Augean Stables

The tall story we Europeans now tell ourselves about Israel

By Charles Moore
The UK Telegraph

7/29/2006

Sir Peter Tapsell is, if the phrase is not a contradiction in terms nowadays, a distinguished backbencher. He first entered the House of Commons in 1959. Noted for his grand manner, he is the longest-serving Tory MP.

At foreign affairs questions in Parliament on Tuesday, Sir Peter rose. He wanted Margaret Beckett to tell him whether the Prime Minister had colluded with President Bush in allowing Israel to “wage unlimited war” in Lebanon, including attacks on civilian residential areas of Beirut. These attacks, he added, were “a war crime grimly reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw”.

Mrs Beckett firmly rejected the premise of the question - that Mr Bush had permitted “unlimited war” - and moved on, but I found myself winded by Sir Peter’s choice of words.

What is happening in Lebanon? After the kidnapping of two of its soldiers and the firing of hundreds of rockets against its people from across the Lebanese border, Israel is trying to crush the Hizbollah fighters who have perpetrated these acts. In doing so, it has also killed civilians. Some 500 people have died in Lebanon as a result.

What was the “Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw”? There were many, of course. But Sir Peter was probably referring to the events of April-May 1943. The Nazis had earlier deported 300,000 Polish Jews to Treblinka. As news of their fate reached Jews in Warsaw, they decided to revolt against further round-ups. For about a month, they resisted. They were subdued: 7,000 of them were killed and 56,000 were sent to the camps.

Sir Peter surely knew this, yet he chose to speak as he did. Here is a man who has been in public life for more than 50 years (he was an assistant to Anthony Eden in the general election of 1955), and yet he compared Israel’s attack to the most famous genocide of the 20th century. What possessed him?

I ask the question, not because I am interested in Sir Peter - he is not an important figure in the current debate, though he may differ on this point. I ask, rather, because his remark seems to me a symptom of a wider unreality about the Middle East, one that now dominates. It tinged the recent Commons speech by William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary. It permeates every report by the BBC.

You could criticise Israel’s recent attack for many things. Some argue that it is disproportionate, or too indiscriminate. Others think that it is ill-planned militarily. Others hold that it will give more power to extremists in the Arab world, and will hamper a wider peace settlement. These are all reasonable, though not necessarily correct positions to hold. But European discourse on the subject seems to have been overwhelmed by something else - a narrative, told most powerfully by the way television pictures are selected, that makes Israel out as a senseless, imperialist, mass-murdering, racist bully.

Not only is this analysis wrong - if the Israelis are such imperialists, why did they withdraw from Lebanon for six years, only returning when threatened once again? How many genocidal regimes do you know that have a free press and free elections? - it is also morally imbecilic. It makes no distinction between the tough, sometimes nasty things all countries do when hard-pressed and the profoundly evil intent of some ideologies and regimes. It says nothing about the fanaticism and the immediacy of the threat to Israel. Sir Peter has somehow managed to live on this planet for 75 years without spotting the difference between what Israel is doing in Lebanon and “unlimited war”.

As well as being morally imbecilic, this narrative is the enemy of all efforts to understand what is actually going on in the Middle East. It is so lazy.

Read the rest.

Gideon Levy, veteran journalist for Ha-Aretz has this to say about the war in Lebanon. It is a near-perfect expression of the PCP trying to grapple with that which it cannot understand, with a heavy dose of moral perfectionism. I give it special attention because this editorial moved some of my progressive correspondants as both wise and rational.
[Levy in bold, blockquote]

Stop Now, Immediately

by Gideon Levy

This war must be stopped now and immediately. From the start it was unnecessary, even if its excuse was justified, and now is the time to end it. Every day raises its price for no reason, taking a toll in blood that gives Israel nothing tangible in return. This is a good time to stop the war because both sides can claim they won: Israel harmed Hezbollah and Hezbollah harmed Israel. History shows that no situation is better for reaching an arrangement. Remember the lessons of the Yom Kippur War.

This is a prime example of the even-handed approach that reflect cognitive egocentrism. Levy shows no sign that he knows what Hizbullah is about — ideology, training, goals, etc. And yet, and yet, how could he not? Perhaps the extensive presence of people reassuring him that Hizbullah, like all other terror groups, are really just interested in power, and ultimately will act “rationally” makes it too easy to miss some essentials of religious madness.

Israel went into the campaign on justified grounds and with foul means. It claims it has declared war on Hezbollah but, in practice, it is destroying Lebanon. It has gotten most of what it could have out of this war. The aerial “target bank” has mostly been covered. The air force could continue to sow destruction in the residential neighborhoods and empty offices and could also continue dropping dozens of tons of bombs on real or imagined bunkers and kill innocent Lebanese, but nothing good will come of it.

This is a good example of Levy’s reknown credulity (or rhetorical excess). Lebanon’s civil war of 1975-90? “destroyed” the country far more devastatingly than this incursion. The Lebanese political system is desperately dysfunctional, and Hizbullah, occupying Syria, meddling Iran, and Western and UN weaknesss, have all contributed to her condition. So Israel can’t be destroying Lebanon politically; on the contrary, this intervention opens a window of opportunity to help Lebanon recover by disarming its militia. And as for the physical damage… how does Levy know what kind of damage? TV?

