Here’s a richly ironic slice of our strange, sad old world in 2019.
Ellen Degeneres is (quite rightly) protesting the Sultan of Brunei for introducing the death penalty (stoning to death) for gay sex. He’s also executing people for adultery, but Ellen doesn’t mention that:
To this, a reply was posted by an account, “Jihyo” (apparently, the name of a Kpop singer), who claims to be a Demi Lovato fan and medical student, and who writes various pro-Muslim comments. The reply was:
This is a Sharia law in Islam. And lgbt is never okay. I am an educated person & a medical student. In gynecology, urology & dermatology departments, we often get gay patients with terrible diagnoses. They always come with complaints relate to their sexual activities.
(I’m not embedding this because it repeats that Ellen tweet also might well be removed anytime by Twitter. But that’s just a cut-and-paste quote of what “Jihyo” wrote.)
In the ensuing war of words, which you can easily imagine if you don’t look for yourself, “Jihyo” is taken to task for being “cruel and inhumane,” for being not in the “21st century,” an “offensive agitator” and “nasty,” etc.
One person more seriously responds that “there is no religious justification for this punishment.” This is an interesting formulation: does the person mean that no religions cite any justification for stoning gays to death, or that no such religious justification would succeed if attempted?
For their part, the Sultan, his people (who perhaps understandably do not criticize his policies), and this “Jihyo” clearly disagree with both interpretations, as do many other Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, northern Nigeria, Yemen, and others. All have the death penalty for gay sex.
So now we have the interesting spectacle of Ellen, along with reliably progressive celebrities like George Clooney and Elton John, criticizing the Sultan of Brunei for a policy that they might or might not realize is already practiced in the most devoutly Muslim countries of the world.
And, interestingly, nobody is calling them “Islamophobic.”
Well, why the hell not? Shouldn’t they be called Islamophobic? What gives? If a conservative, or Allah forbid an alt-right conservative, were to dwell for long on the precise same facts about the modern Islamic world, if they were to call traditional Muslims “cruel and inhumane,” not in the “21st century,” an “offensive agitator” and “nasty,” etc., then what would happen to them? Well, the U.K., Canada, Austria (probably all of the E.U.), and other countries do criminalize criticism of Islam—whether such laws should, in fairness, apply to Ellen’s criticisms of Muslims seems unclear.
The weird unresolved tensions and rich ironies on display here are no doubt what caught the attention of a Paul Joseph Watson, who has worked for Alex Jones’ Infowars for many years. Once, he called himself a member of the “alt right,” before the term became much more clearly associated with fascism. He is, whatever else he is, an avowed foe of the left. Earlier today he posted an article on the kerfuffle titled, “LGBT vs Islam (Choose Your Fighter),” and wryly observed, “This one isn’t going to end well, is it?”
But is it only erstwhile “alt right” people like Watson, and free speech zealots like me, who observe the ironies involved here? Of course not. Old-fashioned Bill Maher could be counted on to notice the weirdness, too. He criticized Clooney for proposing a boycott of the Beverly Hills Hotel: “What about Saudi Arabia? If you really want to get back at them, stop driving or using oil.”
Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan made some well-placed observations on Maher’s show as well: “The nice thing about a free society is that you can have a political life and then you can have your actual life. Not everything has to be political.” He added, “We shouldn’t be dictating our lives by religion, according to the dictates of wokeness. It kills the vitality of a free society.”
Sadly, this hullabaloo will all probably disappear in a week’s time. Brunei will start executing gays, just like Saudi Arabia. Gay activists will go back to making common intersectional cause with Muslims from countries where those same gay friends would be executed. After a few years, self-righteous (but strangely unreflective) Hollywood progressives will once again start checking in at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Europeans and Canadians will keep enforcing blasphemy laws against Islamophobes who criticize Islam, even when such unwoke cretins are criticizing Islam for executing homosexuals—as long as the cretins aren’t too powerful and aligned with the left, of course. Then it’s OK. Then they’re not Islamophobes.
Attempting to make sense of all this, the beautiful people will placidly declare that they “contain multitudes.” Life will likely go on much as before.
Until this year, when I decided to lock down my cyber-life and reformed how I use social media, instead of writing the above, I would have just posted some snide remarks on Facebook or Twitter. But since I’ve quit Facebook and don’t use Twitter except in service of media I have some control over, i.e., Everipedia and this blog, now I have to consider whether the issue is worth making a whole blog post over. In this case, I thought so.
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