I Can Call You Betty

...and Betty when you call me, you can call me Al...

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A relatively new columnist in the still disorganized Counter-Jihad, Danusha Goska, recently published on FrontPageMag a glowing review of a new book by a woman who was the little girl made famous by the real event of an American woman who had disastrously married an Iranian Muslim man who subsequently abused her physically and held her and her daughter virtual prisoners after they moved to Iran in the 1980s, until the mother managed heroically to escape Iran with her daughter  -- dramatized in the 1991 movie most everyone has seen or heard about, Not Without My Daughter, starring Sally Fields as the mother, and Sheila Rosenthal (a Jewish girl!) as the daughter, Mahtob (and, amusingly, the vaguely ethnic looking half Italian half Spanish actor Alfred Molina as the evil Muslim husband).  The movie was based on the book by the same name by the mother, Betty Mahmoody who for some odd reason all these years after has kept the name of the horribly abusive Muslim man she divorced in 1986, Sayed Mahmoody.

Interestingly, some filmmaker in 2002 made a documentary titled Without My Daughter, which attempted to tell Sayed's side of the story (what possible "side" would that be, other than taqiyya...?).  And guess what, when we look more closely into who that filmmaker was -- one Alexis Kouros (sounds harmlessly Greek doesn't it?) -- we see in his IMDB bio that he is a "Persian born medical doctor, researcher, writer and film maker living in Helsinki, Finland."  The odd locution "Persian born" (rather than the more accurate "Iranian born") makes one wonder if he was born in the 19th century or something.  But anyway, his provenance explains why he would spend time, effort and money promoting the lies of the abusive husband against a movie that casts his homeland (and his religion) in a bad light.

For now we have confirmation of the mother's story in a new book, reviewed by Danusha Goska, written by the daughter, who is now all grown up: My Name is Mahtob: My Life in Iran and America, by Mahtob Mahmoody.  Among other things, Mahtob recounts the abuse of her Muslim father vividly:

...Mahtob quotes her dad talking to her mother, "If you ever touch the telephone, I'll kill you … If you ever walk out that door, I'll kill you … I'll send the ashes of a burned American flag back over your body." Mahtob describes Moody beating Betty. "He took clumps of her hair in both hands and brutally bashed her head against the wall." "His fists pounded into Mom, calling her a saag, a dog, a most detested and filthy creature in the Persian culture." "I wanted to get away from my dad and his threats, his beatings and the terrifying sound of his angry footsteps." Mahtob describes her mother sleeping. "first came the snoring, and when the snoring stopped the screaming began. 'Moody, no,' she'd beg…She kicked, scratched, and pleaded."

But all this is the unremarkable moral we learned nearly a quarter of a century ago when the movie came out.  The subtler point that may go unnoticed in the Counter-Jihad is how the reviewer, Danusha Goska, uncritically praises Mahtob's book where it promotes the meme of the Nice Muslim:

Betty Mahmoody loved her husband and his world. Many Iranian Muslims, from shopkeepers to smugglers to a complete stranger met on a park bench, planned and carried out Betty's flight to freedom. She can't name these heroes but she describes them indelibly. No one who has read either book could help but be moved by these heroes' courage, compassion, and dedication. Mahtob's Iranian honorary "Uncle" Kombiz is one of the wisest and most endearing characters of her book.

Even after we eliminate the first five egregiously odd words of that paragraph ("Betty Mahmoody loved her husband..."???  The same husband who slammed her head against the wall and threatened to kill her and abducted her daughter...???), we are left with warm, fuzzy, gushing admiration for all the nice Muslims who helped Betty, and without whom her success story in the end would not have been possible.  The problem with this is that it subtly inculcates or reinforces in the reader a resistance to the Zero Tolerance that should be cultivated.  The overwhelming cultural influence of PC MC throughout the West makes it hard enough to cultivate an appropriate wariness about Muslims given all that we should know about their texts, culture and history -- without deputized idea-warriors like Goska putting subtle brakes on it.

