I have just come across your blog entry about Jorg Lau’s attack on American “Christianism.” Your German contributor put it very well when she called Jorg Lau’s article “primitive and stupid.” (“Primitive,” by the way, if used by a German in this context, means “inordinately simple minded and blinkered,” which is an apt description.)
Although your blog entry is a couple of days old, ,maybe you will be interested in some background information on Jorg Lau.
Lau is married to Mariam, nee Nirumand, daughter of Bahman Nirumand, who is one of those irritating “Islam experts” by grace of their birth, with whom the German media is cultivating a seemingly never-ending love affair.
Nirumand was born in Tehran in 1936 and came to Germany as a student in the Fifties. He read German philology, philosophy and Iranian studies, his doctor’s thesis covered Bertolt Brecht. He returned to teach in Iran, then, fleeing the regime of the Shah, went back to Germany, where he became one of the leading members of the “Movement of 1968” at the German universities, which is still considered here an anti-authoritarian revolt, while its main achievement was firmly to replace German historical guilt by American guilt and to turn Israel into the worldwide number one enemy of the people. But you very probably know all that.
After the Shah’s exit, Nirumand returned briefly to Iran, only to flee once again when the Mullahs came to power.
Nirumand equates “Christian and Jewish fundamentalism” with “Islamism.” They are, after all, according to Nirumand, “instrumentalizing the faith to mobilise the unenlightened masses for their goals.” And Israel’s ownership of nuclear weapons, like that of Iran, has “nothing to do with neither religion nor culture” but is “naked safeguarding of interests.” The above quotes are, by the way, from an interview Bahman Nirumand granted the newspaper Neues Deutschland, mouthpiece of the successor party of the SED, the PDS.
When the recent hostage crisis took place, Nirumand analyzed it as follows in the leading German newsmagazine Der Spiegel: “Iran is at the crossroads. Either the radical Islamists around Ahmadinejad … will succeed in monopolizing the power, or his critics, the moderates, the reformers, will manage to take over the helm. This round goes to the moderates.” As a German blogger put it: “Following this logic from the nuthouse, the kidnapping was even a good thing because it somehow weakened Ahmadinejad.”
So much about father Nirumand. To understand where his daughter Mariam Lau, born 1962 to a German mother, stands, the following snippets of information may be interesting.
This is from another Der Spiegel article and in this vile little bit of anti-Catholic/Christian sentiment Mariam Lau informs us that “Many Catholics who are trying to live with their Church’s guidelines are shattered by the election of Cardinal Ratzinger. On the other hand, some intellectuals are reveling in submissive gestures and self-flagellation rituals that put a Shiite in Kerbala to shame…. What is ethically relativist, and thus somehow arbitrary, about the stance that divorce is better than a broken down relationship? To some, the unborn life in the petri-dish is sacred, to others the freedom of individual decision—why is one ethical and the other relativist? Some consider euthanasia hubris, others a deed of mercy—where is here the indifference?”
Whether this conservative is as “primitive” as she looks and really hasn’t twigged what ethical relativism is about or whether she is spouting her father’s creed that “Not Islam, but Islamism is the problem, and other religions are just as bad,” I don’t know.
Mariam Lau, who moved, as it seems, without problems, from her job as film editor at the leftist daily taz to chief correspondent for the “conservative” Die Welt, should be remembered, too, as somebody who called Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners “pulp fiction with sociologic camouflage code,” namely in a taz article headed “Little Historians” in April 1996, thus sailing safely on the German mainstream. She, too, called the Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen Memorial for victims of the former East German Ministry of State Security (“Stasi”) disparagingly an “educational shock treatment” in Die Welt, another big hit with the German Zeitgeist. Those two statements are, mind you, chronologically ten years apart, with a self-professed change of political stance in between, which proves that the labels “conservative” and “leftist” are without importance and that the staples anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism keep safely together what, at first sight, may seem incongruous ideological bedfellows.
Jorg Lau (born 1964) used to work, as did Mariam Nirumand, for the leftist taz, before joining the liberal (in the European, not in the American meaning of the word) weekly ZEIT. In October 2007, he was appointed foreign correspondent for the Berlin office.
In a country like Germany, which is historically suffering from a blind spot for morality and ethics, coupled with the burden of the Holocaust (which has, interestingly, increased and not reduced anti-Semitism), the faddish, arbitrary “multi-kulti” Ersatz-religion was just what was needed to make an appearance of having overcome the dirty past without having to change one little bit. In such a climate, the unholy Nirumand-trinity was bound to become a huge success.
Note in the blog entry that Lau is denouncing Robertson for his stance on homosexuality, but doesn’t seem to mind that homosexuals are hanged in Iran.
Calamitas
As a postscript, I would like to add that about three weeks ago Stefan Herre, the man who founded the Islam-critical blog Politically Incorrect (the most-read among the political blogs in Germany), received death threats after an article in the German mainstream media denounced him as a “hate-preacher.” Threats he found reason enough to leave Germany together with his young family. And it will get worse.