Mark Steyn - Lights Out

OF ALL THE flagrantly Islamophobic Steyn material Elmo’s Sock Puppets introduced in evidence, the allegation that most tickled my critics’ fancy was this one, from page ten of the Canadian Islamic Congress dossier:

The representation that a large number of Muslims are ‘sheep-shaggers’.

Oh, my. Let’s examine this accusation in some detail. What follows is long, but it does have underage sex and bestiality in it. So enjoy!

The so-called “representation” arose from the following passage in my review of Oriana Fallaci’s final book, The Force Of Reason :

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam – for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s ‘Blue Book’ and its helpful advice on romantic matters: ‘If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.’ I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: ‘A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.’ Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that.

A cheap joke en passant. Indeed, insofar as I dwelt on the ovine fornication, it was to suggest to La Fallaci that, even for us flagrant Islamophobes, it was not perhaps the most useful avenue of attack:

I enjoy the don’t-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I’d rather Mohammed Atta was downriver in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he’s not.

And that’s it. That’s all I said. And no one would remember had not the Socks included the sheep-shagging line in their submission to the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. Whereupon Dr John Miller …actually, I’m not sure he is a doctor: He calls himself “The Journalism Doctor”, but the title seems to be entirely self-conferred. Anyway, at this point, Doc Miller, Prof Miller, Herr Baron von Miller or whatever he is got interested in the case and asked the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal if he could intervene. Silly ol’ me assumed that he wished to intervene to argue the cause of free speech. But no: he wanted to intervene to argue that I was not a “responsible journalist”, and so it was entirely appropriate for the state to censor me. As Rory Leishman noted in the quaintly titled London Free Press , since this thought-police racket got going, “Most journalists have either condoned censorship or cowered in silence.” Canadians who still value liberty should know that, if they rely on anemic PC flunkeys like Professor Miller, they’ll lose their country. At any rate, the BCHRT declined to let him testify and gave him the bum’s rush, so an aggrieved Prof Miller surfaced in the fall of 2008 and kept returning to the subject of the sheep-shaggers line. His complaint in those frantic weeks was in an apparently endless process of evolution. But let’s go through the story so far:

1) First, insofar as I understand his initial argument, he advanced the curious line that the ruling from the Ayatollah was not widely cited, and therefore it was improper of me to use it. Apparently, one should only use familiar quotations in “responsible journalism”.

After it was pointed out that in fact Khomeini’s views on the post-bestiality buffet, child sex and other arcane points of Islamic law are known to many (especially those on the receiving end), a couple of weeks later he revised his line of attack:

2) Now his argument was that I’d concocted it out of whole cloth. The J-Doc declared boldly that Steyn “gave no citation for the quote, and I suspect it was made up.”

In fact, as anyone who reads the passage above can see, I attributed it to Oriana Fallaci’s book. The disinterested observer might conclude that Professor Ethics-Bore had never so much as glanced at the offending article but had simply taken the Sock Puppets’ word for it. So the E-Bore was obliged to revise his argument yet again – and decided to accuse me of what he appeared to have done himself:

3) Now my sin was that I “clearly accepted someone else’s word for it”. Evidently, it wasn’t all that “clear” when he was accusing me of making it up, but a drowning ethics prof can be forgiven for clutching at straw men.

At any rate, that makes three different complaints. As I commented at the time:

That’s the great thing about the self-appointed ‘Journalism Doctor’: When he diagnoses you, he provides his own second opinion.

A couple of weeks later, my crime was revised yet again. I received an e-mail from M J Murphy of Toronto, who blogs as “Big City Lib”, saying only this:

I think you owe Dr Miller an apology.

There followed a link to an Internet post by Mr Murphy headlined “Steyn Gets Punked By 28-Year Old Literary Hoax”:

Remember the kerfuffle between Mark Steyn and journalism professor Dr John Miller from a few weeks back? Dr Miller accused Steyn of taking material for America Alone from illegitimate sources like the infamous Little Green Book: Sayings Of The Ayatollah Khomeini .

Actually, I don’t think even Dr Miller has accused me of any such thing, although I admit, given his shifting accusations, that I’m no longer quite sure what he’s accusing me of. Just to recap, said “kerfuffle” arose not from my book but from my review of La Fallaci’s book in Maclean’s . It’s nothing to do with America Alone . There is no mention of sheep shagging in America Alone . There is no mention of any Little Green Book in America Alone . There is, indeed, no mention of Ayatollah Khomeini in America Alone . Prof Miller and Mr Murphy and their enthusiastic chorus boys at the website Law Is Cool are welcome to check for themselves, via the Amazon.com “Search Inside The Book” service.

But, leaving that aside and forgiving M J Murphy for confusing America Alone with a book review in Maclean’s , if you return to the passage up above, you’ll see that neither Oriana nor I refer to any Little Green Book . We cite a “Blue Book” – or “ Libro Azzurro ”, in La Fallaci’s original Italian. That’s the color we’re nailing to our mast. We’re singing the blues, and it’s you fellers who are smelling the green. Indeed, the guy who brought up the Little Green Book is Prof Miller in one of his attacks on me. I never mentioned any green book. Like I said, I’d rather be blue. So, if M J Murphy and the excitable schoolgirls at Law R Cool have proved The Little Green Book is a “literary hoax”, they should take it up with Professor Miller.

Incidentally, I wouldn’t describe The Little Green Book as a “hoax”. It would be truer to say that it is a somewhat lurid and condensed version of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s work. Nevertheless, if you read M J Murphy’s post, you’ll find that Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago declined to provide an introduction for it. Professor Zonis is evidently regarded by M J Murphy as a greater authority in these matters than I am, so please keep his name in mind.

However, as it happens, I didn’t take “someone else’s word” for anything, whether it was the word of Oriana Fallaci or the compiler of The Little Green Book . When it comes to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s views on sheep shagging, my guide for many years has been a book called Resaleh Towzih al-Masael . The author is a chap called… Ayatollah Khomeini.