Race to the bottom

Fun and games at the Gates of Vienna, a blog whose content could pretty much be summed up as "The Filthy Wogs are Coming". Recently, they allowed noted Norwegian racist Fjordman to guestblog.

There is something I want to note about the concept of "whiteness" that people like Fjordman appeal to. American "blacks" are "black" for a simple reason. Their ancestors were stolen from their homes, decultured and homogenised by the slavers as a monocultural mass of men, women and children. The slavers did not care that Fang people have different marriage rites from those of the Igbo. They did not care that Gambians and Congolese speak languages from different families. To them, they were all black.

This is part of the tragedy of slavery, not an outcome to be celebrated. Yet, curiously, writers like Fjordman want to do the same to "whites". Whereas I can see some merit in believing that one should celebrate what is good about Norwegian culture, I cannot see that Fjordman does that. Instead, he wants to celebrate what is good about "white" culture, as if there were such a thing.

Of course, it's a strange thing for those who stand outside Fjordman's worldview to look in at it. In his world, our common "whiteness" gives us common cause. Which is odd, because when we were kids, we were taught to hate other Europeans for not being like us. The Fjordmans of my youth hated the French as much as they hated blacks. Not that they had much to do with either. When I was, say, 12, there was one black family in my village of three thousand people and no French. The locals contented themselves with hating the English, given the lack of "Pakis" to bash.

I am only going to pick out one part of Fjordman's pseudointellectual essay (how these people love their spurious sources: always the same "thinkers"; always the same distorted stats; always the same sources for the same old bullshit), because it illustrates so clearly how unthinking this particular "intellectual" is:

In May 2007, Osama bin Laden’s deputy terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahri stated that “Al-Qaida is not merely for the benefit of Muslims. That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world.”

Read that statement closely. This Jihadist organization is calling for a global war against whites. Not Christians or Jews. Whites. I have been told all of my life that skin color is irrelevant, but this balancing act gets a lot more difficult when somebody declares war against you because of your race.

But the reason Al-Zawahiri calls on blacks, American Indians, Hispanics and so on to join the jihad is not that he is perpetrating a war on whites, but that he considers himself white.

What irony! Fjordman and his like think that "Muslims" too are homogenous and "black". But Arabs consider themselves white (and are often themselves starkly racist). A visit to any of the nations in northern Africa that have significant overlap between Arab or other Semitic peoples and black Africans will disabuse you very quickly of the notion that they are all just "blacks". Take Sudan, where Muslim Arabs are dispossessing and murdering mostly Muslim blacks.

***

The Muslim menace is, of course, mostly illusory. Most, nearly all, Muslims are just like you and me: people who are just getting on with it. They don't want to destroy your culture, such as it is (since when was the rampant pursuit of material goods and the sexualisation of absolutely everything to the soundtrack of mushy pop, documented by a man who puts sharks in tanks actually a "culture"?); they just want to make a few quid so they can nice up their home.

But that doesn't stop hatemongers such as Melanie Phillips. I well remember disagreeing with a friend quite vehemently because she considered Phillips a "good source" for Wikipedia, just because a newspaper prints her bullshit. (If you wanted an illustration of Wikipedia's bankruptcy as a bastion of intellectualism, in fact, its insistence, driven by a handful of ideologically motivated editors, that newspapers are infallible is as good as any.)

Here Phillips takes issue with the recent letter from Muslim scholars to the Christian top bods. The Muslims, you may have read, have called on Christians to find areas of commonality and live together in peace. Seems fairly unexceptionable, although there are certainly criticisms to be made.

Make peace? says Phillips. But to do that, we'd need to be at war:

First and foremost, it purports to be a plea to Muslims and Christians to make peace with each other. But this implies that both are at war with each other. This is untrue. The Islamic world — or part of it — has waged war on the Christian (and Jewish) western world. The Christian world is merely responding in self-defence. It is the Islamic world which says it wants to conquer the Christian. The Christian world does not say it wants to conquer Islam, merely that Islam should stop trying to conquer it. Yet the Islamic world pretends that the Christian world is engaged in an act of exterminatory aggression against it.

Islamic acts of conquest? Erm. Let me think... erm. Help me out, Mel, because I'm really struggling to recall the massive invasion of any Christian states and the destruction of their infrastructure, command structure and social fabric in recent times. Can you help me out?
On the other side, well, there are two invasions of Afghanistan, one of Iraq, a coup in Iran, the threat of bombing against Iran, the bombing of Sudan, two wars against Somalia's Muslims (Ethiopia is overwhelmingly Christian, remember), not to mention the ongoing support and arming of repressive regimes in several Muslim states and of a repressive, usurper state in Israel. For starters.
But one supposes that in Phillips' world, the "Muslims" are "attacking" us by sending hundreds of thousands of poor people, the flotsam and jetsam of our colonialisation and its stepson globalisation. They didn't just impoverish themselves, you know!
In response to the invitation to consider Muslims as partners, beautifully expressed by the Muslim scholars thus:

So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill

which is a sentiment that it's hard to believe anyone would struggle to get behind, Phillips says:

it’s really a variation of the ancient adage: submit or die

Yes, it's true. These lunatics are so far gone that they read "Let's be friends" and it says "Die white bitch" to them. The war of the West on Islam will never end while this mentality not only gets airtime, but predominates in our media.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:23 am