I’ve become a big fan of Diana West’s blog. In her own way, West is helping to defend the West as well as, if not better than, any other blogger.
Her blog may not buzz with the minute-to-minute newsfeed urgency that energizes Jihad Watch; and, providing no comments threads at all, it lacks any of the vibrant sense of community that thrives on Jihad Watch—but it crackles with her wit and scintillates with her incisively, often excruciatingly apt perspicacity about the problem of Islam. Her coverage of the tragicomedy of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has been unparalleled. And her recent essays on the virtual submission of Yale to Islamic sharia through their befuddled, cowardly decision to self-censor all images of Mohammed in their upcoming book on images of Mohammed—have been superb and bristling with nuts and bolts of relevant facts.
If she is asymptotic, I have not yet detected it. So far, I have found nothing in her writings that I object to—and that’s saying a lot, as I tend to have a contrarian streak that borders on OCD, and becomes even more obsessed when dealing with what I consider to be the most pressing issue of the day, Islam.
It’s a shame that Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has, apparently, distanced himself from her (one reason may be, as I speculated in a couple of previous essays, her diametrically different stance on the recent Iranian demonstrations) and has stopped showcasing her fine essays. In the past, he regularly did so, and nearly always embroidered his introductions of her essays with high and unstinting praise. In the last year or so, it’s as if Diana West no longer exists at Jihad Watch (other than the dutiful remnant of a link to her blog on the Jihad Watch blogroll). Other illustrious members of the Anti-Islam (woops! I mean Anti-Jihad) Movement that seem to have gone by the Spencerian wayside without any reason given have been Bruce Bawer (though we can guess why), Andrew Bostom (here one would be headscratchingly hard pressed to figure out why), and Michelle Malkin (again, we hoi ochloi not privy to the aristocratic goings-on of the smoke-filled rooms where decisions are made huddle out of the loop). Meanwhile, Spencer’s latest Blogospheric buddy has been Pam Geller, whom he cannot seem to feature and praise enough. Some of her low-end asymptotic faults I discussed in a recent essay.
In the often bewildering sphere of blogs—where the biggest problem is too many bloggers and too much information—Diana West offers a clear, crystalline needle pointing West.
I urge my readers to savor her writing, and to dip into her archives as well.
3 comments:
One of the most painful incidents of my life was listening to a pod-cast of Pamela Geller interviewing Diana West.
West's The Death of the Grown-Up is interesting to me all the moreso in that I assumed that my parents' generation of the the 50s was one of stolid conformity to middle-class values made up on the occasion for the sake of stifling all further Human creativity. West says no, that my generation were spoiled by our parent and pampered. It's just one more reason to dismiss the 50s generation as worthless.
Kidding aside, West's book is highly worth the while, sayeth me.
I haven't read her book yet, but I've always suspected that the 60s deformation didn't pop out of nowhere, but must have grown out of some pathologies in the 50s.
I was surprised to find her look into the 50s bringing out the blame there. I lived under the illusion that my parents' generation, 50's boomer-parents, were air-head conformists and McCarthyites. Not so, shows West.
But leaving that aside, I was very interested in her take on dhimmiutude, which makes her book a rel winner for me. Highly recommended.
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