Augean Stables

The Herald Tribune has an article on David Marash’s departure from English Al-Jazeera. His reason for leaving is most interesting.

Note that when he took the job, he assured everyone that Al Jazeera was a fine and reputable news organization:

Calling Al Jazeera “a thoroughly respectable news organization,” Marash, who will co-anchor the news from the network’s Washington studio, said the new show aimed to “win the high end. We want to give the most sophisticated, most nuanced and most global view of the day’s events.”

Alas…

Anchor quits Al-Jazeera, cites anti-American tone

NEW YORK: Former “Nightline” reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in this country.

Marash said he felt that attitude more from British administrators than Arabs at the Qatar-based network.

Marash was the highest-profile American TV personality hired when the English language affiliate to Al-Jazeera was started two years ago in an attempt to compete with CNN and the BBC. He said there was a “reflexive adversarial editorial stance” against Americans at Al-Jazeera English.

“Given the global feelings about the Bush administration, it’s not surprising,” Marash said.

But he found it “became so stereotypical, so reflexive” that he got angry.

The English working for an Arab news outlet, more anti-American that the Arabs? I am shocked. This is another fine illustrations of the kind of politics of resentment that have produced an “American Derangement Syndrome” that, along with its mate, Israel Derangement Syndrome, drive so much self-destructive European coverage.

Imagine… these British journalists who feed Arab hatred of the USA… they probably think the Arabs respect and like them for this. More likely, like the Algerians who cheered when France vetoed American efforts to fight Iraq, they think, “these people are weak; they side with their enemies and attack their friends.” And they’d be right to think that.

My colleague at BU has an interview with the alumni magazine Bostonia.

Bernard Lewis wrote a book entitled What Went Wrong?, in which he explored the Muslim encounter with the West. Here Haqqani meditates on why it’s still going wrong.

Why They Hate Us: The Long Answer

Husain Haqqani explores the roots of a Muslim instability.

By Tricia Brick

Husain Haqqani argues that a lack of economic, intellectual, cultural, and technological productivity in the Muslim world has left a vacuum that has been filled by paranoia and inflammatory rhetoric.

Husain Haqqani recalls a Newsweek cover from October 2001: a Pakistani child brandishing a gun and the headline “Why They Hate Us.”

The photo is emblematic of a question that has haunted Haqqani, director of BU’s Center for International Relations and a College of Arts and Sciences associate professor of international relations. “I have always wondered why the Muslim world is in the eye of virtually every storm, in my lifetime at least,” he says. “The Middle East is a cauldron. The India-Pakistan conflict has a Muslim dimension. In Russia, there’s Chechnya, another Muslim dimension.” Why is the Muslim world plagued by instability, undemocratic governments, and sectarian violence?

Haqqani has set out to find answers. He calls his project State of the Muslim World, and he draws broadly from such fields as anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and demography. He has written a series of articles exploring some of his questions, and he plans to begin writing a book this year.

Despite the diversity of the Islam-influenced world, he says, Muslims everywhere share membership in the Ummah, or community of believers. “There are many differences among Muslims, but there are also common streaks running from Egypt to Indonesia, and there is a sense of belonging together,” he says. “And yet, in the last few centuries, it has been a belonging together in decline. The Kuwaitis may be rich, but they know it is coming from oil in the ground, not from something they’ve accomplished. There is a lack of a general sense of accomplishment in modern times.”

He reels off a succession of surprising statistics in support of this argument: the GDP of the world’s fifty-seven Muslim-majority countries combined is less than that of France.

Mind you, this is what the Muslims produce for themselves… if you will, how they take care of their own people. The huge discrepency between production (GDP) and available capital (income) that characterizes the Arab world is what happens when a prime-divider elite can import everything it needs. No matter how wealthy the country inflated by petrodollars (new petroeuros?), the commoners get the scraps. It’s the sign of a culture of impoverization in which the eliites disdain productive activities and despise manual labor.

Those fifty-seven countries are home to about 500 universities, compared to more than 5,000 in the United States and 8,000 in India. Fewer new book titles are published each year in Arabic, the language of 300 million people, than in Greek, spoken by only 15 million. More books are translated into Spanish each year than have been translated into Arabic in the last century.

These are all signs of insularity, insecurity, incapacity to absorb criticism.

Haqqani is getting some help in pulling together the data. “On Fridays, I usually have a set of my students working with me on this project,” he says. “How many books are sold in Bahrain? Compare that with some other country comparable in size and resources.”

