For there is rot in their bones,
corruption in their hearts,
weakness in their knees,
and their bitter cry sent into the storm
of Kishinev and every Kishinev to come
shall not be heard,
not even in the porticos and corridors of heaven
Chaim Bialek
The City of Slaughter
The unscrupulous way in which the New Left have debased the coinage of language and distorts facts constitutes a bewildering and indeed astonishing phenomenon if only because unlike the Radical Right, it addresses itself predominantly to intellectuals. That, in a free society, a movement with intellectual pretensions can, without fear of exposure or ridicule, misinform its actual and potential supporters argues that the opium of unreasoning faith, irrespective of how it accords with known and ascertainable facts, is just as much in demand among the new Marxists as it was among the ‘people’ whose addiction they so eagerly castigated.
Ernest Hearst
New Left Reappraisals
This article was originally written up in a draft form in April, May and June 2011, and then added to a little toward the end of 2011 and early 2012. The general ideas, feelings expressed and articulated herein have been gestating for years believe it or not. Events since then have only confirmed my worst suspicions and then some…
Perhaps it should not surprise one that Jewish science fiction writers in the main shy away from acknowledging, never mind confronting anti-Semitism among their colleagues and peers within the genre community. Such a hear-no-evil see-no-evil approach reflects especially on Diaspora Jewish life in general, in the US and the UK especially. Given what the science fiction and imaginative fiction genre is about, at bottom and in the main – shorn of its pretensions, shrill denials and self-deceptions – a second-rate escapist pulp ‘literature’; SF does not (in the main) lend itself to the ideals humanity should aspire to, namely introspection, courage, critical thinking and iconoclasm in an age of destructive uniformity. Thus it would be counter-intuitive to expect Jewish genre folk to somehow go against the grain of the wider Jewish community and its zeitgeist of denial and pathetic ingratiation to a gentile society (traditionally hostile to Jewry) that crosses over into neurotic self-loathing all too frequently. Jews in and out of the genre community – human nature being what it is – just want to fit in and get along, and they will pay the price that is always paid…
Expecting Jewish genre folk to go against the grain of a cowering and obtuse Jewish community would be akin to expecting Jewish heroin dealers to embody Jewish pride, uncommon intelligence and combat anti-Semitism with forthrightness and courage even as the rest of the Jewish community (respectable or otherwise) remains apathetic to combating anti-Semitism and even willfully oblivious to it. Science fiction like heroin drug abuse, is an escape – the former an escape that appeals to the bookish and the geeky and the latter an escape that appeals to those less squeamish and more willing to take their escapism all the way, less afraid of the law and more honest about what they are doing in the process.
Science fiction for the most part – protestations to the contrary – reflects on an escapist neurosis among the bookish science and humanities geek oriented community. I do not mean it is solely escapism, nor that it is entirely second-rate pulp-shlock. However imaginative fiction and science fiction itself with notable exceptions, is simply escapism and it is predominantly, with considerable exceptions, a shlock non-literature. Even an anti-literature. As Sturgeon’s law famously tells us: 90% of everything is crap; so why should science fiction be held to a different standard? Yet this does not allow science fiction to get off the hook so easily. It is an evasion to argue that because 9o% of every other genre and art medium is crap, that makes the all-round awfulness of SF more palatable or acceptable, because it doesn’t and it doesn’t mean we should be more forgiving or lenient of science fiction merely because other literary genres and creative and artistic outputs are equally shoddy, or nearly so. It is a tu quoque argument. All the worse for our so-called culture, is what Sturgeon’s law translates to, SF included. In this context the predominantly pulp escapism of science fiction begs the question – of the genre writers and fans – namely what does it tell us about the genre community? The short of it is this – it is a community whose very raison d’etre is a turning aside from the horrors, dullness and meaninglessness of our age, a community that sets itself apart from the rest of humanity’s assorted and varied escapisms solely through the very modernness, the scientific veneer and nerdiness of the formers’ flight from reality.
