Some of us are playing a VERY long game.
It requires a certain (perhaps, in my case, sociopathic) temperament.
Plus I’m a Taurus.
You will rarely see me apologizing for anything I’ve written because I’ve been around long enough to have lost track of the number of times my “crazy” ideas were proven correct.
Of course, I’ve rarely received apologies (or acknowledgements), either.
(Coincidentally, Arnie and I have noticed lately that some of our most vociferous human pests, who tried to torment us for years, have finally fallen silent, at least for now. I vowed that I would outlive them, and I have. However, many bloggers and other writers have been silenced by similar, even lesser, trolls. If only they’d stayed the course…)
Tarek Fatah is classy enough to admit he was on the wrong side of Mark Steyn’s “Future Belongs to Islam” “controversy.”
Mr Fatah dismissed it, as did many others, as “alarmist” – and in my own magazine, too. (The Maclean’s archive is impenetrable, but you can find the Fatah piece here). On the other hand, he sportingly conceded:
“Mark Steyn Has A Right To Be Wrong”
Which is more generous than the Canadian Islamic Congress, who sued over the piece in three jurisdictions in an attempt to get a lifetime publication ban imposed on me in my own country.
Tarek Fatah also has a right to be wrong, which he is quite often. But that’s actually one of the more interesting things about him. Most so-called “moderate Muslims” turn out on not so close inspection to be people who want to head in the same direction as the non-moderate Muslims, although perhaps not going quite so far, or quite so fast. But Mr Fatah has a contrarian streak that wouldn’t be unusual in, say, the Fleet Street of Christopher Hitchens but which is extremely rare in the Muslim world. And, at the risk of damning with faint praise, he has a personal courage far beyond anything Cameron & Co can muster.
And in this case he happens to be, belatedly, right. America Alone is not “alarmist”:
If anything, it was insufficiently alarmist. What’s underway is happening far faster than I suggested eight years ago.