I’d advise a study of the media, the percentage of “conspiracy” narrative, the appeal to zero-sum emotions, the incidence of genuine self-criticism. Interesting question: how to quantify these qualitative phenomena?

Using these facts, Haqqani argues that a lack of economic, intellectual, cultural, and technological productivity in the Muslim world has left a vacuum that has been filled by paranoia and inflammatory rhetoric, fueling “a culture of political anger, rather than political solutions.” Angry rhetoric, he maintains, keeps Muslims in a constant state of fear that Islam and Islamic culture are in danger of being snuffed out, resulting in a persistent cycle of violence as Muslims respond to the perceived threat posed by both external and sectarian enemies.

Well, I guess that answers the implications of my suggestions. It’s so nice to hear a Muslim say this, because when I say it, my “progressive” colleagues call me a racist and a demonizer and my “liberal” colleagues edge away in the hope they won’t get tarred.

At the same time, this culture of anger prevents Muslims from examining the internal problems that plague the Islamic world, such as repressive governments, sectarian conflict, and a lack of democratic representation. “Muslims must rise and peacefully mobilize against sectarianism and the violence and destruction in, say, Iraq,” he wrote in the Gulf Times, an English-language newspaper popular in Qatar. “But before that can happen, Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on Muslim victimhood and toward taking responsibility, as a community, for our own situation.”

This could make an enormous difference in Iraq, because despite the demonization of the West in Arab discourse, and its affirmation by BDS-impaired “critics”, what the US has offered Iraq — real independence if they can sustain it — is a fantastic opportunity. Of course, in the Muslim world Haqqani’s dream of peaceful mobilization against sectarianism and violence is a quasi-messianic leap of hope. It would help if Western progressives didn’t have Bush Derangement Syndrome so badly that they prefer everyone to lose if only they can blame Bush, and so feed the worst instincts in the Arab world.

But if there are bold Muslims who want to bring their people out of this land of self-defeating rage, no single dimension of their culture offers a simpler and more pervasive issue for reconsideration/reformulation than their collective discourse on Israel. This astonishingly uniform and harshly negative attitude not only features all of the elements of this larger discourse of grievance and rage, but each one of them appear in their most severe form. Indeed, I’d venture that anti-Zionism constitutes the “sacred narrative” of Muslim rage and fear, and only by reconsidering it, will Muslims be able to dismantle their prime dividers and enter the productive world of civil society.

Haqqani came to the United States after a career as a Pakistani journalist and statesman. He was Pakistan’s ambassador to Sri Lanka from 1992 to 1993 and was an advisor to Pakistani prime ministers Benazir Bhutto, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, and Nawaz Sharif.

Haqqani is the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, which was a bestseller in South Asia. He is also a practicing Muslim who studied in a madrassa, or traditional Islamic school, in Pakistan.

Although he hopes his message will reach Muslims, Haqqani believes that his research has something to teach Western policy makers as well. “Basically, I am saying that this is an entire section of the world that is reeling from the trauma of its decline,” he says. “How can the United States and other Western powers build relationships with the Muslim world without understanding what happens in the Muslim mind?”

Right on. It takes a great deal of courage to say this.

Instead our policy makers think of how they can appease the angry, resentful Muslim without having a clue about the doubt and anxiety that underlies that anger. Not a good idea.

[Post by Lazar and Richard; hat tip: Roger Simon, who brings it as further proof that Christopher Hitchens was right about religion.]

An interesting article in the London Times by Abul Taher discusses an interview with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Emel, a British Muslim lifestyle magazine. (Actually the article is itself a fairly editorial write-up of the interview. I wonder how Archbishop Williams feels about it.)

Given that the Times’ article makes Williams’ even more anti-American than (his own words in) the interview, it raises an interesting question we will address at the end of this post. Is the author doing a hatchet job on the Archbishop by making him sound even more ludicrously anti-American than he really was? Or is he trying to spell out for his readership the anti-American lessons that the Archbishop was too subtle to articulate as clearly as the “reporter” wanted?

Archbishop Williams already has a history of anti-American behavior in his own right, and consistently urges the West to understand terrorists, not demonize them. As chaplain of Clare College, Cambridge, Williams was active in anti-nuclear protests at U.S. bases. After 9/11, he said that terrorists can have “serious moral goals“, and that they should not be labeled “evil“. Yet he had no problem calling the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq “immoral”.

In 2002, Dr. Peter Mullen wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal describing the Most Rev. Williams as

an old-fashioned class warrior, a typical bien-pensant despiser of Western capitalism and the way of life that goes with it. Perhaps this would not matter much in ordinary times, but when the future of Western civilization itself is under threat, such posturing is suicidal. What havoc this man might wreak from the throne of Canterbury.

