Knife on Earth: Exploring the Idiocy and Arrogance of Two Atheist Icons
The Genetic Book of the Dead is a good read by Richard Dawkins. Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder is a bad read by Salman Rushdie. One is about science, the other is about society. The two books are very different and so are the two authors. Dawkins is White; Rushdie is brown. Dawkins is ancestrally Christian; Rushdie is ancestrally Muslim. Dawkins is a scientist; Rushdie is an egotist. Dawkins has earnt his success; Rushdie has been given his.
Good read and bad read: Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead and Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder
But Dawkins and Rushdie are united by two big and important things. They’re both atheists and they’re both members of a political cult. It’s a cult dedicated to the destruction of everything its members claim to hold dear. In other words, it’s a suicide cult and it’s called leftism. Dawkins’ leftism is intermittent and indirect in The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is about evolution and genetics. Rushdie’s leftism is overt and obtrusive in Knife, which is about the near-death experience he underwent in 2022. He was attacked with a knife whilst appearing at a literary festival in upstate New York. In his own words, he was at the festival “to talk about the importance of keeping writers from harm.” Rushdie, of course, recognizes the irony of that.
A logolatric littérateur
At the festival, he was very seriously harmed by a New Jersey man called Hadi Matar. And Rushdie does not recognize the full irony of that. Like all mainstream leftists, he sees absolutely no contradiction between a description like “New Jersey man” and a name like “Hadi Matar.” Leftists like Rushdie believe in what Vox Day satirically calls magic dirt, that is, the ability of residence on Western soil to transform Third-World folk into First-World folk — in effect, to turn non-Whites into Whites. But the dirt isn’t magic, as Rushdie found out in upstate New York. Or rather, as he didn’t find out. You can see that from the book he wrote about nearly dying at the hands of a New Jersey man called Hadi Matar.
Knife proves that Rushdie doesn’t believe only in magic dirt, but also in magic words. Again, that’s mainstream leftism. Rushdie and other members of the suicide-cult believe that words govern reality. Indeed, Rushdie is not merely logocentric, or centered on words, but logolatric, or worshipful of words. He may claim to be an atheist, but in fact he bows deep and long in the temple of Vayu, God of Wind. Rushdie’s worship of words and wind is part of what makes Knife a bad read. It’s partly a form of self-worship, because Rushdie regards himself as a great writer, a master of words and lord of language. So do leaders of his suicide-cult. That’s why they’ve showered him with honors, decade after decade, and why they paid such fulsome tribute to him after he was nearly murdered by that “New Jersey man.” In Rushdie’s words again, the festival was supposed to be a place “where ideas were debated in an atmosphere of openness, tolerance and freedom.” Instead, it was turned into a place of butchery.
The triumph of Enlightenment values
But Rushdie has neatly turned the tables in Knife. Or so he and his leftist readers will fondly imagine. Part of the book consists of a dialogue he imagines taking place between himself and “the A.,” as he calls Hadi Matar. That abbreviation stands for the “would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation,” as Rushdie states explicitly (p. 5). It can also stand for “the Asshole,” as Rushdie surely meant his readers to infer. He’s a master of ambiguity, irony and implication, after all. He’s also master in the pages of Knife. He writes this of “the A.”: “He does not really want to talk to me, but as this is my imagination at work, he has no choice.” (p. 136) That’s the magic of words. “The A.” has no choice but to have a “conversation” with Rushdie and be defeated by Rushdie’s eloquent exposition of Enlightenment values. At the end, Rushdie informs his imagined interlocutor that he has been on the wrong side of “a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without.” (p. 167)
Take that, Islamists! You have no sense of humor! You should be like Christians and let your religion be mocked, satirized and subverted by leftists like Salman Rushdie. Did Christians try to stab anyone after a homosexual poet called James Kirkup published a poem about a Roman centurion having necrophilic sex with the freshly crucified corpse of Jesus Christ? No, they didn’t. Did they try to stab anyone after a “transgressive artist” called Andres Serrano published a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine? Again no, they didn’t. But Rushdie never mentions those attacks on Christianity or the forbearing Christian response. When Christianity was strong, Christians punished their enemies and critics; now that Christianity is weak, Christians turn the other cheek. Unlike Salman Rushdie, Islamists have no “sense of humor.” And unlike Salman Rushdie, Islamists understand the rules of power. They can see that Christianity in the West is decadent and dying, which is why they have no intention of behaving like Christians now that they are in the West.
