It happened again yesterday. Here’s the story.
A couple of weeks ago, in his regular EuroPress Review for NRO, Denis Boyles looked at some of the factors he thought might be responsible for the rise of nihilism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism in Europe.
Boyles focused on the “cockroaches” in the European Social Forum, (“a global, transnational, conglomerate of well-organized anarchistic antiglobalization groups”), and in particular, on Tariq Ramadan, one of the ESF’s leading lights and grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Adam Nicolson, writing in yesterday’s Telegraph had a response to Boyles’s piece. With some gusto, Nicolson gets hold of the wrong end of the stick and goes thrashing about with it in the tangled undergrowth of his own imaginings.
That is a degree of loathing and contempt, of wilful misinterpretation of foreigners, which you would normally associate with propaganda about an enemy in wartime. Stupid, uneducated, infertile, morally incompetent, socially dead, more animal than human: Boyles's Europe is a continent of Calibans. At no time since the American War of Independence have Americans, or at least some of them, including the hardline Republican Americans of the sort now in government in Washington, viewed Europe and the Europeans with such visceral hatred.Did he say “wilful misinterpretation of foreigners”?
Iain Murray found the article interesting for a different reason.