But “destroying Lebanon” does sound ominous. Our media may, under Hizbullah instructions, show us the same corner of Beirut that’s been destroyed, just as they showed us the same corner of the refugee camp outside Jenin that was destroyed in April 2002, and lead us to think that Beirut and Jenin have been leveled. But why would an Israeli journalist (want to) believe that?
(more…)

A friend has sent me this passage with his astute comment, which I came across while cleaning my desktop. If you read this let me know so I can credit you. It needs no further comment by me.

Source: Article by Bernard Lewis in Encounter Magazine, Feb. 1968 - Entitled Friends and Enemies - Reflections After a War

In the beginning of the article, Bernard Lewis quotes directly from Ibn Hazm of Cordova (994-1064) from Ibn Hazm’s work The Book of Morals and Conduct.

“The measure of prudence and resolution is to know a friend from an enemy; the height of stupidity and weakness is not to know an enemy from a friend.

Do not surrender your enemy to oppression, nor oppress him yourself. In this respect treat enemy and friend alike. But be on your guard against him, and beware lest you befriend and advance him, for this is the act of a fool. He who befriends and advances friend and foe alike will only arouse distaste for his friendship and contempt for his enmity. He will earn the scorn of his enemy, and facilitate his hostile designs; he will lose his friend, who will join the ranks of his enemies.

The height of goodness is that you should neither oppress your enemy nor abandon him to oppression. To treat him as a friend is the mark of a fool whose end is near.

The height of evil is that you should oppress your friend. Even to estrange him is the act of a man who has no sense, from whom misfortune is predestined.

Magnanimity (i.e., hilm) is not to befriend the enemy, but to spare them, and to remain on guard against them.”

In short … you must defeat your enemy and only then be magnanimous. If your stop before victory, you will be understood as weak and foolish. Your enemy will not respect you and will continue the fight and your friend will join the ranks of your enemies.

Islamophobia designates the irrational fear of Islam that drives people to make blanket judgments accusing all Muslims (over a billion people) of harboring the same murderous fantasies that Muslim extremists express and act upon. For most Muslims, Islam is a religion that demands moral behavior from believers who will be answerable to Allah for their actions on judgment day. Islam commands Muslims to care for the sick and the destitute, to organize communities according to principles of justice, to master oneself before one seeks to influence others. Islam does not have a strict hierarchy among its clergy; Islamic teaching comes from largely autonomous leaders in a wide range of communities. To reduce so complex a phenomenon to the “obscurantist rantings of Islamists defies responsible serious scholarship”, to accept a simplistic formula – all Muslims are Jihadis bent on world domination – can inspire both hatred and violence. The issue is one of international importance.

Some Muslims have started to compare the persecution against Muslims to what the Jews endured in the twentieth century. Writer Abid Ullah Jan, decried Western Islamophobia and stated that it was “paving the way for Muslim holocaust… towards mainstream fascism: a time when pogrom of Muslims would not generate any sympathy or reaction in their favour.” Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, speaking on behalf of the 57 Islamic countries, declared the the phenomenon of Islamophobia was on the rise in Europe and urged Western countries to promote tolerance and respect for all religions. He warned about the dangers of Islamophobia: “If we read the trends closely and connect the dots, it is obvious Muslims are being dehumanized. This is painfully reminiscent of the pre-World War II era. That dark chapter of history and pogroms must never be repeated, this time involving Muslims.” Jews more than any group, should be sensitive to accusing other people of what the Nazis accused them: a ruthless people intent on slaughtering and enslaving the German people. To the even-handed observer, neither group should be subject to such slander.

The Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia in its final report “Islamophobia: a challenge to us all” (1997) identifies

EIGHT COMPONENTS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA:

1) Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.

2) Islam is seen as separate and ‘other’. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.

3) Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.

4) Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’.

5) Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.

6) Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.

7) Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.

8) Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

In recent years there has been a growing trend to challenge those perceived as Islamophobes:

• The creation of Islamophobia Watch, founded with the “determination not to allow the racist and imperialist ideology of Western Imperialism to gain common currency in its demonisation of Islam.”
• The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has an annual “Islamophobia Awards“to highlight what they describe as growing anti-Muslim prejudice.
• Organization of conferences regarding the dangers of Islamophobia and the best ways to fight it. (See, CAIR Conference and UN Conference).

Islamophobia is a common accusation used in PCP circles where, like the accusation of Antisemitism, it is intended to stigmatize the person so designated as having gone far beyond the boundaries of acceptable discourse, along with racism and essentialism. Islamophobia has such currency that at least one academic at a US university felt justified in requiring his students to write a paper on “outright Islamophobes”, including major scholars like Patricia Crone, Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, Samuel Huntington. He justifies the assignment by denouncing Islamophobia as a “phenomenon that brings together right-wing Christians and right-wing Zionists.”

Among those accused of suffering from Islamophobia are:

DANIEL PIPES: Director of the Middle East Forum Pipes has been accused of being an “enemy of Islam,” a racist, contributing to the dehumanization of Muslims. His opponents consider his views dangerous because they open the gate to persecution of Muslims. (see here, here, and here).

ROBERT SPENCER: Director of Jihad Watch he is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).
Islamophobia Watch finds him hard to please, to say the least.

STEPHEN SCHWARTZ: A Sufi writer, director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism he blames the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on Wahabism, a puritan Islamic sect that has enormous influence in Saudi Arabia, and through them, throughout the world, The Two Faces of Islam : Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism. Schwartz replies to accusations of Islamophobia.