US is ‘worst’ imperialist: Archbishop
The Sunday Times
November 25, 2007

THE Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.

“Imperial heyday” is Taher’s term. Williams actually did not make this point in his article, although he could fairly be construed to have made it. After all, this kind of thinking is so common in Europe today — the Anti-Zionist variant holds that Israeli imperialism is far worse than, say, French imperialism in Algeria — that the Archbishop could well have made it without any awareness of how facetious it is, how, in a matter of days, British imperial troops and policies killed more “natives” — men, women and children, than the number killed by Americans in any of their recent wars, or the Israelis in the last century.
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In response to a long exchange of thoughts commenting on two posts, one on the Oxford Union’s bizarre notion of serious debate, and one on the issues raised by that post by Sophia, Michael N. wrote the following set of reflections which I think worthy of a post all to itself on the problem of Europeans and moral envy.

It began with a brief remark by MN on the hostility of the Europeans to the USA:

I think that if America DID act more like a traditional empire-building superpower, we might even resent it less here; it would not then compare so favourably with our own record!

That caught my eye since one of the things I think is going on right now about Zionism is that with moral perfectionists like Michael Lerner and the extraordinary self-restraint and self-sacrifice exercised by the IDF (e.g., at Jenin), the Israelis are driving people crazy with their moral standards so far in excess of that of their neighbors. Therefore, one of the reasons why Israel gets demonized is to cut it down to size (i.e., the Jenin “Massacre”). So I responded by asking MN to elaborate:

rl: that’s an extremely interesting final remark. there’s no doubt in my mind that if israel were more brutal, there would be less verbal and physical aggression against them. they just don’t have it in them, and then they get attacked for being brutal.

your comment suggests that the real problem is moral envy, a particularly pernicious form of envy that thrives on some appalling moral “thinking” that includes the kind of moral hysteria we hear from people for whom abu ghraib is far worse then saddam’s (or any other arabs’) prisons, the crimes of israel far worse than, say, darfur.

do you really think this is the operative factor?

because if so, then there’s an inverse relationship between how badly (or well) the usa (and israel) behave, and how roundly the europeans (and the “left”) denounce them.

This is Michael N.’s response, which I think takes the discussion in very interesting directions:

Europe, America, and moral envy. The situation is so multi-layered it’s almost impossible to say that moral envy represents the primary operative factor.

It is perhaps something else closely related; a hatred of obligations. Europe owes America, and it knows it owes America. It is therefore rushing as quickly as it can to forget what and why it owes America.

Or, as I learned from trying to teach my kids, it’s almost as hard to say, “Thank you,” as it is to say, “i’m sorry.” Both involve the implication of obligation. (more…)

Just in case you were starting to feel optimistic about the human race, the following post will quickly dispel those feelings. Conspiracy theorists have long produced their paranoid exposés about global domination by some nefarious organization, be it the oil industry or, of course, the Jews. The internet has provided them with a convenient forum, and conspiracy theorists develop a synergy with one another, feeding off other paranoid individuals.

This post deals with one such conspiracy theory. (hat tip: lgude) If it had stayed in the perverse little universe of anti-globalization and anti-Semitic blogs, I would not waste my or your time on the issue. However, the theory, though it is inconceivable to the point of being ridiculous, has made its way into two major media outlets. Their adoption of the theory is another example of their ideology leading them away from what can be considered even remotely respectable journalism. But that makes the theory dangerous.

The conspiracy theory in question answers, in its proponents minds, questions about the 2004 tsunami that killed over 200,000 people, primarily in Indonesia and India. The theory has its usual villains- George Bush, Dick Cheney, the CIA…and the Zionists. It goes along these lines — George Bush, primarily because he is evil, but also to aid his war effort in Iraq, ordered U.S. forces to detonate a nuclear device in the Sumatra trench in the Indian Ocean as a catalyst for the tsunami. Each theorist has his/her own variation. Let us take a journey to the twilight zone that is the paranoid left’s blogosphere:

On his blog, “24 Hours to Live“, Sarge writes-

Here’s an interesting scenario to nibble on: The Bush junta is tired of explaining itself to the media. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice are sick of the liberals in this country pointing out how many American lives are being lost in Iraq… so……Bush and his cronies devise a cunning and dastardly plan. In order to take people’s minds off of Iraq why not create a natural disaster? We’ve done underwater nuclear weapons tests before (see Bikini Atoll) and they have a significant seismic effect. Is it then possible that the Bush regime detonated a large nuclear device on the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia? After all, a natural disaster of these proportions certainly takes your mind off Iraq…

