I remember way back when I was at University in the US, attempting to have a conversation with a professor of mine about the situation in northern Ireland. I really genuinely did not have a clue who the combatant parties were and was looking for some enlightenment. Sadly, my professor just shook his head sagely and said something along the lines of "... its all just too complicated to explain." So I went off and found some books and (this being before the internet was invented) did some research at the library. I was shocked to discover that the situation, while seemingly interminable and difficult to resolve, was not a bit complicated. There were the Catholic republicans and there were the Protestant Unionists, and each had their legit political parties and each had their respective 'militia' or armed gangs. The Catholic republicans wanted the Ulster counties of Northern Ireland to 'rejoin' the country of Ireland, and the Protestant Unionists wanted to remain part of Britain. Both sides engaged in violent acts to achieve their ends and this fault line has existed for at least some hundreds of years.
Whats so hard to figure out about that? I started thinking about this while reading the following:
Moon over the outhouse
from The Daily Telegraph, November 25th 2003
"The other day, a producer called me up and asked if I wanted to take part in a discussion about an American cartoon strip - to whit, B.C. by Johnny Hart, which has been running in a gazillion newspapers around the world for as long as I can remember. I usually check in with it a couple of times a decade while waiting at the gate for a delayed flight, and am happy to find it refreshingly unchanged. It's set in a modified caveman era, which is to say that, like The Flintstones, its characters enjoy certain accoutrements not necessarily consistent with the time period.
On this particular day's strip, Johnny Hart shows us the caveman walking up a hill at night - there is a crescent moon in the sky - and heading for a wooden outhouse, with a crescent moon on the door, as outhouses traditionally have, at least in America. My own outhouse in New Hampshire certainly did, before it was dashed to smithereens in a hurricane (I wasn't inside at the time, and try not to sound upset about that).
Anyway, we next see a sound effect - "SLAM" - to indicate, presumably, the closing of the outhouse door. The final frame shows a speech bubble coming from within the outhouse with the words: "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?" The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) decided this was not an outhouse joke, but an Islamophobic slur disguised as an outhouse joke. A reader in the Washington Post had noticed the six crescent moons in the strip, and suggested this indicated the real target of the gag. Cair drew attention to the fact that the sound effect of the alleged door slamming was stacked vertically, in a pillar-like shape, and thus could reasonably be read as "SLAM" contained within the overall shape of the letter "I" - or "ISLAM".
"Hmm," I said, thoughtfully, to the producer. "It's true that it's very hard to slam an outhouse door from the inside, what with the lack of space and so forth. Difficult to get back far enough to give it a loud enough slam to justify a sound effect. Unless there's a strong wind to whip it shut," I added, recalling my hurricane. "And even then, one would be more concerned to latch it carefully lest another gust blow it open again."
"That's Marshall Blonsky's line," said the producer, a little impatiently. Blonsky is professor of semiotics at the New School in New York and had apparently got to my penetrating insight ahead of me: "You don't slam an outhouse door." Professor Blonsky argues that the cartoon is indisputably constructed "in a polysemic fashion".
"I hadn't thought of that," I said.
"How about this?" said the producer. "If it's really just a sound effect, how come there's no exclamation?" "Hmm," I said, even more thoughtfully than before. In the end, I declined the invitation. Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I'd become distracted by some of the day's more trivial stories - the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.
No dead Jews in that particular day's headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims. Every society has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality. But one can't help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
My advice would be to go for the direct approach, like Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi, the A-list imam who does the "Thought For The Day" slot on Qatar TV: "O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians." Nothing very polysemic about that. Nothing very polysemic about Cair, either. America's most prominent mainstream Muslim lobby group, it has organised rallies that managed to climax with the singing of "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes." Its chairman, Omar Ahmad, has said that "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant". The Koran "should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth". But its supply of White House invites and presidential photo-ops never seems to dry up, and its willingness to see offence everywhere is treated respectfully by the media.
Meanwhile, while Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analysing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem, as reported in The Sunday Telegraph, is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups", and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims".
Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.
In Holland, the late Pim Fortuyn recognised that at some point the contradiction has to be resolved. In Nigeria and Sudan and other frontiers between the ummah and the rest of the world, it already has - in favour of sharia and the Islamists. It's hard to see why the enervated West should prove any more successful at squaring the circle. But we can at least cherish the absurdities on the way down: European Jews menaced by anti-Semites get less attention than American Muslims menaced by polysemites."
The politically-correct elites that run the EU and many EU countries can't be bothered to find out the 'big-picture' story of why so many young muslims think its just fine and dandy to assault Jews, deface their graveyards and damage their synagogues. They can't be bothered to find out what conditions prevail in the countries of origin of many of the muslim immigrants to Europe, and the implications those conditions have for peace and harmony here. They can spend endless hours discussing Islamaphobia and making sure that prison cells have arrows on the ceiling pointing in the direction of Mecca. They can manfully try to keep up the pretence that because they didn't participate in the Iraq war they have avoided being in the Islamists line of fire. But all their posturing and all their lack of perceptiveness will come with a price tag.
Its not just shameful that the Euro-Elites don't know what they should know- it may come back to haunt all of us.
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