In a splenetic comment to an earlier post, a reader presents us with a clinical example of what I have called Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus: an AIDS-like memetic infection that attacks the social organism’s immune system, rendering it incapable of making essential discriminations — in particular, exactly those self/other distinctions that any organism must make to defend itself against external threats and invasive pathogens.
We read:
When Brandeis University looked into Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s phony claims of fleeing Somalia to gain asylum, her vile remarks about Muslims, and her support of mass murderer Anders Brievik, they decided that they did not want to provide their imprimatur for her. The right wing protested loudly, as they suddenly became staunch defenders of freedom of speech. However, if Ali has the free speech rights to vilify Muslims, then Louis Farrakhan has the same right to vilify whites, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the same right to vilify Jews. Would those who loudly defend Ali make the same vociferous defense of a university withdrew an award to Farrakhan or Ahmadinejad? Wake me up when that happens…
If a writer wants to defame Islam, then she has the freedom to do so and have her writings celebrated by a large university, because when Muslims are concerned, anything is fair game.
In autoimmune diseases, the body’s threat-detection mechanism malfunctions, losing the ability to distinguish between invasive pathogens and its own tissue — between self and other — and the body begins to attack itself. In the most lethal forms of autoimmune diseases, the immune system itself becomes the target of the immune response. This is far more dangerous: it completely neutralizes the body’s defenses, and the victim quickly dies of opportunistic infections. This is what the human immunodeficency virus does, and before treatments were discovered to suppress its disease mechanism, AIDS was a death sentence. The cultural equivalent of HIV is what we see here.
Formerly infected by a virulent and exquisitely evolved memetic agent, a woman has managed to cure herself of it. Knowing that this bug is aggressively opportunistic, highly contagious, mutates quickly, is almost completely resistant to all antibiotics, and is epidemic throughout much of the world, she makes her way to the West, which is already immunosuppressed to the point that an accelerating infection by this restless pathogen has caused significant necrosis in large areas of formerly healthy tissue.
Seeing that her adopted culture’s immune response is faltering, she attempts to activate it. She does so by distributing a film. So far has the opportunistic infection already progressed, however, that her collaborator is murdered in the street by a carrier of the same memetic pathogen.
Meanwhile, the immune system of her Western host is weakening rapidly under the progressively debilitating effect of the second, and ultimately more lethal pathogen — C.I.V. (If I may coin another expression, I’ll say that this disease is ‘ideo-pathic”.) By attempting to trigger a defensive reaction, she attracts the attention of this hijacked system, and it does indeed begin to mount a response: it attacks her.
And this is what you see here. “Support” for Anders Breivik? Nonsense. “Vilify Muslims”? No, her criticism is of the mind-virus that has infected them. “Where Muslims are concerned, anything is fair game?” Nonsense upon stilts, that one: a startling, total inversion of reality in a self-abnegating Western culture that relentlessly derogates its own history and traditions, but that cannot even bring itself to name its ancient and implacable enemy, let alone to speak frankly about it — and certainly not to resist it.
7 Comments
This article is interesting, because the commenters all disagree with it. The commenters seem more intelligent than the author.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117348/ayaan-hirsi-ali-brandeis-controversy
Ali and Breivik share the same goal: “crushing” Islam militarily. Ali blames Breivik’s murderous rampage not on Breivik, but on those who would censor him:
Breivik “says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence (who inspired him to kill). Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence.”
He had no other choice! If that is not an expression of sympathy for a mass murderer, then I don’t know what is.
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Ali refers to the world’s largest religion as “a destructive, nihilistic culture of death” which “legitimates murder” and must be “crushed.” If that is not vilification – as well as a stunningly broad and grossly inaccurate condemnation of a billion people – then I don’t know what is.
* * * *
Let’s suppose that instead of being born in Somalia, Ali was Palestinian. Let us further suppose that her grandfather was evicted from his home by Israeli troops in 1948, her family has lived in occupied land since then, and her brother was killed in the Gaza massacre of 2012. She then refers to Judaism as a destructive and nihilistic religion which legitimizes murder.
