Dean's World

I am still thinking about how to respond in full to Michelle Malkin's response to me. This may be my entire response, or I may have more to say later. I haven't decided yet.

I admit to being a bit surprised and a bit disappointed. For instead of directly answering what I thought was a pretty reasonable (if slightly heated at the end) posting, she seems to have decided to delve into my comments section and dredge up some angry things I said to one of my commenters. Which was something I wrote in angry response to a troll who's been hanging out on Dean's World for a while now, regularly leaving horrible indictments of the entire faith of Islam.

Yeah I lost my temper and swore. But my comments should not be taken out of that context. I won't apologize for swearing--I'm a blue collar guy and I do talk like that when I'm angry. Nor will I apologize for defending my Muslim brothers and sisters who hate terrorists, of whom I know many.

And what did I say in that comment that was so offensive? I said that anyone who spits on the religion of many of our brave fighting men and women in the U.S. armed forces, and the faith of Muslims who are right now fighting side by side with them, is a traitor. A "G*d damned traitor" was my exact phrasing. Well if that makes you mad, too bad, because I believe it. You do not spit on the faith of our loyal citizens and allies who fight against terrorists. That's just wrong. Wrong on every level--politically, philosophically, patriotically, whatever.

But none of that was in my original article directed at Michelle. I wrote that in the comments to my article, in response to one guy who'd p*ssed me off several times before.

Still, I simply will not apologize for coming to the defense of our Muslim brethren who are engaged in the fight against terrorism. It makes me very angry when their faith is treated with contempt. I think I have a right to be angry about that. I think every American should be angry about that. You should not spit on the faith of our brave patriotic soldiers and their allies. You just shouldn't.

You should not spit on the faith of Hamid Karzai and Nouri al-Maliki either.

I'll also say I'm peeved with Michelle for accusing me of whoring for attention. Come off it, Michelle. That's totally unfair. I have about 30,000 daily readers, and its readership continues to grow over time. More to the point, when you were just starting out as a new blogger I was very supportive of you even though I often disagreed with you. I've always treated you with respect. Even when my blog had far more readers than yours I was happy to support you. I also still semi-regularly link both Michellemalkin.com and Hot Air, and have never once condemned you. We often disagree but I think you add a vital perspective, especially as a Woman of Color who is a conservative--which is nothing you should be ashamed of, even if sometimes I think your rhetoric is over the top.

I honestly, Michelle, think that I have never disrespected you, but I think you have disrespected me here. I was just looking for dialogue, but you decided to make me look like a fool because I posted an angry comment or two to my original article. (And yeah, my wife agreed with you, and that's fine too, she's a great woman and the mother of my children, but I think they were both were wrong.)

I wanted to start a real dialogue, and I think that this whole bit with quoting something I said deep in the comments to my original article sidelines the very real questions I brought up. So I'll re-iterate those questions here, in condensed form (which maybe I should have done in the first place):

1) Shouldn't we embrace Muslims who unequivocally reject terrorism as our friends and allies?
2) Shouldn't we be proud of the Muslims who wear America's uniform?
3) Shouldn't we admire and respect those Muslims who fight side by side with American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Phillipines, and other places against terrorists?
4) Should we not be careful not to paint Islam in broad brush-strokes when it might alienate Muslim-American patriots, and the allied Muslims who support our efforts to defeat terrorists?
5) Shoot, shouldn't Hot Air have at least one Muslim Republican in their mix? They're out there you know. As a Woman of Color and a Republican, shouldn't you be able to understand that?

I don't think these are unfair or angry questions. I think they are good questions, important questions, that every Conservative (and every Hawk) ought to contemplate carefully. They certainly aren't intended to be attacks or indictments, and never were.

I will re-iterate my respect for Michelle. Yes, we disagree on many things, but I do not believe I have ever been nasty or condescending toward her. I think I have supported her many times even when that made me unpopular. (Even if, apparently, she never noticed.)