The obvious religious dimensions to science fiction and its fulfilling of religious needs (‘a sense of wonder’) among those who have abandoned faith in the old gods, or whose faith is not enough in an age in which science has explained or explained away all the mysteries our old faiths celebrated (ours is the Age of Scientism) and are indeed predicated on, have been commented on considerably. A community whose fans and writers – from all different backgrounds, walks of life and outlook – are united in a desire for an escape that is both convenient and easy. Namely this – mysteries and wonders they can cling to in the Machine Age in which wonders have been crushed and mysteries explained away. Science fiction inverts the soul-destroying nature of the Machine Age and our Sausage Cities, the rule of scientific and economic materialism über alles, by making of the machine a source of mystery and wonder (intelligent self-aware robots and computers, gleaming spaceships that traverse the stars, beautiful priapic wonder weapons that cleanly annihilate with laser precision). There is the demonology of science fiction. Alienated from Nature as he is in his brown factory metropoli, man’s nymphs, elves and gnomes have become aliens. In more ways than one. So we send our demons to distant stars. It is the only place left for them to go, for our centaurs, sprites, pixies and harpies have long since been annihilated from humanity’s sacred store along with our more corporeal wildlife. And like the faerie, demons and daemons of old, our daemons of the space age – piloting starships and inhabiting the new underworlds that are strange planets – are good and bad, benevolent and malicious, shapeshifters, tricksters, teachers, liars, truth-tellers, foolish, cruel, wise and kind. Destroyers and messiahs. All things to all men. Ourselves in other words. Like the vampire, the alien leaves no reflection in the mirror (SF writers take note) and for the same reason – for alien, like vampire, is the reflection. As all demons are.
The daemon/demon aliens, like the devils, daemons and faerie of old, are nothing less than ourselves. There is a darkly humorous pun at work here – the alienated man of the alienating Age of the Machine encounters the daemon from a star system a thousand light years away, and indeed the alienated man in an alienating Age is as removed from his own heart and true self as if his heart were hidden on a barren planet orbiting a distant star. So our alienated man from our alienating Age of the Machine projects, and he calls his daemon/demon ‘alien’. Do you hear the aliens howling? The howling is that of Trickster Coyote’s. There is nowhere else for our daemons to go but the distant stars since the forests are destroyed, our seas are poisoned, what is left of the marginal wilderness is enchanted no more by nymphs, sprites and fairies. Big Science likewise does not permit it. The stars, the galaxies remain mysterious, perhaps forever out of reach. They have yet to be poisoned by the reach of man even as man desperately explains or attempts to explain their mystery away.
The stars, or more accurately distant star systems and dimensions (through the medium of science fiction), serve as a refuge for our daemons, our faerie. In other words our souls or what is left of them. Our daemon aliens, the faerie of the modern age, are safe there (one hopes), removed by light years from the reach of the atom bomb wielding machine devil that is man. The alien is a fairy in a space-suit. A satyr with a laser gun. The further away we can send our souls whose garb is faerie from the Hades we call earth the better. Yet our daemons invade us here or we invade them there, for what use are daemons/faerie if they do not interfere in the lives of men and we do not interfere with theirs? There is no getting away from the Soul no matter how hard we try. And man do we try. Pass the needle or bong, the bottle of cheap red wine, turn on the flat screen if you’ve got one, an old telly will do just as well, ah the Internet (it makes such a soothing sound). Here would you prefer an old tattered copy of Analog, of interzone? The Soul of Man is a boomerang painted with stars and the dung of coyotes hurled by an Aboriginal Wonga Man as black as the charcoal night.
I digress. Where was I?
Ah yes…
Sellers of machine dreams and those who purchase their wares that never satisfy, that is science fiction writers and the fan community, like heroin dealers and their customers would not in the normal course of things and for the most part, be expected to go against the pervasive lies and groupthink of our society. Au contraire, they give another escape that keeps the wheels of the Death Machine turning. Unlike heroin dealers, the wares of science fiction writers are legal, even if disrespectable, and SF novels and magazines do not damage the liver and the libido, at least as far as I am aware. Speculative Fiction – an escape that does not threaten the ability to hold down a job and cause general organ failure unlike heroin addiction. As far as I know.
Science fiction writer and American literature professor John Kessel in a starkly honest short story Invaders (1990) sums it all up – aliens come to earth, demanding cocaine to satisfy their own drug habit. The aliens and therefore science fiction are a metaphor for cocaine addiction, serving the same needs. Escape and a destructive escape at that. Kessel is scathingly honest and upfront about the SF genre and what it’s all about in his short story. A substitution for cocaine, and no better. Not even a little bit. Science fiction ‘literature’ is no more artistic or culturally enriching, no more edifying or ennobling. Kessel is all but admitting to being a literary equivalent of a drug dealer, yet he goes on dealing… . Invaders may be the most honest science fiction short story ever written.
