Canadian “progressives” infuriated by the replacement of a privileged white male with a gay Muslim woman-of-color
Let Freedom Rain's Jymm Parrett originally titled his post "Globe and Mail replaces Rick Salutin with piece of shit" but after being taken to task by one of his own readers, calmed down slightly and changed the title to the more straightforward, if grammatically incomplete, " Globe and Mail replaces Rick Salutin Irshad Manji"
However the prose lost none of its demented color with:
Irshad Manji is a clueless bore of an ideologue who is the leading edge of the new Globe & Mail campaign to out fox Fox News. Forget Kory and his TV dreams. This is much worse. The Mop & Pail has flown the coop.(it goes on, getting better ..or worse, here .. and here )
"Eugene Forsey Liberal" offers:
I beg of you Globe, stop this folly. The world needs less Manjis, Teneyckes, Lavignes, etc., and more brains, more originality, more wit, more insight, uh, like...hmm, who again? Ah yes, Salutin!
"Orwell's Bastard" gives us:
At a time when the reinvigoration of civil discourse is more important than ever, why in god's name is the Globe jettisoning its most thoughtful, original and engaging columnist? Are focus groups and demographic targeting and tokenism more important to Canada's self-appointed National Newspaper than raising the tone of the national conversation? Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.
In losing Rick Salutin's voice, the Globe isn't just getting rid of a genuinely original and progressive thinker. It's abandoning the whole notion of intellectual curiosity, leaving us with hacks like Blatchford and Wente.
Antonia Zerbisias, in her usual exhibiton of unintentional radical leftist self-parody, characterizes Manji's efforts to reform and liberalize the form of orthodox Islam that imposes the Niqab and condones suicide bombings as "Muslim bashing."
If there was a prize for idiotic interpretations of this event, it might go to David Beers at the tyee.ca who wrote:
Why did The Globe and Mail fire Rick Salutin? Without a better answer from the newspaper's brass, we're left to read Salutin's last two columns and ponder how power behaves when the politics of fear, and those who wield them deftly, are ascendant.The two columns Beers refers to were critical respectively, of Stephen Harper and Rob Ford. If that were grounds for dismissal at the Globe, they would have no one left on staff but Christie Blatchford. But for Beers to know that, he would have to actually read The Globe and Mail.
What's behind the hysterics, of course, is that the old-school radical left realize that they are being regarded as less and less relevant to public discourse. In the US, Barack Obama knows he can ignore them or take them for granted, depending on the circumstance.
Salutin in the Globe was the way that these people could delude themselves into thinking their voice was being taken seriously. Propping a corpse up and putting it into a chair doesn't make it a living person. The Globe finally decided it was time to bury the corpse.
UPDATE: Manji's first column as a regular Globe columnist. An interesting and balanced discussion about the Tea Party's growing popularity and its Canadian applications.
The usual suspects (see above) have flocked to the online comments section to say how awful they think she is. With their usual deficit of irony, some claim they will permanently abandon the Globe because of its replacement of Salutin with Manji, then return two hours later to post another disparaging comment.
Great stuff...the old hippy, lazy lefties cannot tolerate the idea that the Globe has moved on from the most predictable lefty in Canada to a fresh, intelligent, young woman. (Of colour and, damnit, gay...no chance for me ;( )Who just happens to be a Muslim rather than whatever Salutin rejected when he was a teenager and the dinos roamed the Earth
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't get any funnier than the old smelly hippies getting their asses kicked to the curb because they are irrelevant.No one in Canada gives a fiddler's fart except for a handful in the smelly old hippie club. Their self-glorification blogs where they try to outdo each other coming up with the most asinine of thoughts is absolutely retarded. They should check out logic and try to apply it from to time.
ReplyDeleteWell said, everyone.
ReplyDeleteThis phrase appears in the first paragraph: "...the wacko Tea Party.". At what point did you think this article was "balanced"?
ReplyDeleteNot the best sentence to start it with, I agree, Anon at 1:57. But if you read the article again, and ignore both its first and last sentence, I think you'll find most of everything in-between quite reasonable.
ReplyDeleteI'm a leftie socialist tree huggin' radical in most ways, but I LOVE Irshad Manji, I'm guessing I'm not the only one! I think the Globe and Mail is all the better for bring her on. Too bad this blog post of yours is so critical of liberal hippy folks like myself eh? I think the bashing of lefty liberal hippies in general as being against brilliant ground breaking women such as Irshad Manji is nonsense, I think she has a bigger lefty following than you may realize.
ReplyDeleteI've fallen into an unproductive trap that I use for expediency, Rachel, that isn't a fair reflection of the political views I hold.
ReplyDeleteThe whole "left/right" description of political positions has some false premises to it.
Most of the views that I find abhorent or ill-advised, such as the urge to limit free speech in the name of multicultural sensitivity, or foreign policy positions that want to blame all the problems in the world on the "imperialist, colonialist" west, while absovling virtually every brutality committed by Islamic republics or totalitarian regimes like North Korea and Cuba is normally associated with "the left."
My position of marijuana (should be legal and taxed), abortion (this is not the government's business) and Gay marriage (also not the government's business) falls firmly into what would also be considered "the left."
Irsad, whom I've met, is certainly a lot closer to being a "lefty" than a "righty" but it's best to stay away from those tags.
She is an intelligent person who looks at issues and comments on them based on the facts. She has not locked herself into an ideological position that she has to comply with.
My issue with some on the "Left" is that is exactly what they have done. They have any number of ideological positions that they unthinkingly adhere to. The "Right" does too, but in Canada, the extreme right has already been effectively marginalized. There are no blatant racists or people trying to remove the separation of Church and State in the mainstream.
Where as the fanatical left, as personified by the likes of Linda McQuaig, Naomi Klein, Libby Davies, etc. still make some pretense to having a rational view to put forward when they do not.
If you check out rabble.ca, which is relective of those viewpoints, you'll find some of the most vile bigotry, hypocrisy and closed-mindedness imaginable.
They have become more and more shrill, because they know they are being pushed further into the margins.
If more of public debate was between people with different but reasonable views, like Manji and David Frum who can actaully discuss an issue rather than put forward the ideological position behind the issue as their own argument, it would all be a lot more rational.