Yet another conservative misses the mark on Wilders and Islam

Jeffery R. writes:

I’m a frequent reader of your blog and enjoy your commentary very much. I thought you might like to be aware of the linked article, “Who’s Afraid of Geert Wilders,” by Michael Weiss at The New Criterion, if you were not already. p>

LA replies:

Thanks for sending. I’ve just read it. It’s an appalling article—ignorant, sophomoric, superficial. Weiss keeps obsessively chewing the bone of Wilders’s “ban the Koran” idea, as though that were his main position, when it was a rhetorical point, was never presented as a serious proposal, and, as far as I’m aware, has not been repeated by Wilders in at least a year. However, a serious substantive point underlay the “ban the Koran” rhetoric, which was that the Koran is indeed like Mein Kampf, that it is indeed a call to war and extermination. Innumerable millions of human beings have been killed, enslaved, oppressed, and dehumanized over the last 1,388 years by devout Muslims following the dictates of that book.

Meanwhile Weiss completely ignores, doesn’t mention even in passing, Wilders’s actual policy on Islam, which is to stop Muslim immigration and send sharia believers back to their home countries. Since Weiss is so much wiser than Wilders, what does he think ought to be done about Islam in Europe? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t grapple with the issue at all. The article is yet another exercise in empty superior attitudinizing from The New Criterion, a journal of conservative cultural criticism which offers no useful analysis of the left (as I discuss here), and snottily dismisses the single most important figure defending our civilization at present.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2010 05:09 PM | Send