This is my roundabout way of saying: would we thus expect science fiction writers in the main (including the ones so convinced of their seriousness and the artistic merit of their writings) to be any more self-aware, thoughtful, introspective than the fandom they are pushing their ‘drug’ fiction output for? There are of course exceptions, among writers and fans (like Kessel and quite a few others). In the main they think and act like dullards where it counts, like everybody else. Well why of course would they be expected to be any different? The best of them are as likely to be miseducated eggheads living too much in their heads as any, minds filled with false knowledge and trivia. Too little real sense, mindfulness and mental sharpness (what Jews speak of as sechel), too little heart. Although if they are the hard science fiction buffs they can tell you all about jet engines, the latest research developments in hot fusion tokamak reactors, controversies in genetics, the new ideas in dark matter and dark energy, the politicization of NASA and even the sex lives of Victorian scientists; if of the more literary and humanities bent, of Plato, Euripides, Dostoyevsky and the Peloponnesian War. Of the multiplying chimeras, the stew of lies that define the zeitgeist of our age and of Western humanity at the dawn of the twenty-first century, our science fiction writer in the main has nothing more or less to say that is profound, insightful, reasonable than names picked randomly from a phone book. They are as likely to hew to an ideology and all its accompanying follies as the man next door. They respond entirely Pavlov-like, in predictable, foolish and superficial ways to national, political, economic crises. You just need to know the breed.
This brings us to the Jewish science fiction writer, editor and fan. The paragon (well perhaps) of our serious Jewish SF writer is the professor or a man aspiring to be one, a giant intellectual with the rep to match – an Asimov, a Silverberg. His home overflows with books, many are probably Judaica related. Judaica and the dreams of Zion define the world of his boba (grandmother) and zeda (grandfather), even their own bobas and zedas, the dreams and sighs of the old country with their old superstitions, the dybbuks and the golems. They may haunt the mind of our science fiction writer and editor, even inspire him (in fact they certainly do), but how relevant are they? And what of the cruel terrifying memories from the old country – of the Okhrana, the Cossacks, the pogroms, the Shoah itself – how much thought does the Jewish genre writer give them at all? The old country is out of sight, and largely out of mind. Our Jewish SF writer (like his gentile peer) lives in the modern world. What choice does he or she have anyhow?
How though does our ostensibly Jewish writer (genre or not) make use of the haunted past of his people, if he has any use for the past at all and the dreams and nightmares of his ancestors? The golems and dybbuks of the Jews largely vanished with them in the gas chambers. And those who escaped to the New World – to America, Britain, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Australia – their precocious descendants have no use in the main for the old folklore and supernaturalism. This is where our Jewish SF writer is often excepted, for he is one who by the nature of his profession takes the Biblical myths of his people, Jewish folklore, Jewish history and experience and wraps it all in the dreams and nightmares of future worlds and future ages. Yet the culturally Jewish imaginative fiction writer easily fools himself or herself as much as his reader, by pretending Jewish bona fides through the Jewishness of his or her stories.
At bottom, the fact of his culturally Jewish persona means nothing and counts for nothing. As with a religiously observant Jew who keeps kashrut. It’s neither here nor there. What do I mean when I write that it means nothing where it counts? Acclaimed screenwriter and film-maker David Mamet in his book The Wicked Son, whose theme is Jewish self-loathing, denial and wishful thinking in the face of the new anti-Semitism, asks the question to his Jewish brethren – in Israel’s battle for survival against Muslim extremists and their allies and apologists in the West, are you in or are you out?
Jewish cultural bona fides don’t mean a thing when it comes to answering Mamet’s barbed query. In fact the obsessiveness of Jewish themes in a Jewish writer’s or artist’s oeuvre can serve as a distraction, a mask, a syrupy coating over an empty husk; a compensation for the fact that his or her heart isn’t in it, the struggle for Jewish survival in a Jew-hating world. The Jewish imaginative fiction writer, as with his/her largely secular Jewish brethren, assimilated to the nth degree, does not like to be reminded of anti-Semitism; except where it is safely in the past (the pogroms, the Nazis) or where he/she has been raised to expect it, at upper-crust Tory dinner parties in Chelsea, WASP country-clubs in New England. The relative golden age of Diaspora Jewry after the Second World War is his very recent heritage and he wants it to stay that way. Naturally enough.