I think I'm done for now, although there are other specifics I may need to address later (well over a dozen trackbacks, and countless comments all over the place. Wow, the head spins). But I still think that Ali Eteraz, a Muslim-American who hates terrorists, understood my point much better than most.

Update: In response to Dean's World commenter "clarenancy," who says I have given no specific links against Michelle, I respond by saying that I tried to avoid that. Listing such things would read like an indictment, and I was trying not to do that. I thought I was writing to a friend and comrade-in-arms, not an evil person who needed to be denounced. As I said, it was a call to conscience, not a fight I wanted to pick.

Still, some of Michelle's postings that I think could have been better-phrased include:

The Religion of Peace Firebombs &Fatwas

Hmm. Not the violent nutjobs, but all advocates of the "Religion of Peace?"

Muslims kill Christians in Nigeria

Not Islamic radicals and extremists. Just Muslims.

In I Support the Pope, Michelle says things like, "The Muslims clearly have no response to this, because their religion was spread by the sword, and we can see it is spread so still by the forced conversions of Steve Centani and his camera operator." Not Islamic radicals or extremists. Just Muslims.

Her co-blogger at Hot Air, Bryan, posted this extraordinarily pretentious and condescending article defending the notion that Islam is inherently violent based on the Koran.

Muslims Will Execute Christians, wherein she describes three Christians who were convicted of fomenting violence that killed hundreds of Muslims in Indonesia--and implied that somehow Christians are put to a double-standard. But she did not mention that three Muslims are now on Death Row in Indonesia for the bombing in Bali. Yes, one Islamic radical got off with a light sentence of only a couple of years, but three other Muslims are sentenced to die for their horrible murder of Australian tourists and non-Muslim Indonesians.

On the other hand, Michelle wrote in Criticizing Islam on the Airwaves the following: "For the record, I do not consider all Muslims terrorists and would not call Islam a 'terror organization.'"

Again I do not mean, and never meant, to indict Michelle. I honestly hoped it would be a dialogue between friends and allies, who have supported each other for years. I just wanted to ask the question: shouldn't we do a better job of recognizing and embracing our Muslim friends who hate terrorism and radicalism? Who serve in our armed forces, and/or fight alongside our armed forces in the fight to capture or kill terrorists?

Please also see the last two or three minutes of this video.

Please also see this statement by Prime Minister Maliki:

These men are our allies. But not merely our allies, they are our Muslim allies.

Is it too much to ask you to remember that whenever you can, Michelle?

Seriously Michelle, you shouldn't be mad at me. It was only because I respect you that I brought up these questions in the first place.

Peace and respect to you, my sister.

Update 2: Something I have noticed in the angry responses to my question is the running theme that I somehow "attacked" poor Michelle. Please. Read my original question, without delving into the comments. Was there any attack there? I don't think there was. I think it was an honest call to the conscience of a fellow Hawk, with questions I thought badly needed answering. Anyone who thinks I was beating up on poor Michelle is just being sexist and stupid. If I didn't respect her in the first place I would not have posed the questions as I did. Let's dispense with the "Victim Michelle vs. Brutal Dean" narrative--which Michelle never suggested and neither did I. Such a narrative demeans us both.

Every time you are tempted to say "lie" or "spin" in response to a political statement you don't like, you should say "wrong" or "mistaken" instead. Even if it doesn't feel right at first, you should try to stick to that.

Not only will you achieve greater clarity when you speak, you will also hurt far fewer feelings when you do so. You'll also add greater clarity to your arguments.

Martin Shoemaker recently asked, regarding what I ask of commenters:

Reminds me of the old joke: "Why is it when you lose something, it's always in the last place you look?"

I really don't know what you're trying to say. Is it, "You all wait for somebody to choose a course or theme, and then you all follow?" That's the closest I can come to making sense of your complaint.

OK, I realize that I've made much of this, so I should explain it. So here's my best attempt:

Look, I don't expect people to agree with me. People disagree with me every day. Nor do I expect coats and ties and buttoned-down behavior every day.

