Kevin Williamson wrote an article expressing his opposition
to Representative Keith Ellison running to be chair of the Democratic National
Committee (DNC.) As far as I am concerned, Mr. Ellison is big enough and strong
enough to defend himself; I am not defending him.
I am writing because Williamson's article is a perfect
example illustrating how extreme fanaticism leads to mediocrity; a situation I
never had the chance to discuss before. I have this chance now, and I am happy
I do. The article in question came under the title: “A Problem Like Keith
Ellison,” published on December 4, 2016 in National Review Online. It is a
full-length piece with several short spots in it that show where the fanatic
roots of mediocrity start to grow.
Here is one spot: “Ellison is the first Muslim elected to
the House, and he complains that the recent spat of criticism directed at him
is rooted in – ridiculous word – Islamophobia.” Well, if someone wants to say
that hatred of Islam does not exist but that hatred of Judaism does, he needs
to marshal a lot of brain power to explain why one statement is true whereas
the other is false. And he needs to do it before leveling the antisemitism accusation at someone.
Unfortunately, however, Williamson offered no explanation to
the stance he is taking as he went ahead and leveled the antisemitism accusation at least on four occasions.
Here they are:
1. “Farrakhan has relied on a very old tradition:
Jew-hating. His history of vicious anti-Semitism was well established when
Ellison was helping him organize the Million Man March”.
2. “The Democratic representative says that he rejects
anti-Semistism, but he has a long history of sticking up for Jew-hating
weirdos”.
3. “The head of a political group declared that the
allegations of anti-Semitism against Farrakhan were made up and insisted that
the real problem is racist Jews”.
4. “Ellison has said he rejected anti-Semitism, and that his
involvement with Farrakhan was an exercise in community organizing, i.e. the
usual liberals-in-a-hurry bull”.
And that's not the end of the story because Williamson
displays his true colors at the end of the article. Here, in condensed form,
how he does that:
“The Muslim Brotherhood's fingers are in every Islamic pie
in the United States
and the world; turning over that rock will expose that the distance between the
Islamic mainstream and Islamic extremism is not great. Media-friendly Muslims
will be put in a difficult position. We have made it easy for the so-called
respectable Islamist organizations to play both sides of the fence. Republicans
should designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. They should
wait until the Democrats have put Keith Ellison in charge of their party to do
it”.
Kevin Williamson is saying, in effect, that all Muslims are
terrorists, or one step away from being terrorists. And the truth is that no
one who believes in this can say he is not a self-proclaimed hater of Muslims.
This being the case, for Williamson to go on and say that Islamophobia does not
exist, is to deny his own existence … you cannot escape this conclusion. Nor
can you escape its consequence. That is, for the first time, we get to see what
the other side of the Descartes coin looks like. It is this: I, Kevin D.
Williamson, do not think … therefore I am as real as a bubble that is about to
burst.
And because he is as tenuous a reality as that, he thinks
he'll be forgiven writing about Keith Ellison by saying very little about him
while running like a bull on steroids in the name-dropping china shop. And so,
you catch him pretend to talk about Ellison by insulting people and
institutions galore – like this roster of names:
“Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, Bernie Sanders,
the Clinton Campaign, Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam, L. Ron Hubbard, Stokely
Carmichael, a Minneapolis political group, Sara Jane Olson, Assata Shakur, Sami
al-Arian, Fidel Castro, Robert Byrd, the Minimum wage, the Muslim Brotherhood,
Hassan al-Banna, Hamas, the Islamic Society of north America, Al-Shabab,
al-Qaeda, CAIR, ISNA, NAIT, the Islamic Association of Palestine, The Muslim
American Society,” and a few more I may have skipped.
This leaves us with one question to ask: Does this mean
Kevin D. Williamson is so mediocre; he can only be an asshole? The answer is:
maybe yes, maybe not. The puzzling thing, however, is that he does not seem to
have one. Which is why he is full of it and getting fuller with each passing
day.