His great-grandfather may have been a rebbe in Lvov or Vilnius, he says somewhat defensively. That was the time and place. We have Science now and Literature. It may not be enough, but let us not fool ourselves with fairy-tales for children (as he concocts machine fairy-tales for a machine age). Jewish folklore, religion, tradition, insularity did not protect the Jews from the czars’ secret police, from bloodlustful anti-Semitic Ukrainian and Russians and the Einsatzgruppen, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. [The Red Wolf pips in here, 'neither did assimilation and ingratiation to a gentile society. Such a strategy will not protect us neither, anymore than it protected the assimilated and secular German and French Jews from the Nazis'] Plus it’s all superstition. Anyway we don’t need any protection. Blaming Jews for the ills of the world is a thing of the past, along with rampaging mobs looking to spill Jewish blood that followed in its wake. At least where our Jewish SF writer lives. So he/she says. He/she along with his or her Diaspora brethren lives in New York now, London, Chicago, Toronto, California. Base anti-Semitism is out there in trailer-park country where desperate militia wannabes gobble up The Turner Diaries, it’s with those old-school elite Tory snobs and football hooligans.
Left-wing anti-Semitism? What on earth is that? It doesn’t exist or it’s just on the far far fringes of the Left, so far out it’s on Ganymede. There is no real left-wing anti-Semitism to speak of. Criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitic. Just because the Left constantly criticizes Israel without pause – even as the Jewish nation is surrounded and outnumbered by Jew-hating Islamists who openly boast and dream of another Holocaust while denying the past one, and grow ever more powerful and confident with every passing month (HELLO IRAN) – doesn’t mean the Western Left, whose European cultural background is anti-Semitic, is anti-Semitic. What’s that you say?
Anti-Semitic criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
What’s anti-Semitic about condemning Jews for building a security barrier to protect Jewish civilians, children and babies included, from being blown apart by suicide bombers? What’s anti-Semitic about condemning the Jew nation for not surrendering even more territory to Muslim extremists (who we call moderates) and who are hellbent on pushing the Jews into the sea, whilst at the same time not pressuring any other nation on earth to surrender territory to any and all enemies bent on genocide? After all Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza and that worked out… OK maybe not, yet just because Muslim extremists like Hezbollah and HAMAS took over the territory Israel gave up (a policy shrilly supported by the Western Left) and instigated two wars with Israel and brought dozens of Israeli towns, cities, villages and farms under rocket range doesn’t mean it will be the same next time around. The West Bank is different. Just like Egypt. Think the wonderful Arab Spring. They are moderate there and if they are fanatics it’s the fault of the Jewish nation, for building homes somewhere, anywhere. If the Jews just stop building homes and surrender the West Bank to the moderate peace loving PA and Mahmoud Abbas whether in or out of a unity government with HAMAS, all will be well. HAMAS will go away eventually, melting like the snow in spring.
What’s that you say? Fatah, the PA and Abbas are not moderates neither? Of course they are. The NY Times says they are, the BBC and The Guardian too. What more do you need to know?
Abbas has a record as a Holocaust Denier, he calls HAMAS “brothers in arms” and Fatah calls for the destruction of Israel on its constitution. To this day. The Fatah leadership names streets, sports tournaments and town plazas after terrorists, unveils a statue to a female terrorist who gunned down Jewish children. Fatah praises suicide bombers as martyrs and heroes in their mosques and media (TV, radio and newspapers). In their school textbooks there is no recognition of Israel and Jews are labeled as ‘vile’ and ‘treacherous’. In the kindergartens they indoctrinate children into jihad and it is relentlessly imprinted that the Jew is less than human, a devil worshiping unbeliever, a kaffir/infidel and the highest good is to attain martyrdom for Allah. The official armed wing of the ‘moderate’ ‘peace-loving’ terrorist Fatah, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades carries out rocket attacks and suicide bombings and other terror attacks on Jews. Successful terror attacks are celebrated with spontaneous gunfire and the handing out of candies (like on 9-11). Those are the “moderates”. I haven’t even gotten onto Abbas’s predecessor Yasser Arafat and HAMAS.
I’m stopping up my ears now, then maybe you will just go away.
