Thank Goddess that Canada had a right-wing-extremist mass murder of Muslims so that progressives’ and academics’ decades-long insistence of the danger of right-wing extremists could finally be vindicated. They were right all along, they can now insist.

The massacre, on 2017.01.29, at the Quebec City mosque, as English-language media insist on calling it (its actual name is Centre culturel islamique de Québec), is straightforwardly a hate crime even if such charges have not yet been laid. Sole suspect Alexandre Bissonnette was accurately described by the RCMP commissioner as a criminal extremist (transcript). While not charged with such offences, Bissonnette, if guilty, clearly carried out an act of domestic terrorism. What else could you call it when an armed assailant enters a space occupied mostly by a single group and murders and gravely injures a number of them?

If you’re a Muslim named Omar Mateen and you do just that to dozens of gay men and some women among the 49 you kill, and injure 50 more persons, then ultra-left-wing agitators will deem such mass murder not an act of Islamic extremism but a consequence of toxic masculinity.

“Toxic masculinity” is to progressives what “ZOG” is to neo-Nazis: A cherished conspiracy theory that makes its believers sound like liars. Mateen’s own statements to negotiators make his Islamic extremist beliefs clear. Those statements were covered up by the FBI for weeks. (PDF version of ultimately released unexpurgated transcript.)

Islamic extremists plot to murder and actually do murder Jews, gays, apostates, and anyone who gets in their way, including other Muslims. (Quite often they tell us exactly that even while they’re doing it, as by shouting “Allahu akbar!” while, for example, beheading a soldier on a city street.) Every now and then, right-wing extremists plot to murder their enemies, and, even less frequently, they actually do it. By all accounts, Bissonnette falls into the latter category. Then some journalists, whose colleagues tend to cover up clear Islamic-supremacist statements, proceed to comb through Facebook for single-serving “proof” of Islamophobia and/or White supremacy and/or transphobia. (It’s usually a three-for-one deal, isn’t it?)

We can be worried about two security threats at once

Or more than two. Or at least more than one.

This month there were protests in many cities, including Toronto, coördinated under the banner of a National Day of Action against Islamophobia and White Supremacy.

Where’s the National Day of Action against Islam and White Supremacy? Run that and I’ll carry a banner at the head of the march. Because Islamic extremists (really just Islam) and right-wing extremists are both a clear and present danger to civilized societies. Islam is a particular threat to gay men, so I take this issue personally.

But, because I do my fucking research even if nobody else does, I went well beyond the personal. I actually read some of the literature and tried to interview the leading Canadian academic in the field, Barbara Perry. In what is by far the most important paper she’s written in a lengthy career covering right-wing assholes, Perry pretends Muslim terrorism doesn’t happen in Canada, paints Muslims and transgenders as two of the many groups victimized by right-wing extremists, proves there are barely any right-wing-extremist groups in Canada and how impotent they are, and, crucially, admits that lone wolves like Bissonnette effectively can’t be stopped.

But instead of confronting you with a 4,000-word posting, I’m announcing a new venture.

Right-wing assholes in Canada:
A research project

You will recall my months-long self-assigned homework to read every paper on gay money so I could write a guide to journalists on how to quit lying about how rich the “gay community” is. I did all the research up front, wrote the whole thing, and released it in one fell swoop. A classic publishing model. I will now try something else.

I’m making a bet to myself that I will be able to finish the following project:

  1. Read most or all the literature on right-wing assholes in Canada, and critique and summarize it (à la the fagonomics project)

  2. Do what I have repeatedly criticized purple-haired keyboard warriors for being too chickenshit to do: Emulate Stieg Larsson and get to know right-wing assholes personally. (Esteemed colleague James Dubro has done the same thing – for decades – with mobsters)

I may or may not be able to report what I learned from the second tranche of this project. But I’m putting my body where Anti-Racist Canada’s blog is. I’m doing something and they aren’t.

Project homepage

☛ Right-wing assholes in Canada: A research project

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2017.02.16 14:52. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:

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