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Category Archives: Cognitive Egocentrism
Fareed Zakaria: Poster Boy for Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism
I haven’t posted a lot on Iran because it’s not really an area I know a great deal about. But what I can recognize is the predictable tropes of cognitive egocentrism, and that’s what this latest by Fareed Zakaria is full of. I’ve been following his program on CNN segments of which we’ll be posting soon at the new Second Draft site for comment and criticism. There, it’s hard to know what he thinks aside from how he chooses his guests — Gerges is less of an analyst than an advocate, but Zakaria doesn’t seem to notice — but in this piece he’s wearing his colors loud and clear.
Lorenz Gude, one of our regular commenters here notes:
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I found myself pretty surprised by Fareed Zakaria’s piece on Iran in Newsweek entitled “They May Not Want the Bomb.” It is an example of apologetic propaganda that reminds me of hagiographies of Stalin.
Inside a land poised between tradition and modernity
How’s that for a start. It may be somewhere between the two conceptually, but to call it poised between them is to suggest those are its two possible (and imminent) directions. On the contrary, Khoumeini’s “Islamic Republic of Iran” is a terrifying experiment in anti-modern apocalyptic Islam. To leave that out of the picture already marks Zakaria’s (or is it the Newsweek editor’s) conceptual framework as critically deficient.
How about: Inside a land hijacked by anti-modern Islamists on the painful path from tradition to modernity
By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK
Published May 23, 2009
Religion Versus Reality
Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons.
And they wouldn’t lie to us, would they? Zakaria seems to think that having nuclear weapons is like having dessert — something you can take or leave. Does he really mean this? Is this deliberate misinformation or just breathtaking naivete? As the kept woman said to the court when told that her senator lover denied having any knowledge of her, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.
Of course they could be lying. And they could be doing that for the sake of Islam. After all, the Shiites are the original practitioners of Takkiya. As the Supreme Leader Khoumeini put it:
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Should we remain truthful at the cost of defeat and danger to the Faith? People say, “don’t kill!” But the Almighty himself taught us how to kill… Shall we not kill when it is necessary for the triumph of the Faith? We say that killing is tantamount to saying a prayer when those who are harmful [to the Faith] need to be put out of the way. Deceit, trickery, conspiracy, cheating, stealing and killing are nothing but means… (Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad, p.43).
Are these statements made in English and broadcast to us, or in Pharsee and broadcast to the Iranian public. Could it just be fodder for dupes?
And then, what about this:
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Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.
In yet another sign of Teheran’s stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy’s traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons.
One senior mullah has now said it is “only natural” to have nuclear bombs as a “countermeasure” against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel.
The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Nicknamed “Professor Crocodile” because of his harsh conservatism, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi’s group opposes virtually any kind of rapprochement with the West and is believed to have influenced President Ahmadinejad’s refusal to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear programme.
The comments, which are the first public statement by the Yazdi clerical cabal on the nuclear issue, will be seen as an attempt by the country’s religious hardliners to begin preparing a theological justification for the ownership – and if necessary the use – of atomic bombs.
Does Zakaria know about this and doesn’t think it’s relevant? Is the Daily Telegraph misreporting?
Flirting with Reality: Goldberg reviews Morris on Palestinian Irredentism
Nietzsche once remarked that thinking is like diving into an icy pond, going to the bottom and grasping a stone from the depths. Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, gets his feet wet and comes running out.
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Published: May 20, 2009In March, Muhammad Dahlan, a former chief of one of thePalestinian Authority’s multifarious secret police organizations, and once a tacit ally of the C.I.A., defended Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, from the charge, made by Hamas, that it had previously recognized Israel’s right to exist.
ONE STATE, TWO STATES
Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
By Benny Morris
240 pp. Yale University Press. $26
First Chapter: ‘One State, Two States’ (May 24, 2009)“They say that Fatah has asked them to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and this is a big deception,” Dahlan said. “For the 1,000th time, I want to reaffirm that we are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Rather we are asking Hamas not to do so, because Fatah never recognized Israel’s right to exist.”
This was not a helpful statement, at least not to the peace-processors in Washington and in Europe, and to their diminishing band of confederates in Israel and the Palestinian territories. But Dahlan’s comment helps buttress the main argument of Benny Morris’s new book, “One State, Two States.” Morris, a professor of history at Ben- Gurion University in Israel, argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state comprised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.
Nice beginning, especially when speaking to an audience of self-selecting liberal cognitive egocentrists.
Morris is equally dismissive of those who believe that a so-called one-state solution might work in place of a two-state solution. Muslim anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide that separates Arab from Jew, among other realities, make this notion a fantasy. In this short book Morris asserts there is no one-state solution to the Middle East crisis, and no two-state solution. Morris does promote the possibility of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, but he makes the case anemically and cursorily.
This is not to say that Morris isn’t convincing at times, for instance when he says that one-staters, like the constitutional scholar Daniel Lazar and the historian Tony Judt, who envision a utopian post-Zionist future, in fact are calling for Israel to be eliminated.
Yet Morris, like Judt, has an almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state. The difference is that Morris does not believe that Israel’s mistakes — even the settlement movement that colonized the West Bank — are what might doom it. The culprit is the implacable fanaticism of Arab Islamists, who are unwilling to accept a Jewish national presence in what is thought of as Arab land, a position that hasn’t changed since the meeting of the third Palestine Arab Congress, in 1920, which rejected Jewish claims to the land since “Palestine is the holy land of the two Christian and Muslim worlds.” Subsequent events that seemingly contradict this belief — most notably, the P.L.O.’s ostensible recognition of Israel in 1988 — have been staged for the benefit of gullible Westerners, Morris writes.
Most people still think that the PLO changed their charter. They voted to change their charter at some point in the future, and people like Hanan Ashrawi voted against it. Part of the reason we don’t know about it is that both the media , authors like Graham Usher (chaps. 10-11), and the proponents of the Oslo Process like President Clinton were so eager to move on that they pretended that it had already happened. Details and extensive references here.
When on journalist reported on Ashrawi’s no-vote — on the basis of good honor-shame concerns (“This will appear to be a succumbing to Israeli dictate.”) — she was told by her editor that that can’t be true because, “Ashrawi is a moderate.”
So what if, by 2020, Rotterdam is a majority Muslim? We already have an answer.
In October of 2004, David Pryce-Jones, whose book on Arab honor-shame culture, The Closed Circle was to be a major player in my new course, “Honor-Shame Cultures, Middle Ages, Middle East,” came to BU to speak. Commentary published a formal draft of the talk in December of that year, “The Islamicization of Europe.” In the question and answer period, Pryce-Jones told the story of turning the tables on a Dutch reporter who was interviewing him.
“You’re from Rotterdam,” he commented, “are you aware that, by 2020, Rotterdam will be a majority Muslim?
“So what?” the reporter shot back.
Well, it’s not even five years later, and we have a pretty good answer, and it’s not very pretty.
Of course, the reporter was just being “politically correct.” After all, Muslim immigrants, according to the prevailing paradigm, were just like any other immigrant, and to suggest otherwise, was to reveal one’s racist prejudices, one’s Islamophobia. Of course there were some of us, even back then, who felt that anyone who wasn’t afraid of Islam was a cretin.
You be the judge of the reporter’s remark:
Eurabia Has A Capital: Rotterdam
Here entire neighborhoods look like the Middle East, women walk around veiled, the mayor is a Muslim, sharia law is applied in the courts and the theaters. An extensive report from the most Islamized city in Europeby Sandro Magister
ROME, May 19, 2009 – One of the most indisputable results of Benedict XVI’s trip to the Holy Land was the improvement in relations with Islam. The three days he spent in Jordan, and then, in Jerusalem, the visit to the Dome of the Mosque, spread an image among the Muslim general public – to an extent never before seen – of a pope as a friend, surrounded by Islamic leaders happy to welcome him and work together with him for the good of the human family.
