WHAT ABOUT OUR SONS?
by
DAVID SOLWAY & JANICE FIAMENGO
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in frontpagemag.com and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials
of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
video, Loving
You, Loving Me.
Janice
Fiamengo is a Professor of English at the University of Ottawa
who moonlights as a critic of SJW and feminist propaganda. To
that end, she is making a video series, with producer Steve
Brule, titled The
Fiamengo File, available at https://www.youtube.com/user/StudioBrule.
Why
is it that, even when we’re being politically incorrect
about Islam, most of us toe the PC line? A good friend and political
author writes with regard to the Muslim irruption into the west:
“As the father of a daughter and two granddaughters, I
worry about our tolerism of the [Islamic] Culture of Rape…men
whose culture makes them a serious threat to those daughters
and granddaughters.” Islamic culture has a worrisome record,
he goes on to note, not only in its treatment of women but also
in its savage persecution of gays. I write back to him: “I
am not only worried for my daughters. I am worried as well for
my sons. Analogously, I not only deplore what may befall the
gay community; I fear what will happen to the straight community.”
I confess
parenthetically that my primary concern is not the treatment
meted out to gays in Muslim countries. The preoccupation of
good people like my friend with such abuse fits in well with
left/liberal pharisaical compassion and tumid preachiness. Such
commentary focuses more on violence against gays than on that
against infidels and apostates, despite the fact that the numbers
of the latter must far outweigh those of the former. Is it any
more worthy of attention and denunciation that a man be murdered
for his sexual orientation than for criticizing Islam or leaving
the faith?
For
that matter, why must it always be mentioned -- often in tones
of smarmy self-approbation -- that the majority of Muslim killings
are of other Muslims, as if that legitimizes our condemnation
of Islamic practice? It appears all too clear that Muslim oppression
and killing of gays or other Muslims -- anything but Muslim
attempts to undermine and conquer the West -- offer attractive
causes for conservatives because they may meet with progressivist
approval, placing the conservative for once on the same unimpeachable
moral plane as the progressive. It might also be noted that
such solicitude seems hollow at the center. There has been little
public outcry, for example, against the U.S. Army’s advisory
to its forces in Afghanistan to turn a blind eye to their Muslim
allies’ sodomizing of young boys. After all, soldiers
were told, “it’s their culture.” Clearly,
there is something almost ritually selective about our tendency
to righteous outrage.
In
any event, deplorable as it may be, the suffering of gays in
the Muslim world is a side issue. It is not our problem. What
is happening right here in our homeland is our problem. My friend
is right, so far as he goes, to bemoan the growing epidemic
of rape, forced prostitution and sexual molestation associated
with the Muslim entry into western societies. The statistics
detailing the sexual violence attending the Muslim infiltration
of Europe are, to say the least, profoundly disturbing: the
“grooming” and child kidnapping scandals in the
UK -- thousands of young girls sexually abused by Muslim gangs;
the 1,472% increase in the incidence of rape in Sweden (Sweden
is now second on the list of rape countries, surpassed only
by Lesotho in Southern Africa); the problem in Norway where
Muslims comprise 1.5% of the total population but commit 50%
of the rapes. Almost every host society has experienced something
similar. The Gatestone Institute report on Muslim rape statistics
is definitive.
But
in the bigger picture, rape statistics tend to distract us from
the material issue we are inclined to avoid acknowledging. For
it is the liberal culture of the west that is being raped in
toto. Granted, the morbid fate of our daughters -- and even
the distress of persecuted gays -- are critical concerns. Our
focus on them, however, shows how our powers of argument have
been usurped by the progressivist narrative, how uncertain we
are about the legitimacy of defending western culture for its
own sake, as a coherent entity deserving to be saved, not for
the sake of girls and gays alone.
It
is as if we believe that only on the grounds of violations of
women’s and gay rights that a compelling case for defending
our western cultural inheritance might be made -- that our legacy
of freedom, of individual rights and dignity, of democratic
institutions, of separation of church and state, of individual
conscience, of rough and tumble public debate, of legal traditions
such as confronting one’s accuser, that all these are
just so much relativistic dross when compared to the inarguable
goods of female safety and gay liberation, that only what the
Left tells us matters really does matter. Such concern with
daughters and young women, no matter how legitimate, such fretting
about gays and lesbians and transgenders, no matter how heartfelt,
really misses the point. The fact is: all of us are in the crosshairs.
The tears we expend upon the plight of daughters and homosexuals
should be properly shed for all our progeny and for all our
citizens of whatever gender. The 9/11 atrocity in which more
than 3000 people were incinerated should have driven that lesson
home long ago.
Muslims
have carried out more than 25,000 terror attacks since 9/11,
and although lunatics of all political stripes do embark on
killing sprees -- Anders Breivik’s the most notable of
recent vintage -- these pale into insignificance compared to
Islamic terror. That is not to include the many Muslim-inspired
terror plots that have been providentially foiled, several here
in the soft underbelly of my own country, Canada. The sanctimonious
absorption in the misfortune of only certain classes of victims
tends to obscure the full spectrum of the dilemma we are confronting.
Islam targets not only gays and young women, but every single
one of us, straight men, the mothers and the fathers of jeopardized
daughters, and their sons as well.
Instances
abound. To cite just a few. A Dutch filmmaker will be shot and
stabbed in the street. An elderly woman will be decapitated
in her garden. A British soldier will have his throat slashed
on a public thoroughfare. Two men will be killed and five wounded
at a free speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen. A mother
and her son will be stabbed to death shopping at Ikea. A 15-year-old
student screaming Allahu Akbar will assault his teacher
in the classroom. Journalists will be gunned down in their offices.
Jews will be murdered in a delicatessen. Over a hundred people
will be killed in a coordinated series of attacks in Paris.
Thirteen military personnel will be shot dead and thirty-two
wounded at a Soldier Readiness Processing Center. Another four
Marines will be murdered in a recruitment center and a sailor
killed shortly afterward at another center. Two people will
be fatally shot in a hostage taking in a Sydney café.
A 54-year-old woman will be beheaded in a food distribution
center in Oklahoma. A Canadian sentry will be killed on Parliament
Hill in Ottawa and another soldier run down near a mall in a
small Canadian town. A public event protected by the First Amendment
will be attacked with mortal intent.
Such
episodes are merely the grainy tip of the sand dune. They follow
from the besetting vice of liberal thinking -- what my aforementioned
friend in an important book on the subject calls Tolerism --
as it welcomes Islam into the body politic. And they will multiply
as the Muslim surge increases. We should make no mistake about
this. We all fall into the category of the kafir. There
are no exceptions.
As
the saying goes, let’s get real.
