Heralds of the Second Secular Coming: AKA as Fools at the Midnight Hour

Despite the best laid plans of the Revolutionary Communist Party, we blessed three (Ibn Warraq, Christina Hoff-Sommers, and myself) quietly triumphed at Columbia during Islamo-fascism week. But you’d never know it if you read The Nation’s online coverage. Esther Kaplan, author of “With God on their Side: George Bush and the Christian Right, ” led with her bias showing.

In her article, Kaplan spends ten paragraphs demonizing David Horowitz and then dismisses us as fellow travelers in only a mere two paragraphs. I am not complaining. If she had written about us at greater length, she would only have misquoted us or taken our words out of context even more.

For example, she sidesteps my points about the Islamist persecution of homosexuals and only notes that I “sounded an alarm against an epidemic of homosexual pederasty in the Muslim world”–and then likens me to Gary Bauer in his denunciation of gay marriage. Kaplan utterly fails to describe the “violent oppression of women under Islam” (which is also the title of a pamphlet I co-authored for David Horowitz) and fails to mention the heroic feminist struggles in the Muslim world which both Christina Hoff-Sommers and myself discussed.

Kaplan reduces the learned and brilliant Ibn Warraq to just one sentence–yes, the same Ibn Warraq who recently defeated Tariq Ramadan in a battle of ideas in London. I highly recommend Ibn Warraq’s new book, “Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.”

Kaplan and the Nation share a similar point of view. Israel and George Bush’s America (not the Palestinians, the Arab League, or al-Qaeda) are the satanic “provokers.” And, shades of Walt and Mearsheimer: AIPAC and Campus Watch are the primary bearers of “hate” and they brandish academic “hit lists.” Edward Said and the politically correct Stalinists are heralds of the Second Secular Coming and can do no wrong.

Luckily, other reporters were also present. For example, Fern Sidman, who has interviewed me in the Jewish media, described us as “three voices of truth” in the article she published online in the Intellectual Conservative. When President Amadinejad spoke at Columbia, Sidman also interviewed Mary Lou McKinley-Greenberg, the activist who prepared the Questions to be posed to me for the Revolutionary Communist Party. Sidman writes:

“I met Mary Lou Greenberg about a month ago at Columbia University when she was there on the day that Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke. Her group, the Revolutionary Communist Party was there with a huge banner reading, ‘Ahmadinejad is Bad but Bush is Worse.’ Her group was decrying a possible US invasion of Iran. As a journalist covering the event, I conducted an interview with her. She told me that in a communist society everyone would have the right to voice dissent. I asked her about gays in Cuba, (the only Communist country left in the western hemisphere,) and whether they had a right to voice their dissent, to speak out and identify as gays and she equivocated her way through a feckless attempt to answer the question. ”

Dear Reader: Please note that I am publishing my remarks here and not in the pages of Nation magazine. I have learned that “the left” will only demonize their opponents and valorize fascists; and that the “Jewish left” will not, even at the midnight hour, talk or listen to anyone who has already been demonized by the larger “left.” (The Jewish left has, indeed, finally begun to talk about anti-Semitism on the left but they do so only in whispers, in small groups, and only with each other. Their comrades do not support them).

So: the West’s Queer Nation will not stand up for homosexuals who are persecuted by Islam and the Marxist and Secular Feminist Nation will not stand up for women who are persecuted by Islam either. What was it that Pastor Neimoller said about the Nazis who came for the trade unionists?