Do Politicians Dream of Electric Sheep?

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

It is making fun of the leader of a religion and is attaching him to someone who lived 1400 years later and tries to say that what Usama does (by the way, it is Usama and not Osama, never mind the USAma association) is the same as what Mohammad said, all because Usama wears a turban like Mohammad did (or your modern Danish cartoonist thinks he did; historically he almost certainly did not). It is the CONTENT that is offensive, not the DRAWING, get it? Now, in my opinion, the content is just short sighted, stupid, pointless, and not funny, but not offensive. I will find it a bit suspicious that the newspaper that published it, and its editor, are known right-wing, anti-liberal characters and they are even disliked by most of my Danish friends, and as such, I tend to doubt its “liberal”, free-speech supporting claims.

And then, we have the Islamisation of Europe. How much fun. Oriana Fallaci wrote two best sellers about it before she died (what is this with Italian ladies and Fascism?), Victor Davis Hanson warns us against it (although he lives in a farm in Fresno, California and generally seems to dislike whomever is not American), and the average man in Denmark seems to fear it, as you can see here:

“Hej . I am danish .
Mr. Wilders is a hero !!!
Bravo Geert Wilders ! go and get all this muslim pigs .
Its a time to wake up and look around whats happens in the western countrys . I think many of those politiks are sleeping or are afraid of ****in muslims . Mr . Wilders is a brave man and i wish him all the luck he needs . And now something to you mslims . Go home to your muslim country and stay there forever and kiss your muhammd *** .

Keep the good work mr.Wilders.”

I wonder if you replace all those “muslim(s)” with “jews” will you not find this eerily similar to what was said about them before the WWII? Am I the only one who finds the similarity a bit sickening? I am all the time looking for Holocaust survivors who will see statements such as these and write to newspaper editors and blogs and tell them that they heard similar things from ordinary Germans and Danes and French before the biggest disaster of the twentieth century happened. I hope they are a few, since they might be the only ones who can stop the biggest disaster of the 21st century from happening.

By the way, I also always want to point out the obvious: Mr. Wilders, as many others, picks up on the apparent Muslim anti-semitism by showing pictures of Muslims praising Hitler (although at least one is a picture of a salute that is like the Nazi one in the mind of a European, but not for the people who are giving it. After all, there is nothing inherently wrong about raising your right arm erected half-way up, and Hitler didn’t create the pose). Well, I keep on having to tell people that Holocaust was not undertaken by Muslims or Palestinians or Middle Easterners, rather by Europeans, the same heirs of the Christian, Jewish and humanistic tradition Mr. Wilders invites us to join; and don’t blame it only on the Germans: ordinary Dutch and French, Austrians and the English (even the former king of the latter country) were in it as well, and would you deny that anti-semitism is alive and well in Europe?

Muslim takeover of Europe, to get back to the subject. First of all, I find the idea absurd. Really, why do you think most Muslims immigrate to Europe? To set-up Islamic regimes and establish the same situation they have at home? You must be either naïve or genuinely misguided. They move to Europe because of better economic opportunities and because they do not want to live under the rule of the governments who call themselves Islamic. The media does not tell you, but the most potent movement in the modern Middle East has not been Islam, but communism. Saddam Hossein was not a Muslim radical, but a Ba’athist, member of a political party set-up by a communist Christian Arab and at the beginning mostly popular with non-Muslim groups, including Arab Jews. Arab nationalism of the post WWI era owes more to communism than to Islam, and the militant secularism of Turkish generals has more in common with the Middle Eastern political movements of the last century than does Islam.

Many Muslims who move to Europe are those who originally studied in European and American universities and who pride themselves in being secular, even atheist, and “modern”. Those who move to the US (like me) are constantly shocked by how much more deeply rooted religion is in America, compared with what they grew up with. We read Voltaire, Nietzsche and Popper and dream of secularism, but are often taken aback by how much it has back-tracked in Europe and how people like Mr. Wilders and Mr. Bush are emphasizing the “Christian” and “Jewish” side of their cultures and how people in the West are fascinated with Buddhism and Hinduism and other religions.

So, where do we get with this? Nowhere really, and this was exactly the point of this piece. I am not offering solutions, I am not critiquing anything, and I am not fantasizing that I can right any wrongs. I know that many a times, misunderstanding is beyond that, it is really bias and bigotry guised in the form of “cultural barriers” and incompatibility.

I also know that sadly many of these “misunderstandings” are not going to be condemned or even recognized for their danger until all those “Muslim pigs” are forced out of Europe (or just killed) and that after the upcoming slaughter of Muslims, we will have a long period of remorse when we (or rather you, as I will also be killed along with other “Muslims” despite protesting that I am not one) shall study the causes and roots of the biggest hate-crime of the 21st century at the universities and research institutions. I am just writing these as they come to my mind, leaving it for those future researchers to find and to realize that “freedom of speech” in form of hate-speech was indeed recognized as what it is and that human beings never learn from their past mistakes.