Is a fact a fact? Or are only the facts of progressives true?

I see that the Journalism Doctor is hauling me across the coals for not getting the right quote or the right color of Ayatollah Khomeini's book concerning various fatwas on how to deal with animals after having sex with them.

Okay.

I found a similar quote in the "Green Book" among many other similar quotes that would lead me to believe that if I took another ten minutes I'd find the quote Mark Steyn referred to in this translation of a book that maybe at one time had a blue cover when it was published in Italian. The color of the book is not what's important. It's the contents.

I provided proof enough that a book of such sayings exists and a translation is available over the Internet.

I think Nova Scotia Scott says it very well:

Professor John Miller has an air-tight defence against the copy of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” that Mark Steyn promised to send him. Whatever it says, he won’t believe it.

The Blue Book “is a collection of quotes purportedly from him, but without any documentation”.
[…]
[N]o one has verified that the Ayatollah ever said: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.”

Mr Steyn says that quotation appeared in Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason. Prof Miller rejects Ms Fallaci’s reliability because she wrote that book after 9/11, when she had morphed from an internationally respected journalist into an unmitigated Islamophobe. Pre-9/11, she was sound; afterwards, unfortunately, she lost all good sense.

“In three books beginning with “The Rage and the Pride” (Rizzoli: 2002) and many interviews (after 9-11), she [Oriana Fallaci] attacked not only Islamic extremists but Islam itself, as well as a West that she said had become too complaisant and tolerant to realistically understand the threat.
[...]
Fallaci, unlike you, was charged in Switzerland and Italy for violating laws against vilifying religion, and many regarded her as a racist in her later years. So discount the late Oriana Fallaci as an unimpeachable source.

So, says Miller to Steyn, send me The Blue Book if you want—but it won’t prove a thing.

Like I said, Miller’s position is now unassailable. His mind is made up before he reads the alleged source material.

When it comes to a defense of pure facts, then on this particular instance, because I care more about truth than about being right, I admit I did not go the extra mile and find the exact quote.

I found the book and something similar in five minutes on Google. That was good enough for me in terms of a blog post to prove John Miller's inability to use Google effectively. It indicated to me that the Ayatollah did write extensively about such matters as what one does with an animal one has had sex with.

If John Miller is telling journalists about the importance of facts, as if he believes in some objective reality that is out there to be discovered, then I say, John Miller, good on you.

But I detect something different going on. I detect a post-modern whiff of facts-are-only-important-when-they suit a progressive cause, otherwise they are only the tools of power, or of systemic racists or whatever other ad hominem attack he can muster against those with whom he disagrees. I'm sure he holds to the idea that "facts" only belong to the victor in power struggles, thus they are inherently suspect.

I find it bizarre and troubling that this man stood for the freedom of speech of someone who thinks sex with children is a-okay, as long as it's consensual but who dismisses Oriana Fallaci as a racist because she ran afoul of totalitarian laws in Europe that prohibit criticism of religion. (Laws it seems Miller would like to see in Canada, given his unabashed defense of Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act). First off, criticism of Islam is not racist, because Islam is not a race. All races belong to this worldwide religion.

Fallaci, who had the guts to tear off her burka and throw it at Khomeini, during the course of an interview with him, probably knew more about the Iranian regime than any other western journalist. I bet Fallaci, who was a left-wing," speaking truth to power" journalist prior to 9/11 was probably a hero to Ryerson types until she started criticizing radical Islam, the new gay (or the new black, which ever trumps which) for chic progressives like Miller.

Fallaci was also a defender of facts and truth as an objective reality. Far from being a right-wing journalist, she is more like Christopher Hitchens, another left-wing journalist who woke up after 9/11. But where Fallaci and Hitchens fail vis. a vis. postmoderns like Miller is they oppose cultural and moral relativism. Alas, there are no fundamentalists quite like relativists, and no greater haters of Western civilization and the recognition the West gives to inherent human rights.