Fatah/the PA and Mahmoud “Allah loves the martyr” Abbas himself do not accept Israel’s right to exist and don’t even pretend to, not in Arabic, not to their own people. Never have. Abbas insists he never will, and is not under any obligation to do so.
Oh really. Well all that will go away if the Jews just stop building homes – the inhumanity of it. No not the Jew-hate bloodlust of Fatah and HAMAS and Palestinian child-abuse, the indoctrination into extremist hatred, the rocket attacks from Gaza (where there are no Jews) into Israel targeting Jews for death. I mean the inhumanity of the Jews building homes – my God with plumbing and electrical wiring too, the horror of it – where they are clearly not welcome by uh Jew-ha.. uh make that anti-Zionists.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. You don’t even know what Zionism is and you don’t care to know, any more than your anti-Semitic gentile peers and friends do. You have never read anything on it, anything substantial that’s for sure. You don’t have a clue.
Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism, it’s anti-Zionism. Whatever that is… Who cares what Martin Luther King Jr said about anti-Zionism, saying it was just anti-Semitism and that Zionist was just a code for Jew. What would he know about anti-Semitism? My grandparents knew, they were lucky to get out of Hungary/France/Germany/Poland just in time, 1937/38/39 fleeing from the Nazis. Now that was anti-Semitism. What’s that you say? The Nazis were anti-Zionist just like their neo-Nazi successors? Oh please the anti-Zionism of the Left is not the anti-Zionism of neo-Nazis, it’s a fluffy pink peace now anti-Zionism. HAMAS, Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood are all anti-Zionist you say. All Muslim extremists are anti-Zionist in principle. What of it? The Left’s anti-Zionism is different, it’s all fluffy and pink. I already said that. Even its tail is fluffy and its eyes are jelly gumdrops the color of honey. What now?
By definition and in principle anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Oh really now. The Left’s anti-Zionism has its own definition. It is whatever we want it to be, or whatever we don’t want it to be, depends on the time and place and the company you are keeping. Like if it’s some hot Berkeley undergrad with great cleavage for example. You don’t want to let her anti-Zionism – not that she knows what Zionism is any more than I do – get in the way of a good time. Zionism is… what are you going on about with dictionary and encyclopedia definitions, since when did dictionaries and encyclopedias define words and terminology? I mean that’s fine for science and common household items and old-time words like knickerbocker and penny whistle. Zionism isn’t like that. Zionism has changed, it’s evolved, those old dictionaries and encyclopedias don’t apply.
By definition Zionism doesn’t change its meaning. The new dictionaries and encyclopedias say the same thing. Even if like the passenger pigeon, the bluebuck and the auroch, Zionism goes extinct (do you know what that means in reality?), or faces extinction like the jaguar, panda and countless other species of plant and animal, it is what is. It remains what it is. By definition.
Definition, shmenition. Who is the writer here? Me or you? Have you heard what Noam Chomsky says? He says that anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism and that’s the last word on the subject. Since Chomsky is closer to Truth and God (if he existed) and the True Way than any other Jew alive because well he’s Chomsky. And that as they say is that. I win by appeal to Chomsky. Argumentum ad Chomsky is an airtight argument, it cannot be beat for logic, coherence and infallibility.
Chomsky is viciously anti-Semitic and a notorious liar on political affairs. He proves the point, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and rabid anti-Semitism at that.
Really, you’ll have to do better than that. What did Chomsky say or do that is so anti-Semitic? Criticizing Israel isn’t anti-Semitic.
Never mind what he writes about Israel, that’s a whole other thing… (his books are advertised on neo-Nazi websites, at white supremacist rallies and on Muslim extremist sites as well. Even Osama Bin Laden recommended him) Chomsky was exposed for his friendly associations with Holocaust Denying fascists in France like Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume, but most notably Robert Faurisson. Faurissson is one of the most notorious Holocaust Deniers and anti-Semitic fascists in France. Chomsky wrote an approving preface to one of Faurisson’s books in which Faurisson was unambiguous on his Holocaust Denial. In Chomsky’s glowing preface to the book, Chomsky wrote that he saw Faurisson as a “relatively apolitical liberal”. Chomsky wrote to Australian scholar Bill Rubinstein (1980/1) justifying his associations with Faurisson:
“I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust..” and “I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson’s work…”.
Chomsky and his cult lie about the Faurisson affair as a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech had nothing to do with it of course.