Would you then denounce a university’s decision to rescind an award to her with the same vehemence as you denounce Brandeis’s decision to rescind Ali’s award?
You seem not to be bothered that Muslim students at Brandeis might be offended by a commencement ceremony honoree whose shtick is to defame and castigate Islam with the same intensity as Anne Coulter employs to defame and castigate liberals. Would you stand up for the right of Jewish graduates not to be similarly offended by a Jew hater?
* * * *
The fact that you can get away with saying things about Muslims which you could not get away with regarding any other religion is self-evident. Ali has the right to spew venom about Islam to her heart’s content; that is not the issue here. However she has no right to be honored for her obloquy.
I would add that Muslims have a far greater claim to consider Christianity (and the West in general) as their “ancient and implacable enemy” than the other way around. Christians have committed genocide against Muslims from the Crusades through the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; they have supported dictators running puppet governments who tyrannized their citizens; and they have placed Western access to cheap oil above the civil liberties and human rights of Arabs. Whatever evil committed by Muslims in response us far outweighed by the evil committed upon them.
OEM, the first quote in your first comment is taken wildly out of context. I have to think that you did not read the original comment, just quoted it from other sources which also took it out of context.
It was in a speech about some who advocate silence when discussing social,problems. She explained that she and others were quoted by Breivek, but he clearly said he was motivated by the silence of others.
Here is the quote in context:
” …that one man who killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against political Islam in Europe and America — myself among them — but he does not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence. Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence.”
She does not support him, she just says that silence led to his violence. It’s a reasonable belief. I agree with her.
Dom: I read the entire quote before posting it, and it is not taken out of context.
In the first sentence, she exculpates herself from any responsibility for his actions, even though he cited her writings in his manifesto.
In the next two sentences, she expresses sympathy for him as she approvingly cites his frustration at being “silenced,” which motivated him to commit heinous acts of violence. What choice did he have? What can a poor boy do – in sleepy Oslo town, there’s no place for a street fighting man.
Peter:
I would certainly stand up for their right to hear the warnings of, say, someone who wished to speak plainly about the Nazis at a time when the mainstream was in deep denial about their ideology and their aims — and were such a person brave enough to sound the alarm despite being threatened with death by the Nazis for doing so, I’d be more than willing to thank her for it in public, whether there were to be some Germans in the audience or not. Some things are just different from other things, you see, in ways that matter — and there are things in this world, believe it or not, that matter more than ensuring that nobody is ever offended.
As I said, the effect of C.I.V. is to suppress a culture’s ability to make necessary discriminations, and here you continue to offer a textbook example. To a culture weakened by this disorder, everything is equivalent to everything else, and so Islam stands in no different relation to our own civilization than Christianity and Judaism do; therefore what matters is not that we make a frank assessment of Islam, its totalitarian ideology, its utter incompatibility with Western norms, its unquenchable thirst for Christian and Jewish blood and for the conversion or subjugation of all humanity, and the destructive and irreversible effect of mass Muslim immigration on Western homelands. No, to a society dying of C.I.V. the only thing that matters, when even the most rational and necessary discriminations have become intolerable, is that nobody will be offended. And the worse it gets, the harder we must try.
Or, as someone else once said: “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
Your wild assault on Ms. Hirsi Ali — insisting that she actually approves of massacring teenagers — is a remarkably vicious libel. But properly understood, it gives a clean and clear example of the way in which a diseased culture’s immune system attacks itself.
You wrote:
And so they do, if you hadn’t noticed. With bells on. (That’s rather the point of all this, actually.) That might explain some of this stuff.
But thanks for weighing in. Now that you’ve expressed your “sympathy” for their fury, and have “approvingly cited their frustration” at the injustices they’ve had to endure, I’m sure that those waging anti-Western jihad in its many forms will be glad of your “support”.
After all, what choice do they have?
The whole world knows that Islamists delight in telling the world that they delight in murdering Israelis and Jews the world over.
You are a disgusting [scatological expletive deleted – The Editors], OEM.