@ narciso:
That's not a defense of Gellerism. That's a complaint based upon gathered heterogeneous phenomena tied to the main topic only on the basis of ideological assumptions. "You" can denounce illegal immigration til the cows come home, and some people will attempt to denounce you in turn as "anti-immigrant" and worse. Your case won't be helped if you welcome and defend would-be allies who cross over into blatant racism, racially tinged, jingoistic invective, and emotional denunciations of anyone who, like that evangelical group, urges a faith-based humanitarian consideration of the plight of illegals. Whether CAIR has anybody tiptoeing or not is, again, irrelevant except to the extent that the approach of people like Geller taints valid criticisms of CAIR - makes CAIR's job easier. Or makes it harder to stand credibly and forcefully against anti-Christian or anti-Jewish acts.
If it's just your team vs the other team in a nihilistic struggle for domination, then one can hope both lose. Apply the same standard to CAIR and to Geller, to Islam and to anti-Islam, and we may get somewhere.
The question is less whether it’s tied to Islam intrinsically than whether the fear of addressing it is tied to the fear of appearing Islamophobic.
Geller wants to appear "rationally Islamophobic." She addresses honor killings in order to support her larger pseudo-rationally Islamophobic discourse. I am totally unpersuaded that she's more interested in ending honor killings than she is in attacking Islam, or in fact anywhere near as interested in the former as in the latter.
This is obviously false. Of course, it depends what you mean by “the same kind.” Plenty of speech by, e.g., atheists, to the effect that the Catholic Church, due to its doctrines, is a source of child rape, and don’t get ostracized at all. Have Walt and Mearshimer been ostracized?
You are obviously refusing to see what's right in front of you. Criticizing the Catholic Church as an institution, or Israeli policy, is obviously fair game, as would be criticizing Islam or particular branches of Islam. I gave an example way up above, and I'll repeat it here:
If you had a site that constantly described Jews as the enemies of all that was good and holy, constantly called for measures to curtail and restrict Jewish activities, described actions by or on behalf of Israel as actions “by the Jews” (“the Jews stopped the flotilla,” “the Jews’ propaganda says X,” “when the Jews invaded Lebanon”), would you have much of a problem with a corporation that decided to take its business elsewhere?
When, like Geller, you repeatedly and relentlessly attack an entire religion as a community, then you move over into what we designate as hate speech.
I'll give one trivial but typical example that I happened to notice the other day. In describing a joke video intended to show that things really aren't so bad in Gaza, Geller introduces it as "Muslim propaganda":
No second thought. That's how she works in small things and big ones.
How long do you think an analyst would survive at CNBC if he described Goldman-Sachs profiteering off the financial crisis as an action by "the Jews"?
The subject of anti-Catholic and anti-Christian hate speech is complex, because it gets tied up with the perception that mainstream Christianity, as the majority faith in our culture, isn't vulnerable in the same way. And no one would even think of referring to some Satanic cult as "The Catholics." No one, to my knowledge, is out campaigning to get rid of "The Catholics" because they're a bunch of child-rapists. No one, to my knowledge, handles a report on sexual abuse by priests by saying, "Here go the Catholics again. The Catholics were caught abusing children again. We need to restrict immigration of Catholics, supervise Catholic churches."
That said, I sympathize with Catholics and other Christians who feel that people like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are hatemongers, and that their employers deserve to be held accountable.
With particular sects and minority faiths, we tend to be more sensitive. If some blogger decided to attack Mormons, always referred to Reid, Romney, and Hatch as "Mormon Harry Reid" etc., undifferentiatedly associated them with the acts of polygamist sects and constantly brought up ugly events from the history of the church in one-sided and inflammatory ways, then Paypal might drop them, if Paypal was made aware of them. And I think you'd immediately recognize them as nutjobs deserving of being ostracized.
As for honor killing, someone seriously interested in understanding and stopping the practice wouldn't address it within a context of assaulting the entire faith community. Instead, they would encourage the faith community to confront the issue and to hold itself to a higher standard. Geller's approach is similar to discovering that abuse may be going on in a family, and deciding that the way to handle it is to shame the whole family and chase it out of town.
