Salman Rushdie—parasite on the West

In the midst of a long, meandering talk reproduced at FrontPage Magazine, Salman Rushdie makes this interesting observation:

And I remember thinking at the time that oh there is a kind of a team here [referring to John Paul II’s defense of Muslims’ hurt at Rushdie’s Satanic Verses]. The God Squad is not just some kind of phrase that people use—it really is there. I think the thing that’s interesting to me about Ratzinger is that he clearly doesn’t think that. He doesn’t think he’s on the same team as the other guys. He’s prepared to say that he thinks his religion is better than their religion, which is very unusual these days, except of course Muslims who say it all the time. I mean it seemed to me what was behind that fuss was that suddenly the religious consensus was breaking down. But appalling of The New York Times to demand that the Pope not be allowed to say what he felt like in a really seriously worked-out theological essay.

It’s nice that Rushdie calls on the Christian church to believe that it is better than Islam, and praises the present pope over his fanatically ecumenist, dhimmi-like predecessor, John Paul II. But Rushdie’s comment is also a typical example of the parasitism of the left. Rushdie is of course an outspoken atheist who, except when he has felt called upon to express some gratitude to the British authorities who have protected his life from the Islamic fatwa for the last 17 years, has taken the typical multicultural leftist stand of denigrating the traditional culture of Britain and the West for their inequality, exclusiveness, racism and so on. Yet, as shown here, Rushdie also sees Christianity as at least potentially aligned with his own secular democratic values against the expansive tyranny of Islam, and on that basis he would like Christianity to assert itself against Islam, as it once did in the past. It doesn’t occur to Rushdie that the massive presence of non-Westerners in the West, including himself, and the resulting multicultural ideology aimed at undermining all traditional Western beliefs, norms, and identities in the name of ethnic and cultural equality, is the main force driving the pro-Islamic ecumenism for which he justly criticizes John Paul II. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Rushdie gelds the Christian West, then urges it to be strong and courageous.

In reality, a Christian West that believed in itself and rejected Islam, as Rushdie would like it to do, would also be a Christian West that would never have allowed Salman Rushdie and millions of non-Western immigrants into the West in the first place.

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I posted the above at FrontPage Magazine. I’m glad to see that other FP commenters also have Rushdie’s number. Thus Jill Henry writes:

Rushdie:

“I mean multiculturalism it seems to me is a completely defensible idea … We all live jumbled up with each other…”

If by multiculturalism he means building diverse societies, then only if he embraces societies inherently unstable, filled with tension and alienation—is this position defensible.

And the world is not jumbled up, just about all people living in mono-racial societies. Those societies that do suffer with diversity always Balkanize.

Rushdie wants us to live all jumbled up with each other (that way we will accept millions of unassimilable non-Westerners including himself), but he also wants us to maintain enough identify and self-confidence to resist the encroachments of Islam. It’s pure leftist parasitism. Leftists and liberals attack and undermine Christian truth and Western culture, while expecting the benefits that come from Christian truth and Western culture.

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Carol Iannone posted this comment at the Phi Beta Cons blog at NRO:

Salman Rushdie and the Left

Salman Rushdie, chastened from his miserable experience with Islamic fundamentalism, defends Western values of freedom, tolerance, and pluralism in a speech at the Center for Inquiry in New York City. He denounces the cringing behavior of the West in confrontation with intimidation from Islam, and calls for a courageous solidarity that would force Muslims wielding threats and violence to back down. His anti-Americanism may still be heard not far from the surface of his words, but still, he performs a useful service in articulating the problem that the Left presents regarding Muslim culture. Their cultural relativism and hatred for the West and for America, combined with their sentimentality about the Third World, leads them to excuse Islamic radicalism and to tolerate Islamic customs such as the veil and female genital mutilation. (Rushdie also reveals that he feels “very close to George Bush.”)

But when Rushdie got a question asking why our schools don’t teach the greatness of Western civilization, the blindness of the Left came over him, too. He attributed this to the fact that we for the most part don’t pay teachers enough, and not to the Western self-hatred that our educational systems have been cultivating for decades. Furthermore, the schools have been teaching the very cultural relativism and the romanticism about the Third World that Rushdie deplores. So Rushdie is willing to expose the Left now, now that he disagrees with it, but not to expose any of its sins committed while he was a full-hearted partisan.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 17, 2006 02:45 PM | Send