Augean Stables

The reason I have written so little art this blog (and not participated in the excelllent discussions) recently is because I’m preparing the manuscript of my book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience for Oxford U. Press. One of my chapter deals with the Xhosa Cattle-Slaying of 1856-7. In trying to keep up with the recent literature on the subject, I ran across an article by Achille Mbebe, a Cameroonian post-colonialist writer who has penned a blistering indictment of the post-Apartheid government of South Africa which i thought would interest the readers of this blog. Here it is, below, with comments.

Among other things, it underlines two major points: 1) the difficulty of establishing a working democracy; and 2) the almost certainty that any Palestinian state - a fortiori a “one state solution” to the Arab-Israeli problem would produce a failed “democracy.”

South Africa’s second coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome

Achille Mbembe, 14 June 2006

A dozen years after apartheid ended, a dangerous mix of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South Africans to commit political suicide, writes Achille Mbembe.

The deputy chair of the South African Institute of International Relations, Moeletsi Mbeki speaking recently at Witwatersrand University, made an arresting comparison between the current political situation in South Africa and the one prevailing in the period leading to the Xhosa cattle-killing in 1856-57.

The dance of the ghost

By that time, the Xhosa had been involved in nearly a half century of bloody and protracted wars with colonial settlers on the eastern frontier of their homeland. As a result of the deliberate destruction of their means of livelihood, confiscation of their cattle and the implementation of a scorched-earth policy by British colonialists, they had lost a huge portion of their territory and hundreds of thousands of their people had been displaced. As lung-sickness spread across the land in 1854, a number of prophets proclaiming an ability to bring all cattle back to life began to re-emerge.

Note that the way the British behaved in South Africa, especially under the rule of Lord George Grey, makes the Israelis in Palestine absolute angels. The Brits engaged in deliberately targeting civilians as a way to crush the rebellion. By comparison, the “collective punishment” of blowing a suicide-bomber’s house, looks most civilized. And, of course, unlike the British, whose colonialism came after a brutal conquest, the Israelis settled the land without conquest.

Then, a 16-year-old girl, Nongqawuse, had a vision on the banks of the Gxarha River. She saw the departed ancestors who told her that if people would but kill all their cattle, the dead would arise from the ashes and all the whites would be swept into the sea. The message was relayed to the Xhosa nation by her uncle, Mhalakaza. Although deeply divided over what to do, the Xhosa began killing their cattle in February 1856. They destroyed all their food and did not sow crops for the future. Stored grain was thrown away. No further work was to be done. Days passed and nights fell. The resurrection of the dead Xhosa warriors never took place.

In his book The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7, historian J.B. Peires contends that by May 1857, 400,000 cattle had been slaughtered and 40,000 Xhosa had died of starvation. At least another 40,000 had left their homes in search of food. According to Dr John Fitzgerald, founder of the Native Hospital who witnessed the events, one could see thousands of those “emaciated living skeletons passing from house to house” in places such as King Williams Town. Craving for food, they subsisted on nothing “but roots and the bark of the mimosa, the smell of which appeared to issue from every part of their body.”
As the whole land was surrounded by the smell of death, Xhosa independence and self-rule had effectively ended.

Achille Mbembe is a research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He is the winner of the 2006 Bill Venter/Altron Award for his book On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001)
A slightly different version of this article is also published in the Sunday Times (South Africa)

What’s going on?

Not long ago, many thought that South Africa’s overthrow of institutionalised racism and its attempt to build a truly non-racial, modern and cosmopolitan society was the best gift Africa had ever given to the world. Less than fifteen years after liberation, it is no longer clear that the country has the moral and intellectual capacity to generate an alternative meaning of what our world might be, or to become a major centre in the global south.

It turns out, it’s not enough to overthrow tyranny in order to establish democracy.

As the former national-liberation movement the African National Congress (ANC) implodes, the stakes are getting higher. The Nongqawuse syndrome – the name for the kind of political disorder and cultural dislocation South Africa seems to be experiencing – is once again engulfing the country. This is a syndrome South Africa has always suffered in times of demoralisation and acute social and mental insecurity. The Nongqawuse syndrome is a populist rhetoric and a millenarian form of politics which advocates, uses and legitimises self-destruction, or national suicide, as a means of salvation.