With Bush and his cronies calling the shots anything is possible…

I see…Bush (whose powers rival God’s, apparently) created a natural disaster to distract us from Iraq. Since the tsunami took peoples’ minds off Iraq, then it is within the realm of possibility. I accidentally whacked my thumb with a hammer while banging a nail into a board last week, and for a few minutes of excruciating pain, I definitely was not thinking about Iraq. Were Bush and his cronies behind it? Anything is possible…

Joe Vialls introduces the anti-Semitic element that was so lacking on Sarge’s blog. Vialls theory blames ‘New York’, specifically Wall Street. They control John Howard, he says, which he presumes to be able to prove based on Howard’s actions.

Only Little Johnny knew, and of course his trusty crystal ball in New York. To hell with Sri Lanka, his bosses wanted a main base for the huge reconstruction contracts in Asia, designed to replace the failed oil theft and reconstruction in Iraq, and keep poor old Zion on its tottering New York legs for a few more weeks or months.

In the end, what the hell did it matter how many Goyim had to die? And, hey, on the credit side they’d already managed to kill more than 100,00 Muslims in Sumatra with a single tidal wave, which was partial payback for their own resounding defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq..For the Zionist Cabal, obtaining a thermonuclear weapon in America is no great trick, especially when we have the precedent of 100 small ‘decommissioned’ air-to-air atomic warheads being smuggled out the Pentagon’s (civilian) back door, to form the core of the Jewish State’s current nuclear arsenal. Once a weapon system is out date and out of service, loyal uniformed US military personnel can no longer track it.

India Daily introduces the next prerequisite for a good conspiracy theory, UFOs-

Recent alien contacts have been reported with the South Asian Governments especially India. UFO sightings have been rampant over the region affected. Some in Nicobar Island say that it was an experiment conducted by the alien extra-terrestrial entities to correct the wobbly rotation of the earth. And some of the Indian scientists are actually seeing that wobbly rotation of the earth has been corrected since the massive underwater earthquake and tsunami.

The Pagan Prattle has compiled an archive of tsunami conspiracy links.

Ok, we’ve had our fun. Lonely bloggers typing up drivel in their mothers’ basements should cause us to shake our heads sadly, nothing more. We understand how ridiculous the theory is, but it should not surprise us that it exists.

What also might not surprise, but should definitely alarm, is the echoing of these theories in Arab media. This is no longer a joking matter. Are they really that out of touch with reality? Or will they use any chance to smear America, Israel, and the West in order to incite the Arab public against them? Cybercast News Service reports:

The Egyptian nationalist weekly Al-Usbu’ accused the U.S., Israel and India of carrying out nuclear testing that may have cased the tsunami. Those nations were testing “how to liquidate humanity,” the newspaper said.

“Was [the earthquake] caused by American, Israeli, and Indian nuclear testing on ‘the day of horror?’ Why did the ‘Ring of Fire’ explode?” Mahmoud Bakri asked in his “investigative” piece published in the weekly on January 1.

“According to researchers’ estimates, there are two possible [explanations] for what happened. The first is a natural, divine move, because the region is in the ‘Ring of Fire,’ a region subject to this destructive type of earthquakes,” Bakri wrote according to a translation of the article provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute on Friday.

“The second possibility is that it was some kind of human intervention that destabilized the tectonic plates, an intervention that is caused only in nuclear experiments and explosions,” he said…

Al-Jazeera.com reports that many point the “finger of blame,” not at Mother nature, but at “government cover-ups, top secret military testing in the waters of the Indian Ocean and even aliens attempting to correct Earth’s ‘wobbly’ rotation.”

But the most popular theory, it says, is that the Indian and U.S. military are the “main cause of the disaster by testing eco-weapons, which use electromagnetic waves, thus triggering off earthquakes.”

That is the Arab media. They operate under different rules than the Western media, and they have reported on more fanciful theories. Major Western media networks would not treat such a theory seriously. Or would they?

The BBC treats the issue as worthy of serious debate:

Why did US base escape tsunami?

Following the tsunami, conspiracy rumours have been circulating on the internet of how the US base at Diego Garcia managed to avoid casualties while other islands suffered huge losses.

The US Navy’s official Diego Garcia website said the island wasn’t hit by the devastating tsunami because it is surrounded by deep waters and the grade of its shores does not allow for tsunamis to build before hitting land.

