Published in 3:AM magazine, here’s my discussion with the Muslim novelist and exile Tahir Aslam Gora. On Islam, freedom and denial.

“It seems to me that the ideas being expressed most freely are far from tolerant and those who call for a more open-minded formulation of Islam are most likely to be intimidated or suppressed. One might note the recent experience of the reformist author Taslima Nasreen, whose book launch ended in her being violently assaulted by Islamic lawmakers and members of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, whose piety entailed throwing chairs at a terrified woman. Hyderabad police even filed a case against Nasreen for allegedly ‘creating religious tensions’ and writing ‘provocative literature’ – which rather highlights the scale of the change in outlook that’s required.”

Via MEMRI, an Iranian Channel 2 TV report on the heavy metal scene in Tehran.

“Some of the youths unknowingly make themselves look like homosexuals.” More. And. Also. 

Oh boy. On today’s Comment is Free, the incorrigible Seumus Milne takes umbrage with Andrew Anthony, whom he denounces as a “cheerleader of the wider US NeoCon project”, along with his book, The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence. (Extract here.) Milne’s railing against the apostate is typically evasive and distressing to the moral senses, so I’ll highlight only one of his remarkable statements.

“Anthony is in a fury with liberals and leftwingers… for supposedly appeasing terror and Islamism and abandoning Enlightenment values in pursuit of a blind and guilt-ridden anti-Americanism… His political life seems mainly to be a series of angry breakfast-time reactions to newspaper columnists, and Guardian writers in particular…”

Supposedly? Seumas, if you’re listening, this is one of your Guardian colleagues, Madeleine Bunting, denouncing Enlightenment values as “imperialistic” and “an ideology of superiority that is profoundly old-fashioned.” Then doing it again. This is that same colleague rhetorically fellating the ‘spiritual leader’ of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a man who endorses suicide bombing, the murder of homosexuals and the beating of disobedient women as matters of piety. And whom Ms Bunting saw fit to praise for his “horror of immorality”, his “independence of mind” and his mastery of the internet.

And, Seumas, this is you appeasing Islamism and wilfully misleading your readers. Three years in a row.

More on MilneWorld here.

Thanks to The Thin Man for directing my attention, via here, to this essay by Bruce Bawer on Johan Galtung and the “peace studies” movement. It’s a long piece, but worth reading in full as it illustrates just how readily reality can be inverted, not least by an unhinged Norwegian Marxist.

“[The] founding father [of the peace studies movement] is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed as a charismatic and grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that ‘our time’s grotesque reality’ was – no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s ‘structural fascism.’ …Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as ‘a model for everyone else,’ he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation – among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for ‘break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.’

…In 1973, explaining world politics in a children’s newspaper, he described the U.S. and Western Europe as ‘rich, Western, Christian countries’ that make war to secure materials and markets: ‘Such an economic system is called capitalism, and when it’s spread in this way to other countries it’s called imperialism.’ …His all-time favourite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all ‘nice and smiling.’ While ‘repressive in a certain liberal sense,’ he wrote, Mao’s China was ‘endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.’ Why, China showed that ‘the whole theory about what an open society is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of democracy – and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.’”

Here’s an extract from programme one of Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series Enemies of Reason, in which he addresses postmodern emotionalism, 9/11 conspiracies and the egalitarian flattening of values.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

The first programme can be viewed in full, in two parts, here and here. The second programme is broadcast on Monday August 20th at 8pm. Of particular interest are the insights of illusionist Derren Brown, the convergence of environmentalism and ‘spirituality’, Dawkins’ encounter with sociologist Steve Fuller and the description of science as “the poetry of reality.”

Professor D uploaded and disseminated by The Thin Man. Update: Part two is online here.