Yet it is still called "Dean's World" at the top of this whole thing, so I recognize that it's up to me to set the basic ground rules. And I don't always spell those out explicitely, mostly because I don't want to. But here's what I'm saying:

First off, you should think of yourself as in a pub, or a club, and we're all here to discuss things. About 50% of the time, Dean decides the subject, but about 50% of the time it's someone else, like Mary Madigan or Dave Schuler or Jane Novak or Dave Price or Aziz Poonawalla or Tyrone Steels or Scott Kirwin or Ron Coleman or whoever. If any of us posts something serious that we invite you to respond to, the expectation is that you will not be a juvenile ass about it. Jokes are fine, but if someone's put something serious out there for you to discuss, you will not make like a class clown and make raspberry sounds and spit boogers and call people names, or go out of your way to derail a conversation just because you can.

Furthermore, there are more than 30,000 people reading this site every day. This might shock you to read it, but it's true. Yet alone among such high-traffic blogs, we don't just let anyone comment here. Which means that unlike Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs or whatever, when you see a thread on Dean's World you rarely see something like "261" or "727." There's a reason for that. And it's not because we are "elitist," it's just because we recognize that if you are a pre-approved commenter we respect you and want to hear what you have to say, but we do not operate under "wild wild west" rules.

On the other hand, I do NOT, unlike some other bloggers who go to the other extreme, demand that every comment be pre-approved. Because I don't want to do that. If I've let you in it's because I respect you enough that I think people should be able to hear what you have to say. It's a simple matter of, "Okay, I trust you. Go ahead."

You can ask any of the Dean's World front-page contributors (past or present): I've never told them what to write or what position to take. At most I've occasionally sent them an email to request them to write about a subject. Or posted a comment in disagreement with them. But I never told them what position to take, and never edited them (except maybe to fix a typo or a misdirected link now and then). I have never told them what to write, or who to link, or what they should say. And I never will. (Except for my special orders to Aziz Poonawalla to demand that all his Muslim friends swear eternal faelty to me, and also that time that I ordered Ron Coleman to make Dean's World be read aloud in all Orthodox Synagogues worldwide every Shul. But those don't count).

It goes that way with you as a commenter. I don't tell you what to say or how to say it. It's an open account. You do with it what you will. I don't pre-approve what you say, nor should I. You've walked into what I hope is a fine establishment, and ordered a beer (or if you don't drink, a nice cup of coffee or somesuch). There's a stage there, and periodically someone walks up to that stage and speaks. Now maybe she says something goofy, like, "Men, aren't they overobsessed with their penises???" In which case your appropriate response is to laugh and say something silly about women. Or a black guy gets up and says, "What is with those white people? Do they dance funny or what?" In which case your appropriate response is something like, "Yeah but turn down the rap music home boy!"

But someone else gets up and she says, "Terrorism is a problem that affects us all. I have some ideas about what we should do about this." Then I'll tap-dance on your face if you act like the class clown.

I don't know how to be more clear about it except maybe this handy-dandy two-step guide:

Dean's World thread entitled "Hollywood's Top Boobs" or "Star Trek's 40th Birthday": Have fun, go nuts, that's obviously silly.

Dean's World thread entitled "Maliki Takes Control of Iraq's Armed Forces" or "Watergate Redux": say something relatively intelligent, please. Or even if it's funny, try to stay relevant.

We don't all wear suits and ties, but this is a respectable establishment. Try not to be a horse's ass most of the time. But otherwise have fun. I gave you the account. Go ahead and use it. The worst that's going to happen is that I might ask you to cool it--unless you attack me or my family, in which case the gloves are off motherf**ker.

For an even shorter description: It's a grad-school bull-session. Just don't lay a turd in the punch-bowl, m'kay?

(I'll probably re-post this on Monday, just so more people can read it, but if you're asking for many more clarifications you're probably overthinking. Relax, have a drink. Just don't feel up the waitress or hurl epithets at the stage. That's really all I ask.)