The site said the earthquake generated a tidal surge on the island estimated at six feet.

Is America a power for good or ill in the world? Was there a malign hand at work, or has America’s role in the crisis in fact been a model of humanitarian leadership.
Let us know what you think. Is this just anti-US sentiment on the web or something more worrying?

It is something more worrying. It is profoundly worrying that the BBC even asks the question. But, alas, it is not terribly surprising.

Excerpt from Heaven on Earth: Varieties of the Millennial Experience

This section in principle comes either at the end of a chapter on UFOlogy as a form of millennial thought, in which I discuss the close relationship between UFOlogy and conspiracy thinking, or in an epilogue, after the final chapter on Global Jihad as an apocalyptic millennial movement. The text is still raw — needs to be more coherent, and possibly more substantive — and the version below has been altered in ways that correspond with the style of my blog and the style of my academic writing (less of my “jargon” about demopaths, more careful about passing judgments). I welcome comments, links, reflections, criticism, etc.

9-11 and Post-Modern Western Conspiracy Thinking: We Are to Blame

9-11 Conspiracy constitutes the most powerful conspiracy theory in the brief history of the internet age. Within hours of the attacks, accusations that the Israeli Mossad had planned and executed the attacks while “4000 Jews stayed at home,” appeared, particularly in the Arab world, a textbook case of internet conspiracy mongering.

In the Muslim world these theories became the dominant public voice. There, traditional conspiracy operated: We are innocent, our enemies are guilty. In 2002 a Gallup poll found a majority of Muslims interviewed did not believe Bin Laden or any Muslim did 9-11. A 2006 Pew poll found this attitude widespread even among Muslims in the US — 28% — believe that Muslims did not do 9-11 (and 32% unsure, leaving only 40% of US Muslims polled agreeing that Bin Laden carried out 9-11.

Such claims, and their eager acceptance among fringe elements of Western conspiracy thinkers, especially those who already believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, should not astonish observers. Like so many other such conspiracies, they combine “cui bono?” [who benefits?] – Israel, Fascists in the US government – with a semiotic arousal that moves from perceived anomaly — isn’t this strange! — to “obvious” conclusion — what else could explain this? — in the blink of an eye. Among the plethora of Muslim conspiracies that blossomed in the wake of 9-11, perhaps the most scholarly and consequential came from the “progressive” Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom which came out within months of the event in February 2002 and blamed not Israel, but the US Government.

But the story was only beginning. Over the next months, a vast array of hypotheses, laid out in detail at a host of websites, accused George Bush and his administration either allowed the 9-11 attack to occur (Pearl Harbor version), or actively carried it out (Reichstag Fire version). The logic behind all of these theories focused on the perceived anomalies – the size of the hole in the Pentagon (too small), the collapse of the Twin Towers (too neat), of Building 7 (too far away), even the overall success of the plan (too great) – and rapidly moved to explaining them in terms of a government plot, primarily aimed at turning the US government into a police state. Cui bono? – the proto-fascists in the Bush administration.
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A blogpost on No Passarán explores an aspect of European anti-Americanism that I’ve also discussed [and now a new category at this blog]: Envy.

The New-Old Objectification

posted by Joe Noory @ 6:15 AM
Monday, February 26, 2007

In Sunday’s Telegraph, Niall Ferguson continues to flog his notion that present day America can be compared to the British Empire, on that he’s admitted is different because it is not an empire. One of the fantastic differences between the Telegraph and pathological nature of the BBC’s editorial ideology is that the Telegraph invites comments far more directly and without making a show of “letting you” Have Your Say, albeit with heavy editing by beeboids.

“The usual” view is always present. It has this vision of the world being a playground where all the children need to be equal for their own good despite the fact that some have given the world a reason to be on the “time out bench.” For the likes of these folks, even the Darfur genocide doesn’t get you an off-side whistle while “the good” in the world spend years on end trying to define the meaning of genocide anew.

Maybe it’s because they are ignorant, arrogant, parochial and jingoistic.

Maybe it’s because they have either invaded or forced regime change in more than 200 countries, many with democratically elected goverments.

Maybe it’s because they would rather spend their time watching non-stop ‘news’ of such luminaries as Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, than to bother to discover what their own government is doing to them and to other populations of the world.

As ever, the implied self-as-high-culture tries to form comparisons to American low culture. Low-culture to low-culture are quite typically strenuously avoided for the reason that they might produce some actual empathy.

