Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, July 11, 2005

17:50 - Hanging on in quiet desperation

(top)

So I was reading this Hitchens piece (in which he makes the assertion that "By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid?" �without really explaining himself, which he really ought to do, because plenty of people see no logical disconnect there, regrettably enough); but over on the sidebar I saw this:

Tony Parsons
IN THE aftermath of Thursday's mass murder, it was one of the first pieces of breaking news: the Muslim Council of Great Britain had been sent so many hate emails that its computers had crashed.

I immediately thought, bullshoes. Do you know how many e-mail messages a modest Pentium-III-class server can handle per second? Anyone peddling a line like the above, as the mainstream press in Britain apparently did in the immediate aftermath of the attack, would simply have to be playing cynically on the public's general assumptions not only that right below the surface of polite Western multicultural society lies a stratum of bestial rabble hurling itself against its fragile bonds laid upon it by their moral betters and shouting invective at anybody with skin darker than a mocha latt�but that computers crash. Hey, doesn't yours?

Mail servers don't "crash". Gimme a break. Think about how much spam you get, and marvel at the abilities of mail servers all over the Internet to get it to you and all the other untold millions of lucky recipients. All without "crashing". Bogging down, perhaps. Refusing connections temporarily, sure. But an overload of traffic doesn't crash a dang thing.

To paint a phantasmagoria of so much vitriol being spewed out of a British troglodyte underclass that it dwarfs the volume of spam that's so effortlessly passed around the Net these days is stupefyingly dishonest on its face. Perhaps the MCGB received some nastygrams. I don't doubt that one bit. But it's painfully transparent that someone saw a PR opportunity in those one or two examples of the kind of shaven-head distorted Britishness that the unfortunate few saw in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie, and decided to tell the press that they'd received so many pieces of hate-mail that ... well, we received a lot, okay? So many, in fact, that.... [leaning in close] ...Why, it crashed our e-mail server!

Who could refuse to run with a headline like that? It's got everything: confirmation of latent bigotry, an angle of self-blame, and a hook to engage the readership: stupid crashing computers.

So when I finished the Hitchens piece, I clicked on over to read the whole piece. (No permalink yet; if it's no longer the front-page article, it's "FOR SHAHARA'S SAKE, DON'T HATE MUSLIMS".) And lo! What to my wondering eyes should appear?

Not true. Or at least, it is not true that so many people felt a sudden loathing for Muslims that they were compelled to bombard the Muslim Council of Great Britain with hate email.

Because it now turns out that 30,000 emails were sent to the Muslim Council from just one source.

Imagine that. And I'll bet it was totally genuine. Wasn't "planted" at all. No way.

The rest of the article is good, too. I hope to see a lot more of the attitude this guy shows: one that both sides of the aisle can agree on, like we did in those long-bygone days following 9/11, where Left or Right, we could all agree that there was a real threat that needed to be neutralized, and that it could not be identified by any means so easy as "race" or "religion". Not that that means it's too hard to attempt. It's crucial that we do.

But it doesn't help one bit for rabble-rousers like whoever sent the 30,000 bogus hate-spams, or the operative who parlayed them to the press as a grass-roots deluge of bloodline-purgers that brought SMTP servers to a tottering halt, to cynically try to convince us in the Western world that we're too socially diseased to presume to try to defend ourselves.

We know ourselves better than that.

UPDATE: Specifically, no, we don't need to "hate" smiling Shahara Islam... but we do need a way to put the fear of God, as it were, into these people. Seriously. Now. (Via LGF.)