I have no words
I really should have saved some for this. I mean, in the past I’ve escalated my snark and my flabbergasted outrage when I thought it was necessary, but it turns out that I wasted it all on trifles.
When the person who made her career defending widespread internment of a race of people - and advocating the same for another - invokes Pastor Niemoller about an overreaction to some blasphemous cartoons, well…
…I’m already numb.
There is no doubt that there has been violence committed on “behalf” of “Islam.” There is no doubt that the current round of threatened reprisals is, as I said, an overreaction and unacceptable. Violence is always unacceptable.
But when a person in Maryland, a citizen of the most powerful nation in the world, looks at street riots thousands of miles away, riots perpetrated by people who have spent most of the last thousand years feeling - quite often correctly - oppressed by the West, a West who in the past four years has killed thousands of Middle Easterners in retaliation for something which the majority of them didn’t even approve of at the time, let alone have a hand in, and that person in Maryland plays the victim card…well.
“Look how violent those people are,” this clip is saying. “They shoot guns and they burn flags and they kill people. They are not like us. We don’t shoot guns - in the street, anyway - and we don’t burn flags and we don’t kill people. We are not like them.”
We’re not? Read this. Then read LGF. Then find me a qualitative difference.
“But Auguste,” you say. “LGF is just rhetoric, ugly but just rhetoric nonetheless. There’s power behind the Muslims’ words. No LGFer ever killed someone like Theo Van Gogh. No LGFer ever flew a plane into a building.”
That’s true. But just because we convinced our government to do our righteous angry killing for us doesn’t mean it’s any less linked to the rhetoric.
Call this “moral equivalence” if you want, I don’t care. Call this “excusing terrorism” if you want, but you’re wrong. Violence begets violence begets violence. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the new Leni Riefenstahl over there is really horrified by the Muslim world’s made-for-TV reaction, which allows her to peddle this “Arabs are savages” line with video! evidence!
She’s not horrified, she’s salivating.
What do Malkin and her gleeful trackbackers see as the meaning behind this ridiculous piece of melodrama?
Comment by LA — February 4, 2006 @ 7:55 pm
Well said Auguste.
Comment by mark from ireland — February 4, 2006 @ 10:15 pm
Malkin has a good point and I don’t understand why you are attacking her? She is merely pointing out that there have been a significant number of atrocities carried out by Islamists. It’s easy, and frankly intellectually weak to simply call her a racist. She’s pointing out real injustice in this world, and your ankle biting. She’s horrified, you’re salivating.
And another thing, “Violence begets violence begets violence” is a silly, meaningless slogan. It was violence (and a lot of it) that brought down Hitler and ended the Jewish genocide. It was violence that ultimately gave Americans a country of their own.
Comment by Jason Wang — February 8, 2006 @ 1:06 am
That bitch has NO point, except on the top of her empty skull. Are you forgetting, Jason, that Hitler was violent himself, and that he used the excuse of giving Germans “a country of their own” (including several of someone else’s) using the same specious fascist “logic” that Malkin now espouses? (And which you, without reason, seem to think is hunk-dory…hey, it’s not fascism when right-wing AMERICANS do it…bullshit!)
Comment by Ann Onymous — February 13, 2006 @ 5:06 am