THE DANGER OF EQUATING CRITICISM WITH ISLAMOPHOBIA

As some feel justified in denouncing Jewish use of the accusation of “anti-Semitism” to deflect legitimate criticism, however, so can Muslims use Islamophobia to deflect serious discussion about dangerous tendencies within Islam. Indeed, some define Islamophobia simply in terms of public image:

One who contributes to a negative public presentation of Islam and/or Muslims; whose political views and/or scholarship shape how Islam is presented today.

When any criticism or negative presentation of Islam becomes identified with Islamophobia, when any scholar who does not play the role of apologist can be so dismissed no matter how substantial his or her research, then the label has shifted from an important designation (and legitimate accusation) to a weapon of propaganda designed to smear opponents. In such cases, Islamophobia becomes a particularly powerful form of demopathic discourse, insisting that any criticism of Islam is a form of demonizing hate language.

The problem arises when we look more closely at the data. The two cases, however they may share this similarity in being both the objects of vilification, differ in most ways. The Jews were a minority in German (and other European) countries, with an understandably passive public discourse, and an extraordinary commitment to public law, as witnessed by their own passive obedience in assembling for deportation. Despite this public profile of Jews in their culture, Germans were taken over by a ruthless ruler who had plans for world conquest and genocide, and appealed to them by accusing the Jews of everything he planned to do. In other words, Hitler’s image of the Jew was the fevered projection of his own mad desires.

Muslims today represent over a billion people – possibly the most numerous religion on earth. They largely do not have societies, and certainly not polities, ruled by law. By the standards of civil society, male violence has few restraints (honor-killings, vendetta, assassination). Muslims of many ethnic and denominational groups have, shouting “Allah is great!” blown themselves up in the midst of tens, hundreds and thousands of civilians, hoping to kill as many as possible. Muslims openly make calls for world conquest, violent attacks on civilians – Muslim and non-Muslim – glorified as holy martyrdom; and a virulent discourse of world conquest and slaughter; and consider any Muslim who denies that terrorism in a part of Islam as a Kafir (unbeliever). Muslim and Arabic public discourse – media, circles of power – abound in conspiratorial thinking and action in which the “other” – especially the “Jew” – is, by definition, demonized.

Insofar as Islam is genuinely a religion of peace and tolerance for non-observant Muslims and non-Muslim neighbors, then sweeping generalizations about its ruthless imperial tendencies is indeed a form of Islamophobia. To the degree that Islam has yet to grapple with its own theocratic and imperialist elements (dar al Harb, which accounts for Islam’s bloody borders), to the degree that it has not yet developed a formal and powerful theological challenge to the Jihadi ideologies that drove an earlier, warrior culture to make war with the infidel, then fear and criticism of Islam by both non-Muslims and Muslims represents not paranoia but realistic concern. Nor need one express such concerns by demonizing.

In order to explore where legitimate criticism crosses the boundary into demonizing hate speech, we must establish a fair approach that applies the same rules to everyone and enables us to register evidence soberly. Thus we cannot merely say, “even-handedly,” that any criticism of Islam or Judaism is hate speech and constitutes either Islamophobia or Judeophobia, regardless of how Muslims and Jews behave. Otherwise, demopaths can demand that no one criticize them, even as they engage in the worst kind of hate-speech and violence.

THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM

According to the PCP, Islam is a religion of peace. Violent Muslims, especially suicide terrorists, represent a “hi-jacking” of the religion, a deviation and distortion of the “true message” of Islam. Proponents of this perspective, including scholars like John Esposito and popularizers like Karen Armstrong, have dominated progressive public discourse for several decades. Even the President’s remarks in the aftermath of 9-11 reflected this public consensus.

The situation seems more than ironic. The US President, a man who had not even read the Quran in translation, tells the Muslims and the rest of the world what their religion is really about? In the meantime, radical Muslims, fully conversant with the contents of the Quran openly disagree and declare Islam a religion of war and conquest, and moderate Muslims noting Islamist use of violence in silencing criticism, bewail the role of Western intellectuals, who, alone, continue to insist that Islam is a religion of peace.

It is one thing to call oneself a religion of peace, another to act on those principles. The most disturbing aspect of Islam at the moment, is the reluctance of Islamic leaders has to denounce Islamic terrorism. In July of 2005, international representatives from Muslim nations opposed a UN attempt to condemn violence in the name of religion. These appointed, and supposedly qualified Muslim representative’s, then, saw the international condemnation of all religious violence as a specific and unacceptable attack on Islam. Since the London bombings, a distinct shift to a more accommodating Islamic position at least in public declarations has occurred, but it is not clear how much that shift is a response to a fear of retaliation.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this fundamental problem with Islam and civil society right now is the Muslim attitude towards those they label apostates (Muslims who leave the religion). Islamic law holds that apostates deserve death. Right now, the people who qualify as apostates, and are therefore deserving of death, are Muslims who criticize Islam or call attention to problems and the need to reform. The standard response from the Islamic world to the voice of moderate Muslim dissent is outrage and death threats which effectively silence those voices. On the other hand, Muslims who engage in suicide terrorism, those people who according to the PCP are ‘high-jacking’ and ‘perverting’ Islam, do not qualify as apostates according to prominent and vocal Muslim theologians. Again, since the London bombings, there has been some movement towards condemning terrorism, although critics have questioned the value and sincerity of the fatwa.

