Augean Stables

Pierre-André Taguieff sent me two links to articles that deal with the omerta of the French media about Taguieff’s book, « La nouvelle propagande anti juive ». I have already posted on this issue when Robert Redeker lost his position as book reviewer for a small Luxembourgeois paper for daring to review it favorably. Now two articles, including one in the Nouvel Observateur have taken up the cudgels for Taguieff.

Both point to Taguieff’s work on the Al Durah case as one of the main causes of the silence of the MSNM on his work. I reproduce the two passages on Al Durah below.

Note also an interesting incident in the French Senate during hearings for the new head of France2, in which a Senator put the appointee on the spot about the Al Durah story. This story is covered in still greater detail by the indefatigable Veronique Chemla in which she points out that a) the Senator in question (Plancade) gave the new head of France2 (Pflimlin) Taguieff’s book; and b) that none of the MSNM mentioned Plancade’s intervention. (HT/Eliyahu)

Vladimir Vladimirovitch A Lire

Par ailleurs il décrit et démontre la complicité des médias dans le processus précédent. En s’appuyant noatamment sur l’affaire Al Dourah qui lui permet de décrire par quels processus la classe médiatique, au mépris de toute déontologie, a manifesté sa solidarité avec Charles Enderlin, auteur du reportage contesté dans sa véracité (bien qu’il n’ait pas été présent au moment des faits). Israël ne pouvant être que coupable et les Palestiniens des victimes, il n’était en effet pas possible de revenir sur cette version des faits présentant les soldats israéliens comme des tueurs d’enfants palestiniens sans défense. Pourtant bien des éléments méritent qu’une enquête soit menée sur la validité de ce reportage. Ce qu’ont fait d’ailleurs des journalistes allemands demontant point par point la thèse d’Enderlin.

[Among other things he describes and demonstrates the complicity of the media in the preceding process (i.e., the alliance between the left and the islamists - rl). He emphasizes the al Durah affair to describe the way the “media class” (information professionals - rl), acting in violation of all professional ethics, showed its solidarity with Charles Enderlin, author of the contested report (even though he wasn’t present at the time of the events). Since Israel can only be guilty and the Palestinians only victims, it was impossible to revise this version of events in which the Israeli soldiers were killers of defenseless Palestinian children. And yet many aspects of the case indicate that an investigation be carried out on the validity of the report… which German journalists did, dismantling point by point Enderlin’s contentions.]

Les médias ne présenteront donc pas ce livre. Parce qu’il les met en cause et parce qu’il navigue à contre courant en démontrant que cette nouvelle propagande antijuive dont ils sont les porteurs constitue une arme de l’islamisme non pas contre Israël simplement, mais contre les démocraties. Ouvrage donc iconoclaste.

[The media will therefore not present this book. Because it questions them, and because it sails against the prevailing winds, dhowing that this new anti-Jewish propaganda of which they are the carriers constitutes an arm of Islamism not only aimed at Israel, but against democracies. Therefore, an iconoclastic work.]

Tarnero’s article is longer, published in a relatively new and iconoclastic publication, Causeur, which has taken on the Al Durah case already. Again, I only cite the segment directly concerned with Al Durah.
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In my essay on Jew-Baiting in England I redefined Islamophobe as someone who is afraid to criticize Islam. Here’s a comment someone left me at the Second Draft on that post that illustrates the dynamics I described in the essay quite vividly.

Prof. Landes,
What an ill-mannered hysteric you are! How dare you malign this fair city,our Queen and country, you impudent neocon Yank! What you call “Jew-baiting” is principled opposition to the Crimes of Israel as detailed extensively in The Goldstone Report. There are 1,000,000,000 Muslims on the planet – what would the good professor have us do – incinerate them all? As far as “proportion” goes – Israel sits at the epicenter of the world’s troubles,and its murderous racism has a much more harmful impact than do similar atrocities in a backwater like the Sudan. YOUR fantasy, Sir, is that Israel is in fact NOT doing anything except lapping buttermilk and beehiving honey. The truth is a bitter pill to swallow, and dear fellow- you’d be well-advised to pour yourself a shot of castor oil when you drop the little capsule in your already wet mouth.

Ian Slade
London,UK

Let’s take it from the top.
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For the linked version (and the place to leave comments) go to the PJMedia site. -rl

The Hidden Costs of Jew-Baiting in England
Jew-baiting has become something of a sport in England, as Brits feed the monster — radical Islam — that devours them.
July 10, 2010 - by Richard Landes

London is an amazing place, full of vitality, intensity, foreign tourists and residents, a patchwork of pluralism. Talk to the average person, and nothing seems amiss: this cab driver, having driven in London for 40 years, sees no significant change in the neighborhoods he travels through; this financier sees no signs of intimidation; this shopper, this tavern-hopper, this man on the bus, lives in an interesting and relatively normal world. A superficial walk through the [Regent’s] park gives the distinct sense of normality.

But talk to the Jews, and you get a different story. The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists held a conference here this week. The topic: Democratic and Legal Norms in an Age of Terror. Panels discussed everything from the Goldstone Report, to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, to “universal jurisdiction” (lawfare against Israelis brought in foreign courts). Here, in the Khalili Lecture Theatre of the SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies), Jewish lawyers discussed a grim reality whose only public appearance on an everyday basis is the drumbeat of calumny that a boisterous elite — NGOs, journalists, academics — rain down on Israel.

