the damage. “Live your life” pours obscenity on the wounds, making a mockery of innocent lives snuffed out in service to the corrupt ideology that Cuomo lives by. And “stronger than ever”? Who is he trying to con? Not likely in the cards for the fourteen broken bodies who survived this assault.

 

But before we curb our “Islamophobia,” resume the celebration of our diversity and, at the behest of the Governor, “go about our business,” let’s dumpster dive deeper and see where Andy’s fetid, pronoun shell game takes us. We’ve noted the fake “we…we…we”, but what is he up to with “them”?  “We’re not going to let them win.” Leftwing politicians like Cuomo, Obama and Hillary often speak in code, and so you should have your hermeneutical decoder ring handy and be ready to start twisting away. Who are the “them” who are not going to win, and how would we know if they did?  Cuomo can pretend not to notice, but unfortunately, there is already a clear winner, who happens to be Mr. Saipov, patched up from his wounds, celebrating the death of those eight infidels he ran over and enjoying, it seems, the anguish of their families, clearly the losers. So, in keeping with the Governor’s admonition to not let them win, somewhat might want to ask New York’s Chief Poseur, what should a pedestrian or bicyclist do the next time one of our imported jihadist is bearing down on him and his wife and kid in his truck? 

Don’t forget, however, those who designed, manage and promote the system that lets the sort of people into the country who enjoy killing and maiming their hosts. It is not as if there is not some recent history with markers that would reliably indicate what sort of folks they might be and where in the world they might be coming from. These deep thinkers apparently concluded that New York rather than Uzbekistan, with no infidels to speak of to irritate the faithful, was a more suitable place for a man whose given name, Sayfullo, translates as “Sword of Allah.” Are they winners or losers? Perhaps one of the Governor’s “diversity” advisors can shed some light on this. 

Finally, we need to decipher “Don’t let them change us,” one last slippery pronoun in this verbal smog to ponder as we twist the ring. Who does this man think he is talking to? Eight people, very much alive on a bike trail having a nice outing have already been permanently changed – into corpses by an angry Muslim in a rental truck. “Change” doesn’t get more profound and irreversible than this, and, as noted above, somebody, obviously, let this happen to us, somebody who should have grasped the obvious, that fewer angry Muslims in the U.S. means safer sidewalks and bike paths and, for those who care, less Islamophobia. How do we make sense of what seems to be apparent nonsense straight from the Governor’s mouth? 

What we learn from the decoder ring is that the “them” Cuomo is imploring us to resist are not the fanatics, completely open about what they are about, imported by the cult-Marxists to make us more tolerant and diverse. An occasional, unpredictable mass-murder is price of admission paid by the victims. The “them” are those millions of Americans who populate the “basket of deplorables,” the racists, Islamophobes and xenophobes who Hillary fingered last fall during her failed Presidential campaign. These are the folks who Cuomo is signaling are not going to be allowed to win. They recognize that Muslims in America are the left’s latest clients and need their protection as one more victim class, and hence are inclined to challenge their betters to justify the treachery they have put into place. Hence the invention of “Islamophobia” to create one more class of bigots to demonize and shut them up when they complain when they see people in their own country murdered by devotees of the religion of peace.  

Now the man makes perfect sense, ideologically speaking. Cuomo’s pronoun shell game is another artifice of the left. The “we’s”,  “us’s” and “them’s” are elusive and protean, very useful to confuse, distract and misdirect. They are the basic elements in the left’s “science” of attention management, the success of its practitioners measured by how well it augments their power and the extent to which the American people continue to embrace the illusion that they are free citizens rather servile (“irredeemable”) subjects and that their leaders can be held to account for their crimes.

