Not a Prayer

I just received this email from Ken Vernon, the person who originally gave me my advance copy of "Prayers for the Assassin." Having alerted him to my review, he wrote back:

Thanks for posting your review. I am glad you enjoyed the book! Don't forget to check out the accompanying sites...

Ken

Ummm...clearly he didn't read the review. Let's pull some quotes:

[T]he book depends on several wildly implausible leaps to get us from a largely secular democracy to a near-totalitarian Muslim theocracy...intellectually insulting to anybody else with a political pulse....almost no set of reasonable assumptions one could make in which Ferrigno's scenario would play out....all the plausibility of a drug-induced hallucination....If you're going to relax with mindless fiction, try to avoid the ones which suck out your soul in the process.

So yeah--I really "enjoyed" the book. Oh well.

Amusing moment for me though.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, it appears my review has been reviewed. To the negative. There's a few things I could say in response, but I'm going to restrain myself to two quickies. Number one, I don't think it's fair to hold me responsible for the fact that "liberalism" means different things in American politics versus philosophy. Yes, I know it makes for great "we're the real liberals!" moments, but really, cut me some slack here. I didn't create our lexicon, I just use it. Of course, I disagree that the American political liberal scene stands in opposition to philosophical liberalism (gay marriage, anyone?), but that's a debate for another time.

But my real big, big beef is why "moderate" Muslims are always portrayed as only the diet version of fanatics. My reviewer isn't the only one who's done this, but I think it's fair to say that the whole point of the book is to show that even moderate Muslims are really, really, scary. To be a moderate Muslim apparently means supporting theocracy without street beatings. But why isn't the model here the actual American Muslim community, which is remarkably sanguine about all those liberal values which are supposedly an anathema even to the moderates? I haven't seen Detriot go up in flames yet over the Mohammed cartoons. Sure, the CAIR came out with that idiotic statement saying that freedom of expression doesn't extend to offending religions, but that doesn't make them any more extreme than the Vatican. At the end of the day, I think that we should take people at face value. If American Muslims are managing to integrate their faith with liberal values, we should assume it's geniune. If American liberals say that they want equal rights for homosexuals, we should likewise assume it's geniune. Islam is currently beset by a plague of radicalism, but I think it is empirically wrong to assume, as this book does, that this is the result of an ontological flaw in the religion.