Moon Is Too Harsh for Wiscon

Is it a surprise that Wiscon, soi disant feminist SF convention, fired Elizabeth Moon as its Author Guest of Honor? No, the surprise is that she was invited in the first place. A woman who served in the Marine Corps and whose oeuvre includes a substantial quantity of military fiction is bound not to fit in with radical chic snobbery. She’s not right-of-center politically, but one must be left-of-left to be one of the acceptable “womyn”.

Leftist fanatics are, happily, a minute fraction of SF fandom. Unhappily, they have outsized influence, because fans in general are too polite to tell them to shut up. The easy course of action is to go along with whatever the shriekers demand. That only makes them more smugly confident, of course, and encourages them to demand more.

Looked at more broadly, this incident (like today’s other dhimmitude news, NPR’s dismissal of Juan Williams) is an example of the alliance between Islamic supremacism and the Left, for Elizabeth Moon’s offense was criticism of the proposed Ground Zero Mosque. The offending passage came far along in a post whose principal point was that an immigrant group, if it is to be successful, must “come to understand the culture into which it has moved”. She used the GZM as an example of failure to understand:

When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people. Not only were the attackers Islamic – and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for. That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial – does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility. It would have been one thing to have the Muslim victims’ names placed with the others, and identified there as Muslims – but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal’s attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink. It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that – did not anticipate it – and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy. If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved. Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)

Progressives like those who run Wiscon found those sentiments abhorrent, not because there is an untrue or unreasonable word in them, but because the contemporary Left’s natural affinity is with enemies of Western civilization. Before the Iron Curtain fell, they cheered on the Soviet Union. With that ally gone, they have found a new one. True, an Islamofascist victory would lead to the enslavement of women and the loss of those few freedoms that progressives approve (not many gay bars, weed joints or abortion clinics in Riyadh), but that is a small price if the Great Satan of the West can be vanquished.

Comments

[Anthony]

Leon Klinghoffer was shot in the forehead and the chest before being dumped in the Mediterranean by PLO killers aboard the Achille Lauro. He was not drowned. Not that shooting is any better, just trying to reimagine this atrocity as it really happened.