Every now and then all of us who write for a living, at whatever level that may be, produce one of those columns. The stinker. The piece so laughably awful that it follows you around for years. It is an occupational hazard. If you get it very wrong, even accidentally or through a poor choice of phrase – as my dear friends Kevin Myers and Mary-Ellen Synon both once did – it can end your career, or seriously damage it.
Not, however, if you are Fintan O’Toole. Fintan can get away with three or four stinkers a year.
Here he is, this week, with an all-timer. In it, he lays blame for 9/11, essentially, at the feet of Donald Trump. Or at least, Trumpism:
“Before we face into the 25th anniversary of the al-Qaeda atrocities of September 11th, 2001, it is worth asking where they came from. And answering: from the manosphere. The deep roots of this barbaric assault on Americans lie in the same hatred of women that is now embedded in American reactionary politics….
…The terrible irony of the anniversary of the 9/11 crimes is that it will be marked under a US president who fought the most openly misogynistic presidential campaign in the country’s history. Standing beside him will be an avowed Christian jihadist, Pete Hegseth. Both appeal to men who share the most fundamental impulse of the jihadis: the desire to create a society in which women are under male control.”
There’s a lot more in his column – I don’t want to disrespect the blessed Irish Times paywall – but those two paragraphs are essentially the thrust of it: “Jihadi types hated women and want to control them, so in my (Fintan’s) view does Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Tommy Robinson, and that’s all you need to know, Jack.”
The problem with this stuff is not that it’s cheap. We can all do cheap – it would be relatively easy for me to write a column, for example, drawing some obscure but real ideological line from Stalin and Mao to Ivana Bacik and the Irish Labour Party. See? They’re commies.
No; the problem is that Fintan believes it. Deeply and sincerely.
Fintan is, as I understand it – he can correct me – some class of an atheist or an agnostic. Nothing wrong with that. But he has a particular view of religion shared by a particular kind of Irish atheist or agnostic: In essence, that all the religions, the Abrahamic ones at least, are the same or at the very least share the same original sin and pathology, which is that they don’t much care for sex.
His instinct is that all of them share the same anti-freedom, anti-woman, anti-sex instincts, and that all are equally oppressive. This means that Fintan, and a great many Irish people who share his views, genuinely see very little difference between a Salafist Imam telling the men to burn the infidel and beat their women in Cairo, and some televangelist selling purity rings for 12-year-old girls on a local TV station in Oklahoma.
This in turn explains Ireland’s deep rooted, though often denied, anti-Americanism: America is, for all its charming weirdness, the most christianised major western nation left standing in the world. It is also, inconveniently, powerful. And it is the last truly powerful nation in which it might be accurately said that the christian voting bloc often determines elections. Strip away everything else from Fintan’s column, and that is what you are left with: The religious types and their dislike of sex.
Don’t take it from me: Here’s another bonus sentence from his column:
“There is nothing uniquely Islamic about the fanatical desire to control women’s bodies. Little versions of Qutb could have been found in 1950s Ireland too, foaming at the mouth about dirty dancing”
For the record, he means Priests.
Fintan, of course, cannot just write “radical Islam and Christianity are the same”, since that would get him laughed out of town amongst most sensible people, and so instead he chooses a proxy for Christianity: Trump.
That Donald Trump is not a particular north star for yours truly is well known, but there are occasions nevertheless when one is moved to defend him: The notion that Trump, for all that he certainly is a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to the women, is comparable in any way, shape or form to Al Quaed a on the question is almost comically offensive and nonsensical.
We’ve got our vices, we western men: Trump may be a particularly boorish example but it’s not as if he’s the only man to appreciate a pair of breasts or to let his gaze linger on a backside when he thinks he won’t be caught. But to compare his supposed 1950s sexism to an ideology that wants to cover women from head to foot in black and denies girl children an education is not just offensive. It is monstrously stupid.
But it is, in fact, what Fintan believes. He’s written it himself. One of the most pre-eminent newspaper columnists in this land thinks that it is worth expending a thousand of his precious, carefully crafted words, expressing the view that the average American Social Conservative is just like a f*cking Jihadi.
The trick here is to identify one ugly human instinct shared across vastly different movements, and then pretend that the shared instinct renders the movements themselves morally comparable. By that standard, practically every political ideology in human history can be made equivalent to practically every other one.
Donald Trump may be sexist. And it may be the case that some Islamist lunatic who hated women helped provide the intellectual architecture for 9/11. If you cannot see an important distinction between those two things because both contain men with objectionable views about women, the problem isn’t Trump. It’s your brain.
His editors should have laughed him out the door.
JMG
We are to blame for celebrating O’Toole’s preposterous analysis of Brexit. In his book and dozens of articles on the subject, he asserted that the vote was rooted in a nostalgia for empire and a national penchant for self-flagellation.
With hindsight, it is blindingly obvious that the social upheaval caused by mass migration was the dominant factor in the Brexit vote; Ireland is experiencing an immigration backlash after only a fraction of what Britain endured. It is impossible to have been more wrong than O’Toole was, yet his Brexit polemics elevated him to the status of public intellectual par excellence, emboldening him to churn out his elaborate fictions.
Have you seen the video Fintan & Patrick Freyne released at the height of Year Zero (summer ‘20) HOW TO BE A MAN?
It was hilarious, & very swiftly deleted after a withering articulate Twitter backlash.
You are witnessing the death throes of EUSSR regime journalism. They have no idea how to correct course. The Globalists always use effeminate cowardly arsewipes like Finty to convey their messaging, and it lands as high comedy rather than serious analysis.
There's a cadre of extremely capable writers (ye pair included) who are set to nuke this ideology to high heaven in its own Big Tech stronghold, Ireland. Ironically it's the regime's own crimes (endless threats to the life & limb of dissidents and our families) which will torpedo them fatally.
Bring it on.