The situation has a recipe for mafia-style protection rackets and a culture of homerta (silence) where violence and its threat control public discourse. Muslims themselves represent the first and most common target of this violence, from the silenced reformers to the terrorism of Jihadis who consider the vast majority of Muslims as infidels who have regressed to the period of ignorance preceding the Prophet’s revelations (Jahaliyya). The terrible tales of Iraq, Darfur, Algeria, etc.!, in which Muslim terrorists kill Muslim civilians, support the JP’s perception of this violence as that of a fanatic religious war, the most daunting of enemies. One of the terrible truths with which those who will only swallow the PCP blue pill refuse to grapple, is that the first and worst victim of Jihadi Islamism is Muslims who do not join the movement, perhaps that very Islam which really is a religion of peace. In that sense, these forces represent enemies of all those people, Muslims, monotheists, polytheists, agnostics and atheists, who want to live in fruitful and peaceful relations with their neighbors.

We are dupes when we wrongly identify demopaths as “moderates” and ignore genuine moderates. Tariq Ramadan presents himself as a moderate, and has been compared with Niebuhr and Tillich by enthusiastic scholars of religion, as a high-level advisor to the English government may please the PCP desire to silence “knee-jerk elements in the right-wing press and their prejudices,” but if Tariq Ramadan is not a moderate, if his discourse, more closely examined, represents a “modern” reframing of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, then the consequences of such trust may prove most dangerous. Were Ramadan a demopath aiming at a Muslim takeover of Europe, he would use his position to eliminate the hot-heads who give away the game, and empower a whole generation of Muslim communities prepared to wait for a more opportune time, when the demographics improve.

How to tell a demopath in this crowded field of noisy claimants to tell us about Islam? In this case, where Islam stands out right now for the intensity of its demonizing public discourse, the Geiger counter for detecting demopaths is quite simple: What do they say and do about the hate speech that comes out of Islam, especially its Judeophobia? If they deny it, minimize it, make excuses, denounce it with empty formulas… if they engage in it when speaking to the choir… if, when pressed, they resort to accusations of Islamophobia and partisan bias against their critics… then the odds are, you’re either dealing with a demopath or an aggressive dupe. For those committed to civil society’s values, to let such demopaths slide is to hold Muslims in moral contempt by failing to apply the simplest of the rules of fairness. Why? For fear that they will not meet even those expectations? In any case, it condemns Muslims to a continued existence as the victims of systematic cultural and religious violence. Nothing illustrates these dynamics better than the Danish cartoon incident — Islamic hyper-sensitivity to criticism, demopathic comparisons of these cartoons with Holocaust denial, the “Muslim street” rioting, Western fears and intimidation, and the effective extension of Sharia law to non-Muslim areas.

The solution lies not in war, nor in demonizing, but in honest discourse, in supporting friends and challenging enemies; in making true friends and having the right enemies. So far, Islamophobia — the irrational fear of Islam — seems far more a term for demopaths to manipulate than a genuine identifier of a paranoid position.

Some meditations on whether we’re in World War III (hat tip: Jim Stodder). The problem is, “from whose point of view?” and “When does denial contribute to the condition over which one is in denial?”

“World War Three without the blood, sweat and tears”
By Gideon Rachman, FINANCIAL TIMES, Published: July 24 2006 19:05

If you are looking for reassurance at this time of international crisis, do not consult Newt Gingrich. “We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war,” says the former speaker of the House of Representatives, who is currently a member of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board. Mr Gingrich is not alone in his diagnosis. Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said last week that: “The third world war, I believe, has already started. What we’re seeing today in the Middle East is a chapter of it.” Even President George W. Bush has casually endorsed the idea. He told a television interviewer last May that the passengers who fought back against their hijackers on September 11, 2001 had staged “the first counterattack to world war three”. Symbolically, Mr Bush has placed a bust of Churchill (a gift from the British), in the Oval Office.

Good grief. Can’t this man even get a sentence right? What does “the first counter-attack to world war three” mean? It was the opening attack of World War III. (Actually I think the Second Intifada was that – the opening round of Global Jihad.)

Any argument simultaneously associated with Newt Gingrich, the Israeli ambassador to the UN and President Bush is likely to be dismissed on those grounds alone in much of Europe.

Not to mention our own “enlightened” circles drawn to BDS like a moth to the flame.

But the “third world war” crowd deserves a careful hearing. Essentially, they make two points. The first is that Islamist extremists are already waging a multi-front war. Fighting is under way in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine - and a confrontation with Iran is looming. Those inclined to dismiss this multi-front war as essentially a broad regional conflict are reminded that Islamist terrorists have also struck in New York, Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere.

Agreed. We need to empathize this these folk, not by projecting our mentalities on to them, but by thinking the way they do. They are in a war with the West. The question here is not an “objective” one – are we or are we not in WW III? The answer is post-modern. They think we are; we think we’re not; and many of us think they’re not. Same was true in the 1930s. Hitler was already at war; the allies were not. The near future will decide the real question: Will we defeat them before it becomes a full-fledged war (as we did not with Hitler)?

The second argument is that these conflicts are all linked because Islamism is a “seamless totalitarian movement” - in the words of Michael Gove, a British Conservative member of parliament and author of a new book on the subject*. Mr Gove and many neo-conservatives in America argue that Islamism is a direct descendant of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century because, like them, it is implacably and violently hostile to western, liberal democracy.