Angela Merkel, Stalin in Drag

 Back in the Pleistocene era in 1989 the Berlin wall went down.  Most of the East Germans, who had likely contemplated with envy the “freedom” enjoyed by the Jurgens and Gretas next door in the West, must have wondered with great anticipation what life in a post-Stalinist world would be like.  No Stasi knuckle crushing snoops in every crevice to monitor and record what you read, said, or might be thinking, no need to pretend that the stupid government propaganda was anything more than attempted manipulation and control.  How relieved and optimistic they must have been, and no one trying to peer into the future then, even with the wildest imagination, could likely have conjured up as a Frau-Fuhrer so ghastly a phantasm as the Teutonic Stalin-in-drag, Angela Merkel. 

A Stalinist world, such as the USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or Erich Honecker’s DDR, is an alternative universe, one where everything is the opposite of what it is said to be and where just pointing that out amounts to a serious crime.  “Democracy,” majority rule, is the imposition of diktats by the bosses in the Politburo. “Equality” is rigid caste system of privileged party overseeers.  “Freedom” is a one-way ticket to forced labor in the Gulag for those unenthused about life in the workers’ paradise, getting shot trying to escape from East Berlin, or sliding off a crude raft and drowning in the waters off Havana.    

Which bring us to today’s Germany where Boss Merkel has resurrected and summoned the Stalinist Stasi who now pursue the unenlightened ones who exhibit, shall we say, inappropriate emotions.  No room for Germans who do not like the way that they are told to feel about what the apparatchiks are doing to them, a bit like it was in back in the DDR.  Consider, below, this Orwellian description of what German politicians and German police do to German people who fail to understand the proper boundaries of expression.  From a report on recent German government crackdown on social media users.

“In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism. The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”

As officialese goes, this is hard to top for its sheer self-contradictory stupidity, and its bullying, sinister intonations. To begin, “The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action.”  "Hate posting"?  Well, this does sound serious: police action must ensue to stamp out, yes, hate posting. The German people are in grave danger.  But then, try not to laugh, as we learn that the Federal government launched a “coordinated campaign across 14 states” in a country of no less than eighty-one million people, to ensnare a grand total of 36 folks plunking away on social media. Sounds eerily like the Stasi of the DDR, searching far and wide, making sure that no one steps out of line with the approved thinking and guidance of Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker.  This does not describe the action of a government protecting the security and interests of its citizens: it is the work of a propagandizing regime of ideocrats chasing down a few hapless, harmless dissenters. With highly publized punishment for the recalcitrant few, you can cower the many.

These 36 people were “accused of hateful postings over social media” and please note the anonymity, a Kafkaesque nameless specter which accuses but cannot be identified, questioned, countered or even understood.  Who were the accusers and what was the exact nature of the accusations beyond the big old umbrella of “hateful”?  Vague and general works best for government enforcers.  “Hateful” in its normal usage is pretty subjective, but Merkel and the German political establishment have politicized the word so that it is objective, precise and, most important, applicable – “hateful” is disapproval or criticism of state-defined victims – but yet conveniently vague and abstract – producing “a climate of fear” – so as to be able to criminalize whomever they have determined has dissented from the state-imposed multi-cultural orthodoxy.  “A climate of fear” is a nice tool for the government bosses. They can pull it out when needed, supplemented with the lexicon of invectives – “xenophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “nativist” “fascist” -- and unleash their repressive organs, selectively, on whomever offends the the noble sensibilities of the moment.  

“Incitement to racism” as a crime is particularly troublesome to contemplate since “racist” is now applied so promiscuously, particularly by leftwing politicians all over the planet, as to be meaningless beyond its intent as an insult, shorthand for “a stupid, mean-spirited right-winger, lacking in compassion for the unfortunate who has no place in our progressive society.”  In the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed that half of Donald Trump supporters were “racists” and hence, “irredeemable,” which to a lot of people sounded rather hateful, not to mention, threatening. Unlike other crimes, e. g. murder, assault, burglary, jury tampering, it is impossible for one to prove that he is not a racist (no one I have ever heard of has of yet ever pulled off this feat), which makes it so handy and versatile.  Safe to say, no leftwing politician in the U.S in the last twenty years has not at some time resorted to calling someone he or she didn’t like a racist. And, speaking of “incitement,” and “hate speech,” reeved up on a steady stream of Trump-hatred from the likes of the NYT scribblers and CNN, MSNBC talkers, a leftist from the Bernie Sanders camp recently attempted to murder a couple of dozen Republican congressmen in suburban Washington DC.  