All these things are intrinsic to Western culture, as is the very powerful, in most cases more powerful, movement to counter, mitigate and abolish these practices. Where are these movements in contemporary Islam?
Jury's still out on whether the counter-movements really are more powerful. A lot of people, for instance, seem ready and willing to junk 1,000 years of progress on religious discrimination in favor of worldwide religious war. As for where those movements are in contemporary Islam, people like Geller have already decided it's pointless to look. When someone does show up offering to explore and advance reform, he or she is accused of being a front or a fake who hasn't yet agreed to expunge those scary passages from the evil book. When someone from outside the faith points to moderate or quietist traditions in Islam, or to Islamic traditions and settings around the world or from history that don't bear whatever latest revolting characteristic, he's denounced as a "dhimmi," a "traitor," a "fifth columnist," well you SHOULD know the drill by now.
And yet you are willing to judge some things. Are they only those things in which you are without sin? Which might those be? Or is the “we” that is incapable of judging here? In that case, nothing would be stopping you.
You're shifting to a different level of abstraction here. Geller wants us to judge all of Islam, permanently, on the basis of honor killings, 9/11, Paypal dropping her, and whatever other latest selected scandalizing epiphenomenon. I'm saying that's demagogy, and it would be ludicrous if it wasn't a) so widespread (according to John of Powerline typical of "mainstream" conservatism), b) dangerous, and c) morally revolting.
It's also part of refusing to recognize the authentic bases of the "clash of civilizations" in its contemporary manifestations, and insisting instead on an ethnocentric, chauvinistic, closed-minded, self-destructive, and childish narrative in which the good well-meaning West with minor flaws but thank-God powerful counter-movements blamelessly and thoughtfully brings peace and progress (the good kind, not the evil Woodrow Wilson kind) to a stubbornly resistant and benighted world, and the perverse Muslims respond by slaughtering us whenever they have time left over from mutilating their daughters - proving themselves incapable of reform and therefore deserving of Hellfire courtesy of the US military, and damnation courtesy of Pamela Geller.
That sounds like it would be your fault, not his. Anyway, we're grown-ups here, I hope with an interest in seeing things as they are and have been. I'm a big fan of Catholicism. I'm also a big fan of the ancient Greek philosophers, but, if I showed too great an interest in their sexual mores, I'd probably be ostracized. I might even get thrown out of Paypal.
One interpretation of priestly celibacy practiced in those Pornocratic days held that the doctrine applied only to relations with women, and certainly not to young boys collected from the countryside and given the honor of serving.
@ narciso:
"these relativizing jags get a little much," do they? But relentlessly imputing every level of bestiality and murderous intent to all of 1 - 1.5 billion people, and defaming a complex religious tradition going back 1,300 years in order to encourage discrimination, prejudice, misunderstanding, distrust, hatred, fear, and war, that's just what? Fun? A good day's work?
Interestingly, around the same time that Ummayad Cordoba was at its peak, Papal Rome was going through its "dark age" also sometimes known as the "Pornocracy," with all that you might expect under such a title (and more).
Insofar as terrorism is (among other things) the use of violence, or the credible threat thereof, to make certain things unsayable, certain claims or topics taboo, then “pro-terrorist” (not necessarily “terrorist”) is an accurate description of those using threats to silence opponents. And I surmise that threats, or the allusion to the general background of such threats were used in this case.
There's nothing unique about ostracizing people who say "certain things." If someone was directing the same kind of speech towards Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Buddhists, whomever, that Geller directs toward Muslims, he or she would also be ostracized. I doubt that Paypal would hesitate to disassociate itself from Neo-Nazi groups. I doubt Paypal allows its services to be used by the organizations that promote sex with children or hatred of the "mud races" either. There are plenty of types of speech that we don't completely stamp out, but we declare "unsayable" or "taboo" (backed by indirect threat of force) in the sense you're using the terms.
I don’t know how to measure how much a given blog does in the fight against terrorism, but I do know that Geller is unrelenting in focusing on honor killings of Muslim girls, which hardly anybody wants to touch.
