Does Wilders really have Muslim friends?

(Note: See correction below. It was not Wilders, but Lord Pearson, who referred to “my Muslim friends.”)

Ed L. writes:

According to the BBC piece that you cited, Wilders said something oddly tantalizing: “Most of my Muslim friends think it’s a very good film.”

What are you inclined to make of this? Can we take Wilders at his literal word that, in fact, he does have Muslim friends, or should we let it pass as merely an ephemeral rhetorical utterance in which he tried to legitimize himself?

To the extent that we can take the sentence at face value, Wilders is not merely asking us to posit the existence of moderate Muslims; he is asking us to imagine a vastly more improbable subset of individuals. If such friends of Geert really do exist, what can we possibly surmise about them, in terms of who they are, the capacity in which they know Wilders, and their own creedal attachments to Islam? Does Wilders ever meet them in person? If so, are special arrangements made to let them past his bodyguards? More to the point, how could any Muslim who knows about Wilders and has seen Fitna possibly consider him a friend in any genuine sense? That’s even harder to imagine than a Jewish “friend” of Leni.

What would be really amazing would be if a Muslim individual stepped forward (or even put out some clandestine testimonial) claiming to be Wilders’ friend and to aver that Fitna is a very good film. Like Spencer, I’m waiting, I’m waiting,…

LA replies:

I agree it’s strange, and needs to be explained.

- end of initial entry -

Van Wijk writes:

This is a new version of the embarrassing old trope “Many of my friends are from Group X.”

You are correct. Much of Wilders’ ammunition is liberal ammunition, and so the logical conclusions regarding aliens in the West as drawn by traditionalists will remain unknown to him. Perhaps he does agree with us entirely but believes that he must use such language in order to appeal to liberals. I think we know by now that realpolitik will not save us.

He is a truly great and brave man, but comments like this may doom him to failure in the long run.

March 8, 2009

On February 15, Ortelio tried and failed to send me following e-mail. He succeeded in getting it to me on March 8.

Ortelio wrote:

If you read the BBC story again you will see that it was Lord Pearson, not Wilders, who referred to his [Pearson’s] Muslim friends.

LA replies:

Yes, you’re right. It’s the typical sub-competent journalism that we have today. Here’s the passage from the BBC article, which VFR copied in its entirety on February 12:

Mr Wilders was invited to the House of Lords for a screening of Fitna by the UK Independence Party’s Lord Pearson.

The peer said it was a “matter of free speech”, telling the BBC: “We are going to show it anyway because we think MPs and peers should see this film.”

‘No purpose’

He added: “The film isn’t offensive unless you are a violent Islamist. Most of my Muslim friends think it’s a very good film.”

Evidently it is Pearson, not Wilders, who spoke of his Muslim friends. But since both Pearson and Wilders were referred to just before that quote, and since there is a sub-head “No purpose,” in between the preceding Pearson quote and the “he,” thus breaking the immediate connection to that antecedent, and since the article is mainly about Wilders, not about Pearson, the reader could easily believe the “he” refers to Wilders. In fact you were the only person who realized it refers to Pearson, not Wilders.

Thank you for pointing this out and for relieving us of the odd notion that Wilders is going around talking about his Muslim friends who approve of Fitna.

Ed L. writes:

I just saw the addendum to this thread. I suppose that, technically, I have egg on my face, but so be it. Reading a brief news article shouldn’t be a hair-splitting hand-wringing exercise in scriptural hermeneutics. To catch things like that (at least for me, if not Ortelio) would require taking an inordinate amount of time to read what ought to have been a straightforward prosaic news item.

The actual antecedent of “He,” after the “No Purpose” subhead, is “The peer.” Why couldn’t the unnamed author have written “Pearson” in place of “The Peer”? And furthermore, why does just about every sentence or every other sentence in BBC articles (this one is typical of the pattern) have to result in a new paragraph?

Even accepting that the “he” was Pearson rather than Wilders, all of the questions I raised in my original comments (except about letting them past personal bodyguards—assuming that Pearson himself doesn’t have any) still apply. There remains the outstanding question of how any Muslim could possibly have anything good to say about Fitna, regardless of any friendship or contact with Wilders or Pearson. It’s one thing to ask us to envisage and to accept the existence of moderate Muslims as people with whom we can coexist on a live-and-let-live basis; if we don’t antagonize them, they won’t terrorize us. It is at least an order of magnitude more difficult to imagine moderate Muslims who would endorse Fitna (rather than merely refrain from bombing reprisals in retaliation for it).

