"You Are a Xenophobe"

THIS IS ANOTHER in our series, Answers to Objections. The following was posted by Roland Shirk on Jihad Watch, and I thought it might be a useful tactic against blind multiculturalists:

One of the silliest yet most persistent tactics that I've heard used to dismiss the arguments of civilizational patriots (or anti-jihadists or Islamo-realists — take your pick) is to lump us in with some ideology or another — preferably one that is widely discredited. Some assume that all of us are radically anti-religious, or white supremacist, or thoughtless Colonel Blimps who blindly despise every culture but our own. We believe, in the words of Nancy Mitford's fictionalized father, that "abroad is bloody, and foreigners are fiends." These charges are persistent, and we have to waste a fair amount of time refuting them.

One useful tactic, I suggest, is to turn them on their head. If someone accuses you of being a xenophobe, inquire what the opposite of that is. Most likely, your critic will say something like: "A tolerant person," or "a liberal." At that point, you can correct him: "No, the counterpart of someone who is mindlessly hostile to foreign people and things is someone who promiscuously accepts them, who snobbishly prefers them over things home-grown and domestic. If you think I'm a xenophobe, I suggest you might unwittingly have become a xenomaniac. Now what would be a moderate common ground, a golden mean between those two extremes?"

With those amenable to rational argument, such a gambit just might work. With those who aren't, you shouldn't waste your time. I don't engage such people, but rather make a point of mocking them (gently at first, then with a rising level of ridicule, like boiling frogs) till they stop emitting pink clouds of nonsense from every bodily orifice. If there's no hope of that, at least I make sure that innocent third parties who overhear or read the exchange know better than to give these dupes any credence.

Read the whole article>>>