Dear Michael,
From your 9/10 blog: “On the faculty list serve this week Wesleyan’s Muslim Chaplain, Marwa Aly, sent a thoughtful, heartfelt message deploring the hate speech being directed at Muslims in many parts of the country. She asks for something as basic as it is important: that we act with care and understanding toward members of our community, and that we stand up to hate when it is expressed around us.” Michael, context being a Wesleyan mantra, let me lay a little context on you: according to FBI statistics, anti-Semitic hate speech occurs ten times more often than hate speech directed at Muslims.
Did Chaplain Aly’s “thoughtful, heartfelt message deploring hate speech being directed at Muslims,” deplore the hate speech directed by Muslims at the Infidel? Or did her message go along with the mainstream Muslim flow? “…there have been no mass demonstrations in the capitals of what we now routinely call ‘the Muslim world’ to protest jihadism – no crowd shouting: ‘Not in my name! Not in the name of my religion!’ We’ve seen instead protesters carrying signs saying, ‘Behead those who insult Islam!’” – Clifford D. May, in nationalreview.com, Sept. 16.
If “Behead those who insult Islam!” isn’t hate speech, what is? But, should you ever venture into the land of the un-elite (the land outside your postmodernist Mecca), you’d find that actions speak louder than words. What actions? “…scores of terrorist attacks including the August 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, the July 2005 suicide bombings in London, and the October 2005 suicide bombings in Bali. Also multiple suicide bombings in Iraq. Also: the videotaped beheadings of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg. (More recently) Maj. Nidal Malid Hasan and the massacre at Fort Hood, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the attempted Christmas Day bombing, Faisal Shahzad and the attempted Times Square bombing….” – ibid.
Did Chaplain Aly take the occasion of 9/11’s commemoration to lament that day’s mass killing and offer words of comfort to the families of the victims? Under the Old Dispensation (before the Descent of the One We’ve Been Waiting For), our chaplains would dispense their stores of comfort on a “first come, first served” basis, regardless of race, creed, or religion. Under the New Dispensation, those of us not of the Tribe of Ishmael might well begin to wonder whether we’ve become the new underserved, “the other.”
And somewhere have I missed an expression of YOUR words of comfort? In your 9/10-dated infomercial for Chaplain Aly’s cri de coeur, there isn’t as much as a passing mention of 9/11; it must have been consigned to the dustbin of your mind.
Have you funded your program? Granted, you’ve halved the libraries’ budget for books (who needs ’em?) and pink-slipped a bevy of secretaries to pay for your toy, so, clearly, you’re off to a good start. However, the hobby-horses which your garden-variety robed and tasseled ideologue parades about are high-end entertainers – they rock.
No rocker, your global warming nag. Could be it’s caught a cold. No doubt you’ll be trying to warm it over, like yesterday’s mashed potatoes, via Old Faithful, your weekly spout.
However, don’t number me among the many who harbor a long-shot hope of finding a course of action (of course it would have to be foolproof) that would cap your spill. For, after the last of your few remaining readers have died of malnutrition, you’ll still have me, the diehard whose job it is to interpret the slippery entrails of your mind.
Martin Benjamin ‘57