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[UPDATE: M J Murphy of Toronto has also issued his own apology but.... The Miller-Murphy-LawIsCool coalition has collapsed even quicker than Dion-Layton-Duceppe, leaving Law Is Kool Aid as the sole surviving generalissimo of the wannabe junta]
Apparently in Canada you wait almost as long for the "Journalism Doctor" as you do for a real one. But John Miller has now returned to the fray with a response to my piece "The shagged sheep". We might as well get it out the way so we can all go back to the earnest thumbsuckers on the Governor-General, the Crown's reserve powers and the relevant precedent from the South Sandwich Islands constitutional crisis of 1893. Anyway, before that fun heats up, here's Professor Miller:
For the last month, I have been trying to get Mark Steyn to verify a quotation he uses to characterize the threat that he feels Muslims pose to western civilization.
Now he has finally done that. What can I say? Congratulations. It's a start.
No, it's the finish. All the rest is mopping up. But, since you're a glutton for punishment, once more unto the breach. You have not spent the last month "trying to get Mark Steyn to verify a quotation". Instead, you suggested that I'd made it up: False. Then you said I'd failed to provide a citation: Also false. Finally you declared flat out that the cited book by Ayatollah Khomeini does not exist: False again, and laughably so. Three strikes, you're out. You're a fact-checker who attempted to fact-check a joke, and failed. How sad is that?
Professor Miller then goes on to offer a graceless and partial apology which I will leave readers to judge for themselves by slogging through it at the J-Doc's own website. (Incidentally, you'll notice I provide a link to him, but he provides no link to me.) Anyway, after some grudging concessions, he returns for what he calls "Round Two" and poses three questions:
1. Do you not see a fundamental difference between the Fallaci version and the version you now cite from A Clarification of Questions? You say in your most recent blog, "Now, it's true that La Fallaci's wording differs from Mr. Borujerdi's. But so what?" I'll tell you so what: Fallaci, and you, use the quotation to imply that the Ayatollah, and in fact a great many Muslims, condone bestiality. The quotes from A Clarification of Questions, on the other hand, make clear that he considered the practice "loathsome" and "unlawful."
2. Are you aware that the translation of the book you cite has been called into question by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 370 -371 The reviewer, Prof. Azim Nanji of Oklahoma State University, says A Clarification of Questions: An Unabridged Translation of "Resaleh Towzih al-Masael" is deeply flawed. Borujerdi's translation, he says, "contains many errors and is very misleading in places." He calls it "a case of lost labour."
3. Now that you've found what purports to be the actual quote, why do you persist in using it to gleefully make sport of all Muslims, portraying them as uncivilized, vulgar, menacing people who are prone to do the unthinkable and shag or "roger" sheep? Here's what you wrote in your Fallaci review: "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."
It is your use of the alleged quote to promote an inaccurate religious stereotype that I find dishonest. Bestiality is not condoned by Islam. That is a fact. It is prohibited...
What responsibility do you have as a writer to avoid inaccurate stereotypes?
What onus do you feel, as a person who has considerable influence, to promote understanding, not just tear us further apart?
Why do you resort to personal insults when the issues -- most of which you have not addressed -- are journalistic..?
To take the last point first: Why do I resort to personal insults? Well, it's true I called you "Professor Waggy-Finger" and one or two other things you obviously find distressing. But you surely can't be that mystified as to why I have total contempt for you. I have left-wing critics all over the world - Johann Hari at The Independent in London, Glenn Greenwald at Salon in America, Phillip Adams at The Australian - who often say how repellent and disgusting I am. Had you done that, I'd have said pip-pip and bottoms up, and that'd be that. However, you're the only one who's attempted to intervene in a legal proceeding on behalf of the plaintiffs to argue in favour of the government's right to censor my opinions. Had you had your way and helped Mohamed Elmasry to win his case, the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal would have been statutorily obligated under Section 37 (2) of the province's "Human Rights" Code to issue a cease-and-desist order preventing Maclean's from publishing anything further by me related to Islam, the west, terrorism, etc, ever again. In other words, had your intervention succeeded, you would have de facto criminalized my writing throughout Canada.