Note that a the Cattle Killing embarrasses many modern African commentators who dislike intensely the way white scholars speak of the Xhosa committing suicide at the prompting of a 15-year old prophetess. But here, it’s clearly referred to in just such a negative fashion.
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I recently posted the article that Daniel Kalder wrote about apocalyptic in the Spectator. Now he’s published the interview he had with me at Breitbart’s Big Journalism.

Death Wish: Why Are We So In Love with the Apocalypse?
Posted by Daniel Kalder
Jan 24th 2010 at 3:38 pm
Christianity, End Times, History, Iran, Islam | Comments (45)

It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner.

And yet, the End has never been so much fun. Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel.

What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes, professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.

Recently I phoned him from my base in Texas, to chat about mankind’s enduring love affair with the apocalypse. I caught him in Tel Aviv airport at 2 a.m, and it was then, against a backdrop of deepest night, that we spent two hours discussing the end of the world:

With all these apocalyptic films coming out, and fears of Global Warming, plague and nuclear proliferation running rampant, do you think that we are living through an era of heightened apocalyptic anxiety?

You know, that’s almost a precise paraphrase of what journalists were asking me in the 90s, while looking ahead to the year 2000. That was when we had all those movies about planet-destroying comets, and fears of the Y2K bug… There’s always an apocalyptic undercurrent in our culture, but sometimes it comes to the fore.

Why is the pull of apocalyptic belief so strong?

Our love for the apocalypse is connected with our sense of our own importance. To live in apocalyptic expectation means that you are the chosen generation; that in your time the puzzle of existence will be solved. It appeals to our- by which I mean humanity’s- megalomania: we all want to believe we’re special, that God has given us a front row seat for the most important events in history.

But where does it come from?

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With 2012 (the movie) out, I’ve been getting lots of phone calls from journalists dusting off their rollodexes from the 1990s. Among them, Kalder asked the most interesting questions, and has written the most interesting piece (that I know of). It’s published in the Spectator, but not at their site. This is from his.

THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE (AGAIN)

Daniel Kalder

Last weekend Roland Emmerich’s wrathful CGI God was at it again, killing billions in the name of the Holy Box Office in the film 2012. Having already caused carnage with aliens, an ice age and Godzilla, this time Emmerich took his cue from the Ancient Mayans, whose ‘long calendar’ purportedly stops in 2012. But not only is the End nigh, it’s hugely profitable- 2012 raked in $225 million globally in three days. With numbers like that it’s no surprise that a multitude of apocalypses are in the pipeline: whether humorous (Woody Harrelson battles the undead in Zombieland) or depressing (father and son trek across a post-apocalyptic wasteland in The Road) it’s boom time for doom time.

It is surely no coincidence that imaginary catastrophes are flooding our cinema screens at a time when the news itself seems exceptionally apocalyptic. Secular prophets armed with statistics and graphs warn us daily of a new Deluge, coming as punishment for our crimes against the planet. The President of Iran leaves a chair vacant at cabinet meetings for the Hidden Imam, chases the bomb and threatens to wipe nuclear-armed Israel off the map. And speaking of nukes, only a few months ago Taliban forces advanced very close to Pakistan’s own atomic arsenal. Then there’s the plague: H1N1 is spreading across the globe, making a lot of people a bit ill, and leaving a very small minority dead. But if H1N1 doesn’t get us, perhaps economic meltdown or- better yet- overpopulation will, as a scramble for resources sets off apocalyptic wars. And while governments seek solutions, some declare that our situation is hopeless. Interviewed in the Spectator this February, James Lovelock, doyen of the Green movement said: ‘If there were 100 million of us on the earth, we could do almost anything we liked without harm. At seven billion I doubt if anything is possible or will significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption; by significantly I mean enough to halt global warming.’

So: are we doomed? And if so- why are so many people so excited about it?

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A provocative, well-written and thoughtful essay by Benjamin Kertsein on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech with some very sharp perceptions on the human condition and the necessary limits of messianism. Comments welcome. HT/oao (who’s not commenting much these days here)

Obama in Oslo: No More Messiahs
by Benjamin Kerstein

There is a fairly well-known phenomenon among alcoholics referred to as the “moment of clarity.” It is the momentary lifting of the haze of intoxication and denial, giving the drinker a sudden and often shattering insight into the stark reality of their situation. There is a strong possibility that President Obama’s December 9 Nobel Prize acceptance speech has given us a glimpse into a remarkable and somewhat unprecedented variation on this phenomenon: a political moment of clarity — one taking place, or at least publicly announced, on a global stage.
It must be said at the outset that the speech was also unprecedented in the context of Obama and the Obama phenomenon. It was both the first time Obama has said anything of substance, and certainly the first time he has displayed anything resembling political courage. It should also be noted that much of the speech was all but guaranteed to alienate both the president’s far-left base (already incensed by his decision to expand the war in Afghanistan) and his bien-pensant Scandinavian hosts.