I agree. Anyone who looks into this will tend to agree as well. I’d just specify: Nazism, Communism, Islamism are all three active cataclysmic millennial movements (they all believe that they must trigger massive destruction in order to bring on the messianic age), and their totalitarian tendencies are a direct result of their urgent violence. When the messianic age does not come like a plant, then we must carve it out on the body politic.

The British government seems to subscribe to at least part of this argument. Tony Blair, prime minister, has spoken of an “arc of extremism” from Afghanistan to the Middle East. And while most British officials are not temperamentally inclined to talk about “third world wars”, they do see worrying links between the various conflicts. One reason the British have been unexpectedly sympathetic to the Israeli effort to blast Hizbollah out of existence is that they believe that many of the roadside bombs used to kill British soldiers in Iraq are based on technology supplied by Hizbollah.

And my bet is that one of the reasons that the French are as well-behaved as they are – although granted, there’s a lot of affirmative action behind that assessment – may result from messages from their intelligence community that Hizbullah is indeed part of global Jihad, and if they don’t start fighting this now, their own “lost territories” will end up looking like Hizbullah controlled Lebanon in a few years.

But the idea of a “seamless totalitarian movement” also has some obvious holes in it. It requires making almost no distinction between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the “war on terror”.

Yes, I’ll go with the formulation you seem to reject. One of the tragic misunderstandings of the Arab-Israeli conflict came after 1967, when the PCP (both variants) urged us to see this in terms of two peoples fighting for national self-determination – the Palestinian Israeli conflict. It has always had enormously powerful elements of Jihad, fed constantly by Muslim Brotherhood fascism, with the Palestinians as a pawn in the larger game. The faster we realize this, the sooner we can start dealing with the situation effectively. Haj Amin al Husseini was a Jihadist.

It glosses over the fact that Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist - and that it was the American-led invasion of Iraq that turned the country into a honey pot for “Islamofascists” (to use the neo-cons’ preferred term).

No. Saddam wasn’t an Islamist, and given a threat from them, he probably would have done to an Islamist opposition in Iraq what his “fellow” Baathist, Assad did to Hama in Syria. But let’s not forget two things: 1) Saddam’s hero was the totalitarian madman Joseph Stalin; and 2) Saddam did not hesitate to use the tropes of global Jihad (“mother of all battles”) and to support their troops ($25,000 to every family of a Palestinian suicide terrorist). The issue with Saddam has much less to do with what he thought he was doing (really what he told us he thought he was doing), but what forces he was rousing, releasing and riding.

And it struggles to make sense of the fact that the single biggest source of bloodshed in the Middle East at the moment is internecine conflict between Sunni and Shia extremists in Iraq. Indeed, some of those who now worry most about Shia militancy had convinced themselves a couple of years ago that the real problem in the Middle East was Sunni radicalism - and that the Shia were a key part of the solution.

And that illuminates the inadequacy of “normative” analysis when dealing with the dynamics of global Jihad. The third law of apocalyptic dynamics states: “My enemy’s enemy is my enemy.” The vicious fighting between Sunnis and Shiis reflects the kind of absolute hatreds that inhabit the heart of active cataclysmic apocalyptic “warriors.” There have been efforts to bring them together (in the 1980s there were efforts to link up the strands represented by Osama and Khoumeini and a fair amount of cross-fertilization). But the basic principle of those who want to bring on Armageddon holds that you may have to “destroy the world to save it.” So on one level they hate each other as “heretics,” on another, even if they are fellow Muslims, their destruction is part of the process.

But perhaps the most telling argument against the “world war three” thesis is that even many of those advancing it do not appear to believe their own rhetoric. In the same Fox News interview in which Mr Gingrich painted “a worldwide picture of efforts to undermine and destroy our civilisation”, he was asked by a clearly embarrassed interviewer about those who argue that “look, this is a costly war and maybe it includes raising taxes on the upper income to fight it”. Mr Gingrich was having none of it. The third world war will apparently not require “raising a penny in taxes”. Clearly, we are not yet at the blood, sweat and tears phase. The Bush administration is similarly reticent. It argues that we are engaged in a struggle to save western civilisation. But it is still all but inconceivable that the administration would re-introduce the draft - or even sharply raise taxes on petrol - to help win that struggle.

This is cute, and it does get at a critical issue in apocalyptic studies. When does one feel that the signs of an imminent cosmic convulsion are so great that one “steps out of the closet” — and that in itself has two phases, first by speaking and then by acting. In this case it’s clear that Gingrich’s economic policies bear no relation to the reality about which he speaks (and since the President seems to share the notion that WW III should be tax free we seem to be in for catastrophic deficits). Gingrich is still between speaking and acting, and partly that’s because until enough people get excited about this, it’s going to be hard to act.

To be honest, he probably thinks he’ll never get people to accept the notion that we’re at war if they think it’s going to cost them; and inversely, there are probably lots of people who don’t want to realize we’re at war because it will cost. Consider World War III the equivalent for the right that global warming is to the left: in both cases, the “other” side won’t recognize it because it would cost too much.

But that doesn’t mean that either global jihad or global warming aren’t threats. Sometimes as I think about the succession of challenges that face us, I feel like the 21st century is like the TV show “24” writ large. No sooner one crisis solved than another looms.

The constant analogies between the war on terror and the war on Nazism do still matter, however. Choose the wrong analogy and you may end up choosing the wrong policy as well. Slogans about “Munich” and appeasement have been heard before some of the worst foreign policy disasters of the past 60 years - such as the Suez crisis and Vietnam. The same talk was heard before the invasion of Iraq and is now rife in connection with Iran.

