The oh so superior Frum puts Wilders in his place

In a March 1 column on Geert Wilders in The National Post, David Frum has not a single positive thing to say about the West’s leading foe of Islamization. Frum is condescending and superior, writing about Wilders as though he were a distasteful object. It’s evident that Frum has no understanding of the nature of the Islam threat, and no understanding of the unique seriousness with which Wilders of all European politicians approaches it. Fitna—a movie that in 17 minutes captures the essence of the permanent Islamic war against non-Muslims, impresses Frum not at all. As you read the column, you get the feeling that all this is somehow beneath Frum’s level, too dirty and low for his delicate tastes.

Frum’s intent in this column is to lessen Wilders’s stature. But he only lessens his own—if that’s still possible. Who is Frum, whose entire career has consisted of self-positioning, self-advancement, and one instance of embarrassingly bad judgment after another, to look down at a man who has put his life on the line to confront the gravest danger facing our civilization? For all his articles and books, Frum remains, in intellectual terms, a pre-prepubescent, unable to grasp or grapple with realities. He ought to have stayed at National Review, which is, after all, the home of the prepubescent-cons. But it appears that even National Review was too hardline for him.

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Frum’s article about Wilders strangely reminds me of Mark Helprin’s unpleasant, superior piece about the Minutemen in 2006, which I described as

an exercise in attitudinizing. [Helprin] looks down contemptuously on the Minutemen as “a febrile militia of Willie Nelson look-alikes … armed geezers,” and, with more appropriateness, he harshly attacks the business interests and the anti-American left who promote open borders. Yet he himself has nothing to say on the issue. He’s somewhere in the middle between those two distasteful extremes, too good and too pure for everyone.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 06, 2009 11:35 AM | Send