Shah Shmah…
And who imported them into the West? Who subsidized them to breed and build mosques and steadily expand their power and influence? Leftists like Salman Rushdie, of course. But he doesn’t discuss immigration in his book. He doesn’t discuss the rape-gangs of Rotherham either. Or the murder of Asad Shah in Glasgow in 2016. It would have been instructive for him to do so, but not in a way that assisted the all-important cause of leftism. Like Salman Rushdie, Asad Shah was attacked by an Islamist with a knife for committing blasphemy. Unlike Salman Rushdie, Asad Shah was not surrounded by friends and supporters at the time, so the humorless knifeman got what he wanted: a dead blasphemer.
But noisy defenders of free speech like Salman Rushdie and Kenan Malik, a staunch supporter of Rushdie, have never written about Asad Shah. They’ve refused to explore the fascinating parallels between two knife-attacks separated by the Atlantic and united by Islam. That’s why Asad Shah was the victim of what I call a meteor murder, that is, a murder that flashes throughout the headlines of the mainstream media and then disappears for ever. Meteor murders reveal the truth about Third-World immigration, you see, and leftists like Rushdie and Malik are not interested in the truth. As I’ve described in articles like “Martyr with a Machine Gun” and “Malik’s Moral Compass,” the murder of Asad Shah demonstrated how a long Muslim tradition of censorship-by-murder had been exported from Pakistan to Britain. In other words, when you import Third-World people, you inevitably import Third-World pathologies too. That’s why Rushdie ignored the murder of Asad Shah in Knife, although he did mention the attempted murder of the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 (p. 134). That took place in Egypt, when an Islamist attacked Mahfouz with a knife for “offending Islam.” Egypt is a Muslim country, of course. But why did the same thing later happen to Asad Shah in Britain, which is not a Muslim country, and to Salman Rushdie in America, which is not a Muslim country either?
“The spirit of young Trayvon Martin”
The answer is simple. It’s because the non-Muslim countries of Britain and America have imported ever-increasing numbers of Muslims. There are knife-attacks by “Islamists” all over the earth because Muslims have migrated all over the earth. But Rushdie never points out that obvious fact. Just like the Islamists whom he claims to oppose, he isn’t interested in the truth. No, he’s interested in advancing the cause of his favored ideology. That’s why he ignored the murder of Asad Shah and mentioned the murder of Trayvon Martin. Rushdie and other leftists think it was a murder, anyway:
After the World Voices event, as the audience came out onto Cooper Square beneath the gaze of the statue of Peter Cooper on its plinth, a candlelight vigil in support of Black Lives Matter was taking place. The spirit of young Trayvon Martin, whose murder by George Zimmerman, and Zimmerman’s disgraceful subsequent acquittal, had inspired the movement that became BLM, was also in the air. (p. 27)
That’s a good example both of Rushdie’s leftist love of lies and of Rushdie’s bad writing. The two things go together, in fact. Someone who supports civilization-wrecking thugs like Trayvon Martin will also tend to be a bad writer. And a bad thinker. The ugliness of leftism makes itself apparent in many ways, from the ugliness of leftist punims to the ugliness of leftist prose. But there are exceptions, of course. Richard Dawkins is a leftist, but he has an attractive face and writes attractive prose. That’s why I was able to read The Genetic Book of the Dead in a way I couldn’t read Knife. I got bored and skimmed some of Rushdie’s book. I read all of Dawkins’ book with close attention. And I intend to read it again. Dawkins is talking about fascinating things: genetics, evolution, the dazzling diversity of life on earth. All of his books do that and I still admire Dawkins as a scientist and popularizer of biology. But I no longer admire him as an ideologue. In fact, he and Christopher Hitchens did sterling work in turning me away from leftism. Dawkins is a good writer and Hitchens was a bad writer, but they have three big things in common: arrogance, autism and atheism.
