inspired by Rupert in the comments.
TR is a real hate-figure for the likudnik Right in America. I recently had a flier from The New Republic advertising a 40,000 word hatchet job on him, no doubt timed to coincide with the latest refusal of his visa.
I am not quite sure why they hate him so much. I know his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood. That doesn’t seem entirely to determine his grandson’s style of thought. I know he argues that it is possible to be a Muslim and a Westerner and I think that this is his real offence. It is an existential threat not just to certain styles of Islam, but to certain styles of Western-ness, so to say. In particular, if you substitute the right variables, you are led through the following reductio ad absurdum:
- You can be fully muslim and a full citizen of the West, happier to be there than in, eg Iraq or Syria, and with as much right to be there as any other citizen, wherever their ancestors came from.
- Israel is not part of the Middle East. It is a Western country, a real democracy, etc etc …
- You can be wholly muslim and wholly Israeli
… at this point it would be useful to know the lolcode for “Error. Does not compute” because you get to watch it enacted in the pages of TNR: having reached point three, the Dalek spins around squawking and blasting in a small and very vicious circle until its batteries run down, a process which could take another fifty years.
In fact I think this may cast light on the curious conviction of the American right that Europe is being outbred by slimy Muslim hordes. That there is a problem with the children of muslim immigrants is obvious. But it’s not that they will outbreed us and dominate the whole continent within fifty years. The numbers just don’t stack up. But of course there is one place in the world where this is a huge fact, dominating all political discourse, and that is the Greater, post-1967 Israel. I suspect that at least some of the hysteria about “Eurabia” is displaced anxiety about Israel among people to whom the distinctions between Israel and Europe are not as clear as they are to us natives.