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Kathy Shaidle points out the not-so-subtle evolution in Professor Miller's complaint (see below). First, he accused me of "irresponsibility" in circulating the Ayatollah's quotation. Then, he accused me of making it up. Now, he accuses me of "clearly" accepting someone else's word for it. That's the great thing about the self-appointed "Journalism Doctor": When he diagnoses you, he provides his own second opinion. 

Evidently, it wasn't quite so "clear" when he wrote originally: "He gave no citation for the quote and I suspect it was made up." Now my crime is uncritically accepting Oriana Fallaci's word for it. Actually, I expressed no view on the quotation other than using it for some cheap'n'cheerful sheep-shagging gags. It's the otherwise unemployable J-school ethics bore who's chosen to make a great issue out of it, to the point where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to intervene in the British Columbia trial in order to argue that it was legitimate for the Canadian state to rule my opinions illegal. How drearily predictable that Professor Miller should be so eager to make the J-school establishment the third leg of the PC thought-police/Islamist grievance lobby axis.

Professor John Miller has responded to my "open letter" (see below) as follows:

With all due respect, Mr. Steyn, I did not accuse you of making up a quote. You clearly accepted someone else’s word for it. But that’s not journalism. Few journalists I know would take Oriana Fallaci’s word about Islam at face value the way you did, for reasons I will explain.
You uncritically accepted her reference to the “Blue Book,” and went on to have fun with the notion of Mohammed Atta interfering with the livestock instead of suicide bombing. But there is no Blue Book, it’s The Little Green Book. And it wasn’t written by the Ayatollah at all, as you say, but by a source who was apparently at least three times, and three languages, removed.
Moreover, it’s a collection of quotes purportedly from him, but without any documentation, as someone who posted on your blog (Sept. 22, 2006) pointed out to you.
So which Blue Book is it you are offering to mail to me? Which verified quote does it contain?
I’m not going to engage in any scatological references to your credibility seeping away, as you did about me. I’m just saying that no one has verified that the Ayatollah ever said: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.”

First let’s deal with Fallaci. When the New York Times wrote her obituary on Sept. 15, 2006, the headline called her a “writer-provocateur.” Sound familiar? Remind us of anyone we know?

The obit said this:
“In three books beginning with “The Rage and the Pride” (Rizzoli: 2002) and many interviews (after 9-11), she attacked not only Islamic extremists but Islam itself, as well as a West that she said had become too complaisant and tolerant to realistically understand the threat.
“Saying that the “sons of Allah breed like rats,” she strongly condemned the growing immigration of Muslims in Europe, including her native Italy. “Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 2005.”

Hmmm. This is definitely starting to ring bells, isn’t it?

Fallaci, unlike you, was charged in Switzerland and Italy for violating laws against vilifying religion, and many regarded her as a racist in her later years.

So discount Oriana Fallaci as an unimpeachable source.

Journalists usually try to deal with primary sources (Writer-provocateurs seldom do). However, one of your blog puppets, who claims to have once been a journalist, says she has found what you couldn’t.

Deborah Gayapong (http://deborahgyapong.blogspot.com/) writes:
“Well, I decided to get on Google myself. And guess what, I found an English translation of the whole bleepin' book. Within five minutes I found this: “The meat of horses, mules, or donkeys is not recommended. It is strictly forbidden if the animal was sodomized while alive by a man. In that case, the animal must be taken outside the city and sold.”

She also quotes: “If one commits an act of sodomy with a cow, a ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed as quickly as possible and burned, and the price of it paid to its owner by him who sodomized it.”

Hmmm. Not exactly what the Steyn-Fallaci quote from the Blue or Green Book says, but perhaps close enough in the right-wing blogosphere. Clearly, something is lost in translation here, and any skeptical journalist would give these variations of an undocumented quote the skip.

The helpful Deborah refers us to a site called Prophet of Doom, which, if anyone is interested, is at http://prophetofdoom.net/. There’s this description of its author: “This version of The Little Green Book is a translation done by Harold Salemson, whose source was a French translation of the Ayatollah’s fatawah compiled by a Persian named Jean-Marie Xaviere.”

If you want to hang your hat on that as a reliable source, go right ahead but you’re travelling alone, Mr. Steyn.

Oh yes, and what does the Prophet of Doom website say about Islam? “Islam is a caustic blend of regurgitated paganism and twisted Bible stories. Muhammad, its lone prophet, conceived his religion solely to satiate his lust for power, sex, and money. He was a terrorist.”

A reactionary, right-wing blog? I rest my case.

Professor Miller seems to be overcomplicating this. I didn't "hang my hat" on any website. That's his argument: He's the one who thinks the veracity of a quotation is determined by who cites it on the Internet. The book was published in Iran before the Internet was invented, so Prof Miller's argument is a bit like complaining that a wax cylinder from 1904 isn't available on CD. That may be so, but it doesn't mean the wax cylinder doesn't exist

I've offered to send him the book by the Ayatollah Khomeini in which the original statement appeared in the original language. If he doesn't like Oriana Fallaci's translation, he's welcome (as a renowned Islamic scholar) to offer his own. All he has to do is give me his mailing address. All the rest is blowing smoke.