Let us now hear from the head German policeman, Herr, Holger Münch, speaking like he was trained by the editors of Pravda.  “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”  Orwellian Newspeak like this leans toward first-person plural pronouns – “Our free society…” –  there is, of course, no “our”, in possession of a "free society."  This is an intentional misdirection which camouflages the master-slave relationship of the German people and their German governors, the actual power exerted by an elite, privileged class over those whom they regard as their inferiors, some of whom, many perhaps, who resent the imposed mass migration of needy third-worlders and who don’t feel free to complain about it. Of course, we don’t know what the “threats,” “criminal violence” and “violence” are that filled the social media messaging of these now 36 criminals tracked down by the German Feds, but one suspects that the laws upon which the prosecution will be based have been written with  a maximum, "enemy of our freedom" scope and flexibility as to assure conviction and that the presiding magistrates will spare no effort to inflict maximum punishment.  Examples must be made.   

One “climate of fear” that does not seem to trouble Holger Münch much comes from the spectacle of secular, liberated German women accosted in mass by young immigrant Muslim males whose views of women are shaped by the texts of a seventh century prophet from a desert, and whose behavior, coming from German men, would put them for long stretches in prison.   From New Year’s Eve, 2016:

“The world reeled following reports that as many as 1,000 women had been sexually assaulted - groped, robbed, intimidated and separated from their friends - at Cologne's central train station on New Year's Eve. Many of the perpetrators, it was alleged, appeared to be of North African or Arab descent…”  

Oh, yes, no jumping to conclusions too quickly: the “alleged” North African and Arab-descendent robbers, gropers and sexual assaulters numbered at least 1,000.  They collected around one gathering place in a single city in contrast to the 36 Die Herren und Damen in 14 different states at home on laptops posting mean, angry stuff on their Facebook pages, probably read only by the flunkies in the governments' PC surveillance department who sicced the policemen on them.  Who, really, should be afraid of whom?  In the new DDR only Angela and her Handlangeren get to say.  But let’s pursue the conversation about fear.  There was a lot of it on the streets of Cologne and elsewhere in Germany from the criminal violence of Merkel’s protected class of victims.  The perpetrators, however, are not the concern or target of the nouveau Stasi Federal police chief.  Instead, room for more of them must be made so that Frau Merkel’s globalist, multicultural, bona fides remain in tact.  This is a “climate of fear” that the Germans will be expected by Merkel and her crew to get used to.

The hate-speech/hate crime legislation that Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada and other western European countries have put into place is a predictable, logical extension of their capitulation to third world mass migration.  In the U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, who was instrumental in the passage of the 1965 immigration law that led to the flooding of the country with third world immigrants, later became a strong advocate in the Senate of hate-crime legislation.  Mass immigration and hate-crimes are hand in glove measures for leftists. First you flood the towns with aliens and then punish the locals when they complain.

In the same news release cited above, Heiko Mass, the German Justice Minister, is now said to be pushing for a new law that targets “hate speech” on social media.  As the elites’ strategy of the ethnic replacement of their native populations becomes a painful reality to them, it becomes politically necessary to ramp up the criminalization of the inevitable expression of resentment that results, and to punish resistance and opposition to the planned destruction.  The criminalization of speech based on emotion is one more step toward completing the soft totalitarian society desired by the left with its coerced uniformity of thinking and behavior.  Somehow, somewhere down the road we will all be equal the way, God, no, sorry, history intended.  Don’t worry, be happy.

