Carlin Romano: racist

Posted to www.marxmail.org on February 23, 2006

Each day I take a look at Denis Dutton's "Arts and Letters Daily" to keep up to date with what's on the front burner of an important segment of the conservative movement, although one that does not enjoy as high a profile as Fox News, David Horowitz's Frontpage, etc.

Dutton is a fellow traveler of Frank Furedi's libertarian sect in Great Britain that is grouped around spiked-online.com. Like Furedi, Dutton is a big fan of DDT, "development" in the Amazon rainforest, the importance of High Culture, etc. Basically we are talking about a rather toxic mixture of ABC television's John Stossel, infamous for his "news" reports on the dangers of organic food, etc. and Hilton Kramer's New Criterion.

Dutton, a smooth operator, sold his website to the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago for more than a million dollars reportedly. This was a time of superinflated dot.com stocks. I doubt that anybody would now pay 10 cents for this idiotic website.

Today, Dutton has a link to an article that appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Carlin Romano, their staff book reviewer who is also a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since Romano has never struck me as a screaming lunatic in the Dutton/Furedi mold, I was curious what earned him a link in aldaily.com.

Apparently, Romano has joined the Islamophobic current now coalescing around the Danish cartoons controversy. In an article titled "Author sees growing Muslim enclaves hoping to rule Europe," Romano finds much to agree with in Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within." (http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/books/13896555.htm), the subject of his review. Romano also reports on Alan Jamieson's "Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict" and Efraim Karsh's "Islamic Imperialism: A History" (Karsh is a long-time Zionist apologist).

Bawer, according to Romano, is a gay, neoconservative American literary critic from New York who has lived in Amsterdam. This might ring a bell. Pim Fortuyn was another Dutch gay who considered Moslems a threat, stating "if it were legally possible, I'd say no more Muslims should ever enter this country" Gay Islamophobia is a growing phenomenon internationally apparently. In Great Britain, Peter Tatchell has charged George Galloway with homophobia despite a voting record on gay rights that is quite progressive. Tatchell's slanders have been picked up in the USA by Doug Ireland who repeats them on his blog.

This trope about Islam boring away from within is of course a throwback to the 1950s when there was a red under every bed and when films like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" played the same sort of role as the Arab-bashing "True Lies" and "Rules of Engagement" play today.

Romano writes that "Karsh and Jamieson serve up further uncomfortable tidbits." What might be uncomfortable to Romano? Forcing polygamy on Christians? Burning Jews at the stake? Here's what he is worried about: "The great English historian Edward Gibbon thought Arabic might have become the language of Oxford and Cambridge if Charles Martel's Frankish army hadn't stopped an expansionist Arab force at Poitiers in 732."

Oooh, what a scary idea. Speaking Arabic! One wonders if Romano has any idea of the manner in which the filthy Islamic hordes ruled in Spain.

British historian Stanley Lane-Pool has written:

"For nearly eight centuries, under the Mohamedan rule, Spain set all Europe a shining example of a civilized and enlightened state. Her fertile provinces rendered doubly prolific, by the industrious engineering skill of the conquerors bore fruit a hundredfold, cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys in the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana whose names, and names only commemorate the vanished glories of their past.

"...To Cordoba belong all the beauty and ornaments that delight the eye or dazzle the sight. Her long line of Sultans form her crown of glory; her necklace is strung with the pearls which her poets have gathered from the ocean of language; her dress is of the banners of learning, well-knit together by her men of science; and the masters of every art and industry are the hem of her garments.

"Art, literature and science prospered as they then prospered nowhere else in Europe...

"Mathematics, astronomy, botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. Whatever makes a kingdom great and prosperous, whatever tends to refinement and civilization, was found in Muslim Spain..."

(Introduction to "The Moors in Spain")

Romano continues:

According to Bawer, liberals in Europe, even more than their American counterparts, want to believe that most Muslim immigrants share Western middle-class goals: a safe place to live, opportunities for their children, and the like. That accounts, Bawer argues, for the odd mix in their attitudes to Muslims: joy in the "multiculturalism" that makes their previously homogeneous societies more "colorful," and a nativist desire to keep Muslims in their place as exotica.

Bawer asserts that the reality - confirmed for him by the resistance of European Muslims to assimilation, and the marked presence in their communities of honor killings, homophobia, polygamy, marital rape, forced marriage, and intolerance of democracy and pluralism - is that European Muslim leaders, with demographics on their side, still harbor the millennial hope of taking power in Europe, and see the European attitude as both weak and hostile. It is "political correctness," Bawer writes, that has "gotten Europe into its current mess."

There you have it in all its glory. Naked racism vomited on the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer from the literary critic of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the preeminent trade publication of American colleges.

Images of dark-skinned men on the prowl with "demographics on their side", who are "rapists" and who want to take power… Where does this come from? It is basically the same sort of filth that was found in the segregationist press during Jim Crow. Romano even repeats the kind of rhetoric that prevented Blacks from having the vote in the Deep South: "To whom does any country's physical territory belong? Those who have been there longest? A simple majority? The best-educated?" Maybe the Danes should use property rights to makes sure that only good white people can vote.