I'd like to see the argument that ties honor killings intrinsically to Islam rather than to tribal/traditional cultures. There are non-Muslim cultures with similar practices. (I'm not sure whether India has finally succeeded in stamping out the practice of forcing widows to commit suicide.) There are Muslim cultures without such practices. A focus on honor killings, or genital mutilation for that matter, would be typical of someone seeking to manipulate emotional reactions. It's true that the radical Islamists seek close identification with tribal/traditional cultures, in part because one of the main spurs to radical Islamism is the disruption of those cultures especially as a result of economic globalization.
Are (very partial list) child pornography, drug addiction, widespread abortion, exploitation of factory workers, industrialized warfare, and genocide intrinsic to Judeo-Christian or Western civilization? (Let's not even start on traditional and modern Asian cultures.) If not, then why are honor killings a stain on Islam? If so, then who are we to judge?
Perhaps John loses credibility with you here and gains it with others; nor, of course, is credibility the same thing as truth. You choose an odd passage to cite as an example of devastated credibility, though.
The passage I selected was an example of an additional loss of credibility, to me, beyond what might originate simply in what you acknowledge to the parroting of a "line."
John presumes to "surmise" something that, as you again concede, may very likely be much more complicated than he suggests. The difference between people who are appalled by Pamela Geller's undifferentiated attacks on "Muslims" and those who are appalled by Pamela anyone's attacks on "terrorists" is a rather substantial difference... unless like certain recent visitors to this blog, commenters at the HotAir Greenroom, and rightwing opinion leaders you don't in fact see a meaningful difference between defense of Muslims and "pro-terrorism." "Pro-terrorist" isn't just "partisan": It's a foul accusation - fighting words.
There are plenty of blogs, mainstream sites, etc., that have done a lot more against terrorism than Pamela Geller has ever done that aren't in trouble with Paypal and are extremely unlikely ever to be.
As for "violence against Muslims," Geller's discourse is typical of a discourse of incitement, but we still have a generally peaceful and lawful political culture in this country. I'd like to see it stay that way. In the short term, the harm done by a political movement that commits itself to an intellectually stunted and counterproductive discourse may be at first be the harm it does to itself and its political fortunes, but over time the human costs may be much greater than any incurred by direct incitement. We can't say yet that an openly anti-Muslim movement has gone "mainstream" in this country. If it ever did, the repercussions could be extremely dangerous.
@ adam:
I guess nothing if your objective is to destroy your own credibility.
If you're going to repeat someone else's views, you ought to quote or credit them. That way, you might also distance yourself from pseudo-reasoning like this:
One can surmise that Paypal's action against Atlas Shrugs was prompted by complaints from pro-terrorist elements. Be that as it may, it is undoubtedly one small part of a broad effort to stigmatize and delegitimize the expression of mainstream, conservative views.
One can "surmise" all sorts of things, I guess. One can define "pro-terrorist" in different ways, too. One can end up surmising, as I know many who think like Geller and possibly John do, that if you don't share in their hatred of Muslims, you're pro-terrorist.
I surmise also that John's definition of "mainstream" is different from mine. I hope that he's merely insensitive and wrong.
@ adam:
Not sure which team that would be, but renting my mind out to host anyone's prefab talking points is not on my agenda. Nor would praising the practice be.
I'm now wondering which would be worse, to do it consciously or to do it while thinking you're thinking.
@ narciso:
The copyright issue related to "We Con the World," and was brought up by Glick, whose discussion reminded me very much of the kind of thing certain eBay sellers put in their listings in the hope of warding off "takedowns" of listings of suspect items.
Acceptable Use may include copyright-infringing materials, but is much broader, and relates to the kind of material that authorize.net and Paypal prohibit and explicitly commit themselves to prohibiting. Direct incitement would be "hey, dudes, it's majorly our duty to kill _____ or blow up _____ next week." Publishing speeches, news articles, etc., that may support a "revolutionary" position is not the same thing.
But if you don’t like McCarthy or Geller, how about Ayaan Hirsi Ali–would it be of interest to follow up on a recent Mark Steyn column and see how the left has been responding to her?
The reaction to Ali would be interesting to investigate, but by the time, as a writer, you're reacting to the reaction to an original set of reactions (Ali's to Islam), without much knowledge of the underlying subject (ain't never read Ali's books, maybe someday), it seems to me the odds of doing something very interesting get kind of long - too many levels of abstraction and too much accumulated static, too little contact with the Earth.