Attractive White scientist Richard Dawkins, inspiring to leftists (photo from Nature)
Ugly Gypsy rapist Ivan Turtak, imported by leftists[1] (photo from Daily Mail)
Like ugly leftist punims and ugly leftist prose, the three things go together. And I can see Dawkins’ autism much better now, reading The Genetic Book of the Dead, than I could reading The Blind Watchmaker in the 1980s. It isn’t just autism and atheism that go together: it’s autism and science. Dawkins is obsessive and dedicated to detail. He likes sorting and systematizing, cataloguing and classifying, and he loves the digitality of DNA. I like all those things too, but Dawkins accompanies them with arrogance and dogmatism, which proved too much for me in the end. Although I’m still unable to believe in God, I don’t want to be an atheist in the style of Dawkins and Hitchens. For one thing, I now see that their atheism is a central part of the leftist suicide-cult. Just as Salman Rushdie claims to love free speech and has spent all his life helping to destroy free speech, so Dawkins claims to hate religion and has spent all his life helping to promote religion. In other words, Rushdie and Dawkins are devout believers in the suicide-cult of leftism, which is replacing the successfully neutered religion of Christianity with decidedly unneutered religion of Islam.
Predatory parallels
How could Dawkins do that, when there are obvious lessons to be drawn from biology about the idiocy of importing alien species? Take the flightless birds of New Zealand, which Dawkins discusses in another good book of his called Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution (2021). They evolved to be flightless because they lived on remote islands, safe from predatory mammals like stoats and cats. So what happens when stoats and cats are introduced to New Zealand? Slaughter, that’s what. And not just of flightless birds like kiwis: New Zealand has lost species of full-flighted birds to introduced predators too.[2] A thousand miles across the ocean, Australia offers more lessons in the harm done by introducing new species to long-established ecosystems. From rabbits to cane-toads, the newcomers have flourished and wrought havoc on native fauna and flora. And leftists long ago learnt those ecological lessons. They would recoil in horror if someone suggested importing a full range of fauna and flora from Pakistan or Somalia or China into Britain or America or France. You should not intermingle ecosystems like that! Delicate balances will be disturbed, ecological webs rent asunder! Native species will be devastated or destroyed!
Imported predators: a stoat and members of a Muslim rape-gang (images from Wikipedia and BBC)
But one species is exempt from the leftist abhorrence of ecological mixing. That species is, of course, Homo sapiens. Leftists believe that unlimited numbers of alien human being can enter new ecosystems of culture and custom without doing any harm at all. The newcomers won’t trigger ecocide. On the contrary, they’ll introduce enrichment. But this bio-transfer is good only when it involves non-White humans migrating into the White West. Non-Whites enrich and enhance, bringing only blessings and benefits to stale pale societies like Britain, America and France. That’s what leftists believe. They’re wrong, of course. There are very obvious parallels between the harm done by introduced animals and the harm done by introduced humans. A biologist like Richard Dawkins should have seen those parallels long ago and begun campaigning against migration from the Third World. Dawkins should also have seen the danger of disturbing the cultural ecosystems of Western society from within. This is one of the clever and illuminating analogies he uses to instruct his readers about biology and genetics:
As for the all-important interactions between genes in influencing phenotype, here’s a better metaphor than the butcher’s map. A large sheet hangs from the ceiling, suspended from hooks by hundreds of strings attached to different places all over the sheet. It may help the analogy to consider the strings as elastic. The strings don’t hang vertically and independently. Instead, they can run diagonally or in any direction, and they interfere with other strings by cross-links rather than necessarily going straight to the sheet itself. The sheet takes on a bumpy shape, because of the interacting tensions in the tangled cat’s-cradle of hundreds of strings. As you’ve guessed, the shape of the sheet represents the phenotype, the body of the animal. The genes are represented by tensions in the strings at the hooks in the ceiling. A mutation is either a tug towards the hook or a release, perhaps even a severing of the string at the hook. And, of course, the point of the parable is that a mutation at any one hook affects the whole balance of tensions across the tangle of strings. Alter the tension at any one hook, and the shape of the whole sheet shifts. (pp. 189-90; Dawkins’ emphases)
Dawkins’ analogy obviously applies not just to phenotypes but also to ecosystems and to societies. Dawkins himself created the idea of cultural genes or memes, which evolve and interact, survive or go extinct. And he wants to drive one set of memes, one memeplex, into extinction. It’s the memeplex for belief in God and religion. But by his own analogy, that would be a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. As he points out: if you alter the tensions in the strings, “the shape of the whole sheet shifts.” And in unpredictable ways that are much more likely to be harmful than beneficial.[3] By attacking Christianity, something that has been central to Western culture for millennia, Dawkins and other atheists were trying to cut a whole set of strings. At the same time, they didn’t object as a whole new set of strings — those for Islam — were attached to the sheet. These staunch supporters of science, fully aware of the complexity and delicacy of biological systems, were quite happy for the sheet of Western society to be brutally tugged and twisted into radically different shapes.