Indeed, a great many of Obama’s greatest admirers consider the war on terror to be a malicious imperial project whose purpose is to enforce American hegemony on the world. Obama, however, referred to Afghanistan, now once again the major front in that war, with refreshing accuracy as “a conflict that America did not seek,” and “an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.” He also emphasized that “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.” For a president who has often seemed disturbingly addicted to irrational adulation, this willingness to invite derision deserves, at the very least, some measured praise.

More tellingly, Obama’s speech also included several statements that cannot be described as anything other than thinly disguised restatements of the Bush Doctrine. Assertions like “as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation…. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world,” represent precisely the kind of unnuanced moral absolutism that the Bush Doctrine’s critics – including Obama himself – explicitly denounced and rejected.

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The issue of post-modernism has arisen a number of times at the blog (most recently here), and since I’ve been meaning to put up David Thompson’s conversation with PoMo critic Stephen Hicks for some time, I decided now might be propitious. For the sake of introduction (and since I find some valuable items in the post-modern paradigm), let me lay out the major claims — and strengths — of post-modernism. My criticism will accompany the rather ample discussion of Thompson and Hicks.

Post-modernism, as I understand it, represents at once a disillusionment with the failure of the “modern” project — science, technology, the superiority of the modern West — especially in the wake of World War II. No more optimism that the scientific method will produce the solutions to all our problems. At the same time, pomo was a declaration of independence from the demands of the modern, scientific epistemologies, from the demands normally made on exegetical specialists whose job, in every culture, is to interpret the world all about. This meant, above all, probing and, if necessary, stabbing texts in order to “deconstruct” them, to identify their silences and bring out what discourses the text deliberately concealed.

Derrida’s notion of différance, which is a double-pun (differ and defer) and a play on the discontinuity of oral and written media (you can’t hear the difference with “difference”) has much to offer here, especially the notion that a text’s meaning is constantly deferred into an unending future, that the passage of time inevitably reveals new facets of the text’s import. Given that Western culture is profoundly marked by apocalyptic hopes, prophecies, and “readings”, and that time consistently strikes them down and raises them up, the discovery of such a notion in Western culture may not be so surprising. But it is valuable in injecting a little modesty in the otherwise all-too frequent tendency of exegetes to insist they have the meaning.

The rejection of the “objective” is a reasonable linguistic move: language cannot possibly be transparent on reality, especially the reality of human experiences. Even if something “really did happen,” there’s no way to reduce it to verbal formulae, no way for verbal formulae to somehow lock on to the objective reality at which it points. Epistemologically, it’s possible to push it all the way to radical doubt — we can’t know what we can’t know.

One of the more interesting directions pomo thought takes this axiomatic relativism, is the rejection of the “Grand” or “Meta-Narrative,” the all-encompassing, totalistic narrative that includes, gives order and priority in meaning to the multiplicity of “little narratives” that emerge from any event. Pomos have declared the “death” of the Meta-narrative, apparently feeling that having slain the reigning Meta-Narrative (modern, scientific objectivity), they would not allow a new one to gain hegemony.

All of these ideas are interesting and potentially enormously fruitful. The danger I find most pervasive though, is in the lack of understanding and appreciation that post-modernists have for their exegetical freedom. Not realizing that in most societies in most parts of the world for most of history no one, not even the most privileged figures had anything remotely resembling their freedom to interpret and criticize and even reinvent the meaning of the culture’s major texts. As a result, they tend to abuse their freedom, decoupling the key pair of freedom and discipline for an extraordinarily self-indulgent display of solepsistic “creations.”

Indeed, in their eagerness to flaunt their freedom, the unconsciously replicate the ancestors they thought they had slain, those Meta-Narrative driven figures like Hegel and Vico, who saw in history the inexorable march of freedom. And yet, unlike earlier heroes in the heroic narrative — Washington’s refusal to become king comes to mind — they fail to appreciate either the gift they’ve inherited, or the audience to which they, as the culture’s interpreters, are responsible. Alas for us.