What planet are they on? What were the European media reporting from the Holy Land.
But just as indisputable is the distance between this image and the harsh reality of the facts. Not only in countries under Muslim regimes, but also where the followers of Mohammed are in the minority, for example in Europe.
In 2002, the scholar Bat Ye’or, a British citizen born in Egypt and a specialist in the history of the Christian and Jewish minorities in Muslim countries – called the “dhimmi” – coined the term “Eurabia” to describe the fate toward which Europe is moving. It is a fate of submission to Islam, of “dhimmitude.”
Oriana Fallaci used the word “Eurabia” in her writings, and gave it worldwide resonance. On August 1, 2005, Benedict XVI received Fallaci in a private audience at Castel Gandolfo. She rejected dialogue with Islam; he was in favor of it, and still is. But they agreed – as Fallaci later said – in identifying the “self-hatred” that Europe demonstrates, its spiritual vacuum, its loss of identity, precisely when the immigrants of Islamic faith are increasing within it.
Holland is an extraordinary test case. It is the country in which individual license is the most extensive – to the point of permitting euthanasia on children – in which the Christian identity is most faded, in which the Moslem presence is growing most boldly.
Here, multiculturalism is the rule. But the exceptions are dramatic: from the killing of the anti-Islamist political leader Pim Fortuyn to the persecution of the Somali dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the murder of the director Theo Van Gogh, condemned to death for his film “Submission,” a denunciation of the crimes of Muslim theocracy. Fortuyn’s successor, Geert Wilders, has lived under 24-hour police protection for six years.
There is one city in Holland where this new reality can be seen with the naked eye, more than anywhere else. Here, entire neighborhoods look as if they have been lifted from the Middle East, here stand the largest mosques in Europe, here parts of sharia law are applied in the courts and theaters, here many of the women go around veiled, here the mayor is a Muslim, the son of an imam.
This city is Rotterdam, Holland’s second largest city by population, and the largest port in Europe by cargo volume.
The following is a report on Rotterdam published in the Italian newspaper “il Foglio” on May 14, 2009, the second in a major seven-part survey on Holland.
The author, Giulio Meotti, also writes for the “Wall Street Journal.” Next September, his book-length survey on Israel will be published.
The photo above is entitled “Muslim women in Rotterdam.” It is from an exhibition in 2008 by the Dutch photographers Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek.
In the casbah of Rotterdam
by Giulio Meotti
In Feyenoord, veiled women can be seen everywhere, darting like a flash through the streets of the neighborhood. They avoid any sort of contact, even eye contact, especially with men. Feyenoord is the size of a city, and there are seventy nationalities coexisting there. It is an area that lives on subsidies and residential construction, and it is here that it is most obvious that Holland – with all of its rules against discrimination and all of its moral indignation – is a completely segregated society. Rotterdam is new, having been bombed twice by the Luftwaffe during the second world war. Like Amsterdam, it is below sea level, but unlike the capital it does not enjoy an image of reckless abandon. In Rotterdam, it is the Arab shops selling halal food that dominate the cityscape, not the neon lights of the prostitutes. Everywhere are casbah-cafes, travel agencies offering flights to Rabat and Casablanca, posters expressing solidarity with Hamas, or offering affordable Dutch language lessons.
Was 1948 a Jihad? Gelber reviews Morris
I recently posted a piece by Benny Morris on the false notion of “secular” when applied to Palestinian identity, intentions, or ideology, and a commenter, sshender, sent me to a review of Morris’ recent book, 1948, in Azure, by Yoav Gelber, the director of the Herzl Institute for the Research and Study of Zionism at the University of Haifa, who criticizes Morris’ claim that 1948 was a Jihad. Relevant excerpts below, with my comments throughout.
Autumn 5769 / 2008, no. 34
Reviewed by Yoav Gelber
1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris
Yale University Press, 2008, 523 pages.The basic facts of the first Arab-Israeli war are well known but worth repeating.
[snip]
These are the basic facts regarding the 1947-1948 war, known to Israelis as the “War of Independence” and to Palestinians as the “Nakba”—the catastrophe. About these facts there is almost no dispute. About everything else to do with the war, however, from the smallest details to the grandest strategies, there is nothing but dispute. In this ongoing controversy over the events of 1948, which for both peoples residing in the Land of Israel touches the rawest of nerves, a unique place is reserved for Benny Morris.
A professor of history in the Middle East studies department of Ben-Gurion University, Benny Morris published his first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, in 1987 and immediately caused a firestorm of controversy. The book’s impact shifted the public and academic spotlight from Israel’s victory in 1948 to the suffering of the Palestinians during the war and its aftermath. In the years since then, Morris has been attacked by Jewish and Arab historians alike, to say nothing of the vicious criticisms leveled against him by those who have not even read a single one of his works.
It is not difficult to understand why: The book profoundly undermined the Israeli narrative of the war, which held that the Arab leadership was responsible for the creation of the refugee problem by calling for the Palestinians to flee, assuring them that they would be able to return in the wake of the victorious Arab armies. This being said, Morris also repudiated the Arab narrative of 1948, which claimed that Israel intentionally expelled the Palestinians according to a prearranged plan. Regrettably, Morris’s Jewish critics ignored this aspect of his work. Arab readers, for their part, did the same, quoting only those select portions of Morris’s book that reinforced their version of events.
Although Morris was at first identified with Israel’s “new historians”—who take a critical and generally pro-Palestinian view of the Arab-Israeli conflict—he gradually integrated into the mainstream of Israeli historiography. Some post-Zionist historians, from whom he has since distanced himself, claim that Morris has changed his political spots in the wake of the second Intifada. These scholars, captive to the post-modern idea that there is no such thing as objective history, refuse to accept the possibility that a true historian relies on the facts to reach his conclusions and does not impose his own convictions or ideology on the evidence, as they themselves tend to do. Morris has not undergone a sudden conversion. Like any good historian, he has simply been influenced by the accumulated source material.
I’m not in a position to judge here, since I have little expertise, but I don’t think the two arguments are mutually exclusive. I suspect that in his work up to 2000, Morris was involved in what might be called “therapeutic history” — if we Israelis self-criticize for what we’ve done to you Palestinians, maybe we can get the ball rolling. This might explain why some of his work in this period is so shoddy (see Ephraim Karsh’s Fabricating History: The “New Historians”). Hence his shift after 2000, his empirical response to “the accumulated material” may well represent a response to a wake-up call.
I personally, being pomo in my own fashion, think historians inevitably have passions and commitments that drive their work — few are so bloodless as to do antiquarianism out of some pure commitment to “just the facts, ma’am.” The issue is not so much their driving passions, but their respect for the evidence, especially the refractory evidence. Hence, part of the accumulation of evidence that may have influenced Morris, appropriately, was the failure of the Oslo Process.
Arabs Advise Obama on the Workings of Honor-Shame Culture: Rubin parses MEMRI collection
I was planning to do a post on this collection of comments posted by MEMRI, but Barry Rubin beat me to it, and since he knows the players well, I’ll just repost his with my additional comments.
Don’t Just Take My Word for It: Arab Moderates Warn About Mistaken Western Policies
What do moderate Arabs think about what Westerners think about the Middle East? Usually, such matters are raised only in private conversation with those of long acquaintance in whom the speaker has personal trust. But now we have several statements by respected Arabs who are relatively liberal but also part of the intellectual establishment.
This is an important point. As James C. Scott pointed out in his classic, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, there are public transcripts and private ones. It’s rare to get a view of the private transcript, the one that undermines the public, official line.
Thanks to MEMRI for gathering and translating these remarks. They could be just about the most important things you read about the Middle East this year.
As you go along, imagine the reaction of the conventional wisdom types if another American or European had said these things.