Chomsky gave his support to the arming of Hezbollah only a few months prior to the Hezbollah-Israel war of 2006, a war initiated by Hezbollah itself; a war that would see Hezbollah rockets rain down on Israeli civilian population centers targeting Jewish men, women, children and babes for death and maiming.
To all intents and purposes therefore, Chomsky supports the destruction of Israel (by giving his explicit support to Hezbollah) and since the head of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has himself openly advocated genocide of Jewry (not only the destruction of Israel!), Chomsky implies support for nothing less than jihadist terror and mass murder against Jewry worldwide.
So Chomsky gives support to jihadists determined and motivated on the project of ‘the holy killing’ of Chomsky’s Jewish tribe, Chomsky himself and his own family. This is what psychologists call negative identification. Noam C is manifestly a card carrying ‘Jewish’ member of ‘we are all Hezbollah now’ and therefore clearly qualifies as insane.
The Chomsky ouevre is a mountain of offal (his odious commentary on 9-11 and apologetics and support for Mao Tse-tung is something else. And what of his denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide back in ’77?). The only excuse people have for taking this uh “super-intellectual” seriously is that they don’t actually read him at all, and are just echoing a fashionable pseudo-intellectual position. That’s the kindest spin on it.
Chomsky and his cult are delusional, mendacious, stupid in the extreme, clearly left-wing fascist – built on a deep-seated masochism, bigotry, moral relativism and a self-righteous fatuous sympathy for the ‘right’ kind of authoritarianism, tyranny and hate. How to take seriously a Hezbollah supporting ‘Jew’ who remarks, “I see no anti-Semitic Implications in Denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust”? His popularity is chilling…
Well I don’t know about that. I don’t want to know. All my friends. acquaintances, colleagues, peers read and praise Chomsky (or at least they say they read him), so I just echo them too. And they’re all anti-Zionist, well a lot of them anyway. I don’t want to stop and think what that all means. I’m just a science fiction writer, I have no time for any of this. I’m too busy reading science fiction in my spare time. Who has time for this? I have time though for the pulp stew of SF, but that’s different. This is all too disturbing, plus I don’t live in Tel Aviv and neither should you. None of this is my concern. I’m too busy schmoozing at SF Cons with too many goyim who all love Chomsky for one, so uh I don’t want to question any of this too much. Go away you rabid Zionist. You’re a loose cannon. You’re probably a racist, an Islamophobe. We just ignore you. You can’t embarrass our anti-Semitic colleagues, peers and friends who aren’t anti-Semitic anyway because they say they’re not and anyway they voted for Obama in the US and Labour in the UK (just like me as the case may be), so they can’t possibly be prejudiced against anybody. Jews included.
We just totally ignore you. I don’t know why you bother with your drivel. You fuel the flames of anti-Semitism by uh exposing it where it isn’t.
Where have I done that? I have been accused of seeing it where it ain’t in the most absurd and harebrained fashion (and that includes perverse denials of the most extreme anti-Semitism no less – Holocaust Revisionism!); but can you actually show me the beef here, give me a quote, where I explicitly accuse somebody of anti-Semitism who is not so guilty, where I don’t back up my claim with evidence?
Oh well never mind that, thing is you are an Islamophobe. Do you deny that?
‘Islamophobia’ is a relatively recent invention of Muslim radicals in the West (especially the pretend moderate Muslim extremist CAIR in the United States) and their Western apologists to deflect, stifle and disarm their critics. It has been all too successful unfortunately and as a consequence things just go from bad to worse. The excesses of Islam, jihad, Sharia continue unabated regardless.
Look closely and scrutinize just who cries ‘Islamophobia’ at any criticism of Islam and its adherents, no matter how legitimate and predicated on historical, political, religious and social realities such criticism is.