Perhaps the most startling of the sessions concerned the BDS movement. Jonathan Rynhold, from the BESA Center at Bar Ilan, and Anthony Julius, author of Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, both presented a picture of British anti-Zionist activity whose intellectual and moral foundations were profoundly irrational, a dogmatic will to stigmatize and destroy Israel that responded to no argument about proportion (what about other places?) or reason (you make no moral demands of the Palestinians). And behind that lies a much weightier volume of negative feeling, a kind of unthinking animosity that expressed itself in its most banal form when a woman explained to Julius: “We all know why the Jews are hated: you marry among yourselves and live in ghettos like Golders Green and Vienna [sic].” In so doing, she put her finger on the most widespread subtext for hostility to Jews – “they think they’re the chosen people.”

Daniel Eilon, an English solicitor, explained to me one of the mechanisms. It isn’t real anti-Semitism. In fact, most of the stuff that comes out against Israel is intellectually hopeless — phony narratives based on fantasy “facts.” This is really just good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. It’s saying things in all righteous innocence that you know will hurt the Jews to whom you address the criticism. The problem for the Brits (and the Europeans in general), he pointed out, is that historically, there’s never been a particularly high price to pay for Jew-baiting. Now there is.

What my friend referred to with this last remark is lucidly analyzed by Robin Shepherd in his recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel. The elephant in the room, of course, is radical Islam — the people who interpret being “chosen” by Allah as a charter to dominate the world and submit everyone, willingly or not, to Islam. They’re the people no one dares bait; and they’re the folks who take full advantage of every deference to press for more. Daily aggressions from violent gangs constantly expand the territories where the Queen’s writ does not run. In tempo with the retreat of British law and enforcement, Sharia advances from internal community affairs (explicitly on the model of Jewish religious courts) towards the policing of community boundaries and claims on the state for special treatment. The British — like so many other Western nations –mainstream the extremists and marginalize the moderates. As Nick Cohen put it: “The world faces a psychotic movement and won’t admit it to themselves.”
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There’s a silly movie about a young martial arts student whose master sent him on a quest to find a still greater master. His only clue is (it turns out) a Chinese fortune cookie factory named “Sum dom goy.”

I was reminded of it by a passage in my latest read, Anthony Julius’ The Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. In response to the Al-Durah affair, Irish poet Tom Paulin wrote a “squib” entitled: “Killed in Crossfire.”

We’re fed this inert
This lying phrase
like comfort food
as another little Palestinian boy
in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt
is gunned down by the Zionist SS
whose initials we should
- but we don’t - dumb goys -
clock in the weasel word crossfire.

Julius does a fine job of analyzing the multi-layered references to, and invocations of anti-Semitic themes here, including Paulin’s [gnostic] inside knowledge gnosis” that

I’d like to focus on the reference to dumb goys [sic]. On some level this poem is by a man who deeply resents how Jews - he thinks - dismiss him as a dumb goy. Thus they have the nerve to feed him “comfort food” about a cross-fire when (he knows) that they gunned this boy down in cold blood.

And how does he know this? Because Talal, via his useful infidel Charles Enderlin, told him so.

Now that we know that the scene was staged, how different this all appears. Paulin was fed the “comfort food” of an anti-Semitic lethal narrative about a boy gunned down in cold blood, which he (and his fellow fool, Robert Fisk who wrote a piece two days after the story broke denouncing the use of “crossfire” as a euphemism for deliberate murder), swallowed hook line and sinker.

The alleged “comfort food” Paulin rejects here - the Israeli claim that the boy died in a cross-fire, hence they did not deliberately kill an innocent boy, even if they may have killed him - is unacceptable to Paulin and Fisk because it lets Israel off the hook.

In their minds, it puts the typical dumb goy - not them! they’re way too clever - to sleep, while the evil Jewish conspiracy goes on. (Julius point out the use of the “goy” as a derogatory term by the [anti-Semite’s version of] the Elders of Zion in their infamous “Protocols.”)

How ironic that even that defensive posture of the Israelis is far from the real truth, namely that Palestinians faked this - and how many other? - lethal narratives in order to indict Israel and incite hatred. Of course if “crossfire” is unacceptable, how much the more “staged” would be to Paulin and Fisk.

The comfort food that Paulin and Fisk prefer to this weasel-word cop-out, is the far richer nourishment of blood libel, and in so doing they, like Catherine Nay, incarnate the European addiction to anything that can help them target their pathological hatred: the Jews. Like some 400 pound slob whose cholesterol is above 300, they just can’t stop popping down these delightful truffles of moral Schadenfreude that will kill them.

Some dumb goy, indeed.

I just finished attending the International Jewish Lawyers’ Conference here in London. One of the sessions was dedicated to BDS and Julius spoke about the pervasive presence of anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism in England. The discussion moved to matters of “framing,” and I suggested that British Jews might address their British brethren in terms of how by gulping down these tasty morsels of anti-Zionism they were feeding the monster that will devour them.

By and large most of the people there did not know what I was talking about, and when I specified that the monster was global Jihad, they assured me that the British public is far from feeling endangered. My sense is, reading Melanie Phillips in particular, that they misread the public and remain glued to the elites who live in la-la-land.

The following is a report “from the field” (i.e., the MSNM wars), by Michelle Schatzman about the coverage of a riot in the troubled streets of Paris itself (Zones Urbaines Sensibles - ZUS) of Paris. It illustrates the dynamics of a society in the process of decomposition, and probably sheds more light on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire than many ancient texts. What we see at work is the presence of gang culture of territorial expansion and confrontation - the Arabs and their sub-Saharan black allies - operating in an area supposedly (and previously) governed by the rule of law. In the case of the Roman Empire, it was imperial law, in 20th century France, it was democratic (isonomic) law.

The open aggression of the Arab/African street in France goes back to the last decade of the 20th century, but has become much more prominent since the first riots/demonstrations of the new millennium, those of October 6, 2000 in Paris.