First up is Tareq al-Homayed, chief editor of al-Sharq al-Awsat, which might just be the best Arab newspaper in the world today. It combines the unusual characteristics of being both Saudi-owned yet relatively liberal.
Homayed explained that if the West is too lenient to extremists this is a grave mistake. Once you start talking to Hizballah you might as well negotiate with al-Qaida. “Openness for the sake of openness,” he concluded, “makes the situation more complicated and sends the wrong message.”
Studies in Demopathy II: The Pope and Tamimi
In my second of a series on demopathy, illuminated by Nonie Darwish’s book, Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law I want to look at the remarks made by Shiekh Tayseer Tamimi, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority at what was billed as a “dialogue” and at which Tamimi, probably because of his earlier performance before Pope John Paul II in 2000, was not invited to speak.
As a preliminary, let me quote some of Darwish’s book on the issue of Muslim views of the “other” (courtesy of my Kindle):
In Islam, my religion at that time, we looked at ourselves and others very differently. “They are sinners…. Non-Muslims are sinners…. We are Muslims.” They are guilty, but we are innocent. Muslims and non-Muslims were never considered as equals in anything, not even in our imperfections as human beings. The Qur’an and the Hadith were consumed with the idea of kaffir (non-Muslim) representing “evil” and Muslim representing “good,” which caused a split in how human beings were perceived-as good and bad, superior and inferior, human and sub-human. Our Islamic education stressed the inequality between Muslims and kaffir. Kaffir is the dreaded word used against others and also against Muslims who deviate or do not follow Allah’s commands to the letter. Kaffir means “infidel,” or a person who goes astray.
She then goes on to quote both the interview with Choudary that I featured in the previous post and another with Imam Abdul Makin in an East London mosque, who, asked why Allah would tell Muslims to kill and rape innocent non-Muslims, replied, “Because non-Muslims are never innocent. They are guilty of denying Allah and his prophet.”
Darwish continues:
As to Muslims who disagree with the above views, they are also considered kuffar. On March 15, 2008, two Saudi writers, Abdullah bin Bejad al-Otaibi and Yousef Aba al-Khail, each called for a reconsideration of the Wahabi notion that all non-Muslims are kuffar, prompting a top religious figure, Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, to call for their deaths in a fatwa published on his Web site.
That is the great divide – the notion of innocence and guilt, sinners and non-sinners, Muslim and non-Muslim-that every Muslim is commanded to believe and act upon. It is how we were trained to perceive others and explains why the majority of Muslims today are silent about Islamic terrorism. The Muslim outlook regarding the rest of humanity shapes how Muslim society thinks and acts politically and culturally at all levels. That is why the two Egyptian Christian boys Mario and Andrew together with the Christian minority in Egypt have suffered for fourteen hundred years. And that is also why almost all Egyptian Muslims have been stripped of their empathy for and support of Christian Egyptians and therefore fail to stand up for their basic kaffir human rights.
With this profoundly illiberal mindset in mind, let’s look at Tamimi’s behavior and remarks.
Muslim cleric slams Israel to pope, raising anger
11 May 2009 18:27:07 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Alastair MacdonaldJERUSALEM, May 11 (Reuters) – A senior Palestinian Muslim cleric fiercely denounced Israeli policy in Jerusalem in the presence of Pope Benedict on Monday and appealed to the pope to help end what he called the “crimes” of the Jewish state.
The speech, at the end of a meeting between the pope and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy engaged in contacts among the three main religions in Jerusalem, angered both the Vatican and Israel’s chief rabbinate, which said it would boycott the dialogue forum until the Palestinians barred the cleric.
Referring to Palestinian Muslims and Christians, Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi said: “We struggle together and suffer together from the oppression of the Israeli occupation.
“We look forward together to liberation and independence and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”
The incident further marred the start of the German-born pope’s five-day tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories, after criticism by some Jews that a speech at a Holocaust memorial did not go far enough to mend Catholic-Jewish rifts.
Studies in demopathy: Muslims respond to Pope’s visit #1
I’m reading Nonie Darwish’s new book, Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. In it she lays out some of the problem we in the West have in understanding Islam. For us, the basic principle of dealing with the “other” is mutuality, or, as the saying goes, “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” (A nice proverb that dates back to the 17th century, with variants that go back to Rome, and serves as a point of meditation at Wikipedia for the rule of fairness.)
But among many (most?) Muslims, where Islam’s incalculable superiority to all other religions justifies the dominion of Muslims over all other people, such reciprocity not only does not exist, it actually borders on heresy (see her chapter, “Life behind the Muslim curtain”). Indeed, by some Islamic (or only Islamist?) definitions, Muslims are by definition innocent and non-Muslims are by definition guilty — they have rejected the perfect teachings of the prophet PBUH — and therefore deserving of punishment. This is the ideology behind Jihad.
For a good example of the shock of a European faced with this implacable double standard which turns the condemnation by Muslim “moderates” of “killing innocent (i.e., Muslims)” in terror attacks on its head, watch this interview on the BBC (HT/Islam in Action):
One could hardly have a better example of the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. With this in mind, here’s an article about Jordanian Muslims demanding an apology from the pope for insulting their religion.
Pope’s address disappoints Muslim leaders
AMMAN (AFP) — Jordanian clerics expressed disappointment that Pope Benedict XVI in an address to Muslim leaders on Saturday failed to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam.
“We wanted him to clearly apologise,” Sheikh Yusef Abu Hussein, mufti of the southern city of Karak, told AFP after the pope’s address in Amman’s huge Al-Hussein Mosque.
“What the pope said (in 2006) about the Prophet Mohammed is untrue. Islam did not spread through the power of sword. It’s a religion of tolerance and faith,” Hussein said.
Now I find this fascinating. The Muslims want an apology from the pope for saying that Islam spread by the sword, when it did in virtually every place for its first three generations, and many (most?) Muslims glory in the fact. On the contrary, Sheikh Yusef abu Hussein wants the pope to acknowledge that Islam is a religion of tolerance and faith (whatever the latter term means)” when it has little history of tolerance – certainly by modern standards, the best it can do is religious apartheid with its dhimmi system.
What can such an “apology” mean? It can’t possibly be sincere, since, from the perspective of a non-Muslim, it’s clearly not true. (I except from this issue of sincerity the PCP dupes who really do think Islam is a tolerant religion, and could make such an apology sincerely.) But from the Muslim point of view, anyone familiar with the glorious place of Jihad in the history of Islam, can’t possibly take this seriously. Indeed, were the pope to repeat the words they want to put in his mouth, they’d be laughing themselves silly.
Was WW II Necessary? Not if you don’t do history (Fishman on Buchanan and Baker)
I have a colleague in my department whose students recently agreed with the notion that we should have pursued the policy of appeasement with Germany even after their invasion of Poland. Sign of the times? Part of an astonishing failure of our historical understanding? They are not alone. Published authors are now arguing the same. Joel Fishman, whose expertise on appeasement I have already highlighted here, has a review of two recent books that try and make the case. Well worth reading.
Fishman raises a critical question: at what point does writing “history” get so bad/dishonest, that it’s no longer legitimate history. Let the reader judge.
“Bunkum as History: The Revisionist Quest for Lost Innocence”
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan, New York: Crown, 2008, 518 pp.
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, 567 pp.
Reviewed by Joel Fishman
Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2009, pp. 153-161.The two titles above may be non-fiction, but they are not legitimate history-writing. Both are based on facts, but facts that each of the authors has carefully selected with an eye to conveying his own personal message: that the Second World War was an unnecessary, wasteful, senseless, and barbaric endeavor which did not save Western civilization but instead dealt it a major setback. This literature, ostensibly relating to events of the past, is closely linked to the mood of the present, particularly the larger debate in the U.S. about its place in the world. In its broadest context, the question is whether the U.S. should continue to assume its exceptional role as a super-power, or should it conduct a foreign policy similar to that of Europe, or perhaps Canada, one based more on “soft power” ― persuasion and international consensus?
