Elizabeth Moon’s citizenship entry
Spent much of this morning reading comments on Elizabeth Moon's deeply unfortunate LJ entry about Islam.
I was saddened by that entry, partly because I recently became a fan of Moon's fiction, partly because I liked a lot of what I had read about and from her in various interviews and such, and partly (of course) because I hate to see people say stuff like that.
I was also disappointed that in the five days since Moon posted that entry, she hadn't posted any followup that I saw other than responses to the first few critical comments, in most of which she basically said “You're misreading what I wrote.” (I do approve of people taking some time off to think about stuff, but I'd rather see an “I'm taking some time off to think about this” note than a cessation of responses.)
I read maybe a third of the three pages' worth of comments, and I was going to link to some of those comments, because I thought various people (including Cat F, Nora J, Naomi K, Haddayr, Karen M, and plenty of others) said some particularly smart and compelling things in response.
But now I can't link to those comments, because Moon has deleted all the comments on that entry, with a note saying that “Whatever's been said has been said, and answered, and resaid, and reanswered.”
I still have the third page of comments open in my browser, along with a couple of other specific comments. I'll save those to disk; if anyone wants a copy of their own comment, let me know. (If it was on the first two pages, though, I don't think I can retrieve it.) If anyone has mirrored the whole set of comments, let me know and I'll link to the mirror.
Added later: there are big screencaps (images, not text) of page 2 and page 3 of the comments. And someone on Dreamwidth has a Word document of the whole thing.
In the meantime, here are a few quick links to other relevant items:
- Excellent Venn diagram making very clear that the small number of people who attacked the WTC are (a) not the same as the 18 million American Muslims, and (b) not the same as the 1.5 billion other Muslims. (I found Ms. Moon's comment that “many” Muslims weren't involved particularly egregious; try almost all. It's possible “many” was intended as ironic understatement, but it didn't read that way to me.)
- Two American Muslim women (Dinu Ahmed and Hena Ashraf) talk about Park51.
- David M talks about Park51 and about Ms. Moon's post.
- Shweta N objects to Ms. Moon's post; features a lengthy comments thread with good comments/discussion.
- The World SF Blog linked to the original post (that's where I first heard about it), highlighting a few specific phrases from the second half. That entry also has a few comments, including one from Saladin A.
- Nathaniel has reposted his comment that was deleted; this is one of the ones I particularly liked from the original comment thread.