However, the matter of low-brow behavior can’t be entirely hidden:

I am an American living in Britain and I have been abused many times by British people trying to get their jabs in at Americans. Mostly from teachers, believe it or not!

Believe me, I know. The inability to dislodge the prejudice for a person and a nation is a telling and ubiquitous feature of American dealing with Europeans’ lectures on a daily basis.

The difference is refreshing and enormous, and show a great breadth missing at the BBC. Between the highly predictable notes left by readers are those like the following:

As I see it, having visited the United States, the great advantage it’s citizens possess is the ability to succeed, should they so wish. There is no class culture, consequently those who are successful are admired and indeed encouraged to achieve more. Envy and jealousy simply do not exist. It is something the rest of the world cannot understand and this is manifested by the so called “hatred” expressed against a country which is totally different to the class system which dominates all other nations.

Well, there’s always a “root cause” argument to be made too.

People hate America because they want the romance of the hammer and sickle, or the romance of a martyr.
…
The truth is it’s not the US that’s arrogant, it’s the romantics that want a cause that exalts humanity into some kind of superman, when what is actually being offered is the chance to be ordinary.

COMMENT:

Obviously the US is not a place with no class culture, and where “envy and jealousy don’t exist.” As long as there are human beings, envy and jealousy will exist. It’s a question of how much, and how pervasive. My experience has been that the US does have a significantly more generous attitude towards “others.”

Now granted, Finkielkraut had just been dragged through the politically-correct wringer in France when he made those remarks, and he didn’t have to get tenure in an American university. But the larger point, I think, remains. If we think in terms of batting averages, where the degree to which one does not succomb to envy represents hits, then I think American culture bats in the mid .300s and French culture (which I know best in Europe) around the mid .200s.

And given that these issues get at the heart of both positive-sum emotions and atttitudes on the one hand, and the ability to sustain a civil society on the other, these “batting averages” are important gauges of the resilience of a culture in sustaining the experiment in democracy and freedom that modern society represents. Given the pervasive hostility of Europeans to the US documented in the article by Niall Ferguson, when the US is Europe’s natural ally, at a time when Europe really needs good cultural allies in its struggle with a primitive, zero-sum, tribal enemy in its midst (which bats below .100), this pervasively base envy of the US, and the politics of resentment that it spawns seems ominous to say the least.

The Guardian has a story on the return of polio to Pakistani children due to rumors that the vaccine was a secret American plot to sterilize Muslims. In a culture where every move from an outsider is suspect, presumed to be a trick to harm you, it’s very hard to process so “altruistic” a campaign as one that claims it’s designed to keep your children healthy. Nice bundle of anti-modernism, paranoia, anti-Americanism, and self-destructive behavior. (Hat tip: ES)

Polio cases jump in Pakistan as clerics declare vaccination an American plot

· Rumours leave thousands of children unprotected
· Aid workers increasingly targeted by tribal militants

Declan Walsh in Peshawar
Thursday February 15, 2007

The parents of 24,000 children in northern Pakistan refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations last month, mostly due to rumours that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilise innocent Muslim children.
The disinformation - spread by extremist clerics using mosque loudspeakers and illegal radio stations, and by word of mouth - has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan and hit global efforts to eradicate the debilitating disease.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 39 cases of polio in Pakistan in 2006, up from 28 in 2005. The disease is concentrated in North-West Frontier Province, where 60% of the refusals were attributed to “religious reasons”. “It was very striking. There was a lot of anti-American propaganda as well as some misconceptions about sterilisation,” said Dr Sarfaraz Afridi, a campaign manager with the WHO in Peshawar.

Interesting. So Islam has made paranoia is a “religious reason.”

The scaremongering and appeals to Islam echoed a similar campaign in the Nigerian state of Kano in 2003, where the disease then spread to 12 polio-free countries over the following 18 months. Pakistan is one of just four countries where polio remains endemic. The others are Nigeria, India and Afghanistan.

[snip]

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I received a circular email from Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine with comments on the Rosenfeld controversy, asking me if I would “bring this to the attention of your community and to the media?” It represents more of the “they’re trying to gag us” complaint, with a particularly disturbing dual theme: as the title states: “there is no New Antisemitism” on the one hand, and the not-even implicit threat that not acting as he and his fellow progressives advocate — more concessions from Israel — will really lead to the new antisemitism. I think Michael’s thinking is seriously misguided, so I am fisking his piece below. I hope that Michael will respond.