In the background, there seems to be a consensus of public opinion that the intervention in Iraq was mismanaged, even if this policy may have protected the country against terrorist attacks in the post-9/11 era. During the recent election campaign, it was repeatedly asserted that America’s intervention abroad and foreign aid program had misdirected its resources and attention. It would have been preferable, some asserted, for the U.S. to turn inward and cultivate its own garden. Each following his own distinct logic, Patrick Buchanan, an ultra-conservative (a genuine old-con) politician and author, and Nicholson Baker, a fashionable contemporary writer and pacifist, present arguments compatible with the sentiments described above.
Is this similar to the bizarre congruence of the “realists” Walt-Mearsheimer and the “moralist” Carter? It certainly comes out appeasement both ways.
What Do I Think of the Arab-Israeli Conflict? Answers to a Questionnaire
I was recently asked by some students from a Christian private school in Lexington to answer some questions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I post them here, just in case any readers have suggestions to make in the future when I deal with these issues.
What do you think is the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
On one level, it’s a conflict between two different people for the same territory. But there are plenty of such conflicts that have been resolved, including ones where the damages in lives destroyed and uprooted have been far more terrible than what the Palestinians refer to as the Naqba. In India and Pakistan the division created tens of millions of refugees and over a million people were slaughtered by both sides. In Cyprus, tens of thousands were uprooted to divide the island in two. so the issue is not what happened, but why this conflict, more than any other, is so impossible to solve.
Here, I think the only viable explanation is to understand the blow to Arab/Muslim honor at the creation of a free and independent state run by non-Muslims in Dar-al-Islam. (For a larger discussion of this, see here.) As the Athenians explained to the Melians: “It’s not so terrible to be conquered by those who should rule (like the Spartans, or in this case the Christians), but it is unbearable to be defeated by those who should be subject (like the Melians or, in this case, the Jews).”
If you don’t know about the Muslim principles of Dar-al-Islam (the realm of submission where Muslims rule) and Dar-al-Harb (the land of the sword, with which Muslims are at war), you can’t possibly understand either the permanent hostility of the Arabs to Israel (including their refusal to recognize her), or the willingness of the Arabs to keep the Palestinians suffering in refugee camps so that they can be used as a weapon against Israel.
By Muslim standards, the very existence of Israel is a theological blasphemy and an unbearable affront to their honor. That’s what the Naqba is about. If it were about the terrible suffering of the Palestinians who had to flee as a result of the war (which is what the “pro-”Palestinian would have us believe), then the Arabs and Palestinian leaders would have done something to make their lives better (including using a tiny fraction of the trillions of petrodollars Arab countries have taken in in the last half-century). Instead they confined them to permanent refugee camps (no cement floors allowed, they had to live in tents and the mud for years).
It’s striking that during the Oslo peace process, when the Palestinian authority had control of both refugee camps and territory, they didn’t take one refugee family out of those camps. Indeed, the problem of Oslo was not too many Israeli settlements, but of too few Palestinian settlements. The PA did not behave as if they wanted a state, but as if they wanted to destroy the Israeli state.
What solutions would you offer to solve this problem?
Ralph Peters on 21st Century Diplomacy and War
Oao has drawn our attention to a piece by Ralph Peters in Security Affairs. I think it’s well worth considering in terms of what has made us so vulnerable. I am personally still convinced that we can do a great deal to fight this enemy in the world of discourse, but that does not mean it does not also include some decisive victories in warfare. But Peters has some harsh words for the Western media as well.
I welcome comments on any aspect of this important think-piece.
Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars
Ralph Peters
Security AffairsThe most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.
Much has been made over the past two decades of the emergence of “asymmetric warfare,” in which the ill-equipped confront the superbly armed by changing the rules of the battlefield. Yet, such irregular warfare is not new—it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear—and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies—Islamist extremists—may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win.
There are multiple reasons for this American amnesia about the cost of victory. First, we, the people, have lived in unprecedented safety for so long (despite the now-faded shock of September 11, 2001) that we simply do not feel endangered; rather, we sense that what nastiness there may be in the world will always occur elsewhere and need not disturb our lifestyles. We like the frisson of feeling a little guilt, but resent all calls to action that require sacrifice.
Second, collective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. As someone born only seven years after the ovens of Auschwitz stopped smoking, I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today.
Third, ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely.
Fourth, an unholy alliance between the defense industry and academic theorists seduced decisionmakers with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war. In pursuit of billions in profits, defense contractors made promises impossible to fulfill, while think tank scholars sought acclaim by designing warfare models that excited political leaders anxious to get off cheaply, but which left out factors such as the enemy, human psychology, and 5,000 years of precedents.
Fifth, we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit; the privileged among us have lost the sense of grit in daily life. We grow up believing that safety from harm is a right that others are bound to respect as we do. Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue.
Last, but not least, history is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.
By 1965, we had already forgotten what it took to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and the degeneration of our historical sense has continued to accelerate since then. More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944, as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, prize-hunting reporters insist that our losses in Iraq have been catastrophic, while those in Afghanistan are unreasonably high.
We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars” has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.
One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you. Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence (often quite violent in its reality) only worked because his opponent was willing to play along. Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (or today’s) China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Effective non-violence is contractual. Where the contract does not exist, Gandhi dies.
Note that my definition of honor-shame culture states: a culture in which a man is allowed, expected to, even required to shed blood for the sake of his honor, and my definition of a civil polity is one which systematically substitutes a discourse of fairness for violence in dispute settlement. We want to act as if the social contract of a civil polity were extended by verbal fiat — a form of wishful thinking — to everyone. Unfortunately, civil behavior is at a big disadvantage where some players do not disarm, and even greater disadvantage when its own leaders are dupes of demopaths.
Islam, A Religion Like any Other? Tom Holland weighs in
Tom Holland is an extraordinary (non-academic) historian who normally specializes in ancient history. His latest book is an excellent survey of the year 1000 which takes my side in the debate over whether the population of Europe saw that as an apocalyptic year (my position) or not (most of the academic historians). His latest meditations on the failure of Christians (in his case, English [post-]Christians, to understand how fundamentally different Islam is from their own understanding of their own religion offer a fine counter-part to the well-meaning cognitive egocentrism of Chris Seiple.
Kingdoms not of this world
Tom Holland
Published 02 April 2009To imagine that Islam can be transformed with a little nudge here and there into a kind of Church of England with hijabs is absurd, writes Tom Holland. For Christians and Muslims worship different gods, and this has a huge influence on the relationship between religion and state, even in the modern world
There is an optimistic notion, one popular among mystics and atheists alike, that all gods are essentially the same. “I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim”: this may sound like a manifesto for the National Secular Society, but was in fact written in the Middle Ages by the great Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. His vision of enlightenment, one which saw the reality of God as being akin to the veiled peak of a mountain, taught that the world’s religions, though called by different names, are all simply paths that lead to the one identical summit. The appeal of this philosophy, in a multi-faith society such as Britain’s, is obvious. Indeed, at a time when even our future king frets at the prospect of ruling as the defender of merely a single faith, it must have come to rank as the new Establishment orthodoxy. What could be less 21st century, after all, than to believe that the road to heaven might lead through the Church of England alone?
And yet, for all that, the pretence that peoples of different faiths are heading towards the one single destination does simultaneously stand in the finest tradition of Anglican humbug. The Church of England, ever since Elizabeth I declared herself reluctant to make windows into men’s souls, has been dependent for its existence on fudge. The pews may be emptier nowadays than they used to be, and yet the English, by and large, remain wedded to presumptions that are the theological equivalent of milky tea.