LA replies:

I wouldn’t say you have egg on your face. I and Van Wijk shared your view. As I’ve said, the passage in the article was ambiguous.

Writers today constantly use pronouns without clear antecedents, leaving their meaning uncertain, and either misleading the reader or requiring the reader to stop and go back and make sure what a “he” or a “they” is referring to. This comes from writers not looking at their own writing and seeing how it looks from the reader’s point of view. The rule I follow in my own writing is to try to make my meaning clear at each step of the way, so that the reader is not thrown by anything and has to stop and figure out what is being said.

When I encounter that kind of ambiguity or confusion in a published article or book it bothers me a lot. It shows a slovenly self-absorption and a lack of consideration for the reader characteristic of a society without standards. The attitude is, I just write what I want to write. I don’t have to care how my writing appears to others or if they can understand it.

In my view it is also to some extent an outcome of a leftist mindset that deliberately cultivates a lack of mental clarity. Leftism requires a populace that does not think clearly, so that they can be manipulated.

But the situation is not hopeless. I don’t think it’s all part of a plot. A lot of this slovenliness is there because it hasn’t been challenged. Writing to the reporters and editors responsible for such articles and politely pointing out the ambiguity and confusion in their writing will help. Some people in the media are self-esteeming slobs and won’t care. But some will care.

Not long after the 9/11 attack I wrote to a contributor at NRO regarding a relatively minor but still startling mistake in an article of his, in which he had referred to the UN building as being a “short distance” from the World Trade Center, making it sound as though they were a few blocks away from each other, when, in fact, they are in completely different parts of Manhattan, with several miles between them. He replied dismissively and said it was a trifling point and didn’t matter. I lost all respect for him and never read him again. If he didn’t care about correctness in minor points, why should he be trusted to care about correctness in larger points?

Ed replies:

If lack of clarity with pronouns in English is bad enough, we can imagine how much more confusing it can be in Spanish (wherein personal subject pronouns are typically omitted, and there is no clear consensus among grammarians about their appropriate usage) and Japanese (which doesn’t have AMO-AMAS-AMAT verb conjugations, and doesn’t even have any recognized sense of first, second, and third person). My opinion on split infinitives is that they’re a vestigial weakness that has evolved into the English language; the structure of English syntax is inherently such that there’s often no satisfactory way of avoiding them.

As for authors’ clarity, comprehensibility, and capacity for self-critique, at the heart of the matter, I think, is how much importance they ascribe to it. High school mentality, which many carry permanently into adulthood, tends to lead people to flaunt lack of aptitude in mathematics. Any insistence on pedantic rigor, in essentially any intellectual endeavor, is tantamount to fingernails on the chalkboard. Could that partially explain a subliminal recalcitrance in contemporary professional writing?

Lastly, you closed your reply to Ortelio with: “Thank you for pointing this out and for relieving us of the odd notion that Wilders is going around talking about his Muslim friends who approve of Fitna.” But isn’t it just as bad that Pearson is doing it?

LA replies:

I don’t know anything about Pearson. In any case, he’s not a famous opponent of Islam. But the question is a valid one. The only Muslims who would approve of Fitna are Muslims who oppose the core of their religion. And such “Muslims” can have no influence within the Islamic community, though they continue to identify with Islam. The only Muslims who can actually be on our side in opposing the spread of Islam are ex-Muslims, people who are not only non-observant, but who have ended their identity with the Islamic community.

LA writes:

On further thought, I have to admit that the problem of pronouns with ambiguous antecedents is not new. When reading Plutarch’s Lives, for example, I have not infrequently needed to stop and figure out which person was being referred to by a particular “he.” That great writers of former times used ambiguous pronouns does not excuse the practice, though perhaps they assumed a greater degree of reading comprehension, in which the reader would effortlessly grasp from the context what the antecedent of a pronoun was.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 14, 2009 06:22 PM | Send