Homophobia, Islamophobia and Other Perversions of the Left

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon. It is only when we have found again the language that is natural to us that we can answer the great accusations that are constantly thrown at our world from the left.  And it is only when we have found that language that we can move on from the one-dimensional left/ right, with us/ against us, progressive/ reactionary dichotomies that have so often made rational discussion impossible. (Scruton, Roger (2015-10-08). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 6036-6039). Bloomsbury Publishing.  Kindle Edition.)

The current language of dichotomized politics, as the eminent philosopher Roger Scruton states above, demands a great deal of “rescue” work. We must aggressively dispute the use of the jargon that the left has insinuated into our political conversations and polemics, words that both distort reality and give the ideologues on the left undue power to manipulate, worse, to dominate the discussion of issues of great moral, political and social import.  With their jargon they exert their pernicious influence and constantly aim to impugn the motives of those who disagree with them.  Built into the language of the left is the ammunition for an insidious, sustained and long term campaign of nullification and character assassination.

Let us begin our rescue of political language with a repudiation of two of the most odious and egregious pieces of jargon now foisted on us (“thrown at our world from the left”) on a daily basis – “homophobia” and “Islamophobia.”

What in today’s common parlance is a homophobe?  For the polemicists and their censorious patrons on the left a homophobe is anyone and everyone who voices disapproval of homosexual activity and disputes the concept and legitimacy of homosexual marriage.  This disapproval often has religious grounds and, of course, because it is argued from sources and convictions of religious belief, authority or scripture it is considered by the secularist oriented Left as beneath serious moral and political consideration. Certain kinds of moral concepts are off-the-table, so to speak. Religious traditions, practices and values, that have for millennia shaped and informed our morals and social practices now with a with a snap-snap of a finger from these nouveau Jacobins are supposed to be discarded as we suddenly realize how unenlightened we’ve been, how virtuous they are and how much better the world will be with them in charge. 

The neologism “homophobe” was coined to make it sound objective and “clinical”, the sort of jargon used by psychologists and various “experts” to show that they have penetrated the fog and demystified the prevailing superstitions. They understand what the rest of us may at some later time hope to comprehend.  Thus, those unfortunate enough to be in the grasp of homophobia are, well, sick, sick in the sense of psychological aberration or derangement. Phobias are by their nature irrational, unfounded in reality, overreactions to fear, insecurity or anxiety. 

Phobia:  a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational. 

There you have it: this is pretty much a common understanding of what a phobia is – in more parochial terms, phobic people are crazy. You don’t reason with crazy people.  Only trained professionals take what crazy people say seriously but only as it is symptomatic of mental aberration.  You do not have rational conversation and respectful exchange with a homophobic individual about homosexuality because he has no standing as a normal, thoughtful person. He is immersed in bigotry or “hatred” as the left prefers to describe the disapproval of behavior they condone. 

Where, however, is the phobia to be found in the so called typical homophobe? What is asserted does not match reality. They neither fear nor hate homosexuals and they don’t wish to interfere in their lives and punish them. Their aversion to homosexuality is not irrational: it is philosophical and theological. “Homophobia” is not a description of anything real: it is a label contrived to smear those who disagree: it is nothing more than an ad hominem argument in shorthand posing as received social science wisdom.

Homophobes, however, are not just sick: they are “intolerant”. Here is a word kidnapped by left and given a completely distorted meaning, that being: toleration = approval.  So, if you don’t approve of something, ergo, you must be intolerant. But if one considers the logic that should apply to the use of “tolerant” it follows that one can be only be tolerant of what one disapproves of: if you already approve of a behavior, creed or habit, you don’t need to tolerate it. There is considerable irony with all of this because the left disapproves of (despises and excoriates, actually) conservatives, right-wingers, and traditionally religious people (“bitter clingers” as Barack Obama refers to them) but regard themselves as the most open minded and tolerant people around. 