While Goska cautiously and gently schools the daughter, Mahtob, on her silly & naive notion that her father's horrible behavior was due merely to the "personality disorder" of narcissism and not centrally due to Islam, this only has the effect of reminding us that Islam is the source of the problem; but it tends to leave untouched the attendant problem of Muslims who in myriad ways -- including through taqiyya deceit -- make Islam the concrete problem it is for the world.  And when this deficiency is supplemented by the aforementioned soft spot Goska has for Nice Muslims, it tends to perpetuate the old outdated Operating System under which the West continues to process the data of Islam, while the problem is metastasizing under our feet.

When Danusha first came on my radar last summer, I found her to be a welcome and refreshing new voice for the Counter-Jihad.  As I wrote in July in a comment on Jihad Watch after reading an essay by her featured there:

"This fine essay by the most incisively astute Danushka Goska is replete with searingly apt, pinpointed focuses on the problem of the racialization of the problem of Islam by the dominant and mainstream PC MC worldview (yet more evidence, from a mountain range of same out there all around us, one could adduce indicating this most crucial feature that, I maintain, is the main reason for the mainstream West’s continuing myopia about the problem of Islam).

"I also strongly recommend Danushka Goska’s essay, Ten Reasons Why I Am Not a Leftist—written in prose imbued with limpid common sense and humanity."

I still stand by that praise of Goska; but that should not cause us to flinch from noticing, and criticizing, the dismayingly squishy nougat her underbelly reveals with regard to the Nice Muslim meme.  Another remark she feels obliged to make in her review of Mahtob's book:

"Here's what My Name Is Mahtob is not. It is not an anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic or anti-Iran racist screed."

Oh? This kind of skirts around whether or not it's an anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic or anti-Iran screed at all -- leaving out the irrationally supercharged, politically correct multi-culturalist descriptor "racist" which Goska seems to feel it necessary to append. And when she goes on to gush about all the good Muslims who supposedly helped Betty and little Mahtob, one has reason to suspect the book is not, in fact anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic or anti-Iran -- nor all three, as it should be, for God's sake.

In a previous article Goska wrote for FrontPage, she showed more of her gummy nougat:

I lived in and worked in Paterson, NJ, in the 1980s to 1990. I loved my Arab and Muslim friends then, and I love them now.

A reader in the comments section at the time nicely dispatched this nonsense:

This writer obviously morally equates Islam with other religions and Muslims with the adherents of all other religions like she has been inculcated to believe all of her life. Nonetheless, she is wrong because she obviously is a victim of our politically correct society. In reality she doesn’t have any Muslim friends whatsoever although she in effect has been rendered more or less blind to this reality.

And as I noted at the time:

Good God, there is so much nougat in Goska's article, it has the cumulative effect of linking the civic duty of being counter-jihad with an ethical narcissism that anxiously wants to tolerate all the Muslims like Emmie who must, in the writer's mind apparently, abound all over the place.

So in her essay Goska acknowledges a Minority of Extremists among Muslims:

In our many hours-long debates, many of my Arab and Muslim friends expressed enthusiastic and unshakeable support for terrorism. 

But then she has to pull out the Moderate Muslims she is convinced must abound all around us:

Not all did so; my Muslim friend Emmie's utter rejection of terrorism is described here. ... Emmie, a young lady who in many respects is very much like many American Muslims I know.

Two things wrong with this:

1) Her Muslim friend Emmie is anecdotal evidence -- and pitifully inadequate numerically, given the massiveness of the problem that is metastasizing around the globe;

2) The supposed proof Goska provides of Emmie's "utter rejection of terrorism" does not even measure up. I'll let my readers judge for themselves whether Emmie is not subtly pushing the meme that Islam is diverse and that the "bad Muslims" are distorting some benign Islam that is, or could be -- and beyond that, the meme that innumerable Muslims are hapless, decent people who "don't really know their own Islam" and just wanna have sandwiches.  If this is so, then we would be cruel and heartless (not to mention "racist bigots") if we denied entry of innumerable Muslims into our Western societies, and did not open our arms to accomodate their growing presence among us over the decades and generations to come of the future.

Why the Counter-Jihad still has to allow such nougat to be promoted when leaner muscle needs to be cultivated I don't know.  I've long since stopped being surprised by it.  All I feel these days may be expressed by the closing lines of the charming Paul Simon song I opened with:

Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff
Amusing anymore...