“That would be an ecumenical matter” – so Father Ted coached the deranged Father Jack to reply to anything, no matter how challenging, that might be put to him. The joke would have been even better suited to a vicar. The C of E was deliberately fashioned to provide Protestants with as big a tent as possible. Nowadays, with an urgent need to accommodate not only Catholics, but peoples from a non-Christian background as well, that tent necessarily has to appear yet bigger still. Hence, it would seem, the widespread Anglican conviction that there is no problem that cannot somehow be put to rights by an interfaith forum. Far from diluting the peculiarly English brand of Christianity, the ethos of multiculturalism is in many ways the quintessence of it.
Nevertheless, as the schism over homosexuality that is dividing Anglicanism itself has served wearyingly to demonstrate, compromise depends on people’s willingness not to push their own convictions too far. Unfortunately – or fortunately, according to on one’s point of view – not everyone is prepared to sacrifice deeply held principles on the altar of muddling through. Inevitably, the more grandstanding there is, the less sustainable becomes the fiction that people’s beliefs and ethics are all somehow of a kind. The big tent starts to look ragged, to come apart at the seams. A suspicion grows that the philosophy paraded daily on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day just might be wrong, and that the various gods namechecked before the eight o’clock news might not, in fact, all be the same.
The resulting sense of dislocation is hardly unique to our own times. The pagans of classical antiquity, who would cheerfully adopt the gods of alien pantheons and mix and match them with their own, were invariably brought to experience this sense of dislocation whenever they confronted Christianity’s one true God. Christians in turn might sometimes feel a similar uneasiness when obliged to contemplate the deity of Islam.
For instance, it is said that shortly after Muhammad’s death in 632AD the followers of the Prophet sent an embassy to Heraclius, the Christian emperor in Constantinople, demanding the surrender of his dominions and his conversion to Islam, on pain of invasion. “These people,” the emperor is said to have responded in some bemusement, “are like the twilight, caught between day and nightfall, neither sunlit nor dark – for although they are not illumined by the light of Christ, neither are they steeped in the darkness of idolatry.”
Not even Tony Blair at his most histrionic has ever put it quite like that – and, self-evidently, 7th-century Byzantium, with its murderous power struggles, its delusions of grandeur, and its imploding economy, was far removed from the Britain of New Labour. Nevertheless, Heraclius’s simile does pose in peculiarly acute form a question with which Christians have always had to wrestle: are the similarities between their own faith and Islam more profound than the differences?
The Liberal Dilemma: A Dupe of Demopaths Explains how to make inter-religious dialogue work
In my honor-shame class today we read about honor-killings, and their role in restoring men’s sense of well-being by killing disobedient women. The discussion was very lively as we tried to figure out how to deal with the mutual contradictions between liberal beliefs about human nature, and the evidence from the dossiers on honor-killings that depict a profoundly cruel and tyrannical mindset on the part of the men defending their family honor, and — perhaps more distressing — the larger community supporting, if not demanding, their behavior.
As part of the exercise in dealing with the moral problems, I assigned the article below by Chris Seiple on how to dialogue with Muslims. At one point, a student made the classic liberal case that honor-killings are morally repugnant and wondered aloud how, given the peer-pressure involved, we can get Muslims to oppose them. I put to him the classic progressive challenge: isn’t that cultural imperialism? Who are you — we — to tell them what to do? In struggling with the problem, he ended up crying out “auuuugghhhh” in frustration.
Students laughed; some clapped. Exactly. What do we do?
I don’t have a clear answer to that now, but what I do think I have to offer is some thoughts about what we shouldn’t do. And I want to use the deeply well-intentioned Seiple’s meditations as guide to all the errors involved in the current fashionable approach (this one by a Nobel Prize winner) to dealing with Muslim honor: respect their sense of honor; do not engage in gratuitous provocation; avoid insult. Seiple’s essay highlights brilliantly how liberal thinking literally twists itself into its opposite and creates the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism. Prepare to have your head hurt.
HT: Dan Pipes. See also Doc’s Talk
10 terms not to use with Muslims
There’s a big difference between what we say and what they hear.By Chris Seiple
Christine Science Monitor
March 28, 2009 editionARLINGTON, VA. – In the course of my travels – from the Middle East to Central Asia to Southeast Asia – it has been my great privilege to meet and become friends with many devout Muslims. These friendships are defined by frank respect as we listen to each other; understand and agree on the what, why, and how of our disagreements, political and theological; and, most of all, deepen our points of commonality as a result.
I’d very much like to hear about those points of commonality, deepened by these discussions. I have difficulty understanding what “frank respect” means. We’re frank because we respect each other? Or we frankly (overtly, obviously) show respect for each other. I have difficulty, given the subsequent discussion, imagining Mr. Seiple being frank about anything.
I have learned much from my Muslim friends, foremost this: Political disagreements come and go, but genuine respect for each other, rooted in our respective faith traditions, does not.
Again, I don’t understand. Right now, I think there are some very long-term political disagreements. And one of them concerns just the topic he wants to oppose to what he considers transient political issues — the alleged tolerance and respect that Muslims [don't] have for infidels. How many of the Muslims that Mr. Seiple has met in his world travels, who expressed their respect for his faith, really meant it?
(I’m certainly not saying “none,” but I do think that any fervent Muslim will have difficulty feeling genuine respect for non-Muslims. As far as I know, there is no category in Islam as in Judaism of the “righteous gentile.”)
And while I am willing to believe that some of his interlocutors genuinely respect Seiple’s religion and outreach, I’m also fairly confident that a number of them told him what he wanted to hear and felt contempt for his lack of conviction in his own faith. Indeed, one of the things one must ask oneself is not, “what do these interlocutors say to may face?” but “what do these interlocutors say to their fellow Muslims behind my back.
(Again, I’m not even saying that in cases where they make fun of us to their fellow Muslims they do so because they feel it; it could be just yielding to [heavy] peer pressure.)
If there is no respect, there is no relationship, merely a transactional encounter that serves no one in the long term.
This is pure “positive-sum” thinking. If one rethinks this from a zero-sum perspective (i.e., pre-modern Islam [or Christianity]), the “merely transactional encounter” becomes a vehicle for manipulating the “other” into taking a submissive posture which a) forbids him to uphold his values or crticize mine, b) compels him to let me press mine without opposition, and c) creates a long-term advantage for my side, then it unquestionably serves me “in the long run.” Seiple assumes that his interlocutors share his deep mutuality (frank respect), and that they understand that only through that will the long run win-win occur.
But what if they’re not thinking that way? What if they’re in the “I win only if you lose” game? Whatever any individual Muslim may be thinking, I suspect that if you present Seiple’s message — only through deep mutual respect for our differences and commonalities, and an acceptance of each other’s “otherness” will peace come to our sorely troubled planet — and get a candid response from the majority of Muslim leaders around the world today, you’ll get either outright laughter or profound hostility.
As President Obama considers his first speech in a Muslim majority country (he visits Turkey April 6-7), and as the US national security establishment reviews its foreign policy and public diplomacy, I want to share the advice given to me from dear Muslim friends worldwide regarding words and concepts that are not useful in building relationships with them. Obviously, we are not going to throw out all of these terms, nor should we. But we do need to be very careful about how we use them, and in what context.
If I understand correctly, Seiple’s now offering us a list of terms that he feels are likely to hurt efforts at “building relationships” with Muslims, and that he learned this from his “dear Muslim friends” — i.e., those he believes have a deep and frank respect for him and his own religious convictions.
1. “The Clash of Civilizations.” Invariably, this kind of discussion ends up with us as the good guy and them as the bad guy. There is no clash of civilizations, only a clash between those who are for civilization, and those who are against it. Civilization has many characteristics but two are foundational: 1) It has no place for those who encourage, invite, and/or commit the murder of innocent civilians; and 2) It is defined by institutions that protect and promote both the minority and the transparent rule of law.