Are you perhaps beginning to get a glimmer of a clue as to why I don't want to be your Facebook friend? Interestingly, even the aforementioned Messrs Hari and Greenwald, while continuing to find me vile and disgusting, regard as an abomination the so-called "human rights" suits you supported. But perhaps you'd genuinely find it less distressing if I stopped calling you "Professor Waggy-Finger" and instead tried to get you kicked out of Ryerson and made it illegal for you to practice whatever the hell it is you practice anywhere in Canada. If so, just say the word.
Incidentally, I don't really think of you as "Professor Waggy-Finger". I think of you more as a - what's the word? - "dickhead". But then I remembered "the responsibility of the writer" to "promote understanding", and thought I ought to fluff it up into something more arch and literary. Not too literary - not Bertie-Wooster-describing-Sir-Roderick-Spode literary, but something just a smidgeonette shy of a four-letter epithet seemed to be what the situation called for.
As for what you call the "journalistic" issues, I think we've established by now that I was right on the facts, and you were wrong. That said, let's return to your questions:
1. Do you not see a fundamental difference between the Fallaci version and the version you now cite from A Clarification of Questions..? Fallaci, and you, use the quotation to imply that the Ayatollah, and in fact a great many Muslims, condone bestiality. The quotes from A Clarification of Questions, on the other hand, make clear that he considered the practice "loathsome" and "unlawful."
Really? What is that now? Your fourth or fifth factual error? If you read the relevant quotations, the Ayatollah says:
#2631. It is loathesome to eat the meat of horse and mule and donkey and if somebody makes coitus with them, that is an intercourse, they become unlawful and they must be taken out of the city and sold elsewhere.
#2632. If they have intercourse with a cow and sheep and camel their urine and dung becomes unclean and drinking their milk will also be unlawful and they must be killed and burned without delay, and the person who had intercourse with them must pay money to the owner. Further, if he had intercourse with any beast its milk becomes unlawful.
Send me your street address and I'll have the UPS guy come round and staple it on the end of your nose so even you can't miss it. The only thing Imam Khomeini considers "loathesome" is eating the meat of horse, mule or donkey, and it's not bestiality that's "unlawful" but only the poor fellows on the receiving end: "They" become unlawful and must be taken out of the city and sold. Likewise, with any cow, sheep or camel you've pleasured: it's not the intercourse that's "unlawful", only drinking Daisy's milk afterwards. Nowhere in those quotations, in English or Farsi, does the Ayatollah say bestiality is "loathesome" or "unlawful", never mind "prohibited", and I defy you to find a Persian scholar prepared to argue that he does. Indeed, throughout the Resaleh, he finds plenty of other things "loathesome" - for example, he states that it's loathesome to tinge your beard with henna after an ejaculation. (From the looks of your byline pic, you seem to be pretty safe on that one.) But on the matter of bestiality per se, as opposed to bestiality with your mixed-grill special, the Ayatollah is entirely relaxed.
As to questions 2 and 3, you seem to have conceded that I have the facts on my side and you don't. So you now want to move on to matters of interpretation, nuance, generalization, responsibilities of the writer, etc. Matters of opinion. Sorry, I pass. I always respond to charges of factual error, and you've now dropped those, so that's that. But, when it comes to matters of opinion, I don't give a toss about your opinion. You're certainly entitled to yours, which, judging from your attempted intervention in the Vancouver trial, is more than you're prepared to say about me.
So now you're coming on all collegial and angling for a big-picture debate about the broader issues. Well, you're welcome to contact my agent and try to book me for a speech at Ryerson for my usual fee, and I'll be more than happy to take your question afterwards - although I should warn you, as I always say on these occasions, that, while I welcome hostile questions, after a certain point I'd rather just settle it through physical violence. But, other than that, I've no desire to get into an interminable debate on my opinions with a guy who thinks the state has the right to criminalize them. With respect to that, let me quote my late comrade Oriana Fallaci once again, from the very first line of my (rigorously fact-checked) obituary of her in The Atlantic Monthly:
You go fuck yourself. I say what I want.
Oh, dear. I see I've wound up with a four-letter word after all. Alas, my usual twee and writerly locutions cannot improve on Oriana: You go fuck yourself. I say what I want. And, if that's a crime in Canada, then see you in court.
By the way, like the last one you accused me of making up, that Fallaci line is verifiable.
But this time I wish it were mine.
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