Derbyshire on Islam, revisited

Among the egregious so-called right-wing figures who dismiss the Islam threat and seek to discredit serious Islam critics is John Derbyshire. I recently added these four items to VFR’s collection of entries on Derbyshire which I had neglected to include before, dealing with his views on Islam:

Derbyshire’s rejection of conceptual thought, cont. [July 2007. Discussion of Derbyshire article in which he argued that there is nothing meaningful about Islam and nothing worth knowing about it. See especially my comment beginning, “Derbyshire in his essay ‘Islamophobia’ embraces pure anti-intellectualism.”]

Derbyshire, reviewing Robert Spencer, says any resistance to Islam is futile [August 2007. “Derbyshire is a nihilist who, instead of looking for ways to revivify and protect our civilization, writes it off as doomed—doomed by Christianity. Thus his new-found opposition to Islam in this article, and his articulation of a policy that would defend the West from Islam, are not real. They are positions he picks up in order to discard with a contemptuous shrug. His one real agenda, his one abiding passion, is to discredit Christianity. And in order to accomplish that end, he would rather see our civilization Islamized and destroyed than try to defend it.”]

Derbyshire endorses Separationism, while attacking Separationists [September 2007. “In a little month, Derbyshire has gone from (1) dismissing the idea of a Muslim threat to the West, to (2) saying that separationism to defend the West from Islam would be a good idea, but that the West will never adopt it because the West is Christian and therefore weak, and so the West is doomed, but that’s cool because it shows how bad Christianity is, to (3) adopting the separationist strategy while attacking separationists and Christian critics of Islam as ‘Islamophobes.’ “]

Derbyshire deported from New English Review [October 2007. “I’ve been told that one of the founding purposes of New English Review was to serve as an Islamo-critical vehicle. Since Derbyshire has repeatedly trashed all serious Islam critics as ‘Islamophobes,’ neurotic obsessives, and people ‘who need to get a life’ (in his current comment he adds the illuminating insight that the Islam critics’ efforts are ‘auto-erotic’), naturally he didn’t belong at NER.”]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 07, 2011 07:30 AM | Send