This phenomenon of Muslim aggression on a civic level, which reached a momentary paroxysm in the riots of 2005, is perhaps the single most pervasive evidence that Muslims populations in Europe are grabbing power both by street violence and by taking over streets for prayer and (in practice) policing them as part of “their (Islamic) turf.” The same police-gang entente against citizens marked for dhimmitude seems to operate in England as well.

The story at Belleville seems to indicate that a) the cops are, as policy, protecting the Muslims from the law, and b) the news media does not know how to talk about this: it will name the “Chinese” (even when they’re lumping together the folks from far-east Asia), but not the Muslims or the sub-Saharan African street gangs. In the end they end up doing the same thing the police do - cover for the aggressors.

The parallels with what probably happened at the fall of Rome are startling.

A demonstration by 8500 people, mostly from far-eastern origin, took place yesterday afternoon in Belleville, an area in the north-east of Paris.

This demonstration was organized by franco-chinese associations, and motivated by insécurité, i.e. a high level of crime, directed mainly against Chinese-looking people in the Belleville area, where this population is now residing in significant numbers. There have been several waves of immigration to France from the Far-East. The Belleville immigrants have been coming from China in the last ten years. The main other two waves are the wave which arrived in the seventies from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, at the time of the boat people, and the wave of the nineties.

The demonstration started quietly and ended in riots between some demonstrators, some non-demonstrators and the police. Eventually, the quiet was restored around 10 pm. So, we got reports in the three most important national newspapers : Libération, Le Figaro and Le Monde. In fact, Le Monde was content with a commented diaporama.

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One of the key dimensions of global Jihad’s cognitive war against the West is the need to disguise the nature of the “weak” aggressor in this asymmetrical war. If the West knew what radical Islam wanted, they’d oppose it firmly, and they’d have no chance to position themselves favorably over time. Thus, while some of them play tough cop (violent Jihadis like Osama and other Salafi Jihadis), others play nice cop, and argue they would be “moderate” if only we treated them fairly.

Since this desire on the part of violent, fascist, even genocidal Islamic triumphalists who want to create a global Dar al Islam, is so ferocious and painful to contemplate, most liberals prefer to believe their demopathic pretences to moderation. As Barry Rubin points out, in some ways, the media tells us things that will pacify us, and keeps the bad news - news that might swell the voting ranks of (gasp!) conservatives and hawks — out of sight.

This approach has, by and large, dominated the approach of the MSNM for the last decade. The results: a president who thinks he can charm the Muslim world, even the radicals, and whose advisors think that it’s best not to even speak of “radical Islam” lest we offend “true Muslims” who know that any violence is against the “true teachings” of Islam - a useful infidel’s fatwa against Osama and his ilk, if you will. Shades of Grima Wormtongue literally sickening King Theoden of Rohan in The Two Towers.

(Note that I took this from a site which posted in 2008, suggesting that McCain was Theoden, and his advisors Wormtongue. I think that gets it exactly wrong. Tolkien, who had the Nazis in mind, had Wormtongue as a councilor of appeasement, in league with the warmonger Saruman, arguing that Rohen should not go to war.)

Of course, it’s hard not to notice the raging bull behind the curtain. And Muslims are becoming increasingly aware that their “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra is wearing thin. So what do they do? Go to the UN and ask it to ban Islamophobia in the name of “human rights.”

HT for much of this post to Elder of Ziyon.

Muslim states seek UN action on West’s “islamophobia”
16 Jun 2010 17:37:06 GMT
Source: Reuters
* Want investigation into West’s media on religion
* Say racism, xenophobia rife in Europe
* Part of majority group on U.N. rights council
By Robert Evans

GENEVA, June 16 (Reuters) - Muslim states said on Wednesday that what they call “islamophobia” is sweeping the West and its media and demanded that the United Nations take tougher action against it.

Delegates from Islamic countries, including Pakistan and Egypt, told the United Nations Human Rights Council that treatment of Muslims in Western countries amounted to racism and discrimination and must be fought.

“People of Arab origin face new forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance and experience discrimination and marginalisation,” an Egyptian delegate said, according to a U.N. summary.

And Pakistan, speaking for the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), said the council’s special investigator into religious freedom should look into such racism “especially in Western societies”.

Acting for the OIC, Pakistan has tabled a resolution at the council instructing its special investigator on religious freedom “to work closely with mass media organisations to ensure that they create and promote an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for religious and cultural diversity”.

The OIC — and its allies in the 47-nation council including Russia, China and Cuba — dub criticism of Muslim practices and linking of terrorism waged under the proclaimed banner of Islamism as “islamophobia” that pillories all Muslims.

BOUND TO PASS

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Hopefully one of the benefits of the Flotilla Madness, in which a deeply morally compromised state (Turkey, with its record from Armenian genocide to the current Kurdish situation) got to set the international agenda with high moral dudgeon, is the number of people at last willing to look at whether the Emperor’s New Clothes are real or not.

In any epistemological crisis, as the anomalies become both abundant and painful to those who must cling to their paradigm of reality, there emerge almost comic moments, moments when the absurdity of this kind of dance of denial becomes laughable.

This happened recently in Europe - more specifically in Luxembourg. For 15 years, the French philosopher Robert Redeker has published a weekly book review for the Tageblatt, even after he ran afoul of radical Muslims who threatened his and his family’s life and drove him into hiding. And just last week, without any warning, they fired him.

This happened, not because of his “Islamophobic” remarks, but because of his choice of book to review - and to review favorably. The book? The latest study of the European descent into anti-Semitic madness in the 21st century by Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle propagande antijuive. The journal not only rejected the review, but ended any association with Redeker.

But perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the story is the reason the editor gave for rejecting the review:

The readers would not understand that someone might be favorable to Israel.

