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John Miller’s mind is made up
by Scott Gilbreath ~ November 13th, 2008
Professor John Miller has an air-tight defence against the copy of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” that Mark Steyn promised to send him. Whatever it says, he won’t believe it.
The Blue Book “is a collection of quotes purportedly from him, but without any documentation”.
[…]
[N]o one has verified that the Ayatollah ever said: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.”
Mr Steyn says that quotation appeared in Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason. Prof Miller rejects Ms Fallaci’s reliability because she wrote that book after 9/11, when she had morphed from an internationally respected journalist into an unmitigated Islamophobe. Pre-9/11, she was sound; afterwards, unfortunately, she lost all good sense.
“In three books beginning with “The Rage and the Pride” (Rizzoli: 2002) and many interviews (after 9-11), she [Oriana Fallaci] attacked not only Islamic extremists but Islam itself, as well as a West that she said had become too complaisant and tolerant to realistically understand the threat.
[...]
Fallaci, unlike you, was charged in Switzerland and Italy for violating laws against vilifying religion, and many regarded her as a racist in her later years. So discount the late Oriana Fallaci as an unimpeachable source.
So, says Miller to Steyn, send me The Blue Book if you want—but it won’t prove a thing.
Like I said, Miller’s position is now unassailable. His mind is made up before he reads the alleged source material.
But note, first of all, that Miller’s slagging of the latter-day “Islamophobe” Oriani Fallaci is a smokescreen. The ayatollah’s book (or what purports to be the ayatollah’s book) was published long before 9/11 and long before Ms Fallaci got interested in it. She is merely the immediate source of Steyn’s quotation. As far as the veracity of the quotation is concerned, she is a side issue.
Note also that Miller’s approach is completely ad hominem. Personal attacks on Fallaci and Steyn have no direct bearing on the authenticity of the quotation.
As others have pointed out, the impeccably liberal magazine Harper’s published the quotation at issue in its June 1985 issue. (Not the exact wording, but close enough to be a translation of the same original text.)
The Ayatollah’s book of etiquette
By Ruhollah Khomeini and J. Borujerdi (Trans.)From “A Clarification of Questions,” by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, published in 1985 by the Westview Press. Khomeini’s treatise sets out his position on 3,000 questions of everyday life. Translated by J. Borujerdi.
[…]
2,631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of a horse, a mule, or a donkey if someone has had coitus with the animal.
The URL for that quote is http://www.harpers.org/archive/1985/06/0010032, which appears to me to be a page at Harper’s website. But, I dunno, maybe one of Mark Steyn’s “blog puppets” hacked the site. You just can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Assuming Harper’s did not fabricate the existence of the book, the question turns to Westview Press. Is this a reputable publishing house with a track record of credibility and integrity?
Well, it bills itself as a “distinguished publisher of academic and college books in the social sciences, humanities, and sciences” and claims to have been selected as Publisher’s Weekly Publisher of the Year for 2007. Sounds pretty respectable—but maybe the Westview Press fact checkers on duty when A Clarification of Questions passed through the review and approval process were all Islamopohobes. Who knows?
Obviously, the accuracy of the ayatollah’s alleged quotation is an empirical question. As such, it must be assessed using criteria that focus on the quotation itself and not on the political and religious views of the messengers who have passed it along. What is the original provenance of the quotation? A good place to start, it seems to me, would be with the 1985 book credited to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and translated by J. Borujerdi.
For some reason, however, “Journalism Doctor” Miller would prefer to avoid such an investigation. His mind is made up.
UPDATE (14 Nov.): Here’s another reputable reference to Ayatollah Khomeini’s published sayings: A commenter informs us that the Globe and Mail reviewed the ayatollah’s Little Green Book on 29 January 1980. Read the review here.
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November 13th, 2008 at 10:31 PM
Touche!!!
November 14th, 2008 at 07:50 AM
[...] http://www.novascotiascott.com/2008/11/13/john-millers-mind-is-made-up/ [...]
November 14th, 2008 at 08:40 AM
Of course, since the “many people” who later called Fallaci a “racist” are the same people (people like Miller as a matter of fact) who have re-defined “racist” as “someone who dares to challenge received liberal wisdom” — well, you can see the sound reasoning there, eh?
November 14th, 2008 at 01:42 PM
Fallacci probably used the “Green Book” originally published in French in 1979. A review of the English version ran in the Globe in 1980
Ayatollah leaves little to chance The Green Book instructs on every subject from politics to sex
Tuesday, January 29, 1980 P. 17
William French
Toronto ON — First it was Mao and his Little Red Book, now it’s the Ayatollah and his Little Green Book. And while the thoughts of Chairman Mao may have had a more profound influence on the history of the twentieth century – so far – Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomaini is more engaging to read. Hardly any aspect of human behavior is left to chance by Khomaini, and he even provides instructions for the proper way to go to the bathroom.
Sayings Of the Ayatollah Khomaini will be published shortly by Bantam as a $2.25 paperback. It’s a translation of a French edition which became an immediate bestseller when it was published in Paris last September. The French edition was dubbed The Little Green Book because of its cover, and Bantam has preserved the color scheme.