This is an amazing passage… conceptually breathtaking in its disinformation. Let’s begin with the confident assertion: Invariably, this kind of discussion ends up with us as the good guy and them as the bad guy. On the contrary, for those Muslims who view this as a “clash of civilizations,” it’s a no-brainer: they’re the good guys and we’re the bad guys. They care about honor and morality, and we’re a bunch of corrupt, self-indulgent sinners.
This statement betrays how little Seiple actually empathizes with (he overflows with sympathy for) his Muslim interlocutors, and only sees things from his own perspective… which, great-souled man that he is, he will gladly renounce (i.e., the sense that his civilization is better), for the sake of mutual respect (a characteristic Western idea).
But it gets better. Seiple then sets up the opposition between those in favor of civilization and those against it, and defines civilization quite explicitly. 1) It has no place for those who encourage, invite, and/or commit the murder of innocent civilians; and 2) It is defined by institutions that protect and promote both the minority and the transparent rule of law.
Mr. Seiple apparently has no knowledge of civilizations — including European — before the latter half of the 20th century. His first condition is clearly aimed at denouncing terrorism. Of course, unless you insist that civilians are only “innocent” under certain specific situations, we have a Muslim world which is almost unanimous in its approval of killing “non” innocent Israeli civilians, and many more who approve of killing civilians — infidels and Muslims — for political ends. In addition to the “tiny minority” who actually attack civilians, there are widening gyres of Muslims who encourage and invite it.
But the second definition is even more striking and contradictory. This is a purely self-referential Western (or democratic) definition of civilization. Transparency is a modern notion, reinforced by a free press which can report without fear the transgressions of those in power (including judges). As for protecting and — especially — promoting minorities, that is a peculiarly post-WWII phenomenon, fruit of a world aghast at the Holocaust, legislating Geneva Conventions for the world, instituting the United Nations, promoting human rights around the world. No earlier civilization promoted minorities. On the contrary, they saw their authority as a license to put minorities in their place.
Islamic “civilization” (the scare-quotes are in application of Seiple’s definition) does not make the grade here. Dhimmi may mean “protected” (and Seiple may have that in mind), but anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that a) the protection was from the choice of conversion or death, b) there were other groups (pagans) who were not so “protected,” and c) that “protection” involved not promotion but systematic humiliation and subordination.
So what Seiple’s done here is a classic inversion of meaning. In defining “all” civilizations, he’s done just what he said we shouldn’t — made a Eurocentric (Occidento-centric) value judgment that “we are better” (i.e., our values are better than any other; indeed they are the very measure of civilization). But to avoid the “clash of civilizations” he’s granted “civilized” status to everyone else. “They” are civilized like “us.”
Latest Poll of Palestinians Illustrates the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism
The latest polls raise troubling issues which, at the hands of Michael Bar-Zohar’s analysis, sounds a lot like the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism. But then again, how reliable are polls of Palestinians (or anyone). The very tone and context in which the questions are asked can have a huge impact on the answers one gets in any circumstance, a fortiori, in an honor-shame culture.
Comments welcome.
A tragedy of misconceptions
By MICHAEL BAR-ZOHAR
Jerusalem Post, Mar 2, 2009 21:03 | Updated Mar 3, 2009 20:34A survey published on February 5 by the prestigious Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian polling institute, indicates that 46.7 percent of the Palestinians believe that Hamas defeated Israel in the recent fighting in Gaza; 50.8% (compared to 39.3% last April) believe that the rocket attacks should continue, and only 20.8% believe that they are harmful to Palestinian interests. Finally, 55% are convinced that terrorist acts should continue.
These figures illustrate a major aspect of the confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians and, on a wider scope, of the West and the Arab world: a tragedy of misconceptions, a confrontation of two societies that do not understand each other and naively believe that people on the other side have the same way of thinking and reasoning as them. As long as both sides persist in this erroneous perception of each other, there is going to be no peace in the Middle East.
In 1997 the Four Mothers organization was founded. Its goal was the full pullout of the IDF from south Lebanon. Every year, Four Mothers said, we are losing 25 to 30 soldiers in the battle with Hizbullah. Isn’t it a pity to sacrifice these young lives? Let’s pull out of Lebanon, and the Lebanese will leave us in peace. The Four Mothers won and in 2000 prime minister Ehud Barak evacuated every single inch of Lebanese territory.
But the result was the opposite. Nobody in the Arab world believed that Israel had pulled out of Lebanon because of its concern for 25 casualties a year. The retreat was perceived in the Arab world as a victory by Hizbullah over the IDF, and the logical conclusion of Hizbullah and other extremist organizations was that they should continue fighting till Israel’s final defeat. The late Faisal Husseini, a respected Palestinian leader, once told me openly: “Michael, if you don’t agree to our demands [about Jerusalem], we’ll talk to you in Lebanese.” Even the sophisticated Husseini thought that the Hizbullah formula was the one that brought results.
Breathtaking Folly — Surprise! — on the pages of the NYT: Roger Cohen’s Black Hole
I guess I’m like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football. I am continuously amazed at how foolish our pundits are and how ready major newspapers are to give them full rein on their editorial pages.
I’ve already fisked Roger Cohen before for his naïve PCP1, but this surpasses credulity (his and mine).
By ROGER COHEN
Published: March 8, 2009
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grabbed headlines with an invitation to Iran to attend a conference on Afghanistan, but the significant Middle Eastern news last week came from Britain. It has “reconsidered” its position on Hezbollah and will open a direct channel to the militant group in Lebanon.Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah has long been treated by the United States as a proscribed terrorist group. This narrow view has ignored the fact that both organizations are now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible.
So were the Nazis an entrenched part of political and social movements in Germany and Austria. Including them in diplomacy didn’t make peace possible, it made it impossible. What on earth makes someone like Cohen think that by “including” a group that has a virulently anti-semitic platform and calls on its people to commit genocide, that somehow that will lead to peace?
Britain aligned itself with the U.S. position on Hezbollah, but has now seen its error. Bill Marston, a Foreign Office spokesman, told Al Jazeera: “Hezbollah is a political phenomenon and part and parcel of the national fabric in Lebanon. We have to admit this.”
Hallelujah.
This “Hallelujah,” more than anything else in the article, has me slackjawed. It’s one thing to clench your teeth and take your medicine like a man, it’s another thing to cheer as your being rearended by roadrage. The only reason I can come up with for such an extraordinary show of joy is double: 1) Cohen has no knowledge of what Hizbullah and Hamas are really about (how characteristically inappropriate for a pundit), and 2) he’s so convinced that being nice will work that, now that we’re being nice, it’s time to cheer because everything is about to work. I hate to say it, but I’m beginning to agree with oao and cynic here, we’re in deep doodoo.
Precisely the same thing could be said of Hamas in Gaza. It is a political phenomenon, part of the national fabric there.
One difference is that Hezbollah is in the Lebanese national unity government, whereas Hamas won the free and fair January 2006 elections to the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority, only to discover Middle Eastern democracy is only democracy if it produces the right result.
And here I thought that that kind of nonsense was going to disappear quietly as Hamas showed its true colors. Apparently, not to the color-blind. What drives me crazy about these kinds of formulas is that they at once grant the status of “democracy” at the same time as they fail to hold the population responsible for their vote. “What, you have a problem with the Nazis? They were fairly elected.” The superficiality of such formulations, combined with the joy of ceding to the perverse choices of the Arab electorates in question, strike me as sure signs of a massive loss of common sense.
Scruton stumbles through explaining how the West should deal with Islam’s challenge.
A number of commenters have discussed Roger Scruton’s essay in Azure, “Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation.” Some find it excellent even while others find the conclusion on “forgiveness” confusing if not troubling. I read it with increasing dismay and the results are the fisking below. It’s, alas, a good example of how (even mild) Christian supersessionism, makes it so hard for even sophisticated and (appropriately) politically incorrect thinkers to grapple with what confronts us from Islam.
