28 October 2004
Little Green Footballs fans have been writing en masse for two days to either wish that I be sodomized with a broken bottle for suggesting that the rhetoric of the site is fascist and hatemongering, or to assure me that the two comments I quoted in my original post were highly unrepresentative. Looking only at what’s on the front page of LGF right now, here are some more unrepresentative comments from one of the web’s most popular blogs: “Any successor to [Arafat] will likely be more radical and less clever, and that will give Israel the opening it needs to eradicate the vermin in the next year”; “Pali-scum” [that’s supposed to be a nickname for Palestinians]; “The scum are taking advantage of the religious tolerance shown by Israel”; “This may be an opportunity to expel all nazi arabs and muslims. If not now, soon”; “Goodbye you messy old muslim moron”; “we need to encourage those enigmatic times when muslims madly stampede in a frenzied libidinal drive of mass killing – against other Muslims”; “If, in the highly unlikely chance that I will be reborn, as it were, into the Star Child of Arthur Clarke’s 2001, I would reach out my hand and crush the nation of France like the cockroaches they are.” What’s wrong with France? It’ll soon “go Muslim.” Not one of these comments is repudiated on the site. While it’s not news that there are people eager to channel their personal pathologies into a cause, the popularity of such views on the web should be. LGF has a readership bigger than almost any print political magazine. Judging from the email signatures of some of the people who’ve been writing me — lawyers, government employees, professors — they’re an influential bunch. Most major political blogs include links to LGF. LGF readers have enjoyed telling me that they’re the majority. Maybe so. I’d like to think the majority doesn’t take pleasure from imagining, in lurid detail, the pain suffered by Arafat as he dies. Arafat’s a nasty piece of work, but one certainly needn’t admire Arafat, Hizbollah, or any other terrorist to see that there’s a big religion story here: Muslim-hating is mainstream. Not just the kind of nationalistic fever that’s to be expected when U.S. troops are dying. This is something that normally festers only at the fringe: virulent, sadistic, fascistic fury.