Patrick Collison » blog

The Onion nails it.

I’m hesitant to write anything about Islam in Europe. Its mention seems to be subject to a political form of Godwin’s Law[1]. And yet it’s hard to read something like Paul Belien’s latest piece, published today in The Washington Times, and not react in some way.

Belien’s thesis is that “the parallels between Nazism and Islamism are overwhelming” (though “the subject is a taboo”—naturally!). Making the claim, he cites as evidence the example of Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist who had a lecture cancelled at the University of Leeds. Typical of the tenuous relationship those on Belien’s fringe have with the truth, he fails to mention (or doesn’t realise) that the lecture wasn’t cancelled at all, but merely rescheduled and delivered without issue last month.

Belien never makes much effort to specify what aspects of Nazism he sees in Europe’s Islamist movement (is it, say, the rejection of degenerate art?). Examination of his purported evidence doesn’t add much insight: Küntzel’s scholarly work—and the lecture he delivered in Leeds—are on the topic of antisemitism, and how it was transmitted, via the Muslim Brotherhood, to the wider Islamist movement. Is Belien’s revelatory parallel that both movements are antisemitic?

The essay progresses from the inaccurate to the inept. Belien is director of Islamist Watch, and, midway through, he lurches into his movement’s usual sententious drivel—which, regardless of truth, is at least irrelevant to the argument. “There is a war going on between the Jihadists and the West”; “we are losing the battle”; “the European Left, in league with the Islamists, is constantly reminding the Europeans of Hitler and the Nazis, accusing Europe’s identity, the very core of its being, of being intrinsically evil”; “attempts to rob Europe of its identity are seen as ‘good’”, etc., etc.

The flailing continues in the eventual return to the putative equivalence, where Belien offers the claim that “to some, defending Europe’s identity is seen as a characteristic of neo-Nazism” (”some”, as usual, being unspecified), along with a bizarre non sequitur concerning Hitler’s take on Islam—which isn’t even worth addressing.

An essay from Belien, and those of his ilk, wouldn’t be complete without some anguished scaremongering, and in the final paragraph Belien doesn’t disappoint. We’re told that Germany is rapidly turning Islamic: “in addition to the many Muslim immigrants, 4,000 Germans convert to Islam each year”. Well then! Cause for concern indeed. If things continue at this rate, half the country will be Muslim in, um, ten thousand years. If the process started during the Mesolithic Stone Age, Germany would be just now be approaching fifty percent Muslim.

That essays like this are written isn’t surprising. But how does this feeble crap get repeatedly published in otherwise decent newspapers?

Update (7/11): Yesterday’s Washington Times: “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud”.

[1] Literally, in this case.

The British media have given a lot of coverage over the past few days to remarks made by James Watson. The interview reads:

He [Watson] says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really” […] He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

There are strong echoes of Larry Summers’s remarks of a few years ago: in both cases, it is being pointed out that some subset of our society currently performs worse than the group as a whole (in the Summers case, there’s a gender gap in the upper echelons of science; in the Watson case, Africans do worse on tests). And in both cases, the response has been an outpouring of politically-expedient self-righteousness and scientific ignorance.

Britain’s “Skills Minister” (no less) David Lammy was quickly out of the gates: Watson’s views “were deeply offensive” and would “only provide oxygen for the BNP [a far-right British political party]”. The Science Museum was next up: “We feel Dr Watson has gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are, as a result, cancelling his talk.” And, perhaps belying the the notion that the British have an understanding of irony, the Bristol Festival of Ideas cancelled his invited talk.

Watson absolutely deserves strong criticism for the remark that “all the testing says not really”—because it’s not true. (The next day, he conceded that “from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”) But none of the responses I’ve been able to find had the confidence or honesty to disagree with Watson because he’s wrong. To simply imply that any scientist is wrong for making “offensive” remarks purely because they are offensive is vacuous.

In both the Summers and Watson cases, the issues are big. We need to figure out why the gaps in achievement exist in each case. Why can’t we have an honest debate about it?

24/10 See also: Oliver Kamm.

“God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule” over at The Onion. Sometimes it’s not clear whether it’s The Onion or reality that’s satirical.