David Frum debated Steve Bannon the other day and lost, and so he has resorted to a strategy often employed by debate losers. He has written a windy article to re-debate the debate and turn it in his favor: “The Real Lesson of My Debate With Steve Bannon,” by David Frum, The Atlantic, November 4, 2018.
It’s 2500 words that only Frum’s mother could love or stand to read through, but in passing, Frum drops this:
When I was young, the most important challenges to those free societies seemed to come from Communists and Marxists. When I was not so young, the most important of those challenges seemed to come from Islamists. Today, they seem to come from—again, speaking politely—populists.
In 2002, David Frum wrote that Bat Ye’or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude and Cassandra of Eurabia, was “the great Islamic scholar,” a “very great scholar: original, authoritative, lucid.” But by 2008, Frum had switched sides, complaining that “the scholar Bat Ye’or and the popularizer Robert Spencer” locate “the sources of Islamic violence in the Koran itself, in the person of Muhammad, and in the core teachings of the Muslim faith.” Never mind that Islamic jihadis do that on a routine basis; it was our fault for pointing out that they do.
And now this. Bear in mind that “Islamists” want to destroy free societies through violence and subversion, and replace them with Sharia states that will deny the freedom of speech, impose the death penalty for criticizing Islam and leaving Islam, reduce women to the status of commodities, legalize wife-beating, and institutionalize discrimination against and harassment of non-Muslims. Populists, by contrast, want to stop their nations from being inundated by migrants with vastly different values, and preserve the rule of law as delineated in the Western tradition, providing for equality of rights for all people. The people whom Frum is identifying as the threat to free societies, worse than “Islamists,” are the very people who are working hardest to defend free societies.
David Frum has, in short, gone quite mad.