A weird obsession
Published in: Melanie's Blog
Sunny Hundal appears to believe that when in a hole, he must keep digging. Clearly smarting from my reference yesterday in the Daily Mail to his smear against me, where he falsely suggested that I had been a major influence on the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik (a smear previously discussed by me here), he has tried to respond with what he clearly imagines is a rebuttal of my argument point by point. However, all he has done is to demonstrate rather spectacularly his own intellectual (not to mention moral) limitations.
People can read for themselves his lame attempt to keep his smear going, and marvel that anyone can pass off such a succession of absurd non-sequiturs, contradictions and leaps of logic as a serious argument. Suffice it to say here that Hundal makes three egregious false assumptions -- plus one vicious and defamatory additional distortion.
First, he appears not to understand the difference between someone who commits mass murder because they are deranged and someone who commits mass murder in pursuit of a political, religious or ideological goal.
Second, he appears not to understand the difference between the impact of mainstream analysis of social and cultural trends on the one hand and incitement to hatred and mass murder on the other. He seems to believe that the former is just as likely to cause someone to commit mass murder as the latter. He thus defames the former while sanitising the latter.
Third, when attacking my concern with extremism, he seems to confuse those who do not advocate violence with Breivik, who did.
Rather more serious, however, is his distortion of something else that I wrote. He quotes this from a Spectator blog post that I wrote about the murder of the Israeli Fogel family in the West Bank, a terrorist atrocity in which even the throats of the children and a baby were cut:
The moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media...
Hundal remarks:
And she says she makes a distinction between violent and non-violent Muslims…Hmmm, really?
His implication is that I was accusing all Arabs of being morally depraved. But of course I was not. As anyone can see from the piece in question, I was referring to the depravity of two very specific groups of Arabs -- those who murdered the Fogel family, and those in the Palestinian Authority who incite Arabs to hatred and murder of Israelis and Jews. In other words, Hundal has taken my words totally out of context and misrepresented what I wrote.
So not content with one smear against me, Hundal has now resorted to another. And thus he merely draws further attention to his weird obsession with me (check it out for yourself on Google) which is now driving him ever deeper into that hole he has dug.
