The staggering ignorance of Sally Kohn

We’ve been talking this week about Sally Kohn, a grassroots community organizer turned CNN commentator who, as we’ve seen, could use a little less ideology and a little more historical perspective – plus (not to be too cruel about it) the kind of general knowledge that you need to get at least one or two $100 questions right on Jeopardy.

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Sally Kohn

Yesterday we mentioned an article Kohn recently wrote after her first-ever visit to the Netherlands. As we noted, she interviewed Tofik Dibi, whom she identified as “one of the country’s leading Muslim political figures.” She quoted Dibi as telling her that Dutch tolerance is a myth, a lie, an illusion, and that he spends every day in the Netherlands feeling as if he’s the object of suspicion just because of his religion.

As it turns out, Kohn left out a few tiny details about Dibi. For one thing, he’s apparently a Muslim only by heritage. He wasn’t brought up in a religious home. His parents divorced when he was a child. He attended a Catholic school, not a madrass. As a young man, he joined the Green Party, which gave him such a great welcome that, within a very short time, his name was placed near the very top of its list of parliamentary candidates, essentially guaranteeing his election. In 2007, at age 26, he entered parliament, where he remained until 2012.

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Dibi in parliament

During those years in parliament, Dibi was considered a major Dutch politician – and a major leader of the Dutch Muslim community. Last year, however, after leaving politics, he wrote a memoir in which he came out as gay, explaining that he hadn’t come out earlier because he knew that Dutch Muslims would never have considered a gay man to be a legitimate Muslim leader.

In short, Dibi, who skyrocketed to political power thanks to the support of non-Muslim Dutch politicians and voters, has little apparent reason to complain about Dutch “Islamophobia.” What he has suffered from, beyond question, is Islamic hostility toward gay people.

sally11Now, there’s no way of knowing whether he told Kohn any of this during their conversation. But the simple fact is that every major detail of his political career is publicly available information. We can only assume either that Kohn didn’t take the trouble to look up even the most basic facts about her interviewee, or that she chose to edit the story of his career – and, perhaps, trim his personal testimony – in such a manner as to ensure that it fitted her narrative. For the unfortunate reality is that Kohn, like so many useful gay stooges on today’s left, prefers not to acknowledge the brutal reality of Islamic gay-hatred – although she’s perfectly happy, of course, to proffer the ugly lie of Dutch “Islamophobia.”

How did Kohn conclude her Amsterdam piece? “In the United States,” she wrote, “I’d come to think of tolerance as a linear progression….Here in Amsterdam, things were spun around. Or maybe just round. Openly gay politicians were rabidly anti-Muslim.…Amsterdam was neither enlightened nor close-minded but constantly shifting, not progressing along a line but simultaneously occupying multiple points on a circle. Like a wheel of cheese. Or maybe spokes on a bike. Constantly turning.”

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A part of Amsterdam that Kohn apparently didn’t visit

We submit that the only spinning was going on inside Ms. Kohn’s head. A bit of unsolicited advice for Ms. Kohn: first, close your left-wing ideological prayer book and open your mind to the facts, whether you like them or not. Read up on Islamic history, theology, and law. Face up to the harsh reality of jihad, going back to the very founding of the faith and the Islamic attempts over the centuries to conquer Europe. Learn about the ways in which the current wave of Islamic immigration has replicated those efforts – and has transformed Europe in ways that threaten the very liberalism for which you claim to stand. Struggle to understand that if “very liberal” and openly gay Dutch people are exercised over Islam, it’s precisely because they’ve lived at close quarters with it long enough to know that it is, at its very roots, the very opposite of liberal, especially when it comes to gays.

Which brings us, at last, to the August tweet with which we kicked off this week. We’ll look at it tomorrow.

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