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Crescent Moon
Saturday, September 25th, 2010 07:53 pmBack in the 1970s, Tom Robinson sang "When left is right and right is wrong, you'd better decide which side you're on." Ah, how simple things seemed in those days. Now it's hard to say what the sides are. Take, for example, the current furore about Elizabeth Moon's invitation to speak at Wiscon because she was critical of plans to build an Islamic centre near Ground Zero. Now I have no plans to attend Wiscon (wrong continent) and I'm not very familiar with Elizabeth Moon, so would have ignored the whole shebang were it not that I'd recently read her novel Surrender None. To the extent that a writer's politics can be deduced from her novels, then it's pretty clear that Moon ought to be one of the good guys, and certainly not someone you would expect to be guilty of racism, religious prejudice or whatever, just as you wouldn't read Atlas Shrugged and expect the author to be a social democrat.
Turning to what Moon's post, I found most of it to be eminently sensible. Certainly no upright person would argue with this paragraph:
On the other hand, Moon does fall into some classic traps, notably the "some of my best friends are ..." trap. I remember being dumbstruck when my aunt said "I've nothing against Black people—some of them are quite clean," but is this so different from "many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons"? As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tithenai points out, if you said something like that about Black people, Jews or women, it wouldn't go down well. You probably couldn't even say it at the John Birch Society these days. Many Americans don't seem to get the idea that saying "Muslims are X" is like saying "Christians are X." There are almost as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians, so as soon as you start saying things about them en masse, you're likely to put your foot in your mouth. Worse, Moon says that the 9/11 attacks were greeted with "indecent glee" by "the Islamic world in general." Wrong. They were greeted with indecent glee in Palestine and maybe a few other places. In most of the Islamic world they were greeted with horror. They held a minute's silence in Tehran, of all places. The attacks were immediately condemned in Islamic media worldwide. However, the American far right has worked very hard to perpetuate the myth that all Muslims were dancing in the streets on 9/11, and it's a shame that a writer of Moon's calibre fell for it.
So all in all, Moon made some factual errors, and voiced some wrong opinions. Don't we all?
Turning to what Moon's post, I found most of it to be eminently sensible. Certainly no upright person would argue with this paragraph:
When a rich man, like Ken Lay of Enron, can claim that he has suffered more than the low-level employees of the company because he's lost more money (his wealth going down from hundreds of millions to only 20-something millions)--when he can spend his pre-sentencing time at his luxurious home in Aspen with his family, while a poor man will spend his pre-sentencing time in jail--the system is obviously creating bad citizens. When a President's wife (Laura Bush) publicly announces that she and her husband have suffered more from the war than anyone else--a statement I'm sure most brain-injured and amputee vets and their families would take issue with--and then retire to a cushy Dallas home and a cushy central Texas ranch--with a big estate in Patagonia waiting should they wish--we have an excellent example of citizenship failure right at the top.Even when she gets on to the main issue of Islam, immigration and the controversial mosque, she still makes some good points. It doesn't sound very nice to suggest that Muslims in America should go out of their way to forestall Islamophobia—blaming the victim and all that—but it is sensible advice. After all, if the US were to bomb a city in a foreign country (which it does quite often) then it would be sensible for Americans living there to distance themselves from the actions of their government, and to avoid actions which could provoke hostility, like, for example, July 4th celebrations a couple of blocks from where the bombs fell. Speaking as an immigrant, I know how tiring it can be always to be seen as a representative of your country, race, religion or whatever, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
On the other hand, Moon does fall into some classic traps, notably the "some of my best friends are ..." trap. I remember being dumbstruck when my aunt said "I've nothing against Black people—some of them are quite clean," but is this so different from "many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons"? As
tithenai points out, if you said something like that about Black people, Jews or women, it wouldn't go down well. You probably couldn't even say it at the John Birch Society these days. Many Americans don't seem to get the idea that saying "Muslims are X" is like saying "Christians are X." There are almost as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians, so as soon as you start saying things about them en masse, you're likely to put your foot in your mouth. Worse, Moon says that the 9/11 attacks were greeted with "indecent glee" by "the Islamic world in general." Wrong. They were greeted with indecent glee in Palestine and maybe a few other places. In most of the Islamic world they were greeted with horror. They held a minute's silence in Tehran, of all places. The attacks were immediately condemned in Islamic media worldwide. However, the American far right has worked very hard to perpetuate the myth that all Muslims were dancing in the streets on 9/11, and it's a shame that a writer of Moon's calibre fell for it.So all in all, Moon made some factual errors, and voiced some wrong opinions. Don't we all?