The fact that the “gay lifestyle” has been normalized in our increasingly secularized culture and that homosexuals live openly and prosperously, in some places proudly as “gay” would suggest that toleration is at least moderately in place and relatively widespread. However, the left, despite what they say, do not want toleration of homosexuality: they demand, and are intent on coercing, approval of it. Their dishonest and coercive strategy is to place anyone who does not embrace the complete normalization of homosexuality as a “lifestyle” outside the moral and political boundaries of American life. In our diverse multi-cultural society, since when, it seems fair to ask, does someone have the right to coerce someone else into approving of their morals?

Toleration is giving moral and physical space to someone you disagree with. “You leave me alone (with respect to our differences); I’ll leave you alone, and we’ll agree to disagree and go about our separate business.” The huge advantage of real toleration is the buffer of time that it offers.  Over time, toleration with its norm of respectful live-let-live disagreement helps to soften people on all sides and make them more understanding of each other. The gradual development of the norm of toleration beginning in 17^th century Europe over time enabled initially very hostile Christian sects to reduce their hostility and accept, though not necessarily approve of their differences. But of course for the left, if you disagree, you are to remain silent while your intelligence and character are impugned and your religious freedoms are extinguished. 

In moving from homophobia to Islamophobia similar ideological motives are masked by the use of language that, again, as Roger Scruton notes, attempts “to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it.” (Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 4916-4917).

“Islamophobia” deserves a great deal of scrutiny as it is an attempt to change reality by the way we describe it.  The term has a short history, probably not more that 20 or 25 years.  Did Islamophobes suddenly come into existence a couple of decades ago?  If not, what were they and where were they before?  If so, what suddenly gave rise to yet another phobia the left loves to lecture us about? And, in light of what the militant followers of Islam have been about in the last few years, perhaps the fear that they have generated of Islam is not completely irrational.  Is it mere coincidence that Islamophobia emerged about the time followers of Islam, in the name of Islam, were engaged in horrific acts of terrorism all across the globe – the U.S., Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia. Is it also coincidental that during this time we have no record of Buddhists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Mormons or Mennonites crashing airliners into sky scrapers, mass kidnapping and force-marrying young girls, making You Tube videos of beheadings and immolations and establishing by conquest a theocratic state? There are reasons why the word “Islamophobia” has been invented and not “Christanophobia”, “Mormonophobia” or “Buddhophobia” which have nothing to do with what those who coined and use this word want us to believe.

Just who are these Islamophobes who suddenly have sprung into being? Here is how the folks who know all about these things at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender explain it:

Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure.  It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve "civilizational rehab" of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise).  Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.  (http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/defining-islamophobia)

So, this particular phobia is the product of a “global power structure”, which of course makes it all crystal clear if you are content with sheer vacuity.  And, what kind of a global power structure?  The “existing Eurocentric and Orientalist” one, which I guess is more menacing than one that doesn’t exist.  This is stated as if we are all supposed to know what precise meanings to attach to “Eurocentric” and “Orientalist” but these terms, like “Islamophobia”, are recent constructs, only intelligible to the ideologues who invented them and like the way they sound. They are vague terms of disapprobation rather than description. One can discover almost any kind of global power structure that readily fits one’s imagination and will bare the blame for the world’s many disparities – International Jewish bankers, the Tri-Lateral Commission, etc. The Berkeley “experts” are sloganeers, and here above is a medley of tropes that fill the left’s lexicon of agitprop designed to arouse those already indoctrinated. Nothing concrete, real or identifiable is doing the “fomenting” of fear and prejudice.  Even more preposterous is the claim that Islamophobia “reintroduces and affirms a “global racial structure …” etc.  How does an abstraction like Islamophobia bring a “global racial structure” into being? (Note the contrived parallelism of vacuous phrases: “global power structure” – “global racial structure”) What IS a “global racial structure, and what does Islam have to do with race?  It is a religion!

Any one of any race can be a Muslim.  This purported definition is a masterpiece of verbal smog and incoherence.  