In an irony that only the sane can appreciate, Taguieff had written specifically about the mentality the editor articulated. As Redeker noted in his review:

The blanket demonization of Israel is the daily bread of the media. That Israel is Evil seems to be self-evident. And yet, these opinions, that mutate into passions, are ideological constructions disseminated by a clever work of propaganda which Taguieff examines exhaustively. They recyle the old - the traditional Anti-Jewish stereotypes - in new forms.

Apparently, in reading those lines, the editor found not a description of her own mentality, but an assertion so absurd she could not allow it to be published. (Alternatively, this was just an excuse not to admit the real source of her anxiety, namely the fear that a favorable review of a book that tore the mask off of the Jihadi-Leftist hatefest might alienate the wrong people.)

As Kofi Anan said in 2002 about Jenin, echoing what Ehad Ha-am said in 1892 about the pogroms: “Is it possible that the whole world is wrong and the Jews/Israelis are right?” Don’t be ridiculous.

Robert Redeker, interdit d’écrire du bien d’un livre

lundi 14 juin 2010, par Emmanuel Lemieux

Le supplément littéraire du quotidien luxembourgeois Tageblatt a refusé la critique favorable du livre de Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle Propagande antijuive (PUF), mettant également un terme à une collaboration de 15 ans avec l’auteur de l’article, l’écrivain Robert Redeker menacé de mort par des islamistes.

Robert Redeker, agrégé de philosophie, écrivain et ancien chroniqueur du supplément littéraire du Tageblatt.

“J’avais ma page dans le supplément littéraire du Tageblatt depuis 15 ans, je n’ai manqué aucun numéro. C’était l’analyse d’un livre, généralement de philosophie. Pour le numéro de juin, j’avais choisi d’écrire sur le dernier livre de Taguieff. J’ai écrit un texte favorable à ce livre. C’est ce texte qui m’a valu d’être censuré. La directrice de ce supplément m’a écrit : “notre collaboration s’arrête là”.

Sec ! Viré ! confie Robert Redeker. D’après la rédaction en chef, les lecteurs ne comprendraient pas qu’on fût favorable à Israël ! ”

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[The following is a transcript of a talk I gave at a conference on Intellectuals and Terror, a month ago. I held back publishing it because I wanted to give some good examples. The Flotilla offers precisely that “in spades.” I will add links later on.]

Lenin allegedly referred to Western intellectuals who so supported the communist experiment that they disguised its horrors from the West as “useful idiots,” because their idiotic romantic attachment to communist dreams made them highly useful allies in deceiving the West and preventing it from opposing the Soviet Union when it was still vulnerable.

Today observers use the term to describe liberal intellectuals who enjoy freedom and prosperity, yet undermine both by giving moral and material support to revolutionary movements hostile to such bourgeois values. But that’s actually a mild accusation against useful idiocy. By covering up the engineered famines in Ukraine and in China, by dismissing evidence of the Gulag Archipelago or the Cambodian killing fields, all of which killed tens, even hundreds of millions of people, useful idiots have been responsible for aiding and abetting the terrifying death machines.

Given that history itself revealed that they had been dupes of the most staggering sort, even such brilliant ones as George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre lost their credibility. One would think, therefore, that with the lessons of the last century still fresh in our minds, these memories would immunize us to the appeal of useful idiocy in the late 20th, early 21st century.

A fortiori, one would expect the wisdom so painfully gained in the course of the 20th to insulate the West from serving as useful idiots to a revolutionary movement with none of the idealistic appeal of communism, but rather with a record of regressive, gynophobic, authoritarian, and nihilistic traits that virtually guarantee that any success such a movement might have would be a catastrophe for those so unfortunate to have these revolutionaries “liberate” them.

So why would a late 20th century progressive sympathize with, support, run interference, even lie and deceive, for a movement that manifested all the worst traits of totalitarian megadeath from the 20th century – the cult of death, the embrace of nihilism, paranoia, and genocidal hate-mongering? At least the fellow travelers of the early and mid-20th century had a noble ideal for which they carried out their campaigns of misinformation. But now, we have intellectuals from a wide range of fields running interference for Islam, even in its most regressive forms.

And of course, at this asymmetrical stage in the war that Global Jihad wages against the West, nothing is more critical to the capacity of Jihad to mobilize – to recruit, indoctrinate, train, and deploy – its forces than a cognitive victory in which its targets in the West are kept in the dark about its real intentions. And given the yeoman job that apologists like John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Juan Cole perform in this sense, I think it worthwhile to use the expression “useful infidel” for this new breed of fellow travelers. Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions to subject the entire world to Sharia than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace that is perfectly consonant with democracy, and that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal, deviation from true Islam.

I want to argue that this astonishing paradox – Islamic Jihad is the last thing one would expect reasonable, progressive intellectuals to support – strips away the pretence of naïve good intentions that the older “useful idiot” used to plead. Once we confront the “irrationality” of useful infidelity, and realize the urgency of trying to understand a phenomenon that pushes us in the direction of cultural, even civilizational suicide, we must confront the underlying (self-destructive) emotions.

Demopaths and their Dupes

It seems to me that the phenomenon of useful idiocy revolves around a particularly dysfunctional relationship, that between demopath and dupe. Demopaths arise in response to democratic cultures, which they target in a cognitive war suited only to assaults on such societies, that is, ones that embrace principles of a human right to freedom. They themselves embrace authoritarian principles of dominion by force, what Lee Smith has chronicled so chillingly in his latest book, The Strong Horse. Their line of attack: “you (democratic target) do not live up to your commitments; and in particular, you violate our (demopathic belligerent) rights in preventing us from participating in your democracy.”
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I have argued repeatedly that 2000 marks a catastrophic moral failure on the part of the “progressive” (and even the “liberal”) left. Nick Cohen again hits the nail on the head, this time about the moral collapse of liberalism in the past decade and the corresponding rise of a post-modern fascist sensibility which, like earlier forms of fascism, found the Jews a particularly choice target for post-modern scape-goating.