In terms of static, some of Ali's most provocative statements are highly criticizable, and discussing them honestly wouldn't serve the purpose of turning my evil eye on the left. In the meantime, Kristof at the NYT reviewed Ali's newest book, and was raked over the usual coals with the usual raking motions by Ali's rightwing fans. The negative dialectical "repair work" would lead to recovering content from Kristof's review that partisans of Ali's have ignored, and I expect would be taken overall as yet another attack on the right by the deviationist thought criminal CK MacLeod.
If you've seen a criticizable response to Steyn on Ali, please link it (you're also free of course to do the critique yourself).
@ narciso:
Just visited Revolution Muslim for the first time. I don't see anything that obviously violates Acceptable Use terms of the sort I quoted. It seems to have very little original content at all.
CK, theory is theory. find that PayPal or like business has paid out a dime because of association with someone engaging in expressing obnoxious opinion before trying to offer that theory.
I'm assuming that language like the "prohibited activities" stuff I posted was specifically designed, possibly laid out almost word for word, to protect businesses from lawsuits or regulatory enforcement.
If you go to the divine Geller's site, she has provided the letter she received, which includes links to the Paypal "Acceptable Use Policy" statements.
If you could find a truly hateful, relatively high profile lefty who engages in similar language aimed at a protected class (race, religion, gender, etc.) then you might have a post, or even something to push Paypal on. Bank executives, political officials and parties, nations... I don't think they'd qualify unless the speech in question amounts to direct "incitement."
@ OhioCoastie:
There are always plenty of targets. Ones worth bothering with, or that others aren't already bothering, is another question.
Thought it might be interesting to see what people at the site were finding of particular interest - whether they made for good posts or not. I hadn't noticed the Geller news until it was brought up by adam, an author at this blog. Since even he is having trouble faulting Paypal for dropping her, even though he starts out more sympathetic to her, or at least to her side on certain issues, I don't see a juicy lefty target, but I do think it's an interesting item.
@ factualizing frog:
I just know from my business that credit card processors require merchant applicants to forswear all manner of naughty interests, and that we're warned that violating Da Rules can lead immediately to termination of accounts. What proportions each kind of concern plays, I can't say. But if such and such payment processor consistently or egregiously turned a blind eye, I betcha they could be jeopardized.
A typical credit card processor agreement includes language like the following under Prohibited Activities:
You agree that You will not at any time conduct Your business in any manner that directly or indirectly offers, sells, leases, licenses or displays, delivers, advertises, recommends, or promotes any product(s), service(s), data, information, image(s), text and/or any content which:
( i ) is unlawful or violates any applicable local, state, federal, national or international law, statute, ordinance, or regulation including, without limitation, Credit Card Association rules, consumer protection law, Internet tobacco sales, firearm sales, unfair competition, antidiscrimination or false advertising;
* * *
(iv) is threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, obscene, libelous, slanderous, deceptive, fraudulent, invasive of another's privacy, tortuous, or otherwise violate Company’s rules or policies;
(v) victimizes harasses, degrades, or intimidates an individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or disability;
I don't think you need to engage in an unusually broad reading of Geller's material to wonder which of the above, esp. (v), might apply.
Precisely what a payment processor most fears I can't guess, but I don't find it hard to imagine an anti-discrimination lawsuit attaching a company that was made aware that its clients violated the above, but didn't do anything about it. And I can imagine corporate legal departments erring (far) on the side of caution.
The above was authorize.net. Don't ask me why I didn't go searching out Paypal's specific language. I'm sure it's like the above, if anything more restrictive.
He proposed the kind of sustained protest that he believes kept the KSM trial out of Manhattan Federal Court. I believe that the "money quote" was included in the first "fight them all together" piece.
Liability for what?
If Paypal and other credit card processing companies facilitate fraudulent or otherwise prohibited activities, then they lay themselves open to being attached as defendants in civil lawsuits (as well as to being prosecuted in criminal ones).
I'm not saying it's likely, or offering an argument to shut down Geller's site as a "clear and present danger," but running a "hate site" and leading "hateful" political activities is the kind of thing that sometimes gets people in legal trouble, especially if acts of violence are at some point involved, and legal trouble of that sort very frequently leads to lawsuits, and lawsuits very frequently get paid for by the deep-pocketed defendants, and, whether or not the direct costs are easily absorbed, can lead to very unwanted PR and related troubles.
