I LOVE BEING REDUCED TO A CULTURAL STEREOTYPE

In an article in The Sunday Times of London entitled "Where Do You Stand in the New Culture Wars?," Sarah Baxter pats herself on the back for praising Christopher Hitchens and his new partner in Muslim-bashing, Martin Amis, quotes Amir Taheri as if he weren't a lying propagandist who told last year that Iraq had no refugee crisis, and declares, in essence, that you're not a liberal unless you support George W. Bush's foreign policy. Did you seriously think people like this were in retreat? In America, maybe -- but in England they appear to be roaring back, led by Amis, who's a celebrity in his native land and therefore is finding a wide audience for his increasingly Hitchensian bombast.

Here's the difference between "progressives" (yay!) and "the left" (boo!), according to Baxter:

Nick Cohen, whose book What's Left? has just been published in paperback, identifies progressives as antitotalitarian internationalists who subscribe to "some kind of universal values", as he puts it.

"The left are like old-style Tory imperialists, who believe rights are all very well for western Europe but not for Johnny Foreigner, and that the liberation of women is essentially for white-skinned women, not brown-skinned women," Cohen says.

Because, see, if you don't believe that it's appropriate to proclaim a war of (oh, what's our justification for the war this week?) liberation for brown people, bomb the crap out of the brown people's country, let looters run roughshod over it, then seize control of the country "temporarily" while failing to secure the peace as a civil war breaks out and a refugee crisis unfolds, then you hate brown people and think they don't deserve freedom.

And just in case you're not sure whether you're aiding and abetting the most monstrous evil in the universe, Baxter offers a short quiz:

...My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women's rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

And my own test for spotting a liberal-bashing clone is as follows: If you think everyone who hates Bush loves Castro, if you believe that everyone who doesn't want to herd all culturally conservative Muslims into death camps actually admires the burka and suicide bombing, and if you think that anyone who doesn't want to bomb Iran back to the stone age approves of Ahmadinejad, then you pass the test. I'm sure Baxter does, with flying colors.

There's a longer quiz, in PDF form, linked to Baxter's article. It's all derived from the same nonsense -- that everyone who opposes the war loves Ahmadinejad and Castro and Che and Chavez and thinks genital mutilation and honor killing are the bee's knees. I think I get most of the right answers, but I am unabashedly a fascist in the eyes of Baxter, or whoever devised the longer quiz, with regard to question #3: "Is it acceptable to insist that a woman wears a veil?" Er, yeah -- it is acceptable for a religious faith to require this. Or do you not think it's acceptable for a religious faith to require a man to wear a yarmulke or earlocks, Sarah? If that's the case, who's being the anti-Semite now?