Читаем After America полностью

Picture Timothy Treadwell cooing love songs to his killers. You don’t have to go to the Arctic to see that. In Philadelphia, there is an organization called the BDS Coalition. BDS? As in “Bush Derangement Syndrome”? No.

It stands for “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions,” and it’s an alliance of groups committed to working for “social justice” in “Palestine.” So they staged a disruptive “flashdance” at a Philly supermarket to protest the store’s “policy” of carrying brands of hummus made by companies perceived to have too close ties to Israel.¹⁰³ Watching these young white twentysomething American students “dance into action” around the hapless grocery clerks, you couldn’t help noticing that (without wishing to stereotype from modes of dress and levels of hirsuteness) more than a few of the young ladies appeared to be stern feminists, if not, ah, persons of orientation. In America, so what?

But try it in Hamas-run Gaza.

There is a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. When they march in Gay Pride parades, they chant:

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid—now there’s a cause. When he spoke to Columbia University, President Ahmadinejad of Iran told his audience that there are no homosexuals in Iran.¹⁰⁵ Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Gaza to see the new production of Mame? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions. In Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan, homosexual men were put to death by being crushed under a wall specifically built for that purpose.¹⁰⁶ Under the Taliban, it was just about the only work you could get in the otherwise depressed Afghan construction industry. Have you tried being a lesbian in Yemen? Have you tried being a woman in Yemen?

A few years back, I thought even spaghetti-spined western liberals might draw the line at “Female Genital Mutilation”—or “FGM,” as it’s already known in far too many western hospitals from Virginia to Australia. After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest. Yet already female genital “mutilation” has been replaced by the less judgmental term of “female genital cutting.” In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics floated the suggestion that, because certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “cutting,” in a spirit of multicultural compromise perhaps U.S. pediatricians should amend their opposition to the practice, and provide a “ritual nick” to young girls.¹⁰⁷

Nonetheless, at the Gay Pride parade they know their priorities:

There is a moral frivolity to the Eloi’s generalized concerns for “the planet.”

But it quickly advances to the next stage—a moral decadence that expresses itself by venerating those who will gladly kill them when they have served their purpose as useful idiots. Listen to Sheikh Muhammad al-Gamei’a, an Egyptian Muslim of such exemplary moderation that he was the head imam at the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in New York at the time of 9/11’s, er, “controlled explosion.” Shortly thereafter, he explained why he agrees with Philadelphia BDS Coalition and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid that it’s all the fault of the Jews: “You see these people all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. Because of the Jews there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world….”¹⁰⁸

So Jews are to blame for lesbians? Do the prancing sapphists in that Philly supermarket know they’re just tools of the International Jewish Conspiracy?

Fortunately for them, they’re taking their courageous stand for Palestinian “social justice” in Pennsylvania. Not everyone keeps such a discreet distance. In 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set off to hitch-hike from Milan to the Palestinian Territories to promote “world peace.”