Paypal operates around the world - in all sorts of different countries.
adam, I'm wary of general characterizations, since it's easy to demonize someone as a demonizer. From my reading of Geller's site and Geller's performance on CNN, I think that at a minimum she puts a private company like Paypal, a deep-pocketed processor of transactions, in a poor position. Paypal and similar companies - credit card processors - are covered by numerous laws in numerous jurisdictions, and potentially subject to every imaginable liability claim if they fail to show due diligence.
If you had a site that constantly described Jews as the enemies of all that was good and holy, constantly called for measures to curtail and restrict Jewish activities, described actions by or on behalf of Israel as actions "by the Jews" ("the Jews stopped the flotilla," "the Jews' propaganda says X," "when the Jews invaded Lebanon"), would you have much of a problem with a corporation that decided to take its business elsewhere?
And let's be clear: McCarthy didn't "counsel suspicion" of the CI - which is aggressive but might amount in practice to "keep an eye on the CI." He called for a campaign to prevent Cordoba House-NYC from being built, depicting it as a significant milestone in the "Grand Jihad" to "sabotage America" and turn it into a "Shariah society."
@ adam:
I find the whole thing deeply disheartening.
@ narciso:
That's not a defense of Gellerism. That's a complaint based upon gathered heterogeneous phenomena tied to the main topic only on the basis of ideological assumptions. "You" can denounce illegal immigration til the cows come home, and some people will attempt to denounce you in turn as "anti-immigrant" and worse. Your case won't be helped if you welcome and defend would-be allies who cross over into blatant racism, racially tinged, jingoistic invective, and emotional denunciations of anyone who, like that evangelical group, urges a faith-based humanitarian consideration of the plight of illegals. Whether CAIR has anybody tiptoeing or not is, again, irrelevant except to the extent that the approach of people like Geller taints valid criticisms of CAIR - makes CAIR's job easier. Or makes it harder to stand credibly and forcefully against anti-Christian or anti-Jewish acts.
If it's just your team vs the other team in a nihilistic struggle for domination, then one can hope both lose. Apply the same standard to CAIR and to Geller, to Islam and to anti-Islam, and we may get somewhere.
Geller wants to appear "rationally Islamophobic." She addresses honor killings in order to support her larger pseudo-rationally Islamophobic discourse. I am totally unpersuaded that she's more interested in ending honor killings than she is in attacking Islam, or in fact anywhere near as interested in the former as in the latter.
You are obviously refusing to see what's right in front of you. Criticizing the Catholic Church as an institution, or Israeli policy, is obviously fair game, as would be criticizing Islam or particular branches of Islam. I gave an example way up above, and I'll repeat it here:
When, like Geller, you repeatedly and relentlessly attack an entire religion as a community, then you move over into what we designate as hate speech.
I'll give one trivial but typical example that I happened to notice the other day. In describing a joke video intended to show that things really aren't so bad in Gaza, Geller introduces it as "Muslim propaganda":
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/06/shocking-video-muslim-propaganda-gaza-oh-gaza-.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
No second thought. That's how she works in small things and big ones.
How long do you think an analyst would survive at CNBC if he described Goldman-Sachs profiteering off the financial crisis as an action by "the Jews"?
The subject of anti-Catholic and anti-Christian hate speech is complex, because it gets tied up with the perception that mainstream Christianity, as the majority faith in our culture, isn't vulnerable in the same way. And no one would even think of referring to some Satanic cult as "The Catholics." No one, to my knowledge, is out campaigning to get rid of "The Catholics" because they're a bunch of child-rapists. No one, to my knowledge, handles a report on sexual abuse by priests by saying, "Here go the Catholics again. The Catholics were caught abusing children again. We need to restrict immigration of Catholics, supervise Catholic churches."
That said, I sympathize with Catholics and other Christians who feel that people like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are hatemongers, and that their employers deserve to be held accountable.
