| Wednesday, April 30, 2003 |
10:19 - Keepin' it Bouncing
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
|
(top)  |
I've been following Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs for several months now. It's the kind of place that can really raise some eyebrows-- not just because of its content, but because of the reaction it inspires among those who don't like that content.
For those who haven't been to the site: its primary focus is the events in the Islamic world and surrounding environs that continue to shape the post-9/11 global political landscape. The timbre is unapologetic and uncompromising, and many people who stumble across it from left-leaning sources often mischaracterize it as a "hate site". LGF has been tarred as such numerous times over the past year or two, been de-linked from others' blogs in the midst of hands-fluttering scandals, and generally had its reputation precede it outside its own circles, and not in a good way. Charles has been fielding a lot of hate mail lately (or at least posting more of it, for the purpose of mocking it); sites like this one state glibly that Charles believes that "The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim". Now, while it's easy for someone who has followed the site for a long time to point out counterexamples which disprove that slur, a casual viewer who finds himself on the page is likely to be very startled by the content, and I can hardly blame such a person for being a little unnerved. I don't believe any of Charles' posts would hold up under scrutiny as being "hate speech" (though occasionally he has been known to overreact a bit to ambiguous, easily misinterpreted language); but nonetheless, there are times when I feel self-conscious about reading it, as though I should be worried someone might be reading over my shoulder and conclude that I'm some kind of Nazi.
Which means that LGF serves as a very interesting test case, now that the political-correctness era is being dealt its most serious blow by the fallout of 9/11. While it doesn't meet any of the criteria that would normally characterize a "hate site" (c'mon, Charles takes great pains to point out reasonable and hopeful viewpoints from within the Muslim world-- there are just precious few of them), LGF is perhaps the modern archetype of a straight-talking, call-it-like-he-sees-it rejection of PC moral relativism. The fact that the result looks to so many people like "hate speech" is a symptom of the sickness of our times.
Terry Gross' Fresh Air last night had as a guest a historian who spent the hour bemoaning the censorship that school textbook writers have imposed upon themselves-- insisting upon portraying every civilization throughout history as "glorious", for instance describing the achievements of the Mayans in towering, florid terms that make the students wish they'd lived there-- but not saying a word about how they performed ritual human sacrifice or hadn't invented the wheel. Similarly, textbooks insist upon treating every religion in a positive light-- focusing on Islam's 14th-century achievements, while glossing over the treatment of women in modern-day Sharia states and the undeniably important links to terrorism. (The fact that all textbooks get vetted for "accuracy" by a single Islamic scholar, as the historian noted, certainly doesn't help matters.) The result is that kids are being denied exposure to troubling intellectual problems, stunting their ability to make informed decisions later in life; they're presented with a description of a world that's peaceful and harmonious and egalitarian, while a step outside (particularly if you happen to attend Manhattan's Stuyvesant School) will tell you-- quite forcefully-- otherwise.
LGF is a guilty pleasure for a lot of people, I'm sure-- because it feels so much like "forbidden fruit" these days, like a voice from another time when the Thought Police weren't hovering outside our doors, when you could talk about things like requiring immigrants to learn English or like joking about how Asians are bad drivers, without being labeled a retrograde fascist Jewish Nazi. So a lot of the most respected people in the blogosphere are fans of LGF, and come down on Charles' side whenever charges of "hate speech" are leveled. It's one of the few sites that's so determined to pursue its chosen goal that it's willing to alienate the opposition to the point of attracting cyber-terrorism.
We can address the "root causes" of people's assessment of LGF as a site that claims "the ony good Muslim is a dead Muslim". I think it's fair to say that Charles thinks that something is wrong with Islam, or at least with certain popular practices of it, and that something needs to change-- something that explicitly bans the hateful incitement spewing from the imams of the faith's highest mosques; something that removes the incentive toward suicide-bombing and jihad in its modern virulent interpretation; something that expresses hope and joy for the here-and-now and the real world rather than nihilism and self-destructive yearning for the afterlife. But that's a criticism of Islam, not of Muslims-- except when we're talking about people who perpetuate exactly those problems within Islam. And when Charles points out some example of this kind of idiocy, the eyes of casual readers widen in horror at what may appear a condemnation of all Muslims and a desire for them all to be erased from the planet.
Again, this is an entirely inaccurate characterization of the site-- but it's reasonable to see how one might arrive at that viewpoint, especially if one is coming from a world of moral equivalence and political correctness. This kind of raw, unashamed criticism (of such sacred cows as "religion" and "culture") is hard to find these days. It's rare.
And in cases like LGF, where the content and the readership consistently backs up its claims with facts and reasoned discussion, and in which the supporting texts (from large-scale and respected sources) require so little in the way of embellishment to support Charles' position, it's equally easy to see why it's such a haven for those readers who are just plain sick and tired of bullshit.
To see just how far a site can go without venturing into its own kind of incitement and legitimately earning "hate" labels, LGF is probably it. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a case study that forms a cornerstone of neoconservative/South Park Republican thought.
|
|