      

“[T]he first concern of revolutionary movements on the left,” again to quote Roger Scruton, “has been to capture the language, to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it. Revolution begins from an act of falsification, exemplified equally in the French and the Russian Revolutions, as in the cultural revolutions of the contemporary campus.” (Scruton, Roger (2015-10-08). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 4916-4917).

“Homophobia” and “Islamophobia” are not words that accurately describe people or capture any of their distinctive attributes or conditions.  They are perversions, means of falsification, as Scruton notes, language designed not to reflect reality and speak the truth, but to serve ideological purposes and the acquisition of power.  Anyone who wishes to participate in an intelligent, serious conversation on homosexuality and contemporary Islam should vigorously resist the efforts of anyone who uses these words as if they are anything other than the vehicles of their ad hominem attacks and obfuscation in the service of cultural revolution.   

Diversity-Speak: Animal Farm at Wright State University

When talking about race-relations in America these days one cannot overstate how corrupt the use of language has become. “Racism” is now a term of art reserved for demagogues, ideologues, character assassins and “professionals” who make a career of their race.  An honest, dispassionate discussion of race in America is verboten, and nowhere does the production of verbal smog with its semantic deformation and fake moralism on this subject rise more rapidly to match the level of Soviet-era, Pravda-style Newspeak than on the campuses of American universities.  

In most American universities there are now firmly entrenched “diversity” commissars -- here a Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, there an Associate Provost of Multiculturalism, everywhere a PC zealot with a hefty title, a heftier salary, and a job description written in the indecipherable argot of "Diversity-speak."  These are people with no real jobs. Installed by craven university presidents they serve as scolds and busybodies, self-proclaimed authorities on whatever might hurt the feelings of those in the currently certified victim classes. Within their purview are micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces and correct usage of pronouns in the service of transgenderism. Since these czars, are charged with conjuring into reality such elusive and nebulous abstractions like diversity, inclusion, equity, etc., who can ever remotely guess what it is that they are actually doing?

The language of academic Diversity-Speak is a subgenre of Newspeak. Its constricted vocabulary and closely regulated grammar make it into a straight jacket of ideological orthodoxy the constraints of which no one is supposed to break out of. The key words, in typical Orwellian fashion, are twisted beyond normal recognition. Everyone knows this: everyone pretends otherwise. 

The diversity VP at any typical university now serves as the institutional superego. He/she plays the role of the priest, a stern moralist who intones the politically correct incantations, but, most importantly, functions as the living symbol of the university’s vigilance against what must never be tolerated in even the slightest degree, racism and its spin offs – sexism, ableism, homophobia, the forced march on to infinity.  This is no small task since racism and its feral cousins are now so pervasive and manifest themselves in so much abundance, some of their forms so recondite, only to be discernible by the priest and his acolytes.  Thus: institutional racism, systemic racism, casual racism, overt racism, covert racism, legacy racism, environmental racism, economic racism -- on it metastasizes with an ever more complex taxonomy yet to be constructed and guaranteed job security for the well-paid necromancers.  

These high level diversity positions are steeped in perversity so glaringly obvious that the fact that no one can mention it (resistance is futile) suggests that higher education is now firmly in the grip of political extortionists and con-artists posing as moralists. The ludicrous perversity is that of the inevitable motive of self-interest built into the heart of the “diversity profession.” The more racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic an institution is (the more victims there are to attend to), of course, the greater the role, the higher the charge, the larger the entourage, the more power there will be for the officially anointed voices of the voiceless.  Attending to lots of victims requires lots of resources – increased personnel, more offices, bigger budgets for travel to conferences on diversity, the Diversity & Inclusion Conference & Exposition in San Francisco, October 2017, for example. https://conferences.shrm.org/diversity-conference  What chief diversity officer anywhere, even if he wanted to, would admit to a serious reduction in all the “isms” and “phobias” in the institution where he is employed?  Fewer “isms” and “phobias” mean fewer staff, diminished influence, less visibility, ultimately another line of work with more accountability.