With particular sects and minority faiths, we tend to be more sensitive. If some blogger decided to attack Mormons, always referred to Reid, Romney, and Hatch as "Mormon Harry Reid" etc., undifferentiatedly associated them with the acts of polygamist sects and constantly brought up ugly events from the history of the church in one-sided and inflammatory ways, then Paypal might drop them, if Paypal was made aware of them. And I think you'd immediately recognize them as nutjobs deserving of being ostracized.
As for honor killing, someone seriously interested in understanding and stopping the practice wouldn't address it within a context of assaulting the entire faith community. Instead, they would encourage the faith community to confront the issue and to hold itself to a higher standard. Geller's approach is similar to discovering that abuse may be going on in a family, and deciding that the way to handle it is to shame the whole family and chase it out of town.
Jury's still out on whether the counter-movements really are more powerful. A lot of people, for instance, seem ready and willing to junk 1,000 years of progress on religious discrimination in favor of worldwide religious war. As for where those movements are in contemporary Islam, people like Geller have already decided it's pointless to look. When someone does show up offering to explore and advance reform, he or she is accused of being a front or a fake who hasn't yet agreed to expunge those scary passages from the evil book. When someone from outside the faith points to moderate or quietist traditions in Islam, or to Islamic traditions and settings around the world or from history that don't bear whatever latest revolting characteristic, he's denounced as a "dhimmi," a "traitor," a "fifth columnist," well you SHOULD know the drill by now.
You're shifting to a different level of abstraction here. Geller wants us to judge all of Islam, permanently, on the basis of honor killings, 9/11, Paypal dropping her, and whatever other latest selected scandalizing epiphenomenon. I'm saying that's demagogy, and it would be ludicrous if it wasn't a) so widespread (according to John of Powerline typical of "mainstream" conservatism), b) dangerous, and c) morally revolting.
It's also part of refusing to recognize the authentic bases of the "clash of civilizations" in its contemporary manifestations, and insisting instead on an ethnocentric, chauvinistic, closed-minded, self-destructive, and childish narrative in which the good well-meaning West with minor flaws but thank-God powerful counter-movements blamelessly and thoughtfully brings peace and progress (the good kind, not the evil Woodrow Wilson kind) to a stubbornly resistant and benighted world, and the perverse Muslims respond by slaughtering us whenever they have time left over from mutilating their daughters - proving themselves incapable of reform and therefore deserving of Hellfire courtesy of the US military, and damnation courtesy of Pamela Geller.
That sounds like it would be your fault, not his. Anyway, we're grown-ups here, I hope with an interest in seeing things as they are and have been. I'm a big fan of Catholicism. I'm also a big fan of the ancient Greek philosophers, but, if I showed too great an interest in their sexual mores, I'd probably be ostracized. I might even get thrown out of Paypal.
One interpretation of priestly celibacy practiced in those Pornocratic days held that the doctrine applied only to relations with women, and certainly not to young boys collected from the countryside and given the honor of serving.
@ narciso:
"these relativizing jags get a little much," do they? But relentlessly imputing every level of bestiality and murderous intent to all of 1 - 1.5 billion people, and defaming a complex religious tradition going back 1,300 years in order to encourage discrimination, prejudice, misunderstanding, distrust, hatred, fear, and war, that's just what? Fun? A good day's work?
@ fuster:
I guess I did.
Interestingly, around the same time that Ummayad Cordoba was at its peak, Papal Rome was going through its "dark age" also sometimes known as the "Pornocracy," with all that you might expect under such a title (and more).
There's nothing unique about ostracizing people who say "certain things." If someone was directing the same kind of speech towards Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Buddhists, whomever, that Geller directs toward Muslims, he or she would also be ostracized. I doubt that Paypal would hesitate to disassociate itself from Neo-Nazi groups. I doubt Paypal allows its services to be used by the organizations that promote sex with children or hatred of the "mud races" either. There are plenty of types of speech that we don't completely stamp out, but we declare "unsayable" or "taboo" (backed by indirect threat of force) in the sense you're using the terms.
I'd like to see the argument that ties honor killings intrinsically to Islam rather than to tribal/traditional cultures. There are non-Muslim cultures with similar practices. (I'm not sure whether India has finally succeeded in stamping out the practice of forcing widows to commit suicide.) There are Muslim cultures without such practices. A focus on honor killings, or genital mutilation for that matter, would be typical of someone seeking to manipulate emotional reactions. It's true that the radical Islamists seek close identification with tribal/traditional cultures, in part because one of the main spurs to radical Islamism is the disruption of those cultures especially as a result of economic globalization.