MARCH 14, 2010…12:37 PM
How the ICA came to symbolise Liberal Cowardice

There is much to talk about in Ian McEwan’s Solar. As I say in today’s Observer, he makes a hat tip to John Updike and allows the great issue of global warming to be explained through the devious manoeuvres of a slobby and disreputable hero, Michael Beard. However, McEwan goes to some trouble to show that there are worse people in the world than Beard by sending him to meet a postmodern audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Like Lawrence Summers at Harvard, Beard had incautiously suggested that there may – just may – be evolutionary reasons for gender differences in the average intellectual aptitudes of men and women. The press denounce him as a Nazi and a eugenicist, and he agrees to appear at the ICA to defend himself. In an acid scene, McEwan shows that London followers of post-modernism are as contemptuous of the scientific method and as potentially racist as Alaskan followers of Sarah Palin.

“When he mentioned the metastudies reporting that girls’ language skills were greater on average than boys’, there was a roar of derision and a speaker on the platform rose fearsomely to denounce him for the ‘crude objectivism by which he seeks to maintain and advance the social dominance of the white male elite’. The moment the fellow sat down he was rewarded with the kind of cheers that might presage a revolution. Bewildered, Beard did not get the connection. He was completely lost. When, later, he irritably demanded of the meeting if it thought that gravity too was a social construct, he was booed, and a woman in the audience stood to propose in stern headmistressly tones, that he reflect on the ‘hegemonic arrogance’ of his question.”

Beard’s opponent is a Jewish academic who respects the scientific literature and explains nervously why he is misreading it. Even though she is against the hated Beard, the ICA turns against her, for reasons you may be able to guess.

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On my class list-serv (class of ‘71), we’ve had a discussion of the relationship of Muslim demographics to aggressive behavior. I posted these remarks based on two remarkable pieces, one by Raymond Ibrahim on Taqiyya and Islam, and one a video made by a exceptionally courageous Parisian of the take-over of some public streets in Paris every Friday for 2 and a half hours.

As everyone who’s spent some time with the Quran knows, it’s full of contradictions, especially on the subject of the use of violence. “No coercion in matters of religion” (sura 2) vs “Fight against the infidel till they either convert or submit” (suras 8, 9). The Muslim commentators came up with the principle of abrogation, in which the later passages (the suras are not listed chronologically, but the later Medina suras are the more coercive) abrogated the earlier ones.

In a very important article Raymond Ibrahim lays out the implications of this for Islam:

However interpreted, the standard view [among Muslim scholars] on Qur’anic abrogation concerning war and peace verses is that when Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should preach and behave according to the ethos of the Meccan verses (peace and tolerance); when strong, however, they should go on the offensive on the basis of what is commanded in the Medinan verses (war and conquest). The vicissitudes of Islamic history are a testimony to this dichotomy, best captured by the popular Muslim notion, based on a hadith, that, if possible, jihad should be performed by the hand (force), if not, then by the tongue (through preaching); and, if that is not possible, then with the heart or one’s intentions.[23]

In a study of tolerance in the Protestant Reformation, Andrew Pettegree came to the conclusion that “tolerance was a loser’s creed” (p. 198), that when they began, Protestant movements were in favor of free speech and dissent (protest), but as soon as they were in a position to take power, then they argue that God gave them their strength because they are right, and imposing their belief is what God wants. Thus, the US constitution is the first time in the history of Christianity that tolerance is a winner’s creed.

Now how that happened, and how it can happen in Islam is not something we will figure out by making arguments about moral equivalence (we were just as bad) or moral inversion (we’re worse).

I strongly recommend the Ibrahim article for many reasons, not the least being the problem it sets before us on this issue: while in Christianity there is no hint of the principle that drove so many Christians to seek power to impose their beliefs on others — on the contrary, everything “argues” against it — the Quran has actually embedded in its collection of suras that very argument, formalized by later commentators across the board (all four schools of jurisprudence). If libido dominandi (the lust to dominate) can have that affect on Christians whose texts are against these principles, a fortiori, will it be difficult for Muslims to confront them… especially if we don’t confront them about these matters.

Before 2000, virtually every book on Islam argued that it was overwhelming a fatalistic religion (inshallah — if God wills it), an attitude that permits many today to argue that the “vast majority of Muslims are moderate.” In the 1960s and 70s sociologists, working on the “secularization model” were depicting its imminent demise.

1979 marks the beginning and 2000 marks a key turning point in Muslim attitudes globally (aided by both media and the second intifada/9-11), in which allahu akhbar as a war cry became more and more widespread. This “awakening” has changed many Muslim attitudes towards both themselves and their neighbors.

There is a territorial battle going on that we are losing because we don’t/won’t even recognize it.

I recommend watching the video full screen in order to read the English subtitles.

Alexandre del Valle has posted at his blog an interview with France Soir of the Egyptian-born, Italian journalist and European deputy, who has just published a book, in response to Islamist terrorism, a hymn to life entitled, « Pour que Vive Israel » (ed du Roche). Since his conversion to Christianity, there are fatwas out on his life.

Apparently he’s been reading Fiamma Nierenstein.

