RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Sunday night I was up late writing, and so on Monday I slept right up until the moment I was awakened, sometime around midday, by the blaring sound of a marching band in the street. I didn’t need to look out the window to know what was going on. The music was The Internationale. The date was May 1. In the small Norwegian town where I live, the May Day parade was passing by.

The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way – with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma Goldman. The piece – entitled “When Communism Inspired Americans” – is the latest example of what has long since become a genre all its own: the fond look back at American Stalinism.

The essay isn’t Gornick’s first contribution to the genre. Her 1977 book The Romance of American Communism, a collection of interviews with old Party members, was described by Commentary reviewer Marion Magid as an “adoring account” that depicts their perfidy “as a romantic episode in American history.” In the book, Gornick portrayed these old Communists as “the golden children called to Marxism” and claimed that they “feared, hungered, and cared more” than other people and possessed a “wisdom passion alone can purchase.” Noting that most of Gornick’s interviewees were Jews, Magid quite rightly challenged the idea that there was any “wisdom” in their “slavish support of the Soviet Union throughout the long period of Stalinist treachery and the calculated destruction of Soviet Jewish life.”

Nor was there anything “golden” about their ability to keep their Communism intact despite (this is Magid’s list) “The Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Doctors’ Plot, the takeover in Czechoslovakia, the Slansky Trial, the murdered writers, the labor camps, and all the rest.” Not only did American Communists accept all these abominations, noted Magid, “they justified it, those wonderful couples, ‘hungry for justice,’ rushing off to protest meetings and ‘peace’ rallies and picket lines while supper cooled on the stove at home and bullets met their mark in the cellars of the Lubianka. To read this book along with, say, the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam is to become almost physically ill. The romance of Communism, indeed. It is an apology that is required—not an elegy.”

One can understand Magid’s disgust. Back when it was first published, The Romance of American Communism was part of a new wave of books, movies, articles, and other material that treated that subject with sympathy. In The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Public Life (1991), Guenter Lewy cited Gornick’s book, along with films like The Front and Lillian Hellman’s memoir Scoundrel Time (both 1976), as part of a “new attitude” and “revisionist history” that represented American Communists “as persecuted defenders of American democracy.” Lewy quoted historian William O’Neill: “One would not know from seeing such films as The Front or reading books like The Romance of American Communism…that the heroes in them were apologists for Stalin’s death machine.”

Recently, Kumail Nanjiani, the star of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” complained to Chelsea Handler on her Netflix talk show about the supposed negative image of Muslims in American popular culture. A Pakistani-American and Muslim, Nanjiani asked Handler what she sees in her head when she thinks of Muslims and Handler answered that she envisions “serious people” and “…not like …fun.” Nanjiani interjected “there’s a beard” as she was speaking and she agreed and repeated “beard”.

Handler’s answer, apparently, revealed the horrific bigotry of America and its culture — and Nanjiani explained what a big scandal it all represents. This is why, he told Handler, his wife wants to start a Tumblr called, ‘Muslims Having Fun.’ Because, you see, as Nanjiani whined, one never sees Muslims having fun in American popular culture.

Handler got very excited about all of this and subsequently tweeted out in moral indignation: “Why don’t we get to see any fun Muslims?”

Oh, the injustice of it all.

What Nanjiani won’t tell us, of course, and what Handler would never dare say, let alone fathom, is that maybe we see “serious-minded” Muslim men with beards, and we don’t regularly see any Muslims having fun, is because . . . well . . . it may all have something to do with Islam. There is a great value, you see, placed on the wearing of beards in Islamic texts (i.e. Sahih al-Bukhari 7:72:780) and Muslims are required to emulate the example of the Prophet, who is believed to have sported a beard.

In terms of having fun, if Nanjiani and Handler were even remotely interested in, or honest about, Islam, they would know that Islam mandates the polar opposite of the Declaration of Independence’s emphasis on the right of humans to pursue happiness. It is a fundamental difference between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which my book, United in Hate, argues is at the heart of Jihad’s war on the West.

Nanjiani and Handler might do well to focus on why Ayatollah Khomeini stated:

Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.

In my interview on the Nanjiani-Handler comedy fest with Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), he had this to say:

This episode reflects the general tendency of the Leftist intelligentsia to claim that people are suspicious of Islam or Muslims in the U.S. today because of the ‘media,’ which is supposedly ‘Islamophobic.’ The idea that the establishment media, which so assiduously covers for Islam by obscuring in any possible way the Islamic identity and motives of jihad murderers, is ‘Islamophobic’ is laughable, but it nonetheless prevails.

We don’t see Muslims having fun because, you see, ‘Islamophobes’ control the entertainment industry (which gave us, a few years back, the Canadian sitcom ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie,’ a forced exercise in Muslims Having Fun.