There is no New Anti-Semitism
by Rabbi Michael Lerner

That’s quite a title. So since 2000, the outburst of virulent hostility to Israel, and beyond that to Jews, especially in Europe, unprecedented since the Holocaust is not “new”? But it does exist, no? Or has Michael been reading The Nation? Presumably we will immediately get evidence supporting the article’s title.

The N.Y. Times reported on January 31 about the most recent attempt by the American Jewish Community to conflate intense criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Alas no. No discussion of on what basis Lerner thinks this new Antisemitism is non-existent; apparently an assertion in the title is enough. Instead we get the opening chords of the claim that bad people are trying to silence criticism of Israel by calling them antisemites. At least Lerner’s concedes that it’s “intense” criticism (apparently his version of Judt’s “harsh” criticism).

This is the issue guys. Just when does “harsh, intense” criticism of Israel become irresponsible, especially when joined to a troubling silence about (or pro-forma denunciations of) Palestinian/Arab/Muslim behavior (suicide terrorism), attitudes (Judeophobia), and beliefs (paranoid conspiracy theories), far more vicious than anything Israel has mustered — including the delirious cutting edge of the new Antisemitism? Let’s address that, please, rather than claim you’re being conflated, smeared, or gagged.
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Ellen Horowitz, again.

I will post an essay with this political cartoon as the symbol at a later date. In the meantime, I recommend my essays on France, especially the one on the consequences of Al Durah.

Tovia Singer of Israel National News Radio has a talk show where he interviewed me. The interviews are available. The titles are his, a bit more sensational than we medievalists normally go for.
I’d say:
“Islam at War with World because of a not uncommon pathology of Honor-Shame mentality”
and
Europe willing to Self-Destruct Because it Can’t Give up Moral Schadenfreude at the Expense of the Jews.
But that’s why he’s got the show and I’ve got the blog.

A7Radio: Islam at War w/ World Because of Honor-Shame Mentality
16:48 Aug 13, ‘06 / 19 Av 5766

A7 Radio’s “The Tovia Singer Show”

How to use XML?

Renowned Boston U Historian:
Islam at War with the World because of Honor-Shame Mentality (Special Three-Part interview)

In an eye-opening interview, Dr. Richard Landes, noted professor of History at Boston University and founder of The Second Draft, exposes the medieval mindset that nourishes Islam’s war with Israel and the US.

Listen Now -or- Download

Also on Tovia Singer:
Europe Willing to Commit Suicide Just to Destroy Israel?

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[Note: This is the final installment of a revised paper delivered last week at a conference in Jerusalem on Antisemitism, Multi-culturalism and Ethnic Identity at Hebrew University under the auspices of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, June 16, 2006. The first installment can be read here.]

Moral Equivalence, Multiculturalism, and Conspiracy Theory

Brief note: I’m in favor of multiculturalism of the variety described in Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s book The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. I’m terrified of a particularly dangerous form of multi-culturalism informed by what strikes me as a virtually suicidal adherence to such dogmas as “moral equivalence.” By and large I will be treating the latter form, which I consider pathological.

This kind of thinking, which I have dubbed the PC Paradigm (in the liberal form, Politically correct, in the radical, Post-colonial paradigm), certainly has its appeal. Since the early 1980s it has dominated both the media talking heads and the academic discourse about the Middle East… forbidding us, on pain of accusations of racism, from identifying primitive cultural traits, (like warrior honor-shame culture), and their pathologies (like “playing the victim” and honor-killing your daughter when she’s raped by your son), from discussing the less savory aspects of Islamic imperialism, and their lengthy pedigree (like Dar al Harb, and dhimmitude).

Moral Equivalence constitutes an important dimension of multi-culturalism as it is currently practiced. “Who are we to judge?” All cultures have their own sets of values, and to imply a hierarchy of values is a form of cultural imperialism that we must renounce in order to live in peace with each other. In a kind of therapeutic act of good will that features our generosity, our stupidity and our secret condescension, we say: “Don’t worry, we are as bad as you are.” Saïd’s Orientalism appeals fundamentally to such sentiments.

Now this kind of “therapeutic approach” is the inter-cultural variant of a peculiar trait of modern civil societies, and that is their extraordinary willingness to be self-critical. Self-criticism is at the core of modern society’s abilities – without open criticism and the ability to change one’s mind and learn from one’s mistakes, there would be no modern academy, no science and technology, none of the transformative elements that permit a civil society. But self-criticism can become pathological, a kind of intellectual form of beaten wife syndrome: “if he’s angry it must be my fault.” At its extreme, it has a kind of messianic quality to it, a kind of masochistic ominipotence fantasy, in which if everything is our fault, then by changing we can fix it. Thus we have the spectacle of a culture (the West, with Israel in the lead) willing to publicly self-criticize at levels never achieved in the recorded history of civilizations.