Muslim extremists and oversensitive moderates (that are not always moderate by a long shot) shriek ‘Islamophobia’ as a matter of course. Their faith in their religion and its supposed rightness and truth is so shaky and insecure at bottom that they attempt to stifle and quash any criticisms with intimidation and bullying, the better to quell their own doubts. That’s what crying ‘Islamophobia’ is all about. Liberals and conservatives in the West go along with this dishonest gangsterism in the main for a number of reasons – the ideology of cultural and moral relativism, fear, a long, sordid tradition of cowardly appeasement that is inertial, self-loathing, ignorance, superficiality, Arab oil money and purchasing power and let us not forget anti-Semitism (the real villains are the Jews). Know-nothing Westerners, anti-Semitic liberals especially, are the useful idiots of Islamists and their tyranny and oppression; the former shrieking ‘Islamophobia’ like the deeply conditioned automatons they are and thus, unwittingly or not, serve as the allies of Islamist tyranny and terror. The anti-Semitism of many of these Western ‘secularists’ ready to defend Islam and its faithful by slandering its informed, knowledgeable and reasonable critics as bigots, is palpable and pervasive among them; as much as large swaths of the insecure Muslim faithful decrying all critics of Islam as bigots are streaked through with a strong strain of anti-Semitism themselves. The shared enemy of Western liberal (and many conservative) secularists and reactionary Muslim clerics and their obedient followers remains the oldest scapegoat – the Jew and the Jew nation alike. Hence the sinister undercurrents to those crying ‘Islamophobia’ in the West and among the Muslim Ummah, all but lost and entirely over the head of our miseducated Jewish liberal “intellectual”.
These sinister undercurrents are lost to him for he is so assimilated into the gentile world that he is gentile to all intents and purposes. He or she is no longer a Jew on the outside looking in with necessary skepticism and wariness of a culture that has been at best apathetic to him or her, and at worst murderously hostile. He is now on the inside looking out, he has surrendered without a fight, for he did not even know there was anything to stand and fight for. He was never told, so successful has been his miseducation, conditioning and assimilation. It would make his life easier in every sphere, this is the unstated supposition, unstated since taboo – it is neither acknowledged nor discussed and like all taboos its smell is everywhere. The short of it is this – our miseducated Jew (it matters arguably little whether he is religiously observant or not) does not have his warning radar functioning properly. In fact it isn’t functioning at all, because it isn’t there at all. It has been weeded out through disuse, neglect and apathy. Such gentile ‘Jews’ (Jews In Name Only) are like male buck without their antlers; or to use an analogy our Jewish SF writer and reader may appreciate, they are like the Eloi, stupid and defenseless. As long as our egghead Jew is shrieking ‘Islamophobia’ mindlessly, he inadvertently reveals his adoption of the cultural relativist liberal creed, a creed not only hostile to his own, but to all humanity and truth itself. Our miseducated ‘Jew’ responds with guffaws and dismissal to this critique, he can only do so, such is the dissonance between his own specious and mad ideology and the ugly reality. The flood will come and it is coming and it will wash him away anyhow. In a nutshell – crying ‘Islamophobia’ is appeasement and accommodation to a fascism that is theocratic in its nature.
Ha I knew it. You are an Islamophobe. Racist. That’s why we won’t have anything to do with you, that and you’re a loose canon. Plus we don’t want to be bothered with any of this. It’s all too depressing, acknowledging that nothing has changed and people still blame the Jews for all the ills in this terrifying world and that would include people I consider my friends, peers and the fans and there is the depressing situation in the Middle-East which just gets worse… . Disturbing truths I don’t want to know about. I’m in the escapism business, you know that! OK we don’t always like to admit it, but we all know deep down that Kessel’s Invaders sums it all up. Yet we go on. Look at you, you read science fiction!
You’re changing the subject, and I no longer read science fiction.
Really?
Yes, like you say Kessel sums it all up. Even though he still deals.
Then what on earth?? What are you blogging about? You expect that to endear you to us? Basically telling us that we are no better than cocaine dealers who have the law on our side, and all the fans cocaine addicts! Now we have two good reasons to tell you to get stuffed, you pour scorn on science fiction and you are an Islamophobic racist.
I don’t care to endear myself to anybody. Actually I don’t pour scorn on all science fiction, and recommend a very small part of it to people who have never read it. The genre has its masterpieces, its geniuses – Olaf Stapeldon, P K Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Karel Capek, J G Ballard and plenty others of course. For every The Starmaker, War of the Newts, Beyond Apollo, His Master’s Voice, More than Human and Miracle Visitors; there are a thousand novels, way more than that even, ranging from pure dross to at best a derivative mediocrity, many of which are routinely praised as masterful by genre critics. Anyhow non-genre literature is likewise mediocre, even dreadful in the main. Although I gotta say the genre’s standards – protestations to the contrary about having ‘arrived’ – remain abysmal. Plus way way too much has been published, it drowns out the good stuff. Novels, novellas, short stories alike. Noise to signal is high. Most all wannabe science fiction writers should do something else with their time. Anything else short of robbing liquor stores. I have answered you on the ‘Islamophobia’ charge. What are you going to do when the next Jihad against Israel begins in earnest? Surely very very soon. This time it may well be worse than anything seen since ’73, it could be…
Could be what?