But there have been other events in history besides appeasement and there are other decades that can be learnt from besides the 1930s. In fact, the struggle between western liberalism and Islamism may end up looking a lot more like the cold war than the second world war. In the cold war, people had to get used to the idea that normal life was taking place against the backdrop of terrifying risks that could not be eliminated by military action alone: then it was Soviet missiles, now it is the fear that a terrorist might get hold of a nuclear bomb. Then, as now, there were episodes of “hot war” - in Korea and elsewhere. But the cold war ultimately turned on a struggle between ideologies and social systems, rather than armies.

To move to the cold war is like shifting from the Nazis to the Prussian aristocracy in thinking about Germany. These conservative elites, no matter how zero-sum they play the game, can be counted on to be pragmatic. But they can be swallowed in a minute by a genuinely popular movement promising immediate and total salvation even at the cost of total catastrophe. The cold war (especially MAD) was based on the understanding that the Russians were “rational” if zero-sum (ie they wouldn’t self destruct). These guys are not remotely rational despite what our specialists tell us.

Communism finally imploded because it could not produce prosperity or a decent society. Militant Islamism - a miserable, medieval philosophy - is bound ultimately to go the same way. In Iran, which has had to live with a fundamentalist regime since 1979, there is plenty of evidence of popular disillusionment with the system, particularly among the young. It is this disillusionment that offers the best hope for the kind of “regime change” that actually lasts. Incapable of offering the hope of a decent life (at least on earth), Islamism’s only real recruiting sergeant is an appeal to a sense of Muslim humiliation and rage against the west. There may be further occasions when the “war on terror” requires military action.

This reminds me of the dinner conversation I had with a friend. I was, typically, bemoaning the threat of Islamism and global Jihad, and warning darkly that we hadn’t seen the worst of it (I must be a lot of fun at dinner), when my friend said: “Look, in 25 years, this whole thing will have blown over.” Yeah just like 25 years after Hitler took power it had blown over. As Rachman points out, the analogy you pick plays a big role in the policy you chose. The point is not to pick the analogy by the policy it implies, but by its accuracy in describing the situation. The right policy at the wrong time will give you something very much like Oslo.

But each new military front will be eagerly greeted by Islamists as a validation of their world view. It is no accident that one man who would happily embrace Mr Gingrich’s vision of a “third world war” is Osama bin Laden.

I assume this is meant to be ironic, and a put-down of Gingrich and his companions. Ouch. It’s precisely because Osama is already living in WW III, has already, enthusiastically embraced the “clash of civilizations” that our own intellectual elite continues to heap its contempt upon, that puts us in our danger. We don’t want to be in WW III. The question is, do we have our heads in the sand (which makes our asses tempting targets)? As my Israeli friend put it: “The hardest thing for me to realize [after the second intifada] was that the question of war and peace was not in our hands.

This just in: People don’t like to self-criticize. (Which is one reason most people misunderstand the Jewish eagerness to do it.)

By DANIEL GILBERT professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”
He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t
Published: July 24, 2006

LONG before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother’s lap and my brother and I had what we called “the wayback” all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we’d fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But he hit me harder.”

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words — like “retaliation” and “retribution” and “revenge” — whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.

That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

I know the pattern well. Some people — I think it’s called passive aggression — will needle endlessly (I call it “playing the picador”), and then when they get hostility, they are genuinely surprised. For them, the fight starts when they get hit. Everything before was nothing.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.

This is what I understand to be the meaning of “love your neighbor/the stranger/the “other” as yourself,” that is, give him or her the same “break” you always give yourself. Most people think of themselves as innocent. At least give the other person the initial courtesy of trying to see how he or she might think that of themselves. It’s the empathic imperative, and civil society depends on it. It’s the opposite of the dominating imperative: rule or be ruled.

Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin.

Do I detect moral equivalence and the “cycle of violence” that so comfortably occurs to people who adhere to PCP?

But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

I think a glance at my “conversation with Omar” reveals just how genuinely different the perceptions.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not.

Now whose rules are these? Certainly not the rules that prevail in honor-shame cultures. Indeed “an eye for an eye,” which so many modern “moral” giants look down on for being so, well, primitive, was actually introduced a) to impose the kind of fairness Gilbert invokes, and b) to insist that, unlike every other system of revenge in the ancient world (Code Hammurabi), everyone was equal before the law: a nobleman’s eye was as valuable as a commoner’s. And, of course, it was never meant — at least according to the rabbis — to be taken literally. In any case, while I personally adhere to these notions, particularly if it’s what we’re teaching our children for use when fighting in the “wayback,” I think it’s absurd to think that everyone (or even a majority of people) automatically agree.