But to return to the notion of the corruption of language, specifically Diversity-Speak, focus for a moment on the recent official announcement (below) of the appointment of a Diversity Chief at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. The announcement is worth parsing since it is so generic and tediously formulary that it could come out of almost any American university or college.  The language in the announcement, as should become obvious momentarily, is stereotypical, banal Diversity-Speak. Its design, ironically, is to say nothing that any remotely thoughtful and reasonable person would say depicts any aspect of reality. This is not language that is meant to reveal or describe anything but rather to soothe and misdirect.  

   

Matthew Boaz, Wright State University’s director of equity and inclusion, has been named to the new position of chief diversity officer….. Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access. He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented students, strengthening recruiting efforts and coordinating Title IX policies. As chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership in promoting a campus culture that supports diversity and inclusion, forging strong partnerships with students, faculty and staff. “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with the university,”…..   http://webapp2.wright.edu/web1/newsroom/2017/02/21/matthew-boaz-named-chief-diversity-officer-at-wright-state/

To begin: “Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access.” “Nationally recognized leader”?  Beyond a ten mile radius from Dayton, Ohio no one could be found who ever heard of this guy. This lead-off talking point is a throw-away line, sufficiently vague and ill-defined as to be meaningless. One might ponder the dubious premise behind this fake encomium and speculate that anyone with a ‘diversity’ title can rise to this stature since there are no recognized standards or measurement of achievement that could be offered in support.  

  

To continue: “He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented students….”  Who were these students? Where were they?  What did he do to help them? What did he help them do?  Why did they need help?  No clue (wink-wink, it is obvious, isn’t it?). All we are supposed to know is that he is a guy who helps people, well, the right sort of people. What else does one need to be to be a diversity VP?  Just string together a few more of those vague generalities and bolster the fiction that there is a large contingent of needy people who will flounder without him.   

On to “partnerships”: As chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership… in forging strong partnerships with students, faculty and staff.  Ah, yes, the obligatory “forging partnerships”, another key filler phrase to signal how busy he will be but with no clue about what he will be doing.  What kind of partnerships? Why are they necessary? What have these partnerships achieved in the past that make them valuable?  

It gets worse: “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with the university,” Boaz said.

Clearly, Mr. Boaz won’t be wasting his time on trying to appear modest.  The sum total of “every member of the Wright State community” if you count students, faculty and staff, would be in excess of 20,000 people, each with a “unique identity and authentic self”.  Unclear is how he will have time for any other goals, much less time for basics like eating, sleeping and finding the men's room  -- Oops, the gender neutral restroom. Still, given that Wright State University draws many of its students from the surrounding conservative rural counties, it seems reasonable to conjecture that some them might possess an “authentic self” (perhaps a traditional Christian self) that will not sit well with the pronoun-neutral apparatchiks in Student Affairs who warm the seats in (are you ready?) The Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer & Ally Affairs. One needs to twist furiously away on the Diversity hermeneutical-decoder magic ring just to decipher the meaning of the office title and to guess at how the people inside fill their days. Those members of the “WSU community” who can’t quite get the hang of transgenderism and its Talmudic pronoun assignment challenges might have to undergo a compulsory “attitude adjustment”, a correction to their not-quite authentic selves so as to emerge proud of their experience.  

This announcement is PR gobbledygook.  No one should take it seriously and it is likely that few people do.  It was written and issued no doubt with the hope that no one would pay it too much attention, and thus suggests how crude and cynical is the rationalizing of what diversity people are all about and how spineless the university administrators are who sic them on everyone else.  

Leonard Shapiro, a prolific historian of Soviet history and politics in attempting to distill the essence of Stalinist era propaganda wrote that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as jarring dissonance.” (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Random House, 1971, p. 477) The above example of Diversity-Speak resembles the propaganda described by Shapiro -- no attempt to convince or persuade -- just a predictable uniform public utterance to discourage dissonant thinking and remind everyone that the right people are still in charge.   

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