Azure Winter 5769 / 2009, no. 35
Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation
By Roger ScrutonWhat it is about our civilization that causes such resentment, and why we must defend it.
The West today is involved in a protracted and violent struggle with the forces of radical Islam. This conflict is intensely difficult, both because of our enemy’s dedication to his cause, and also, perhaps most of all, because of the enormous cultural shift that has occurred in Europe and America since the end of the Vietnam War. Put simply, the citizens of Western states have lost their appetite for foreign wars; they have lost the hope of scoring any but temporary victories; and they have lost confidence in their way of life. Indeed, they are no longer sure what that way of life requires of them.
That’s an interesting formula, since it is quasi-religious, in the sense that religion does answer the question “what life requires” of the adherent. Having translated religious morality into a secular idiom (e.g., Kant), having dismissed religions as so much hocus-pocus, modern secular people who care about morality don’t know what to do but push the “most moral” elements to the extreme. As a result we get a “progressive left” that is at once scornful of religion (especially of the “white” variety, Judaism and Christianity) even as it pushes a “turn the other cheek, love your enemies as yourself” morality in international relations. “Wildly inappropriate” comes to mind.
Of course, the kind of wisdom expressed in a biblical text like, “nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his dispute,” could not penetrate the mentality that, for example, supports the “poor Palestinians” no matter how badly they behave. Religiously deracinated “ethics” can be as dangerous a phenomenon as religious zealotry. (Or is that moral equivalence?)
At the same time, they have been confronted with a new opponent, one who believes that the Western way of life is profoundly flawed, and perhaps even an offense against God. In a “fit of absence of mind,” Western societies have allowed this opponent to gather in their midst; sometimes, as in France, Britain, and the Netherlands, in ghettos which bear only tenuous and largely antagonistic relations to the surrounding political order.
I like the expression “fit of absence of mind,” because it was a fit, a blood-libel induced fit that led “progressives” to adopt Jihadi hatreds, and walk out on anyone who dared to criticize Muslims (a fortiori Palestinians) because that made their third-world colleagues in the fight for justice and truth “uncomfortable.”
And in both America and Europe there has been a growing desire for appeasement: a habit of public contrition; an acceptance, though with heavy heart, of the censorious edicts of the mullahs; and a further escalation in the official repudiation of our cultural and religious inheritance. Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the archbishop of Canterbury would give a public lecture advocating the incorporation of Islamic religious law (shari’ah) into the English legal system. Today, however, many people consider this to be an arguable point, and perhaps the next step on the way to peaceful compromise.
It’s even worse. Twenty — even ten — years ago, it would have been inconceivable… now he says it’s inevitable.
PC, Prohibited Analysis, and the “Arab Mind”: More from Green’s thesis
In the version I’m revising for publication, this section is now called “Discouraged Analysis.” This section is taken from a chapter called “Flawed Assumptions and a Poor Understanding of the Threat”, which opens by explaining that the National Security Strategy (2006) is based on some PC, but probably incorrect notions about Islam. Hence the below…
PROHIBITED ANALYSIS
The national security strategists do not make their assumptions in a vacuum. They do so in the context of an intellectual environment that pre-ordains some conclusions and discourages others. In essence, there are accepted judgments Westerners may levy with or without support, and there are judgments deemed unacceptable despite support. It is the unintended byproduct of a benevolent, intellectual environment designed to correct a human history filled with uninformed, unjustified, and unfortunate bigotry. However, rather than removing moral judgments from intellectual pursuits altogether — and this would be a prudent philosophy for achieving objectivity — Western intelligentsia, including mainstream media and academia, allows penetrating, sometimes derisive critiques of its own culture while disallowing it of other cultures.
Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind has to be the most enduring example of a solid, if imperfect, work routinely rejected by modern scholars as “emblematic of a bygone era,” Orientalist á la Edward Said’s definition, racist, “lurid,” and, like Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, too general to be accurate or of any use. Critics deride neo-conservatives in the current administration for reading it; some of the more polemic critics claim it “…provided the intellectual backdrop for the torture and sexual abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib.”[1]
Rejecting Patai’s work as a disfavored “type of thinking,” one anthropologist ironically dismisses it as “culture talk,” while another claims “[Patai] can no longer be taken seriously.” In true, universalist form, critic Emram Qureshi suggests, “Rather than plumbing some mythical ‘Arab mind,’ we should affirm the shared humanity that transcends our differences and binds us all together.” Lee Smith, whom National Public Radio interviewed without contest, eloquently demonstrates the accepted discourse on Patai:
The very title of The Arab Mind suggests that it’s possible, and desirable, to reduce a set of cultural ideas and circumstances to a single concept. Patai’s term is more than the vulgar shorthand of mass politics (e.g., “the black community”). It belongs to an old tradition that classified races according to their ostensibly characteristic traits, a field pioneered by 19th-century European writers and shared by, among others, T.E. Lawrence. “They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation.”[2]
Racism-driven inquiry certainly did leave an indelible mark on “the academic mind.” The rejection of obviously flawed and bigoted analysis from the 19th century, however, has produced its own problems. Analysts are now required to assume the universality of human character and prohibited from inquiries like Patai’s, lest they be lumped in with the likes of 19th century bigots.
The problem, of course, is that there are differences between cultures and religions that affect behavior and judgments—this cannot be gainsaid. Moreover, it deprives such terms as “Arab” and “Western” of any utility by picking them apart with incessant particularization. It could be inappropriate to use the term American, for instance, because there are fifty diverse states, hundreds of counties in some of them, thousands of towns and cities, as well as a wealth of cultures and subcultures — in the United States alone. Because it would be difficult to find many U.S. citizens who conform to every character trait considered quintessentially American, the term American can have no use, so the argument goes.
Cognitive Warfare: More from Stuart Green’s thesis
More from Stuart Green’s thesis, The Problem of Cognitive Warfare, this time from chapter 3.
The Discourse and the Cognitive Offensive
Any discussion of the cognitive offensive must begin with a discussion of the discourse, for it is the accepted discourse cognitive warriors see as the strategic target. Limited to the issue or conflict at hand, the discourse may be considered a relatively small memeplex that finds its anchor in larger environmental memeplexes such as culture, religion, prevailing academic paradigms, economic traditions etc. It can, however, be manipulated by outside influences through transparent, open debate, or a protracted information campaign that makes skillful use of propaganda, violence, and knowledge of the adversary’s environmental vulnerabilities. The degree to which the accepted discourse is vulnerable to destruction from the outside depends on the nature of the contributing environmental factors.
Information and “Information”—The Accepted Discourse. It is important here to discuss the transformation of information into “information.” There must be a careful distinction between information meant to persuade and “information” meant to persuade. That is, there must be a way to differentiate between “information” cynically distributed for effect and information—less the quotation marks—distributed for effect but believed by its propagators to be true and free of exaggeration, regardless of the reality.
One could argue, for instance, that the Palestinians’ uttered beliefs are no more propaganda than those of many Jewish settlers who feel a strong emotional and historical connection to the land. Nonetheless, in the context of cognitive warfare and the pressing need for persuasion, there comes a point at which information ceases to be the heartfelt, honest articulation of one’s views. Disconnected from the desire for expression or articulation and no longer parallel to the propagator’s perception of the truth, it emulates propaganda in the traditional, pejorative sense and may be considered an engineered, infectious meme.
As time wears on and the conflict’s rhetoric intensifies, propaganda may pull away from empirical and perceived truths. Its propagators, seeking to shift the intellectual locus of legitimacy, attempt to obscure empirical truth by supplanting it with a “new” truth—in other words, manipulation and deception. Brodie offered the Trojan horse and repetition—discussed briefly in chapter three—as just two means by which minds may be deceptively changed. The more successful the campaign, the more acceptable debate peels off the empirical truth, hopefully, from the propagator’s perspective, without the constituents knowing.
