Essays in Idleness

On checking the news later, I discovered that I had not chosen the perfect morning to write lightly about the phenomenon of “hatred.” Or perhaps I had. One reader complained that my piece on the artist Mondrian yesterday was, in light of breaking news from France, in “extremely poor taste.” He proposed that I take “hatred” more seriously.

I won’t. I have been exposed to hatred all my life, and my mama taught me to laugh at it.

But the use of the word “hate” as a term of art in the New Jurisprudence is now well-established. The purpose is identical to that which the liberals advanced when replacing the term “rape” with “sexual assault,” the definition of which could then be gratuitously extended. The idea was to slur the distinction between the heinous crime of rape, and minor infractions such as “unwanted touching” and flirtation. This would, for a start, enable feminists to tout fresh statistics showing that one-in-three women had been “sexually assaulted.” (Perhaps two-in-three women were too modest.)

“Hate crimes” put coarse language on a level with murder. The intention was to get something into law that could be used selectively against political opponents, while “sensitizing” (i.e. neuroticizing) the public to the fuller range of progressive Newspeak.

Conversely, in his role as the serious criminal’s best friend, the contemporary liberal diminishes the significance of rape and murder. These are reduced, in principle, to the level of saying things that are rude. The law of course still observes gradations; but I noticed that, in Germany for instance, where violent attacks not on but by immigrant Muslims have become an almost daily occurrence, the cops were busy raiding sixty addresses to arrest people accused of posting hateful anti-Islamic blather in social media. As the old ballad had it, “The world turned upside down.”

Facebook, Twitter, and Google — a fair cross-section of service providers — have all agreed in Germany and elsewhere to put “programs in place” that use all their search resources to track and silence such inconvenient voices as that of Milo Yiannopoulos; if not for what he said, then for what some trolls contributed by way of enhancement.

Yesterday’s “incident” was the murder of a Catholic priest, during Mass at the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, Normandy. The police knew that this church was targeted; and one of the perpetrators had been released after actual conviction on terror charges. It is good to know now that he is dead, and so will not be participating in further “incidents.” (Unless there is some conduit from Hell.)

The French president said it was an attack on all French citizens, which presumably includes the citizen Islamists; our pope called the violence “absurd.” I find these lies in extremely poor taste. It was not an attack on all Frenchmen, but symbolically on a Catholic priest. And it was not absurd, but purposefully directed to that end. Father Jacques Hamel was martyred during the morning Mass. His throat slit, then by some accounts, beheaded; two nuns and two others at prayer also seized and tormented; and another throat slit; while a rant was delivered from the altar, in Arabic.

I am truly disgusted by remarks from Rome that we hope the elderly priest is at peace, and that we condemn “every form of hatred.” This reduces the teaching of Our Lord to the asinine. Reference to Islam was carefully avoided.

One wonders what atrocity the Islamists must commit, to make their point more explicit.

I really don’t care if they hate us. That is their opinion, and none of my concern. I do care that they are trying to kill us, on the basis of verses plausibly cited from the Koran. Would it hurt their feelings if we called them on this?