Mark Steyn responds to Miller here:

Professor Miller seems to be overcomplicating this. I didn't "hang my hat" on any website. That's his argument: He's the one who thinks the veracity of a quotation is determined by who cites it on the Internet. The book was published in Iran before the Internet was invented, so Prof Miller's argument is a bit like complaining that a wax cylinder from 1904 isn't available on CD. That may be so, but it doesn't mean the wax cylinder doesn't exist

I've offered to send him the book by the Ayatollah Khomeini in which the original statement appeared in the original language. If he doesn't like Oriana Fallaci's translation, he's welcome (as a renowned Islamic scholar) to offer his own. All he has to do his give me his mailing address. All the rest is blowing smoke.

But Miller's mind is already closed. He only cares about facts in order to nitpick about irrelevant ones the way an octopus squirts ink to ward off predators. He wants to confuse with facts when it suits him, and when it doesn't, never let them get in the way of a good story that would attempt to destroy all dissenters--with the state's jackboots if need be.

What a sad spectacle he is making of himself.

Binky also saw the original incident where Miller in effect claimed Mark Steyn had made up the quote because he could not find it on Google.

He writes:

Currently, Dr. Miller is denying reality, as in the existence of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Blue Green Book of Shi’ite Ettiquette for All Occasions. This appears to be the final collapse of the modern mind into willful illogic, when it encounters disagreeable or indigestible facts: ‘You only say that because you’re Mark Steyn’, or even ‘You can’t tell ME what to think!’ Season with ’so there!’ and ‘nyah, nyah!’ to taste.

As Mr. Gilbreath points out, we’ve moved from the realm of opinion into the realm of facts: the widely attested Blue Book by Khomeini either exists or doesn’t: it is a telling but sad sign if Dr. Miller– as an all-powerful journalism prof– imagines he can change facts simply by refusing to believe them. Or that he holds with the ugly little creed that whatever people whom He Really Doesn’t Like may happen to say, it’s automatically untrue, because he doesn’t like them or their so-called facts. He’s wise to the Conspiracy™, dontcha know.

Enjoy the following: I don’t know about you, but if I were a journalism student, I would much rather listen to this disreputable Scott-blogger person as a professor, than anyone with the views of the self-beclowning Dr. Miller. Otherwise, you have the hard slog of backwards-decoding Dr. Miller’s bizarre views into something approximating reality and reasonable opinion. I’d much rather get things straight from the horse’s mouth, rather than from the messy end of said equine.

Ezra Levant pegged Miller from the get-go:

As I said when I received this invitation, I wanted to find out what made John Miller tick -- he's the Ryerson journalism professor who tried to intervene on behalf of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn, in the five-day show trial in Vancouver this spring.

What would possibly possess a journalism professor to be pro-censorship?

The answer is pretty simple and boring, actually: he's a guilty white liberal who is willing to sacrifice our ancient liberal values of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of mosque and state, in an act of journalistic affirmative action. That's it. You can see a near-transcript of his remarks here, where he essentially opened with an apology for being a white man.

It was nothing more thoughtful than that: he's white, Maclean's magazine is white-ish, so any brown-skinned Arab who complains against it has moral authority, even if they have no legal or moral case.

Pretty lame.

Miller didn't seem very familiar with the depth of the anti-Semitic bigotry at the Canadian Islamic Congress; over dinner, he expressed surprise when I told him that, at a Canadian Association of Journalists forum in 2006, Elmasry repeatedly condemned the "zhoos" who owned the media in Canada, and abused their zhooish powers to keep down good Muslims.

There was a weird moment during the panel when Miller said that Mark Steyn simply wasn't a good journalist -- compared to him, one presumes -- because Miller couldn't find corroboration for one of Steyn's quotes about Ayatollah Khomeini's weird fatwas about sex.

Those quotes were from Khomeini's famous Tahrir-ol-vasyleh, his Iranian version of Mein Kampf -- his master plan for the world, right down to how to have sex with chickens -- the part Miller thought Steyn was making up.

I went to Google as Miller was talking, and found a ton of references for it. There's even a reference to it in the bestselling novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Harper's magazine referred to it; there's a whole Iranian feminist foundation dedicated to repealing Khomeini's rules, including his sex rules.

It was pretty sad: an ageing journalism professor, looking down his nose at Steyn and accusing Steyn of sloppiness (and disparaging mere bloggers, too), while half the kids in the room could have found what Miller couldn't in about five minutes on the Net. Some "expert" witness.