Must say, it reminds me of the political cartoon Ellen Horowitz did for me some years back and I posted as part of an essay she had done on the way Arabs project their brutality onto Israelis:

Magdi Cristiano Allam: Halte à l’antisémitisme sous couvert d’antisionisme!
Lundi, 2 novembre 2009

L’avis inédit du célèbre journaliste italien député européen sur l’actualité internationale. Bientôt de passage en France, il publie en réponse au terrorisme islamiste un hymne à la vie intitulé « Pour que Vive Israel » (ed du Rocher),

Magdi Cristiano Allam, ancien Vice-Directeur du Corriere dela Sera, est l’une des personnalités politico-médiatiques les plus populaires d’Italie. D’origne égyptienne, auteur de nombreux best-sellers sur l’islam et l’Occident, il est menacé de mort par le Hamas et Al Qaïda en raison de ses positions sur l’islamisme, sur Israel et depuis sa conversion au christianisme. Député européen sur les listes de l’Union du Centre (UDC) parti membre comme l’UMP du Parti populaire européen, il a créé son propre mouvement, Io Amo L’Italia, Anima d’Europa, qu’il ambitionne d’implanter dans toute l’Europe. Protégé en permanence par de nombreux gardes du corps, France soir l’a rencontré au Parlement européen ;

France Soir : Les fatwas contre vous ont été renouvelées depuis que vous avez quitté l’islam, le fait de lier l’islamisme à l’islam a–t-il agravé votre cas ?

MCA : Je me bats plus que quiconque en faveur de la reconnaissance de droits des Musulmans en tant que personnes, mais je suis opposé à l’islam en tant que religion, que j’ai essayé en vain de réformer mais dont les textes fonateurs légitiment la violence. Hélas, les Musulmans modérés sont moins orthodoxes que les Islamistes.

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Goldstone has unleashed a whole new round of boycotting activity, including the folks at Trondheim U. in Norway. As a number of people have pointed out, if you don’t want to be a hypocrite, refuse not only to deal with Israelis, but also anything they produce.

Applause For The SmartHand: Human-machine Interface Is Essential Link In Groundbreaking Prosthetic Hand
ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2009) —

In one sense, our hands define our humanity. Our opposable thumbs and our hands’ unique structure allow us to write, paint, and play the piano. Those who lose their hands as a result of accident, conflict or disease often feel they’ve lost more than mere utility.

A new invention from Tel Aviv University researchers may change that. Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand of TAU’s Department of Engineering, working with a team of European Union scientists, has successfully wired a state-of-the-art artificial hand to existing nerve endings in the stump of a severed arm. The device, called “SmartHand,” resembles — in function, sensitivity and appearance — a real hand.

Robin af Ekenstam of Sweden, the project’s first human subject, has not only been able to complete extremely complicated tasks like eating and writing, he reports he is also able to “feel” his fingers once again.

In short, Prof. Shacham-Diamand and his team have seamlessly rewired Ekenstam’s mind to his SmartHand.

Read the rest.

If you have academic credentials, I recommend the following petition protesting European lunacy in Norway.

hereA Petition To Refute and Condemn the Anti-Israel Academic Boycott Campaign at Norway’s Trondheim University

Written by: By 246
October 31, 2009

To: Academic Colleagues From Around The World Wishing to Refute and Condemn the Campaign at Norway’s Trondheim University to Boycott Israeli Scholars and Academic Institutions

We, the undersigned Nobel Laureates, scholars and members of the international academic, research and professional community, refute and condemn the campaign to boycott Israeli academics and academic institutions at Trondheim University.

We stand in solidarity with Israeli academics and academic institutions; if you boycott them, boycott us as well.

Read the rest.

Always wanted to go to Trondheim.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Fredrik Reinfel - Swedish EU Chair
French President Nicolas Sarkozy

Your Excellency:

I understand you have yet to decide on how to vote on the upcoming resolution on the Goldstone Report. I am a medieval historian, unwillingly drawn into this maelstrom of madness that has seized the world community about Israel (painful parallels with incidents from the Middle Ages and modern times). Since I have put up a website with a detailed critique of the Report — www.goldstonereport.org — I won’t bore you with details. Suffice to say, we’ve found Kafka’s judge.

This charade at the UN, where countries who couldn’t bear a tiny fraction of the scrutiny brought to bear on Israel, mobilize votes to pillory her, will be part of the chronicles of the moral failure of the West in the works of future generations of historians. I know there are “realpolitik” reasons to abstain or even vote for the resolution. But even those are merely short-term advantages and long-term disasters for any country that wants to defend itself against medieval holy warriors. Think of how history will view you.

I urge your government to support peace by voting No to this shameful and (self-) destructive resolution.

Sincerely
Professor Richard Landes, Boston University

Go here to send your own missive.

Apologies to my readers for my long absence during several important events. A brief update and list of articles worth considering for discussion. I am now in a better position to both post and pay attention to the excellent discussions some of you readers have been maintaining while I lurked.

Swedish article on Organ Transplant

Among the most significant items on which I need to post has been Aftonbladet controversy, the Swedish article accusing the Israelis of engaging in harvesting organs from dead Palestinians, what many — justifiably to my mind — consider a modern blood libel. By now, it’s clear — and avowed — that the author has no evidence for his claims, and even the families involved admit that they never made the claims. Barry Rubin has some excellent remarks on Facebook about why, even though the media openly admits to holding Israel to a higher standard, it’s equally if not more important for the media to be careful with Israel, given the long history of libels against it.

So if you say that you hold Jews to higher standards remember equally that they have been treated, misexplained, misunderstood and lied about to lower standards. That there are people–often the main supposed witnesses to the things you denounce Israel for–who have a vested interest in making Israel look bad and who are willing to lie, along with reporters and others who have an antagonism to Israel. What are you doing to correct that side of the balance?

I’m going to hold you to a higher standard in your coverage of Israel for the same reason.