Are (very partial list) child pornography, drug addiction, widespread abortion, exploitation of factory workers, industrialized warfare, and genocide intrinsic to Judeo-Christian or Western civilization? (Let's not even start on traditional and modern Asian cultures.) If not, then why are honor killings a stain on Islam? If so, then who are we to judge?
The passage I selected was an example of an additional loss of credibility, to me, beyond what might originate simply in what you acknowledge to the parroting of a "line."
John presumes to "surmise" something that, as you again concede, may very likely be much more complicated than he suggests. The difference between people who are appalled by Pamela Geller's undifferentiated attacks on "Muslims" and those who are appalled by Pamela anyone's attacks on "terrorists" is a rather substantial difference... unless like certain recent visitors to this blog, commenters at the HotAir Greenroom, and rightwing opinion leaders you don't in fact see a meaningful difference between defense of Muslims and "pro-terrorism." "Pro-terrorist" isn't just "partisan": It's a foul accusation - fighting words.
There are plenty of blogs, mainstream sites, etc., that have done a lot more against terrorism than Pamela Geller has ever done that aren't in trouble with Paypal and are extremely unlikely ever to be.
As for "violence against Muslims," Geller's discourse is typical of a discourse of incitement, but we still have a generally peaceful and lawful political culture in this country. I'd like to see it stay that way. In the short term, the harm done by a political movement that commits itself to an intellectually stunted and counterproductive discourse may be at first be the harm it does to itself and its political fortunes, but over time the human costs may be much greater than any incurred by direct incitement. We can't say yet that an openly anti-Muslim movement has gone "mainstream" in this country. If it ever did, the repercussions could be extremely dangerous.
@ adam:
I guess nothing if your objective is to destroy your own credibility.
If you're going to repeat someone else's views, you ought to quote or credit them. That way, you might also distance yourself from pseudo-reasoning like this:
One can "surmise" all sorts of things, I guess. One can define "pro-terrorist" in different ways, too. One can end up surmising, as I know many who think like Geller and possibly John do, that if you don't share in their hatred of Muslims, you're pro-terrorist.
I surmise also that John's definition of "mainstream" is different from mine. I hope that he's merely insensitive and wrong.
@ adam:
Not sure which team that would be, but renting my mind out to host anyone's prefab talking points is not on my agenda. Nor would praising the practice be.
I'm now wondering which would be worse, to do it consciously or to do it while thinking you're thinking.
@ adam:
Dutifully checks the boxes, doesn't he?
@ narciso:
The copyright issue related to "We Con the World," and was brought up by Glick, whose discussion reminded me very much of the kind of thing certain eBay sellers put in their listings in the hope of warding off "takedowns" of listings of suspect items.
Acceptable Use may include copyright-infringing materials, but is much broader, and relates to the kind of material that authorize.net and Paypal prohibit and explicitly commit themselves to prohibiting. Direct incitement would be "hey, dudes, it's majorly our duty to kill _____ or blow up _____ next week." Publishing speeches, news articles, etc., that may support a "revolutionary" position is not the same thing.
adam wrote:
The reaction to Ali would be interesting to investigate, but by the time, as a writer, you're reacting to the reaction to an original set of reactions (Ali's to Islam), without much knowledge of the underlying subject (ain't never read Ali's books, maybe someday), it seems to me the odds of doing something very interesting get kind of long - too many levels of abstraction and too much accumulated static, too little contact with the Earth.
In terms of static, some of Ali's most provocative statements are highly criticizable, and discussing them honestly wouldn't serve the purpose of turning my evil eye on the left. In the meantime, Kristof at the NYT reviewed Ali's newest book, and was raked over the usual coals with the usual raking motions by Ali's rightwing fans. The negative dialectical "repair work" would lead to recovering content from Kristof's review that partisans of Ali's have ignored, and I expect would be taken overall as yet another attack on the right by the deviationist thought criminal CK MacLeod.
If you've seen a criticizable response to Steyn on Ali, please link it (you're also free of course to do the critique yourself).