When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

It’s not clear to me here whether Professor Gilbert understands the difference between hitting your brother in the back seat of the car, and dealing with groups like Hamas and Hizbullah. If he doesn’t, he’s a victim of liberal cognitive egocentrism, and his implicit affirmation of the EU’s condemnation of Israel fits right into the thinking of PCP. Such thinking actually prolongs the agony by rewarding the aggressor. Of course, in Gilbert’s calculus, there are no aggressors, just innocently egocentric responders, and a cycle of violence with no beginning.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

So if it’s like that when people are trying to be careful, what on earth would lead anyone to think in these terms when dealing with the situation that Israel faces. The “responses” of Hamas and Hizbullah are not even tuned to this scale of things but to the need for vengeance pumped up by a hatemongering propaganda machine, and to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict represents this kind of spiral writ large suggests profound lack of understanding, to say the least.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

This underlines how difficult it is to sustain a civil society in which these kinds of insensible escalations get short-circuited well before they lead to violence. The huge difference between honor-shame cultures and civil societies appears precisely at the threshhold to violence. In the former, the threshhold is low: I have the right to shed your blood for the sake of my honor. In the latter, it is high: “We can work it out” as the Beatles put it.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Alas, one more well-intentioned, intelligent intellectual trips on his own liberal cognitive egocentrism. The entire exercise is predicated on the desire on both sides to be fair, that even when one does, it’s hard. A concessive sentence at the end about the roles that hatred intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict does little to avert the impression that he thinks this kind of analysis can help in the Middle East, although he’s wise enough to not even try.

There are, it seems to me, several issues here of major concern.

The dramatic difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the matter of empathizing with the other. There are a long list of books — Yellow Wind, for example, the equivalent of Black Like Me — movies, and “new, post-Zionist historiography” that show, sometimes to a fault, the effort to see the conflict from the Palestinian’s side, the Israeli willingness to be self critical. The Israelis are not only participants in the culture that Gilbert’s experiments assume, they are significantly accomplished in precisely the kind of effort he urges upon us all: “stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves.”

The problem with this advice, is that it assumes good will on both sides. We should trust others because they, like us, naturally prefer the story that makes them feel good about themselves, but when it’s pointed out to them that they may be unfair, they make the effort to see it “from the other guy’s point of view.” The problem with people who live in the world of the dominating imperative — and that’s why Sagan called it the paranoid imperative — is that they immediately assume that if someone else hurt them, they did it on purpose. They are, in terms of what Gilbert asks from us, not trustworthy. If you apologize to them, empathize with them, try and work it out by compromise with them, they will take it as a sign of weakness and become more aggressive.

And there’s nothing for stoking anger than thinking someone did you harm on purpose. That’s the core of the blood libel, the power of the Al Durah icon: The Israelis did it “in cold blood.” So when most Palestinians (and many other Arabs and Muslims) think about what Israel has done to them, it’s not only a “natural” imbalance that can happen to anyone, it’s a malicious, malevolent, murderous, and it far exceeds any suffering the Palestinians have ever inflicted on the Israelis. As Omar puts it, in one out of many passages:

This is what I can call a drop in the ocean compared to what the Palestinians are facing each day inside the West Bank and Gaza of continuous humiliation and unbelievable levels of life. I can flood your blog with endless pictures of the most disgusting and horrifing pictures in the world describing children of three and four months scattered into pieces, I can bring endless pictures clarifying the kinds of weapons your peaceful and beloved Israel have used upon poor innocent civilians, I can swamp you with hundreds of thousands of horrible stories for Palestinians describing what the Israelis did to them inside their prisons. But what would I benefit by doing that? You’re ready to justify, you’re ready to come with opposite stories, you’re ready to tell me that Israel kills and butchers civilians because terrorists hide between them! But the real story remains that this has to be one of the most ridiculous and deceitful justification anyone could come with.

And in the honor-shame nexus they inhabit, revenge is the only answer.

To stand with Hezbollah in his resistance isn’t backwardness, supporting Nasrullah isn’t an act of blood seeking, Hezbollah, unlike every other Arabic resistance militia is capable of fighting back, Hezbollah is capable of making the Israelis feel what we have been feeling for the last 60 years, if you were Palestinian, your visions won’t be the same, if you go through what this nation had gone through, you’ll make a deal with the devil if he’s capable of fighting your slaughterers.

Suicide terrorism is the very symbol of Palestinian rage, not over what Israel has done to them — fellow Arabs have done far worse — but over a narrative they tell themselves that nurses grudges and breeds vengeance.

Here we come to the hatred, intolerance and deceit (avarice is a bit-player in the world of rage we’re dealing with) that Gilbert concedes may play a role in conflicts. Palestinians inhabit a culture where, from cradle to grave, they are fed images of hatred and encouraged to embrace genocidal ideologies. This is light years away from the nice, comfortable positive-sum world Gilbert and his colleagues and their subjects inhabit. If psychologists want to contribute to resolving the conflict, let them do experiments on how attribution of intention intensifies conflict… on how treating people dedicated to nursing grudges as if they were eager to renounce them produces unexpected results… on how when one side of a conflict commits to self-criticism and the other to demonization, all the nice suggestions of psychologists trying to make things better may well make things worse.

Compare Professor Gilbert’s well-intentioned but rather naive analysis (as applied to the Middle East) with a more realistic discussion:

It is a common error to assume the principle of proportionality relates to the proportion between the scale of damage and the scale of retribution. This argument might have been in order if it regarded a scuffle of two sides that agree to do so within known rules of engagement [i.e., brothers in the “wayback” — RL]. But war is seldom like that. War is fought to try and obtain an objective. When the objective is legitimate it is referred to as a necessity. The principle of proportionality relates to the proportion between the amount of force used to the amount required to achieve the same necessity. When one side routinely attacks the other with no legitimate cause over years, and the other side has an interest to stop the aggression, it is allowed to use the required force to achieve that objective. In our case, we can see that a little force will not be enough, since all the force used so far is not sure to be enough.

