Here's an especially interesting passage from Jacoby's column:
But ``Prayers for the Assassin" is no screed. If its villains are Muslims, so are its heroes; Ferrigno is quite aware that moderate and liberal Muslims have the most to fear from an Islamofascist victory.
He is also quite aware of Islam's appeal. Many converts to Islam find comfort and reassurance in its moral certainty and firm standards, and Ferrigno underscores the point. ``Don't tell me about the old days, girl, I lived through them," says one character, a top government official. ``Drugs sold on street corners. Guns everywhere. God driven out of the schools and courthouses. Births without marriage, rich and poor, so many bastards you wouldn't believe me. A country without shame. Alcohol sold in supermarkets. Babies killed in the womb, tens of millions of them. . . . We are not perfect, not by any measure, but I would not go back to those days for anything."
I've written elsewhere about a conversation I had with a Muslim woman in Dubai last December, an immigrant to Europe from Egypt who told me she was really upset by the descent of her native country into Islamic extremism. But she said that she and her husband just wanted to raise their kids as normal Muslims in the West, and that that was very hard given the militant secularism and aggressive sleaze in the public square. I share her views. In fact, though the radical Sayyid Qutb's diagnosis of the West is far too harsh, and his remedy -- totalitarian Islam -- absolutely unacceptable, there is a lot more truth in his assessment of where the West went wrong than many people would be willing to admit.
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Interestingly enough, David Weigel just posted an amusing article about this asinine book over at Reason.com:
"If this sounds like a hard sell, it is: Prayers for the Assassin's "Islamic States of America" has all the scares of an episode of Monster Chiller Horror Theater. The novel is overrun with a goofy cast of knife-fighting fedayeen and white-bearded Islamists with names like Mullah Oxley and "The Old One." Black-robed secret police shake down women for looking at the imam of Chicago's marriage advice website: "The imam of Chicago countenances abominations!" San Francisco is a hotbed of sharia law where "they behead homosexuals at the Civic Center every week."
http://www.reason.com/links/links062706.shtml
Does anyone *seriously* think that this country is in danger of being overrun by Islamic fanatics? Really?>
Miniseries, "The Holocaust", late 1970's. Lurking in my memory.
Scene: Germany, late 1930s. Several of the (Jewish) main character's friends are urging him to leave Germany with his family while he still can.
Gentile wife of one of the characters: "But such a thing could never happen in the country of Goethe and Schiller!"
Jewish friend: "Unfortunately, madam, neither of those gentlemen is in office at the moment.">
The novel may certainly be badly written, I dunno. And no, I don't think the US is anywhere close to being under shariah. But surely it is worth thinking about what that would mean. Europe has a much more serious prospect of one day in the near-distant future going under shariah -- or having to fight a bloody civil war to avoid it. It's useful to think about what shariah might mean, and to work hard to keep the idea of it ever coming to the US at bay.>
I think that we have more important things to worry about than what it might mean to live under shariah in the USA.
I've noticed that my morning newspaper(Philadelphia Inquirer)which was recently bought by a Republican is changing. The political commentator has been sent to the internet and now we read commentary about the need for Christians to have the right to slam homosexuals in the schools because that's what they believe that God would do.
I worry more about a free press. I worry that journalists will be thrown into jail if they share "classified information"(that's anything that makes the current regime look bad). I worry that this regime will misuse their power and not only spy on Americans, but get even with Americans who don't like them(people more powerful than me- like Plame and her husband). I worry that we'll end up staying in Iraq for years and years because the Republicans can't think of another strategy and think that anything short of forming a new strategy is "cutting and running." (BTW-that's some way to support the troops). I worry that books like this will cause Muslims to be harrassed by those who find enemies under every rock which isn't stamped with a logo from their own religion. I worry about our inner cities that have fallen apart while our legislature discusses flag burning. None of the kids being murdered in the streets are being attacked by a burning flag. I worry about the fact that we're discussing flag burning and doing nothing about a health care crisis. I worry about people who think that we need to think about what life would be like under sharia when we have so many other things to think about.>
Harvard researcher Daniel Gilbert offers some insight that might help those with "can't happen here" myopia. (thanks to Tim Blair for this)
"The human brain mispredicts the sources of its own satisfaction, Gilbert says, and the reason is that we fail to understand how quickly we will adapt to both positive and negative events. People are consistently surprised by how quickly the abnormal becomes normal, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. When people say I could never get used to that , they are almost always wrong.
if you really are interested in Prayers for the Assassin, go to my website, www.robertferrigno.com and read the first two chapters.
all best
Robert Ferrigno>
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