The passage of time and the growing intensity of propaganda increase the gap between the acceptable discourse and the empirical truth, which gradually becomes lost or obscured. In the most extreme scenarios, the gap between the empirical truth and acceptable discourse grows so large that the former is perceived as extreme or unlikely.
Figure 1: Changing the Accepted Discourse 1
In their campaign to expose “alternative” points of view, for instance, Holocaust deniers have benefited from time’s passage and the death of most survivors. As the evidence literally dies off and memories fade, the idea that far fewer Jews died during World War II seems less extreme and therefore more acceptable, particularly when that idea is pitched as a moderate alternative to the notion that the Holocaust never happened. In fact, Holocaust denial is a common theme in the Muslim world (see chapter seven). It presents a major memetic threat to Israel’s legitimacy in international eyes, as much support for the state’s existence is predicated on the Holocaust and the perceived, tenuous survivability of the Jewish race.
Introduction to Bob Simon: Criticism welcome
Here’s the text of remarks I plan to make introducing Simon’s 60-Minutes piece. Suggestions welcome.
We’re about to examine Bob Simon’s lamely titled piece: “Is Time Running out for the Two-State Solution?”
Scientists would consider repeating failed experiments without learning from their mistakes irrational, and repeating experiments that blow up in your face, folly. Alas, that’s precisely what Simon invites us to do by restating all the failed assumptions that guided the previous peace-making experiemnts as if they were axiomatic truths:
• that to achieve a peaceful 2-state solution, Israel must retreat to the 1967 border
• that a Palestinian state has to be free of Jews and therefore Israel must dismantle all the settlements
• that the Palestinians would accept this withdrawl as sufficient for a real peace
• that the settlers are religious fanatics, the primary obsactle to peace
• that the “humiliating” checkpoints and separate roads are the product of Israeli land greed rather than a response to Palestinian terror
• that one can safely ignore the fanatic terrorism of the Palestinian camp, including the teaching of hatred that pervades their media
• that Israel has only three choices: full retreat, apartheid occupation or ethnic cleansing
In so doing he repeatedly misrepresents reality, disguises critical dimensions of the problem, exaggerates those that support his argument, and in the end, creates a perception that endangers:
• Israel, to whom he advises concessions that have consistently resulted in violence
• Palestinians, who will remain in the grip of a self-destructive fanatic leadership which he refuses to expose
• And, ultimately, the West, which, so badly misled, is likely to pursue policies that will benefit global Jihad and paralyze democratic defenses.
Inevitably, one must ask, is this intellectually dishonest, and if so, is it deliberate. We invite you to make up your own mind as we fisk this remarkable piece of “investigative journalism.”
Blair vs. Hamas: The Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism Personified
An Iranian press agency reports on Hamas leader Khaled Mashal’s visit to Iran and his remarks about Tony Blair’s remarks about the conditions of Hamas’ participation in discussions aimed at resolving the conflict. Both the remarks, and the article, represent lucid insights into the deep disconnect between the religious and political culture that produces an organization like Hamas, and that that produces a politician/diplomat like Blair. The Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism at work. Again, like the exchanges between Obama and Ahmadinejad, we have two different notions of honor at play.
Hamas: Blair’s remarks mirror of stupidity
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:15:52 GMTHamas has dismissed a condition set by Mideast Quartet Envoy Tony Blair that the movement must recognize Israel before starting talks.
Mushir al-Masri, the head of Hamas’s parliamentary bloc, said Saturday that raising this “suggestion” testifies that Blair is not familiar with the situation in the Middle East.
He termed Blair’s suggestion as “utterly foolish and useless.”
Both the tone and the content suggest contempt, in particular for how clueless Blair is. He just doesn’t get it: Hamas has no intention of changing its tune on Israel, and believes that the vast majority of the Muslim world (minus some cowardly politicians) is behind it.
Note that they make no effort to “respect” Blair’s feelings. On the contrary, dissing him, public scorn, is part of their act. No reciprocity here.
Note that the article begins with the insult before even revealing the remarks to which it is a reaction.
In an interview with The Times published Saturday, Blair said Hamas must be involved in the Middle East peace process; however, the movement have to recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce ‘violence’.
Although by Western standards this is basic stuff, simple groundrules for reaching a positive-sum solution, by Jihadi standards, this is a joke. From their point of view, he is an idiot, not only because he’s made a demand they will not meet, but because unless he’s got a way to marginalize Hamas, that’s a losing opening gambit, in which case he’s an idiot and a fool. (Let’s hope he’s got some other moves in response to this clearly predictable reaction to his opening condition.)
Obama’s Al Arabiya Interview: Honor-Shame Dynamics and VDH’s Analysis
I’m teaching my favorite course this semester on “Honor-Shame Cultures, Middle Ages, Middle East.” In a discussion, we touched on President Obama’s interview on Al Arabiya and his offering an open hand to soften the clenched fist of the Muslim world, including an offer to meet with Ahmadinejad without conditions. When I asked them what they thought the response might be, the closest I got to an accurate estimation was, “they ignored it.”
I pointed out that, as we had been learning about cultures given to blood revenge, people have long memories, and that they keep score. In that sense, since 1979 — i.e., when Khoumeini took over — Iranians had humiliated the Americans and the West repeatedly, from the seizure of the American Embassy, to kicking the US out of Lebanon via their proxies, Hezbullah, to intimidating the Western intelligentsia with the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, to messing with the US in Iraq, again via proxies. So Iran, having been offered the hand of friendship was less likely to view this offer as a sign of magnanimity and courage and a new opening for a peaceful diplomacy, than as a sign of weakness and cowardice.
And within moments, Ahmadinejad responded precisely as a player in the honor-shame game could be expected to respond, not with magnanimity but with the aggresion one can expect from someone who smells blood: to Obama’s offer to meet without conditions — a position that many warned was an ill-advised concession — Ahmadinejad responded with a host of conditions, from further grovelling (Iran has their own list of grievances against the US), to major on-the-ground unilateral concessions.
And still more predictably, dedicated America haters chimed in — Hugo Chavez blamed Obama for not showing sufficient respect; while our own media discussed his “cool” or “ambiguous” response.
Below, Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis with comments from the honor-shame perspective.
January 27th, 2009 8:40 pm
Dancing Among Landmines—The Obama Al-Arabiya Interview.President Barack Obama is being praised for choosing an Arabic TV network for his first formal television interview on the Dubai-based, Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya news channel. I think we can all appreciate the thinking behind such bold outreach, given that the media at home has chortled to the world that our new guy’s unusual background, in sort
A classic PCP move based on principles of integrity: be self-critical, and generous in judging the other side. They in turn, out of gratitutde for how you’ve shown them respect, will reciprocate. The Israeli progressives tried this on a massive scale during the Oslo process, including rewriting/revisioning Zionist history in the form of an apology to the Palestinians for all the damage Israelis had caused their neighbors.
Now this kind of historiography is a form of “therapeutic” history — “if I apologize, then the other side can accept my acknowledgment of the suffering I’ve caused them, and we can both move on. But therapy is a most dangerous platform on which to build a serious history, not only because it subordinates facts to a rhetorical stance, but because if you misjudge your audience(s), it can misfire. Indeed, not only has post-Zionism (predictably) provoked more hatred — “we told you so, we always knew you were to blame! — among Palestinians and other anti-Zionists, but it has seriously, dangerously, undermined Israeli self-confidence.
Obama, in a minor way, is trying the same maneuver. Let’s hope he’s got a fast learning curve. In any case, both history, and the study of honor-shame cultures suggests that this maneuver will backfire.