The Significance of Prayers for the Assassin
As zerorevenge recently pointed out (http://zerorevenge.livejournal.com/999161.html), back in 2006, Robert Ferrigno published a novel entitled Prayers for the Assassin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayers_for_the_Assassin), which was a political thriller set in a dystopic future America in which radical Islam had (through immigration, subversion, terrorism and fraud) taken over most of the country. Shari'a was now the law of the land, and civil rights were now no more extant than they are in, say, modern Iran or Saudi Arabia.
This is, of course, an improbable future. America, unlike Europe or even more Russia, does not have a severe birth dearth amont her native population. And most of our immigrant population comes from Latin America, not the Mideast. The American Armed Forces would be unlikely to tolerate a Muslim regime that proceeded to dismantle the US Constitution, and the American people would themselves be too well-armed, ornery and aware of their rights to submit to any such tyranny.
Nevertheless, I am very glad that Robert Ferrigno wrote this book.
What Prayers for the Assassin was really about was not so much an argument that a Muslim subversive conquest of America was probable (Ferrigno probably knows that it isn't) as it is a demonstration of how utterly horrible it would be for a formerly-Civilized country to have to live under shari'a. Ferrigno set it in America to break right through the "Only America Is Real" psychological defense most Americans use in order to avoid facing up to this reality.
We know -- if we pay attention to the foreign news -- just how horrible it is in Muslim countries for anyone who isn't a high-status Muslim male belonging to the sect of the rulers. Police gang-raping women and then sending them to prison for "fornication" in Pakistan, homosexuals executed in Iran, Christian garbagemen forcibly deprived of their jobs (and pigs) en masse in Egypt, the destruction of centuries-old Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan ... But places like Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan are safely far, far away. So we simply drop these atrocities down our cultural memory holes and tell ourselves that Islam is "civilized" and a "religion of peace" and similar nonsense. Because we know it Couldn't Happen Here.
By showing it Happening Here, Ferrigno breaks through our psychological defenses and, basically says: This is evil. And this is real. In order to deny the revelation of the evil of Islam in Prayers for the Assassin, one must either be ignorant of what happens on a daily basis in Muslim countries, or one must explicitly say to oneself "Yeah, but that only happens to foreigners. And they aren't people like we are." In other words, it strips the modern Left bare of any defenses other than ignorance or explicit racism.
That's why the Left hated this book. Because they want to have their cake and eat it. They want to suck up to radical Islam while trusting that the Right will protect them from actually having to live under radical Islam; and they want to symapthize with(to show how non-racist they are) the radical Muslim elite of highly misogynist, religiously-bigoted, and anti-gay men, while ignoring the suffering that this elite imposes on women, non-Muslims, and gays who have the misfortune of actually living under their sway.
This book strips away the veils, and leaves the face of this hypocrisy indecently exposed. Which is why I'm glad it was written.
This is, of course, an improbable future. America, unlike Europe or even more Russia, does not have a severe birth dearth amont her native population. And most of our immigrant population comes from Latin America, not the Mideast. The American Armed Forces would be unlikely to tolerate a Muslim regime that proceeded to dismantle the US Constitution, and the American people would themselves be too well-armed, ornery and aware of their rights to submit to any such tyranny.
Nevertheless, I am very glad that Robert Ferrigno wrote this book.
What Prayers for the Assassin was really about was not so much an argument that a Muslim subversive conquest of America was probable (Ferrigno probably knows that it isn't) as it is a demonstration of how utterly horrible it would be for a formerly-Civilized country to have to live under shari'a. Ferrigno set it in America to break right through the "Only America Is Real" psychological defense most Americans use in order to avoid facing up to this reality.
We know -- if we pay attention to the foreign news -- just how horrible it is in Muslim countries for anyone who isn't a high-status Muslim male belonging to the sect of the rulers. Police gang-raping women and then sending them to prison for "fornication" in Pakistan, homosexuals executed in Iran, Christian garbagemen forcibly deprived of their jobs (and pigs) en masse in Egypt, the destruction of centuries-old Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan ... But places like Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan are safely far, far away. So we simply drop these atrocities down our cultural memory holes and tell ourselves that Islam is "civilized" and a "religion of peace" and similar nonsense. Because we know it Couldn't Happen Here.
By showing it Happening Here, Ferrigno breaks through our psychological defenses and, basically says: This is evil. And this is real. In order to deny the revelation of the evil of Islam in Prayers for the Assassin, one must either be ignorant of what happens on a daily basis in Muslim countries, or one must explicitly say to oneself "Yeah, but that only happens to foreigners. And they aren't people like we are." In other words, it strips the modern Left bare of any defenses other than ignorance or explicit racism.
That's why the Left hated this book. Because they want to have their cake and eat it. They want to suck up to radical Islam while trusting that the Right will protect them from actually having to live under radical Islam; and they want to symapthize with(to show how non-racist they are) the radical Muslim elite of highly misogynist, religiously-bigoted, and anti-gay men, while ignoring the suffering that this elite imposes on women, non-Muslims, and gays who have the misfortune of actually living under their sway.
This book strips away the veils, and leaves the face of this hypocrisy indecently exposed. Which is why I'm glad it was written.