(Deborah Gyapong has more here). 

Dear Professor Miller,

I see you have now taken your critique of my writing a stage further. From reports of your remarks in Halifax, I understood your complaint to be that my quotation from Ayatollah Khomeini was not widely cited by anybody else and therefore I shouldn't be using it. I confess I found it a curious line of argument - that journalists should only recycle familiar bromides everyone already knows - but what do I know? You're the professor. Anyway, I now find you've moved on to accuse me of making the quotation up:

As an example, I mentioned Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn’s lack of responsibility in quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who allegedly said that it’s okay for a man to have sex with animals, as long as he kills them after orgasm and doesn’t feed the meat to his own village. He gave no citation for the quote, and I suspect it was made up. The only places I could find it on the Internet were on some right-wing blogsites. 

Really? There are those who beg to differ. As I said, I'm not a trained journalist such as yourself, merely a dilettante. However, over the years I've written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, The Irish Times, The Sunday Times of South Africa, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Star-Times of New Zealand, and even The Globe And Mail, so I've had occasional interaction with credentialed editors and fact-checkers around the globe and they all react pretty much the same way. Had you penned the above paragraph for, say, my old editor at The Atlantic Monthly, he would have said, "Er, John, we hate to bother you, but we have a bit of a problem with you saying that Steyn 'gave no citation for the quote'. Unlike you, we looked at his actual piece. It's a book review. A review of a book by the late Oriana Fallaci called The Force Of Reason. And he seems to make it pretty clear to most sentient beings other than amoeba and journalism professors that the quotation comes from her book. So are you saying that Fallaci made it up? Or that Steyn made it up and somehow planted it in Fallaci's book? Possibly while melting the steel in World Trade Tower Seven?"

Here's what I wrote in Maclean's:

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. 

Seems pretty clear to me where it comes from. However, I think the easiest way to resolve the issue is for me to mail you a copy of the Ayatollah's book. As you pride yourself on being far more clued in to the Muslim community than I am, I'm sure you'll have no difficulty getting it translated. But, in case you do, I'll also send you the standard English translation. That should settle it, don't you think?

So please email me a mailing address to steyn@marksteyn.com. If I don't hear from you, I'll ship it to your employers at Ryerson, together with a polite suggestion that either you might like to apologize or they might be advised to offer refunds to any students who paid good money to be taught journalism "ethics" by your good self.

Yrs, etc,

Mark Steyn

PS I see you bill yourself as "The Journalism Doctor". One hesitates to say "Journalism physician, heal thyself", but that strange leaking coming from your ass is your credibility.

Over at Free Canuckistan, the Binksmeister recounts a day at a big confab on "the legal and ethical limits of free speech", which billing tells you a lot about the cut of the organizers' jib. Still, Margaret Wente was there, as was Ezra Levant. And so was John Miller, the Ryerson journalism prof and beloved comic figure who a couple of months back attempted to intervene in the British Columbia show trial on the pro-censorship side. Binky captures the great man in action:

During the event, Professor John Miller of Ryerson (live-blogged here.. his stuff starts around 1:06.. he’s Head Of The “Ezra For Prime Minister Committee” ) slagged Mark Steyn [see 1:33] as a mere ‘polemicist’ and not a responsible journalist. As an example, he used Mark’s quoting of Ayatollah Khomeini from (he said) the now infamous Macleans article. Looks like he’s been trusting the citations of the SockPuppets, because as Steyn himself notes, it’s actually from the Maclean’s article ‘Celebrate tolerance, or you’re dead‘.

Miller asserted that after a thorough Internet search, he found the Khomeini quote only in one comment on one [echh, ptui] blog. Meanwhile, Ezra was surfing online, and interrupted a minute later to point out he’d just then Googled 100+ references to the quote in question, including one from the eminently liberal Harper’s Magazine, 1985. Public pantsing accomplished. 

So much for Professor Fact-Check. Still, John Miller is quite right. I'm not a "journalist" and have never described myself as one. And, when I give speeches or appear on TV or radio and the organizers or producers send us the biographical intro in advance, my trusty assistants always insist on the removal of the word "journalist". This used to be purely for truth-in-advertising reasons - I wouldn't want audiences to get the false impression that I'd passed rigorous tests and acquired a diploma signed by Professor Miller. But lately it's been for a more basic reason. I had lunch with Ken Whyte, my publisher at Maclean's, the other day, and mentioned en passant that one consequence of a year's worth of thought-police investigations was that it was no longer possible to avoid the painful truth that, for a profession that congratulates itself incessantly on its courage, bravery, fearlessness, etc (far more than, say, firefighters do) and hands out awards all year long for "speaking truth to power", most journalists are total pussies happy to suck up to state power as long as it's in PC clothing. Professor Miller, a J-school ethics bore boldly campaigning for the right of government bureaucrats to censor writers, would seem to be an almost parodic example of the phenomenon.