In an introduction to the Bantam edition, Clive Irving, former managing editor of The London Sunday Times, observes that to anyone reared and educated into the assumptions of Western life, the sayings of the Ayatollah are words from an alien mind. Many of the sentiments expressed here will seem – by turns – offensive, risible, pathological, obsessive, says Irving. But their strangeness cannot be lightly cast aside . . . For these are the words of a man who brought down – with words, not arms – the most elaborately armed regime in the Islamic world.
The book is a collection of extracts from three books of Khomaini’s teachings, The Kingdom of the Learned, The Key To Mysteries and The Explanation of Problems, all of which were originally published in Persian.
November 14th, 2008 at 04:58 PM
What do you want to bet that the version Oriana Fallaci read had a blue cover?
November 15th, 2008 at 01:51 PM
And the bonafides of the book’s translator are pretty impecable. Harold Salemson’s obit from the NY Times in 1988.
Harold Salemson, 78, Film and Book Critic
Published: August 28, 1988
Harold J. Salemson, a former film and book critic who translated biographies of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Georges Simenon, died Thursday at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, L.I., after suffering a heart attack. He was 78 and had lived in Glen Cove for 30 years.
Born in Chicago, Mr. Salemson was educated at home by his parents until they moved to France in 1922. He attended the University of Montpellier and the Sorbonne. Later, he attended the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
After returning to France in 1928, Mr. Salemson contributed to English and French literary publications and became a film critic for Le Monde. For two years, he headed a literary magazine, Tambour, which published works by Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, and Andre Maurois, among others.
In 1966, Mr. Salemson became a book reviewer for Newsday and began translating books. Among the more than 20 books he translated were ”Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times,” by Pierre Cabanne, and ”The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali,” an autobiography.
and more here from the Dictionary of Literary Biography
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/harold-jason-salemson-dlb/
…Translations were an important part of Salemson’s work. His translation into English of Cocteau’s poem “Angel Wuthercut” was published in the New Review and reprinted in Putnam’s The European Caravan (1931). Others include translations for French periodicals of Eugene O’Neill’s “Moon of the Caribbees” and “Bound East for Cardiff,” the novellas of V. F. Calverton, and an early piece by Eric Blair (later known as George Orwell) for Monde.
Salemson returned to the United States in November 1930. Pursuing his interest in movies, he went to Hollywood in 1931 as critic and correspondent for L’Intransigeant, then the leading Paris evening newspaper, and its affiliated publications, including the movie weekly Pour Vous and the sports weekly Match (later Paris-Match). These properties were bought in 1938 by Paris-Soir, and Salemson was retained on the staff as Hollywood bureau head until the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940. During the same period he worked in several capacities on films and contributed extensively to periodicals in the United States and abroad. He was then one of the few writers in English giving films the serious critical attention they later came to receive generally. In World War II he was involved in the Mediterranean Theatre during the invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and he wrote the leaflets dropped by plane throughout the landings in the South of France. Although he was blacklisted in the late forties and the fifties, he continued to work in both the artistic and executive ends of the movie industry. Salemson and his wife live in Glen Cove, Long Island. He has taught film courses, subtitled foreign films, worked at free-lance writing and editing assignments, and continues to translate French books into English….
November 15th, 2008 at 09:22 PM
Thanks, Bob01. That information is very enlightening and much appreciated.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:58 PM
There is a French online edition of what is known as the Green Book (link below). The introduction says that the Green Book has been published in French in 1979 by the late Jean-Edern Hallier, a leftist writer and philosopher. Absolutely nothing has been changed from the text he published at the time. The text compiled by Hallier have never been disputed regarding their translation or their choice: they do not distort the thought of their author, Khomeini, or of Islam. The original book is available only at rare booksellers.
This online edition of the 1979 Hallier Book contains the paragraph cited by Mark Steyn.. and countless other rules. One of them states that “Eleven things are impure: urine, dung, semen, bones, blood, dogs, pigs, NON MUSLIMS, wine, beer, sweat of camels who eat garbage”.
http://www.pointdebasculecanada.ca/spip.php?article488&var_recherche=khomeini
November 16th, 2008 at 02:25 AM
Well, the book did not come up out without some criticism from Middle Eastern “experts” of the day , to be honest. Sounds all very familiar these days.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A1FF6395C11728DDDA10A94DB405B8084F1D3&scp=1&sq=%22Green%20Book%22%20Khomeini&st=cse
A little research shows that the book was likely commissioned by the French leftie writer/publisher/disturber of the peace Jean Edern Hallier.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19970116/ai_n9643240
My French isn’t very good but a history of Editions Hallier Libre is here
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:1vsZmeBY1EYJ:www.jean-edern.fr/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D55%253Acreation-des-editions-hallier%26catid%3D51%253A70s%26Itemid%3D64+%22Jean-Edern+Hallier%22+%22Editions+Hallier%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2
November 16th, 2008 at 10:18 AM
[...] JOHN MILLER’S mind is made up …. [...]
November 16th, 2008 at 12:15 PM
I wouldn’t say exactly uncontested as the article from the NY Times in 1980 which I posted late last night (?) indicated but the book’s American publishers defended the work.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A1FF6395C11728DDDA10A94DB405B8084F1D3&scp=1&sq=%22Green%20Book%22%20Khomeini&st=cse
Clive Irving, who wrote the forward, has written widely on the Middle East including a history of Iran.