Pat Condell, whose Wikipedia entry describes him as an “English stand up comedian, writer, playwright, secularist and atheist,” has produced several short but brilliantly acerb videos in the last couple of years about the mounting threat of radical Islam. His most recent installment, which I believe was released just a couple of days ago (it’s available on the weblog Little Green Footballs here) scales new heights of articulate outrage. Take a look: a more thoroughgoing, not to say entertaining, condemnation of hypocritical multiculturalism would be hard to find. Condell divides his ire equally between Islamic fanatics, who would destroy Western civilization, and those connoisseurs of abasement who would capitulate to any demand in order to preserve their sense of politically correct liberal election.
As always, Condell’s address is refreshing for its forthrightness: “What we need,” he observes, “is not more respect for Islam but less respect for Islam and more respect for ourselves.” The culture of Islam, he argues, is not equal, “it’s inferior” to European civilization. “It encourages violence against women, against Jews and homosexuals. It sanctions polygamy and marrying old men to young children in a disgusting travesty of human relations.” Condell also makes a point I have often insisted upon, namely that “Islamophobia” is a misnomer: a phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing the depredations of radical Islam. On the contrary. If you want to indulge in phobia-speak, far better to natter on about Islamophobia-phobia: the irrational fear of Islamophobia, which has reached epidemic proportions in Europe and wherever politically correct intellectuals congregate.
As for freedom, Condell makes the crucial point that it is only won by sacrifice and can only be preserved by constant vigilance. We in the West, such conspicuous beneficiaries of other people’s sacrifices for our freedom, are tempted to forget that. We do so at our peril–and not only our own peril, of course, for the next generation is growing up fast to take our place. What sort of place will we leave for them? Freedom is hard won; it takes constant effort to preserve; but it is easy, all too easy, to lose. And as Condell notes, there is an important sense in which our freedom, and the institutions that embody and protect it, are not ours absolutely but ours only in trust: “we don’t own it,” as Condell says, “we’re custodians of it. It’s not our to give away.” Would that his final adjuration–”Show a little backbone for once, just once”–could be graven upon the lintels of the West’s legislatures and universities.
I couldn’t agree more – see my post here.
I don’t agree with everything Pat Condell says – it is sometimes frustrating that he lumps religions together as if they were all equally threatening – but he is spot on in this clip.
I agree completely with Condell…
Islamophobia is not irrational..
philkan (Athens/Greece)
“It (Islam) encourages violence against women, against Jews and homosexuals. It sanctions polygamy and marrying old men to young children in a disgusting travesty of human relations.”
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Yes, but, unfortunately, with a little twist here and a slight shift in interpretation there, one could just as easily attribute these sins to the West.
These are the “travesties” that I call the “soft” case against Islam and they are usually made by journalists and other members of the chattering classes that have at best a superficial understanding of Islam.
[Whenever I dilate on this subject, I can’t help but conjure up the preposterous trip of the NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd to Riyadh a couple of years ago and her “analysis” of her trip. Talk about superficial!]
[Just another unmarried “gringa” on the prowl. It used to be the French and Italians that were the prey, then for a while, it was Latin Americans. Now it’s to the “Gulf” that they congregate….the place is swarming with’em each on some worthless “mission” or “project”. “Princess” Diana is a prime example of this, what with her Saracen companions. How far we’ve fallen.]
The “hard” case against Islam as a viable civilizational vehicle runs much deeper than appears at first sight.
Remember that while “Mohammed” may be the most popular given first name in Islam, a close-second is the much more revealing name “Abdullah” which translated word for word literally means “Slave of God”.
And they mean it too. That is to say, man is nothing and God is everything. The complete antithesis to our Greek and Christian heritage which places man front center.
Remember too that the total yearly GDP of the more than 20 Arab countries barring oil exports is exceeded by Finland’s. Remember that Spain translates more books in one year than all the Moslem countries combined have in several centuries…..and so on.
All these and many more dysfunctional attributes and facts point to a dying civilization….or one that has been dead for centuries depending on one’s (my) perspective.
Read any Islamist tract of recent times and you’ll notice that they have no program for the future except a return to the past. (wow, how inspiring!).
The fact is, Islam is a DIS-abling force – it tries to keep man – his inventiveness, his curiosity and so on – down…at all costs. How different from the West which, with all its faults, is an E-nabling civilization. That doesn’t mean the West is destined to “win” willy-nilly….but it means it’s worth fighting for – at all costs.
This culture of disability or dysfunctionality dominates and permeates the entire spectrum of the Islamic way of life, from the sacred to the profane, from the mundane to the exalted.
Been to Cairo recently? Try to get anything done and you’ll see what I mean. Faucets that don’t work even though they are 24 karat gold-plated, menus in restaurants that feature 20 different choices but which really have only 2 available, wide boulevards featuring donkey carts, pedestrian cross-walks that are totally ignored by both pedestrians and traffic and so on. (You still can’t drink water from your hotel or home faucet, for Xrist’s sake, without risking your health).
Apologists will disagree and point to various “traditions” and customs that would seem to disprove that the cultural is internally and fatally flawed.
There’s a tradition, for example, from the “sunna” (sayings and practices of the prophet) that goes something like “Seek knowledge from any source whether it be the Chinese or the Hindoo or Barbarian because they can all teach you something.” Well, you may indeed “seek” knowledge from anywhere, but that doesn’t mean you will be allowed to do anything with it.
Arab countries are noted for their disgruntled Western educated intelligentsia who, having been educated in the West, return to their home countries only to find out that what they’ve learned is either inapplicable in their home territories or is poorly funded (the sciences, zum Beispiel) or is somehow disapproved either for religious or cultural reasons. So they simply stagnate.
A famous physicists (I forget the name, but who works at UT-Austin) recently remarked that in the last 50 years, he had yet to come across a single physicist working in the Arab world whose work was worth anything. He went on to say that he knew many Arab scientists who lived and worked in the USA who were making contributions to the field, but that’s because they were living in the West. Once they returned home, they entered a black hole of nearly total obscurity.
[To be continued later]