Mea maxima culpa
In other words, those bio-literate atheists were idiots. But Dawkins, for one, has started to glimpse the size of his idiocy. He has said that he’s a “cultural Christian” and that he prefers the sound of church bells to the “aggressive-sounding” Muslim call to prayer. After he expressed that preference, he was immediately accused of Islamophobia. I share the preference and I have to confess my own idiocy. When I accepted Dawkins’ version of atheism, I too looked forward eagerly to the extinction of Christianity. And I too ignored the encroachment of Islam. I wasn’t as bio-literate as Richard Dawkins, but I should have seen the parallels between biology and society, between importing predatory animals and importing predatory ideologies. And I should have asked how much things like science, which I did value, owed to things like Christianity, which I didn’t value at all. Nowadays, I’m still unsure how valuable Christianity is. How valuable true Christianity is, I mean, not the traitorous parody of Christianity that currently does the Devil’s work all over the West. That parody of Christianity should — and will — be driven into extinction, but atheists like Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie won’t like what replaces it.
And they won’t like the civil wars that will soon erupt all over the West. Nor will the great ironist Salman Rushdie recognize the irony of those civil wars. His bad books have explored the end of the British Raj, when the strings of Western imperialism were cut and the sheet of Indian society shifted sharply into new shapes. They were shapes of civil war, of inter-communal massacre and ethnic cleansing. The bad writer Salman Rushdie, knowing all that history, has worked all his life to reproduce it in the West. So, in his own way, has the good writer Richard Dawkins. Separated by skin-color, culture and the quality of their writing, they’ve been united by the idiocy and arrogance of their atheism. For a good analysis of where that idiocy and arrogance will soon take the West, I can recommend some new posts by a writer called El Inglés at Gates of Vienna. He’s writing for Whites in Britain, but his words apply to Whites everywhere else:
If you are a British man or woman, with a family, living in or close to a part of Birmingham, or London, or Bradford that is likely to be caught up in communal violence, you deserve to know what might be heading your way. Making a hard decision in advance might allow you to save your family, your wealth, your health, your sanity. The government and its various satellites will always insist everything is under control. Do you trust them?
I do not want British people to end up in this situation. Forewarned is forearmed, and it is in this spirit that I offer the only publicly-available, open-source analysis of this subject matter that is ever likely to be made available to them. And who knows — by openly analysing that which cannot be mentioned in polite circles, this document may yet compel official institutions to quietly model those same unspeakable futures. (“Crown, Crescent, Pitchfork: Part One,” Gates of Vienna, 6th July 2025)
[1] Ivan Turtak and his two fellow rapists are described as “Slovakian” in newspaper reports, but I think they’re Gypsies.
[2] But the island has struck back, because New Zealand has exported harmful species of its own, like the New Zealand flatworm and pigmyweed.
[3] As Dawkins often points out in his books, there are far more ways to damage a functional system like an engine or genotype than to improve it.