Maybe rather than assume moral equivalence they should look for the possibility of a moral gap. They might find a chasm. Of course to do that, they’d have to realize what’s going on “over there…” I recommend that before Prof. Gilbert gives us more insights into what perpetuates the cycle of violence in the wayback, he spend some time checking out the up front, middle and wayback of the Palestinian vehicle.

Try your experiment of hand pressure on them and see how rapidly it escalates. We are dealing with people who immediately jump to the most hostile and violent conclusions. Professor Gilbert, what do you think would happen to your distribution of data if you were to include Palestinian male youth in your experiment? Is that even a question that can occur to you?

This is the first of a number of French posts that I will put up with brief summaries in English. This article looks at the case of Dutch Professor of early Christian History, Pieter Van der Horst, who had the bad taste to want to give his retirement lecture on the myth of Jewish cannibalism (the blood libel) through the ages. That, of course, to any honest and courageous academic, meant dealing with its widespread presence in the Muslim world today, including its arrival via fascist links, in particular between the Arabs (Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Nationalism) and the Nazis. The response of his colleagues and superiors in the academy not only illustrate the mechanisms of Eurabia, but also answer the question that Jews have been agonizingly asking since 2000: why won’t anyone talk about this?

Retour sur l’affaire Van Der Horst: Eurabia et la mise au pas des universités européennes

Paul Landau *

Au moment où le Hezbollah vient de plonger le Moyen-Orient dans une nouvelle guerre, et alors que les regards de toutes les capitales occidentales sont tournés vers la frontière entre Israël et le Liban, un événement se déroule au cœur de l’Europe, loin de l’attention des médias internationaux, dont les conséquences et la signification à long terme sont tout aussi graves que celles de l’embrasement subit du front israélo-arabe.

Dans un livre récemment traduit en français 1, l’historienne Bat Ye’or, dont les travaux pionniers ont porté à la connaissance du grand public un pan inexploré de l’histoire mondiale - celui de la dhimmitude et des rapports entre l’islam et les minorités non musulmanes - a décrit la soumission grandissante des élites politiques européennes aux diktats de la Ligue arabe et du monde arabo-musulman en général, sous couvert de “dialogue euro-arabe”, et elle a inventé un terme pour décrire ce processus politique, culturel et économique, qui est en passe d’entrer dans le lexique politique contemporain : Eurabia.

Pour ceux qui douteraient encore de l’existence et de la réalité d’Eurabia, la récente affaire Van Der Horst vient illustrer les conséquences du processus décrit par Bat Ye’or, au cœur du bastion de la culture européenne : l’université. Cette affaire, qui vient de défrayer la chronique aux Pays-Bas et a été rapportée par plusieurs grands quotidiens américains et israéliens, a curieusement été passée sous silence par les médias français… 2

Pieter Van Der Horst est un professeur à l’université d’Utrecht, spécialiste du monde hellénistique et des débuts du christianisme, dont les travaux lui ont valu une renommée mondiale dans le monde universitaire. Au début du mois de juin 2006, il devait prononcer un discours d’adieu à l’occasion de son départ en retraite, après 37 ans d’enseignement. Le sujet de son discours était “le mythe du cannibalisme juif”, et il se proposait de faire la généalogie de ce mythe, depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine.

Comme Van Der Horst le relate lui-même, il avait l’intention de suivre la trace de l’accusation selon laquelle les Juifs consomment de la chair humaine, depuis ses origines gréco-romaines, en passant par le Moyen-Age chrétien, et jusqu’à la période nazie et au monde musulman actuel. La démonisation des Juifs dans le monde musulman a en effet ses racines, explique Van Der Horst, dans le fascisme allemand. Et il rappelle que Mein Kampf, le livre-programme d’Adolf Hitler, a figuré sur la liste des best sellers dans de nombreux pays du Moyen-Orient.

La sympathie pour le nazisme dans les pays arabo-musulmans remonte à l’époque qui précède la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Le dirigeant palestinien Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti de Jérusalem, a collaboré activement avec Hitler. Il a passé plusieurs années à Berlin pendant la guerre, poursuit Van Der Horst, et a visité le camp d’extermination d’Auschwitz, ce qui lui a inspiré un plan d’édification de chambres à gaz en Palestine, pour régler la “question juive”, sur le modèle nazi… 3

A sa grande surprise, Pieter Van der Horst ne put prononcer son discours d’adieu devant ses collègues de l’université d’Utrecht comme il l’entendait. Il fut convoqué par le doyen de l’université, qui le pria instamment de supprimer le passage de son discours concernant l’antisémitisme musulman. Ayant refusé d’obtempérer, Van Der Horst fut convoqué séance tenante devant une commission ad hoc, qui invoqua trois raisons pour supprimer le passage litigieux.

La première, c’est que ce discours risquait - s’il n’était pas expurgé de son passage litigieux - de provoquer la colère de “groupes étudiants musulmans bien organisés”, et que le recteur ne pouvait assumer la responsabilité des réactions violentes qu’il n’allait pas manquer de susciter. Par ailleurs, la commission craignait que ce discours ne porte atteinte aux efforts de rapprochement entre Musulmans et non-Musulmans au sein de l’université. Enfin, les collègues de Van Der Horst prétendaient que le discours de celui-ci était en-dessous des critères universitaires, allusion aux remarques sarcastiques qu’il contenait à l’endroit de certains politiciens néerlandais.

Abasourdi, Van Der Horst envoya tout d’abord son discours à des collègues spécialistes