The end.
That couldn’t possibly happen. Anyhow if the Jews just stop building homes and if they surrender ever more territory to the peaceful Palestinians – the true Jews as Israeli SF writer and editor Lavie Tidhar calls them – who just want to be left alone, there would be peace. Plus Israel has a powerful army and air force…
You are not listening to anything I’m telling you, and you go round in circles. Never mind the Palestinians who don’t want peace, they want to destroy Israel, that’s what they say. HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, Fatah. That’s why they have so much sympathy and support in the world. That’s an unpleasant truth but really it is what it is. What about Egypt? Iran and its nuclear bomb program? That’s the big one. Hezbollah? Syria? Even Turkey. The Israeli army and air force can only do so much. They are human, not devils with occult powers nor are they supermen as much as even the staunchest Zionist would love to believe; and they are hampered by the UN and the Western and world media, Western governments and institutions, NGOs and the general public, your fellow Leftists included who largely vilify the Jews (that’s what we mean when we talk about Israel) for doing anything at all to oppose and resist the Jihad. The usual suspects will blabber on knee-jerk about ‘cycles of violence’ and ‘disproportionate response’, neither of which make any sense whatsoever and in fact are anti-Semitic criticisms, because they are nonsensical lies.
There you go, you are a right-wing rabid Zionist Islamophobe fascist.
I hear the same stupid language from anti-Semites. Of course I’m a Zionist. I know exactly what it means, unlike you.
Are you saying I’m anti-Semitic, simply because I’m not a rabid Zionist racist like you?
Either that or you are a coward desperate not to rock the boat, and offend your anti-Semitic colleagues, peers, acquaintances, friends. Who wants to make one’s social and work life more difficult than it already is? You gotta pay the bills too, I understand. Really I do. Or else you are in serious denial, head in the sand (like most).
I knew you would call me a self-hating Jew.
That’s because if it quacks like a self-hating Jew… Plus maybe you are just a coward or looking at how all this will affect your commercial prospects, your bank balance or you are in deep denial and you definitely don’t want to lose so-called friendships. Perhaps all of these things. They are not mutually exclusive.
Well then we have nothing more to say to one another.
No I guess not. Just this: what are you going to do when the next major war breaks out? All the signs are that it will be even worse than ’73, even if Israel can weather this terrible storm.
If the worst comes to the worst, if Israel is destroyed, the Left will rewrite history and pretend they were even-handed in the Middle-East conflict; even supportive of Israel and sweep all their lies about Israel, their hatred of the Jews (and that’s what it is all about) under the carpet, and they will quickly forget about the Palestinians they pretended to care about. Liberal Diaspora Jews will go along with these lies because they will be desperate to exculpate their own guilt. Then they will build another memorial or three to another holocaust of Jewry if it comes down to that, and they will lie through their teeth to their own children about where they stood and what they believed. They will lie to themselves easily enough. New lies will be built on the old ones. They will block out the past and reinvent themselves. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia or not, as the case may be. Their progeny in the main will let them get away with their lies, as progeny do, for they will not know any better and as adults they will repeat these lies to their children in turn. And a new Big Lie will be born, the Left stood with the Jews. Who cares for history after all? A few historians, academics, journalists and others will tut tut and write books setting the record straight but the lies will dominate like they always have. So it goes.
You have a crystal ball do you Nostradamus, you think you can see the future now? That’s absurd. Your blog is so pathetic in the grand scheme of things. Even in the minor scheme of things your blog is pathetic.
I know. So it is.
Now stop wasting my time. I have to get back to writing the fourth volume of my series on the genetically modified carnivorous Vulpatian alien-cyborg hybrids and their conquest of the Pleiades, with their thousand starship fleets. And I have a panel at an upcoming SF convention on androgyny and cyberpunk in the context of the Cold War that I need to write notes for. Now that is meaty stuff. Red Wolf, you think that animal totem suits you? Please you are nothing but a pimple on a hobbit’s ass. So tada you.
What’s dhimmitude anyhow?