Dershowitz addresses the Swedish government’s invocation of “freedom of the press” as an excuse for them to weigh in on this.

Israeli spokespeople have hit back hard on this, both officially and unofficially. Below is Mordechai Kedar’s responses to the author of the piece, Donald Bostrom, in which he mentions al Durah and invokes Pallywood. Note how Bostrom starts by saying, “It’s not up to me to have any evidence…” How do you think Kedar comes off?

One of my correspondents shudders at Kedar’s performance.

This TV interview with Kedar and Bostrom is a disaster. Bostrom comes across as the calm, reasonable speaker. Kedar is overheated and makes unsupported allegations that Palestinians are “compulsive liars” and have a conspiracy—these remarks make him look like a racist. Kedar is right, but his delivery completely undercuts his own message.

Bostrom, on the other hand, is a poster-boy for Pallywood, as it manifests in journalism. Not only are Palestinian witnesses “as good as anyone’s”, but the work of the NGOs and other journalists in having Israel as a daily human rights violator, make anything the Palestinians claim perfectly believable.

Yale University Press and the Danish Cartoon Book without Danish Cartoons.

The appalling decision of Yale U. Press not to publish the cartoons out of concern for the sensitivity of Muslims is, among many issues, a perfect illustration of the role of experts (the unanimous 12 who recommended not to publish the cartoons) of the role of an anomalous consensus among our elites whose opinions matter. All twelve? No one i respect who thinks on the issue of how we deal with militant Islam would have recommended so pusillanimous a course. Was there not one person in the bunch to say something like this?

This is absurd. Of course you publish the cartoons. Their almost entirely anodine nature is part of the story.

It attests to the nature of the violent response, which was the bullying of a newly empowered advocacy community: global Jihadis who feel that Muslim sharia should rule the planet. Not to publish would be to act like dhimmi. It would replicate all the errors that were made at the time of the event, in which America’s failure to publish the cartoonbs in every paper at once betrayed Europeans behaving bravely, and signaled to the Islamist triumphalists that indeed the whole world was vulnerable to their demands.

Or just a simple, “don’t be ridiculous.”

In any case, the “unanimous 12″ strike me as the most significant elemnt in this lamentable story. It’s testimony to the Emperor’s New Clothes effect. The court has so taken control of the discourse that the simplest and most obvious responses are not merely “voted down,” but excluded. Let’s not forget that the emperor and his court carried on the charade even after the crowd had turned against the hegemonic discourse in which the emperor’s clothes were dazzling.

But this issue is not confined to Yale alone. This essay, by Yale senior Matt Shaffer, about his time at Yale gives an intellectual backgrtound to this court consensus.

Condemning prejudice is great, but devoting the keynote speech of Yale orientation to a finger-wagging lecture against bigotry, as Professor Yoshino did, was like opening a conference of physicists with a warning on the dangers of astrology. In short, Despite Dean Salovey’s assertion that, “We will help you learn how to think rather than tell you what to think,” it looked more and more that they were going to teach us neither how to think nor what to think, but rather, what to feel.

That evening, things went from mere disappointment to sheer farce. Tedious lectures turned into indoctrination. We were required to attend ‘discussions’ with our freshman counselors about Professor Yoshino’s speech. The freshman counselor set the tone, and then student after student performed a series of variations upon a single theme: white men are bad, Islam is fabulous and judgment is bad. We need to be eternally vigilant and morally courageous in the face of the innumerable male WASP bigots around us. (Why we are allowed to judge white people as bad and Islam as good when judgment is supposedly forbidden is beyond my ken.)

This article — despite it’s somwhat archaic conclusion about truth beauty and goodness — supports the folllowing lllustrated metaphor in some detail. When I first read this cartoon (HT Michelle Saltzman) I confess to feeling uneasy. The packaging is harsh; the insights, given Shaffer’s reflections, seem quite accurate. Is it Kedar-style? Or something else.

Belgian correspondent Rudi Roth writes:

Only in Belgium

Belgian NGO urges Muslims to boycott Israeli “bleeding” dates during Ramadan

Muslims in Brussels are being urged by a Belgian NGO, INTAL, to boycott Israel and Israeli dates during Ramadan. It seems that it is the first time ever that in Belgium - a country of Christian culture - (and in Europe) Muslims are being specifically targeted by non-Muslims with a view to boycotting the Jewish State. Muslims account for 30% of the population in Brussels, which is also the “capital of Europe”. Israeli dates are very popular in Europe.

Belgique: appel à boycotter les dattes israéliennes à l’occasion du ramadan

and also on:

Primo Europe

It is a real religious importation of the conflict… and maybe an acceptance that it is a religious problem and not a territorial one?

The Belgian NGO, Intal, received government money from cooperation development for making a brochure for use in school.

In the brochure stereotyping of Jews and Arabs is exerciced for the young students.

The same organization already cooperated with the federation of Morocco, and associations of Antwerp to organise other boycott actions against Israel.

I see this less as a religious phenomenon, than as an excellent example of the scapegoating of Jews and Israel that the European “left,” fearful of Islamism and eager to curry favor with Muslims, engages in. In this sense, such a move represents a perfect illustration of the dynamics of Eurabia – fear of the aggressor prompts Europeans to identify with them (and thereby act like Dhimmi), and uses an “progressive discourse” that has lost its moorings and foundered in blood libels, to justify, indeed intensify the forces hostile to the very existence of progressive values.

How can one expect Muslim students in Europe to develop civic courage when their alleged “elders” in a civil polity cater to their basest emotions so blatantly.

As the joke runs, “what’s the difference between a brownnoser and a sh*thead? Depth perception.

Here’s an ad that sums up all the elements of a “friction-free” self-indulgent world created by modern freedom without discipline.

