The LA Weekly is an "alternative" newspaper that occupies roughly the same
place on the spectrum as the Village Voice, salon.com, the Nation Magazine,
etc. Marc Cooper has a weekly column and Doug Ireland is a frequent
contributor. The editor is Harold Myerson, a leading liberal wonk who also
edits the American Prospect, a magazine funded by Bill Moyers basically.
In the latest issue there is a positive review
(http://www.laweekly.com/index.php?option=com_lawcontent&task=view&id=12921&Itemid=47)
of a new book by Oriana Fallaci titled "The Force of Reason," which the
reviewer Brendan Bernhard (author of White Muslim: From L.A. to New York to
Jihad) describes as an answer to the question: "How did Europe become home
to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?"
Here's a snippet from the review to give you a sense of how disgusting both
Fallaci and Bernhard are:
>>Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing
Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan
Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the
mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. One day Arabs
were a remote people
camping out in tents with camels
the next, they
were neighbors. On the streets of West London appeared black-clad women
adorned with beaked masks that made them look like hooded falcons.
Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four steps ahead of the
women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks like a crew of escaped film
extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes.<<
This is basically the same filth found in Carlin Romano's Philadelphia
Enquirer review of another racist diatribe that I wrote about here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/CarlinRomano.htm
Bernhard concludes his review with a ringing endorsement of the Danish right:
>>As that Norwegian Mullah told Aftenposten, Our way of thinking
will
prove more powerful than yours. One hopes hes wrong, but if he is, it
will be ordinary Americans and Europeans, including courageous
Arab-Americans like L.A. resident Wafa Sultan and the Somali-born Dutch
politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali (two women openly challenging Islamist
supremacism), who prove him so, and not our intellectual classes (artists,
pundits, filmmakers, actors, writers
). Many of the latter, consumed by
Bush-hatred and cultural self-loathing, are perilously close to becoming
todays equivalent of the great Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who so
hated the British Empire that he sided with the Nazis in World War II, to
his everlasting shame. The Force of Reason, at the very least, is a welcome
and necessary antidote to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere.<<
It is becoming apparent that along with the growing hatred of the war in
Iraq there is a counter-tendency taking shape among certain liberals that
*objectively* gives aid to expanded wars in the Middle East. Both Cooper
and Ireland have solidarized themselves with the Danish racist right around
the cartoon controversy. The whole purpose of books such as the kind that
Bawer (reviewed by Romano) and Fallaci write is to increase the hatred of
Western liberals toward Muslim and Arab peoples. Since the conservative
right is already lined up behind an agenda of the New Crusades, winning the
liberals to a war on Iran is essential.
If a war is launched against Iran, it will have many of the same rationales
as the invasion of Afghanistan. It will be put forward as a war to
"liberate women and gays", as a war to allow freedom of expression and
democracy, etc. But basically it will be a war about oil just as the
current war is. It is a sign of the decrepitude of contemporary liberalism
that it will allow itself to be drawn into this insane march toward a war
that has disastrous implications for all of humanity.
--
www.marxmail.org
