If you can't join 'em, beat 'em
Letting Muslims out of the melting pot is the western world's recipe for disaster
Mark Steyn - April 10, 2006
I used to date a Muslim gal. Don't think I've ever mentioned that before. I was going to, once. It was a year or so after September 11, and the editor of the National Post was noting that some Muslim lobby group had just given me the Islamophobe-of-the-Month award for the umpteenth time. I was under the misapprehension that, if you win six months in a row, you get the Lincoln Town Car and two weeks in St. Lucia, but my boss seemed to think it less of an occasion for congratulation.
"I'm not Islamophobic," I protested. "I've dated Muslim women. I'm very partial," I added, lapsing into a modified bit of Brit vernacular, "to Islamototty."
"Under no circumstances are you to say that in print," he said sternly. ("Totty" is Britspeak for "hot babe" or "hot babes." The form can indicate singular or plural, as in "I went to a party at this duke's pad. Talk about your posh totty." Would have been nice in Austin Powers, but it may postdate Austin's sixties' heyday.)
Anyway, the babe in question was Iranian, and so hot that, when she curled up on the Persian carpet, I worried it would combust. But I digress. Her family had been forced to flee when the Shah fell, and so she was part of that vast Iranian diaspora one meets in Paris and London and Los Angeles, and even Toronto. I won't mention her name, as I Googled her up and discovered she's now at a broadcasting network somewhere in the general vicinity of the Middle East. I would like to be able to report a heartwarming story of our love triumphing over the odds, like an update of Abie's Irish Rose--the Jewish-boy-meets-Catholic-girl play that was Broadway's longest-running hit of the 1920s. But the odd thing is, looking back, I can't recall a single conversation we had about Islam. We talked about the Shah and, in political terms, the Ayatollahs, and, in cultural terms, about the food and literature and so forth. But I can't say I gave a single thought to her religion, any more than I did, at that time, to my own. Insofar as we had any tribal allegiance, it was to the rootless cosmopolitan media world in which we hoped to make our fortunes.
She was a residually observant Muslim, in the way that there are many Anglicans who go to church at Christmas and Easter and would still wish their children to be Christened and eventually married in church. Which makes her much more of a "moderate Muslim" than, say, Dr. Wafa Sultan, the Syrian-American psychiatrist from Los Angeles who, at great personal risk, took on some A-list Sunni scholar live on Al Jazeera the other week. Dr. Sultan was on splendid form, booting every one of Professor Jihad's points into touch, scoffing at the rationale behind the many Muslim "grievances," pointing out the backwardness and misery and oppression that attend the advance of Islam. But political debate isn't Wimbledon: it's possible to win every point and still lose the match. Here is the crucial exchange in that Al Jazeera interview:
Wafa Sultan: I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being . . .
Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?
Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural . . .
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