And at its most pathological levels, it produces not just moral equivalence, but moral inversion: “we (Israel, the US, the West) are not only as bad as you are, we’re worse.” It is that kind of moral disorientation that has fueled the massive failures of the “progressive left” since 2000, its hate-fest at Durban, its feeding frenzies over Al Durah and Jenin, and were it not for the world cup, the Ghalia family’s tragedy in Gaza. In a sense, when Chomsky declared in the wake of 9-11, that Americans were the worst terrorists, he opened the door to the conspiracy theories that teem through Western culture today.

Think of the reaction of a 9-11 conspiracist to the suggestion that Hamas planned the Gaza Beach massacre of 6-9-06 because of sagging polls, the threat of Abbas’ “peace referendum,” and a desire to embarrass Olmert before his trip to Europe. Outrage! “You racist! How dare you suggest that these people would be so base! You must really hate these people to imagine that.” And yet he or she, without hesitation, embraces far worse thoughts about our own administration, a product of over two centuries of sustained effort to purge such vicious behavior from our elected elites. How intellectually and morally crude! How self-destructive.

In that sense, 9-11 actually constitutes a new direction in the history of Conspiracy theory. Normally Conspiracy theories operate in order to scapegoat someone else and assert both one’s innocence and one’s right to violence. It depends on what psychologists call cognitive egocentrism: “they” think like “we” do – libido dominandi all around. 9-11 Conspiracy theory, as part of a larger project of morally equivalent multiculturalism, actually reverses this process.

Left-wing Conspiracy theories, progressives who believe in 9-11 systematically project good will onto the cultural “other” – Islam is a religion of peace, Bin Laden and Hamas have good reason for their anger, if only we’re nice to them they’ll be nice to us. Thus the next step after blaming Bush is to exonerate Bin Laden: Bush is creating an Islamic boogy man who does not exist; the Americ an government’s behavior since 9-11 presents a greater threat than Bin Laden. Bin Laden is an agent of the USA. Meanwhile, the “other” – global Islamism, particularly in its dominant Salafism – systematically projects bad will onto us (concessions, apologies cannot be sincere or meant to help, they are either a trick or a sign of weakness). This Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism is very dangerous and policies based on it tend to explode in the faces of those who earnestly seek to make them work. They have brought us Oslo, the current French response to their own Intifada, and the Anglican bishops dialogue with Islam as described by Margaret Brearly yesterday, to take a few examples.

Why would such good intentions lead so quickly to hell? Why is not “good neighborliness” working right now?

Partly, because we are dealing with demopaths, with people who use the language of democracy, human rights, moral equivalence, tolerance, not because they believe in them, but because they can use them to disarm us. Demopaths “use democracy to destroy democracy.” And when you let them in, they plan to push you out. Right now the largest collection of demopaths and their dupes can be found at the interaction between Islamists and westerners. From our point of view, it’s dialogue and moderation; from theirs, it’s Dawa, or the verbal dimension of Jihad of conquest.

Given the radical instability of sustaining such an intensely inaccurate view of reality, those who insist on seeing their enemies as innocent, must find an explanation for what the evil that continues to flourish despite (I would argue in part because) of their efforts. And here we get the peculiar post-modern twist. We’re the ones at fault. We’re the evil ones. If Bush did 9-11, then the world makes sense: they are angry with us for our aggressive imperialist ways; our leaders continue to act in aggressive imperialist ways; if we stop them, then everything will be better. Get out of Iraq, withdraw to the West Bank, give money and programs to the “lost territories”, open dialogues and dismantle the apparatus that, whatever its origins like the Anglican Church, have brought us civil society.

And in so thinking, speaking, and acting, those with Bush Derangement Syndrome and an according attraction for 9-11 conspiracy end up thinking and speaking like the paranoid Muslims who initially cheered on 9-11 and then, when it didn’t go well for them, immediately blamed it on a conspiracy. This convergence of “left,” “progressive” conspiracism (far more mainstream among Europeans) with the most aggressive versions of global Islamist discourse, represents a genuinely terrifying example of an alliance of dupes and demopaths around the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. For the Western dupes (among whom I suspect are some demopaths), this is the height self-criticism and commitment to overcoming our imperialistic impulses; for Islamist demopaths, this is a standard expression of imperialist ambitions demonizing an enemy. Both positions are poison; and together, they’re weaponized poison.</