Patient love, self-sacrifice, genuine affection… none of this registers. No wonder Europeans don’t reproduce much. It’s such a… bother.

Now on the other hand, the people who produce many kids don’t hesitate to smack the little creep. Neither side has the patience for the extraordinary patience it takes to raise a child in an integrity-guilt culture where the product is an autonomous individual who chooses responsible behavior rather than acts out of fear.

PS. I’m suspicious of this ad. The kid does not strike me as French (bad accent and he says “la bonbon” rather than “le” or “les”); although the father is a perfect replica of the narcissistic hippies I knew in the early 70s.

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 Europe

by 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.

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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.
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Emmanuel Navon teaches Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He was recently interviewed by the major French radio station about Lieberman’s upcoming visit to France.

Thanks for Spoiling the Party

By Emmanuel Navon

I was interviewed today on RFI, France’s international radio. The topic was Avigdor Lieberman’s upcoming visit to Paris. It went, in substance, like this.

Question: How come Lieberman is not officially endorsing the two-state solution?

Answer: Why should Israel support a “solution” that keeps working in theory and failing in practice, and that is systematically rejected by the Palestinians? They rejected partition in 1937 and in 1947, showed no interest in establishing a state between 1949 and 1967, and rejected both the Camp David proposals and the Clinton parameters. They are now partially ruled by Hamas, which denies Israel’s right to exist, and by Fatah, which denies Israel’s right to be Jewish. Creating a Palestinian state while Hamas has the upper hand and Iran is about to become nuclear would pave the way to Israel’s destruction, not to peace. The Palestinians have to choose between the “right of return” and the “two-state solution.” And they will not be inclined to choose realism and compromise while backed, incited and manipulated by a nuclear Iran.

Silence.

Question: Hmm. Well, Lieberman’s refusal to unequivocally endorse Palestinian statehood is probably why he’s going to get a cold shoulder in Paris. Bernard Kouchner is not going to hold a join press conference with him. Isn’t that understandable?

Answer: I don’t remember your country giving a cold shoulder to a Turkish official for not accepting the creation of a Kurdish state or for not ending the occupation of Cyprus.

Silence # 2 (slightly longer this time).

Question: President Sarkozy will probably not receive Lieberman, obviously because of his views. How do you feel about this?

Answer: Sarkozy had no problem receiving Muammar Gaddafi at the Élysée Palace. How do you feel about that?

Silence # 3 (swiftly replaced by a “thank you very much,” meaning “I think we’ll stop here”).

Note how French diplomats have no trouble humiliating the Israelis in public, but, as Navon so delicately points out, have no trouble groveling before much uglier nations. Alas, if only France took seriously De Gaulle’s comment that “France is not France without its grandeur.”

Lieberman is “guilty” of failing to toe to the party line. The fact that Europe’s “recipe” for Middle East peace has consistently failed in the past fifteen years is irrelevant. And it doesn’t seem to cross Europeans’ minds that Israel might be interested in peace as well (who gets blown up in buses for goodness’s sake?)

But, mostly, Europe feels that Israel should get a taste of China’s medicine. After all, if European leaders can be scolded by China about Tibet and Taiwan, surely Israel can be scolded by Europe about the West Bank? China put Sarkozy in quarantine after he received the Dalai Lama during the French EU Presidency. President Hu Jintao agreed to meet with his French counterpart at the G20 summit in London only after the latter accepted to “recognize” that Tibet is part of China.

This may seem like a contradiction (or a joke — I wouldn’t put it past Navon), since it’s the opposite of what one might expect. The French clearly didn’t like their international humiliations, so why would the obvious thing to do, be turn on someone else. But that expectation reflects liberal cognitive egocentrism: do not do onto others as you don’t want them to do onto you.

The French response, which Navon takes almost as a “rational” policy illustrates nicely the basic principle of hierarchical, honor-shame cultures. Hierarchies at their worst position people in a vertical chain in which you suck up and shit down. The French are good at that: If I’ve been made to suck up, then for sure I’ll find someone I can get away with shitting on. And of course, both because they’re small and they don’t strike back violently, the Israel and the Jews are an ideal target: that “shittly little nation.”

Pressuring Europeans works, because business is business. Why do the Tibetans or the Kurds need a state of their own? Who needs self-determination when Europe’s interests are at stake? Indeed, this “rights of man” thing is really a European idea, and trying to impose it on other cultures is surely another expression of Western arrogance and imperialism (and don’t you dare having the nerve of reminding those wimps that the official ideology of China’s communist party was “made in Europe”). Hence are Kurdish, Irish, and Basque separatists labeled “terrorists” in European media while Hamas killers are mainly “militants.”

In other words, don’t expect moral consistency from European moral discourse. The bottom line is, “Moral Europe is at the ethical cutting edge of the global community, don’t confuse us with the details.” If I had to identify the first “big idea” that came to me after 2000, it’s that people feel very strongly about being seen as moral (a kind of honor-shame integrity thing), and in the case of the Europeans, seeming morally superior to Israel and the US was so powerful a desire that they actually were willing to commit suicide just to engage in the charade.

Europe is entitled to put its interest before its principles. But it should not expect Israel to put its security at risk. If the price for saying the truth is to be snubbed by nerdy hypocrites, may Lieberman have the privilege of being a party pooper in European chancelleries and of spoiling dinner parties in Brussels.

A number of my students in my honor-shame class did papers on the role of honor-shame in schools and gangs. The Europeans are hanging with the honor-shame people and picking on the integrity-guilt people. It may feel good, but unless you’re ready to play hardball — which the Europeans clearly are not — you’re going to lose out in that company.

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 Affairs

The 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.
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