And now to Thompson and Hicks…

UPDATE: Shrinkwrapped has an interesting (and approving!) read of this post. The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part I and II

Postmodernism Unpeeled

A discussion with Stephen Hicks.
March 22, 2009

“In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works.”

Dr Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College, Illinois. He is co-editor with David Kelley of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton, 1998), and has published in academic journals as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Reader’s Digest. His book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault was published in 2004 by Scholargy Publishing and is now in its eighth printing. He is the author and narrator of a DVD documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was published in 2006 by Ockham’s Razor Publishing.

DT: In an exchange with Ophelia Benson, I mentioned Explaining Postmodernism and suggested one of the book’s main themes is that postmodernism marks a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality among the academic left. Is that a fair, if crude, summary?

SH: It is striking that the major postmodernists - Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty - are of the far left politically. And it is striking that all four are Philosophy Ph.D.s who reached deeply skeptical conclusions about our ability to come to know reality. So one of my four theses about postmodernism is that it develops from a double crisis - a crisis within philosophy about knowledge and a crisis within left politics about socialism.

In millennial studies jargon that’s cogntive dissonance at recognizing (and denying) the failure of one’s outrageously hopeful expectations, at the horror of witnessing the God that failed.

Here, rather than acknowledge that the failure of expectations was due to a misreading of human nature, we have people throwing out the very effort to accurately read the world of humans.

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In a post on the hypocrisy of the “self-”critical left, Diane left a note on the ominous signs that the West was committing suicide. I didn’t answer it at the time, but I’d like to address it now.

I just started Ibn Warraq’s “Defending the West” last night. It promises to be a slow but highly rewarding read. And a couple of days ago I finished Shelby Steele’s “White Guilt.” Is it my imagination, or are there increasing numbers of books out there by serious and credible people challenging the “progressive” anti-Western, anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist orthodoxies?

Or am I allowing myself to be lulled into a false sense of security/hope by completely tuning out the MSM?

oao would have us think the end is near. Say it ain’t so, RL. You’re the milleniallism scholar. The end is never near, right?

You may think — as do I — that Ibn Warraq and Shelby Steele are “serious and credible people,” but, like Khaled abu Toameh, these folks tend to be dismissed by the progressive camp. On the other hand, unlike oao, with whose analysis in detail I often agree, but with whose overall conclusions about the utter collapse of Western educational systems and the doomed state of the West I disagree, I think the future remains undetermined, and in fact, we still have great power and resources if only we’d use them. (And that’s not military power, I’m talking about.)

On the contrary, this battle is far from over. And although every day and week that we delay in dealing with it (e.g., Iranian nuclear power) seriously, the eventual costs are all the higher. I don’t think that Europe, for example, will start fighting back until some significant area — a city like Malmo or Rotterdam — gets turned into a toxic Sharia-zone.

On the other hand, I think that events like the debacle of Durban II are hopeful signs, not only the defection of so many key Western nations, but the walk-out of Ahmadinejad’s rant, to the accompanying cheers of the peanut gallery. On the other hand, having a schizophrenic president, who takes away with one hand what he gives with the other, doesn’t help.

While it’s true that “the end” has yet to happen, immense catastrophes have — like the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the “apocalyptic” World War II (which made the unimaginable World War I look like small potatoes, and which the Germans would have won had the US not entered). So I take no comfort in the fact that the apocalypse hasn’t yet happen.

Indeed, unlike in the past, where only God could bring about the end, now — even as we no longer believe in God — we now have the power to destroy human life on earth. So especially for atheists, who think that the reason the End hasn’t come has nothing to do with God’s involvement, the present offers the first serious threat of annihilation.

On the other hand, I have a perhaps irrationally optimistic sense of the resilience of the West. In particular I don’t think that most “liberals” are intentionally suicidal (unlike the radicals), and I do think they can and will wake up.

The issue is still how long it will take and how high the eventual cost. But we can wake up too late. At least a new dark age will reduce our carbon footprint.

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 2009

To 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?

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Daniel Pearl’s father, Judea, reflects on the world seven years after his son’s death. Not a pretty picture. In so doing he raises some critical issues about the vulnerability/stupidity of the Western world when faced with the remorseless hatreds that (among many other deeds) killed his son with such deliberate brutality. My comments attempt to bring out some of the issues he merely raises in order to stay within his word-limit for an op-ed.