@ narciso:
Just visited Revolution Muslim for the first time. I don't see anything that obviously violates Acceptable Use terms of the sort I quoted. It seems to have very little original content at all.
fuster wrote:
I'm assuming that language like the "prohibited activities" stuff I posted was specifically designed, possibly laid out almost word for word, to protect businesses from lawsuits or regulatory enforcement.
If you go to the divine Geller's site, she has provided the letter she received, which includes links to the Paypal "Acceptable Use Policy" statements.
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/06/paypal-cuts-off-atlas-truth-is-the-new-hate-speech.html
Several of the commenters are kind enough to demonstrate almost immediately why Paypal may have had a point.
If you could find a truly hateful, relatively high profile lefty who engages in similar language aimed at a protected class (race, religion, gender, etc.) then you might have a post, or even something to push Paypal on. Bank executives, political officials and parties, nations... I don't think they'd qualify unless the speech in question amounts to direct "incitement."
@ OhioCoastie:
There are always plenty of targets. Ones worth bothering with, or that others aren't already bothering, is another question.
Thought it might be interesting to see what people at the site were finding of particular interest - whether they made for good posts or not. I hadn't noticed the Geller news until it was brought up by adam, an author at this blog. Since even he is having trouble faulting Paypal for dropping her, even though he starts out more sympathetic to her, or at least to her side on certain issues, I don't see a juicy lefty target, but I do think it's an interesting item.
@ factualizing frog:
I just know from my business that credit card processors require merchant applicants to forswear all manner of naughty interests, and that we're warned that violating Da Rules can lead immediately to termination of accounts. What proportions each kind of concern plays, I can't say. But if such and such payment processor consistently or egregiously turned a blind eye, I betcha they could be jeopardized.
A typical credit card processor agreement includes language like the following under Prohibited Activities:
I don't think you need to engage in an unusually broad reading of Geller's material to wonder which of the above, esp. (v), might apply.
Precisely what a payment processor most fears I can't guess, but I don't find it hard to imagine an anti-discrimination lawsuit attaching a company that was made aware that its clients violated the above, but didn't do anything about it. And I can imagine corporate legal departments erring (far) on the side of caution.
The above was authorize.net. Don't ask me why I didn't go searching out Paypal's specific language. I'm sure it's like the above, if anything more restrictive.
adam wrote:
He proposed the kind of sustained protest that he believes kept the KSM trial out of Manhattan Federal Court. I believe that the "money quote" was included in the first "fight them all together" piece.
If Paypal and other credit card processing companies facilitate fraudulent or otherwise prohibited activities, then they lay themselves open to being attached as defendants in civil lawsuits (as well as to being prosecuted in criminal ones).
I'm not saying it's likely, or offering an argument to shut down Geller's site as a "clear and present danger," but running a "hate site" and leading "hateful" political activities is the kind of thing that sometimes gets people in legal trouble, especially if acts of violence are at some point involved, and legal trouble of that sort very frequently leads to lawsuits, and lawsuits very frequently get paid for by the deep-pocketed defendants, and, whether or not the direct costs are easily absorbed, can lead to very unwanted PR and related troubles.
Paypal operates around the world - in all sorts of different countries.
adam, I'm wary of general characterizations, since it's easy to demonize someone as a demonizer. From my reading of Geller's site and Geller's performance on CNN, I think that at a minimum she puts a private company like Paypal, a deep-pocketed processor of transactions, in a poor position. Paypal and similar companies - credit card processors - are covered by numerous laws in numerous jurisdictions, and potentially subject to every imaginable liability claim if they fail to show due diligence.
If you had a site that constantly described Jews as the enemies of all that was good and holy, constantly called for measures to curtail and restrict Jewish activities, described actions by or on behalf of Israel as actions "by the Jews" ("the Jews stopped the flotilla," "the Jews' propaganda says X," "when the Jews invaded Lebanon"), would you have much of a problem with a corporation that decided to take its business elsewhere?
And let's be clear: McCarthy didn't "counsel suspicion" of the CI - which is aggressive but might amount in practice to "keep an eye on the CI." He called for a campaign to prevent Cordoba House-NYC from being built, depicting it as a significant milestone in the "Grand Jihad" to "sabotage America" and turn it into a "Shariah society."