The ankle biters try a bit of deception
Daniel Simard posts an article he and his co-complainers Naseem Mithoowani, Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Sheikh managed to sneak past the editors at the Calgary Herald. I say “sneak” because smack dab in the middle of the thing is a truly sleazy bit of language manipulation:
One of the many user comments featured an extract from Steyn’s article: “The number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes.” lawiscool
An inattentive reader could be forgiven for concluding that Steyn had remarked about the Muslim breeding rate. And that inattentive reader would be wrong.
Steyn was quoting Mullah Krekar,
“Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” Krekar said. “Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries are producing 3.5 children.“By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.”
He claimed that “our way of thinking… will prove more powerful than yours.” He loosely defined “western thinking” as formed by the values held by leaders of western or non-islamic nations. Its “materialism, egoism and wildness” has altered Christianity, he claimed. aftenposten (emphasis mine)
As far as I am concerned the Mullah may be onto something. Which is, frankly, a problem and one which I think should be openly addressed in Canada without fear of a Human Rights Tribunal here in BC or any where else.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 pm
What the human rights tribunal complainants have succeeded in doing is taking language that I might have looked askance at a year ago, and made it a part of everyday discourse that I now find perfectly normal.
I hadn’t even bothered to read Steyn’s book before that.
Which is precisely the opposite of what they intended. The irony is killing me.
(Figuratively, I mean; not in the way that some jihadi with a great big knife… And there you go again, I’m making an off-colour (feeble) joke that I would never have dreamed of making…)
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:24 pm
“... and made it…” should be “... and making it …”
Any more faulty parallelism and my writing will be fit for “Law is Cool”.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Do you even know who this guy is? He’s an anti-Saddam, Kurdish terrorist, from Iraq.
It’s not like he’s a local leader or anything.
And using the quote and referring to it as an “extract from Steyn’s article” is hardly manipulation. It is an extract, even if he was quoting another.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Renaud, it really does not matter who the Mullah is, my point is that Steyn was quoting him not uttering the words himself.
As to the question of manipulation; I like sources clearly labeled so I can tell at a glance whether what I am reading are the author’s own words or a quotation. As it happens this particular smear had already made the rounds in the blogosphere before the lawiscool people decided to drag it out for one more dance so I knew Mark had not written the words in question. However, because of the deliberate obscurity of the lawiscool piece many people would have been left with the contrary impression. I call that manipulation.