OPINIONFEBRUARY 3, 2009
Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil
When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?

By JUDEA PEARL

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today’s world emerged after his tragedy?

The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters.

I’ve found references to the trial, but not to the cheers of jihadi supporters. Anyone have a link?

Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of “the resistance.” Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny’s murder would be a turning point in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

Although Pearl does not go into it, his son’s murder was the first “beheading video” to get put up on the internet. That grotesque snuff film has spawned a whole industry, and the posted films get millions of downloads in days. One of the less salubrious impacts of the new communications technology of cyberspace.

The larger issue, however, concerns the trends at work in 2002. Pearl may not have begun to catch on seriously until after the death of his son. Indeed he may have shared his son’s optimistic (if “realistic”) world view — that we can work out, talk out, negotiate out of any conlfict.

But for those of us who understood why the Oslo Process had blown up in our faces, who understood the Jihadi vision that lay behind the Intifada, who understood how massive an intellectual and moral failure had occurred, starting in late 2000, when, inspired by the wrenching image of poor little Muhammad al Durah, the European “street” and the activist “Left” turned against Israel and embraced the “Palestinian” cause, for those of us who had been watching in dismay at the spread of a new wave of anti-Semitism thinly disguised as delirious anti-Zionism spread unopposed by the liberal and progressive authorities… for us, Daniel’s death was just one more roadsign on the path to the present.
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N.B.: The following is an essay I wrote several years ago while working on early Christian millennialism. It’s a critique of René Girard’s work on the subject, in particular, the ideas he delineated in a book with the modest title of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. I’m posting it here partly because Yaakov of Breath of the Beast is working through some of Girard’s ideas and we have come to similar critiques of this seminal thinker’s provocative work. I also welcome any suggestions or criticisms from readers, even though this is not in the main stream of this blog’s focus. The essay is neither polished, nor fully footnoted; consider it a draft.

According to Girard, the New Testament (NT) stands apart from all previous thinking on sacrifice, with the partial exception of Judaism, because, rather than declare the sacrificial victim guilty, the victim is the very image of purity and innocence. Thus a mythical implosion occurs. This unjust sacrifice of the innocent extinguishes the self-regenerating mentality of sacrificing the guilty, thus putting an end to scapegoating. The notion has problems with handling Jewish materials, something especially evident in the work of Hamerton-Kelly, whose anti-Judaic tendencies flourish under his apologetic pen.

What strikes the millennial scholar here, however, is the depiction of Jesus as innocent. Granted Girard is working with the “myth” of Jesus, – indeed, Girard regularly and, I think, revealingly, refers to not to Jesus but to Christ.¹ But the myth is self-consciously embedded in a historical discourse about millennial hopes and apocalyptic expectations which – surely much to amazement of all sides at the time were they to know it but not retrospectively to Girard – continues to flourish to this very day.

From the millennial, that is from the historical rather than mythical point of view, Jesus is not “innocent.” On the contrary, he was wrong about the imminence of the apocalypse and, whatever his intentions, dangerous to those who brought their demotic millennial hopes to the surface in a prime divider society profoundly hostile to such sentiments, in the case of Jesus, during the pax romana, whose peace the Romans nailed down, literally, with crucifixion. The kingdom was not at hand, and he got crucified for simple and predictable reasons by Romans who had no doubt of his guilt. There may well have been Jewish aristocrats who shared this perspective, and even invoked the “safety of the people” (given Roman rule), for their conservative, prime-divider politics. The disciples, those who developed the myth as well as those who wrote it down, needed above all to save their faith in their own salvation. And they chose to do so by denying Jesus’ error and in so doing, denying their own continuing and continuously fruitful error of anticipating the end at any moment.

The sacrificial victim in this process of denial was Judaism, especially Pharisaic (later rabbinic) Judaism. This sacrificial Judaism was judged guilty by Christians for the mere fact that they did not accept the divine, blameless and faultless messiah of the Christians. Thus, far from putting an end to scapegoating, NT narratives actually imbedded a new kind of scapegoating into its very history and salvific myth. For Christians, Christ, Jesus sacralized, was innocent, the Jews guilty of the double crime of killing the man and denying the God.

