It seems to have started while I was out of the country, at Wafa Sultan’s recent speech at a Toronto synagogue.
Obviously, I wasn’t there. I know someone who was and trust her observations. (See the link above).
Also, I highly recommend that you read this thread.
This story is gaining traction — see Andrew Bostom’s comments today at Pajamas Media — so I feel obliged to say something, especially as someone who has been the focus/target of similar “things” before. Those experiences may or may not color my take. I’m not sure. You decide.
Yes, Tarek Fatah’s next book is (or is that “was” at this point?) Why We Hate the Jews. The same house is also publishing Michael Coren’s book Why the Catholics Are Right. It’s a series on “controversial” issues, and in a rare fit of creativity and courage, a Canadian publisher has decided to do something provocative for once. Obviously, because I follow these things, albeit from a vast distance, I know this. Not everybody does, and even if they do, they might not “get” it.
Next: Tarek Fatah has been vocally anti-burkha and anti-Sharia courts. He has also been anti- the corrupt “Human Rights” Commissions. All this is a matter of public record. I saw him in the audience when Mark Steyn spoke at Chapters, and he seemed to be enjoying himself a great deal.
I have also met Fatah a couple of times. Everybody knows he is a lefty. He likes being a lefty. I doubt he is terribly fond of me, considering what I’ve written about Islam on this blog, if he gives me any thought at all, which I doubt. I don’t care either way.
However:
That Mohammed consumated his marriage to Aisha when she was nine years old seems incontravertable. In fact, insisting that she was 14 or 19 in the face of all the “evidence” ironically makes my reading of the source material more “Muslim fundamentalist” than it does Fatah’s!
That Mohammed had sex with a nine year old girl isn’t just a creepy thing because “they did things differently in those days.” (And that’s always the funny part, because the same Muslims who say “they did things differently in those days” can be pretty quiet when it comes to people “doing it today” — because Mohammed did…)
It is creepy because it is creepy.
And pardon my Western sensibility, but a true “prophet” would be someone who didn’t follow the strictures of his time, no?
Hence my ad nauseum line that Jesus raised a nine year old girl from the dead, and somehow managed not to have sex with her afterwards! Phew! So much for “all religions are basically alike”…
I was also startled to see this Facebook thread, in which one commenter makes the matter of fact observation that many Muslims DO insist that (sniff) unless you read the Koran in Arabic, you can’t possibly understand it (you stupid infidel). Conveniently (for them) this renders all attempts at criticism moot. Cute trick.
I’ve been told this by Muslims on phone in radio shows and read it countless times. It seems to me (I wasn’t there) that that was the point Wafa Sultan was making in her speech. However, on this Facebook thread, Fatah was prompted to call out the poster who made it, telling him to “take this hatred somewhere else.”
I actually appreciated Fatah’s candor in that post:
You sound like the Muslim haters who relish in their appetite of bigotry, but dress it up as of they were trying to liberate us Muslims at a great cost to themselves.
Although unlike Fatah, I’m not impugning “Jim’s” motives (don’t know him and he sounds perfectly reasonable etc), Fatah is right that yes, there are people like that. There’s me, for one. I just leave out the “pretend” part, right? Come on. Let’s just be honest. Please.
Some people are afraid of forfeiting their position in the politically correct Canada of 2010/their future Order of Canada/friendships/their publishing deals/other stuff I don’t have.
Other people are struggling to face horrible facts and balking, because they are human.
Isn’t the lack of candor all around the problem? Isn’t this just what I’ve been saying here, for years, in my own crude way?
Can’t we all NOT just get along?
