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#imwithstupid

My work computer is a shared computer, so the only news browsing I do is on the ultra-orthodox news.bbc.co.uk. This morning, I left their auto-updated news roll on the Sydney siege running and was surprised to see the very first entry for #illridewithyou. No explanation, just that someone had created the hashtag. I assume it was accidentally dropped into the wrong thread.

Nope. Did you see this thing? A Sydney woman was on a train this morning, seated next to a woman in a hijab. At one point, the woman took off the hijab. Woman A runs after Woman B at the station, tells her to put the hijab back on and Woman A will escort her to her destination. Woman B gives her a long hug but declines.

Thousands have now signed off on this — it’s the second most trendingest hashtag on Twitter at the moment — offering to escort people in religious garb safely around Oz.

If a Muslim commits a crime in the name of his religion and your first thought is, “ZOMG, how can I protect innocent Muslims from my violent, racist fellow citizens?” you have officially signed off of the team. You have ticked the “not my tribe” box on the demographic form. You have identified your neighbors as a greater threat than the barbarians at the gate.

This backlash? It has never happened. Oh, some moron sucker-punched a Sikh and I think an idiot threw a piece of bacon at a Mosque once. Some reprisal.

Just another opportunity for the ruling class to preen in public and congratulate itself on how morally superior it is to the rest of us knuckle-dragging plebs.

p.s. isn’t it equally possible that Woman B — the hijab-wearing Muslim woman — took off her identifying garment because she was distressed and embarrassed by the Sydney siege itself?

Comments


Comment from Veeshir
Time: December 15, 2014, 10:11 pm

What is both funny and endy is that the backlash always misses the Muslims and hits the Jews.
.s. isn’t it equally possible that Woman B — the hijab-wearing Muslim woman — took off her identifying garment because she was distressed and embarrassed by the Sydney siege itself?

Isn’t it possible that, once away from her honor-killing relatives, she took off the slave sack?


Comment from Veeshir
Time: December 15, 2014, 10:12 pm

.s. isn’t it equally possible that Woman B — the hijab-wearing Muslim woman — took off her identifying garment because she was distressed and embarrassed by the Sydney siege itself?

Isn’t it possible that, once away from her honor-killing relatives, she took off the slave sack?


Comment from Brother Cavil
Time: December 15, 2014, 10:18 pm

Or (c) the whole incident was made up out of whole cloth.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: December 15, 2014, 10:28 pm

Oh, shit, Veeshir. I found one in the spam bucket and kicked it loose, now I’m not sure which it is.

You can delete one yourself, or I’ll do it. Or they both stand, as the first makes an interesting observation.


Comment from Stark Dickflüssig
Time: December 15, 2014, 11:13 pm

Oh, I thought the whole “ill ride with you” was part of an ebola sharing program.


Comment from Davem123
Time: December 16, 2014, 12:54 am

This eagerness to believe the worst about western civilization and to impute nobility to literal savages seems suicidal to me. I suppose it’s understandable, with the constant drumbeat of anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-western civilization propoganda put out by academia, the entertainment industry, etc.

Is this kind of thing really becoming more common or does it only seem that way?


Comment from The Neon Madman
Time: December 16, 2014, 2:12 am

Word.


Comment from Veeshir
Time: December 16, 2014, 2:43 am

I tried to delete the second one but it came back.

#I’llridewithyou isn’t about helping Muslims, it’s about making tolerant, better than you, humble lefties fell superior to the hate-filled reich-wingers who hate them some mooselimbs.


Comment from David Gillies
Time: December 16, 2014, 5:47 am

I wish someone would explain to me why a backlash would be a bad thing. Turning the other cheek might be the Christian thing to do, but I’m an atheist. An enemy stops fighting only when a) sufficient of his military-age males have been killed as to make continued prosecution of hostilities impossible or b) the cost of continuing the conflict is intolerable.


Comment from P2
Time: December 16, 2014, 7:16 am

How could any of this have happened anyway? Isn’t Islam a religion of peace and aren’t the Aussies gunphobic?


Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: December 16, 2014, 8:42 am

Obsessive white guilt. Western culture includes internal criticism that is almost inconceivable to other cultures. It’s been a good thing at times: it’s how the West threw off dogmatism, superstition, rule by ossified and corrupt elites, and became so successful.

It’s also been good in that it enabled Western societies to recognize and stop doing bad things.

But it has run amok into an auto-immune syndrome. David Brin wrote about it as “the Dogma of Otherness”: the ingrained assumption that dissenters, rebels, and outsiders are right and the mainstream is wrong. (Mark Twain was infected with this idea over a century ago; Kipling satirized it.)

Liberals and and leftists had great success in attacking racism, nationalism, and militarism – both in abolishing these evils and their horrid consequences, and in gaining the credit for it.

This success carries them onward. The psychological rewards of it pushed them into total absorption into the appropriate mindset. It becomes a reflex.

Europeans have a particularly virulent case of this. That’s somewhat understandable given what racial and nationalist thinking led to there in the 20th century. However it makes them bend over backwards. Mark Steyn wrote of a Dutch journalist who was informed that if present demographic trends continued, the Netherlands would become a majority Moslem country, and answered “So?”


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: December 16, 2014, 9:50 am

Only one thing I would take slight issue with in that comment, Rich Rostrum: “it’s how the West threw off dogmatism, superstition, rule by ossified and corrupt elites…”

Personally, I would have said ‘exchanged’ rather than ‘threw off’. A ‘corrupt and ossified elite’ is precisely what rules both our countries now.


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: December 16, 2014, 3:30 pm

Comment from Veeshir
Time: December 15, 2014, 10:12 pm

.s. isn’t it equally possible that Woman B — the hijab-wearing Muslim woman — took off her identifying garment because she was distressed and embarrassed by the Sydney siege itself?

Isn’t it possible that, once away from her honor-killing relatives, she took off the slave sack?
*
*
It’s the start of summer down there in Sydney. It’s possible, too, that she took off the slave sack because she was hot! (Overheating, I mean, sweating in the heat, not sexy. Though I guess that could be true too.)


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: December 16, 2014, 7:32 pm

Well said, Rich. I think it was Janet Daley who said liberalism is an auto-immune disease.

I’d forgotten that, Wolfus — this is high Summer and hot as hell in Oz. I wouldn’t want to wrap my head in black cloth.


Comment from BJM
Time: December 19, 2014, 6:05 am

Burge nails it.

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