Thus it cannot be “merely” the Saducees who are guilty of killing Jesus, it must be the Pharisees who are responsible for killing Christ. For the sake of saving themselves from the rocky shores of cognitive dissonance, Christians consigned their religious parent to perpetual guilt, and, as we shall see, when Christians gained power, to oppression, prison and death. Girard, despite his usual acuity in such matters, does not perceive any of this disguised sacrificial activity in the text, partly because it is crucial to his own reading of the Crucifixion, partly because his entire effort aims at showing that this text presents the end of sacrificial constructions. Thus he repeatedly refers to and analyzes the “Gospel” and the “text” as if it only needed direct interpretation, not deconstruction for its silent and disguised sacrificial activity.
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Benny Morris has a new book out on 1948. In the course of researching it he discovered how intense the religious dimension of the conflict that year. Such an observation is on the one hand, quite ordinary and empirical, on the other, a violation of the principles of cognitive egocentrism whereby the Arab objection to Jewish independence must be formulated and presented to the public as a “rational” objection, as a “nationalist” argument. Negotitations according to the PC Paradigm will only work if the dispute is about territories and rational national narratives that can come to a mutual understanding (2-state solution). But if it is profoundly zero-sum and religious in nature, then all the pacific bromides about war not being the answer fall by the wayside.

Here Morris discusses the religious dimension of 1948 and chides the modern historian for not taking it seriously.

Historians Should Take the Jihadi Rhetoric of 1948 Seriously

By Benny Morris

Mr. Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author of 1948 (Yale University Press), from which this article is excerpted.

Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv [the Jewish residents of Palestine before the founding of Israel] and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. In the months before the invasion of 15 May 1948, King Abdullah, the most moderate of the coalition leaders, repeatedly spoke of “saving” the holy places. As the day of invasion approached, his focus on Jerusalem, according to Alec Kirkbride, grew increasingly obsessive. “In our souls,” wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, “Palestine occupies a spiritual holy place which is above abstract feelings. In it we have the blessed breeze of Jerusalem and the blessings of the Prophets and their disciples.”

The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938.

The Muslim Brotherhood gained great strength from their anti-Zionist activities particularly during this period of the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-39, launching, according to Matthias Küntzel, their first “fanatical solidarity campaign in which the idea of Jihad was linked to the policies in Palestine,” and going from 800 to 200,000 years from 1936-38 (p. 21).

Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forego the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine. In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended “to take over … all the lands of Islam.” Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, “the memories of the Battle of Badr … as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din’s [Saladin’s] liberation of Palestine” from the Crusaders. Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: “The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ “

Of quote not only marks the Jihad as apocalyptic, but also, alas, genocidal.

The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the “street” and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and ulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women’s Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: “The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders …. [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘holy war’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.” The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: “No Moslem can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands,” reported Kirkbride from Amman. “Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda] … who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject. “

Note that even the Christian Arab is swept up in the mood of collective empowerment. One cannot understand either the decisions of the Arab leadership in 1947-49, or the catastrophic scale of the defeat, if one does not understand the omnipotent inebriation they felt about their cause.

Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the ulema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing “the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics, . . . and leaders of public opinion.” It was, ruled the council, “necessary to liberate Palestine from the Zionist bands … and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes.” The Arab armies had “fought victoriously” (sic) “in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty.” The ulema condemned King Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: “Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers,” concluded the ulema.

The Naqba was not the terrible tragedy that befell the Palestinian refugees. They were collateral damage, soon to be turned into sacrificial victims by imprisonment in the camps. The real Naqba was the catastrophe of Jewish sovereignty in Dar al Islam — a humiliation to the Arabs, a blasphemy to Muslims.

While on the Cape last week, I saw a number of signs that read “War is not the Answer.” I had only recently brought up this bumper sticker with my students in order to illustrate the problems of liberal cognitive egocentrism: No culture has ever proposed such an idea, with the exception of some messianic groups. Those that have (and survive), live in exile (Jews after Bar Kochba, Tibetans). Indeed, it’s hard not to savor the irony of these well-intentioned folks, living peacefully on the land of the Wampanoags whose plague-decimated numbers were finally reduced to some 400, and completely subjugated by “King Phillip’s War.”

A visit to the sponsoring site of this pacifist sign reveals that it is, indeed, a messianic pacifist group, the Quakers, who arose out of the messianic crucible of the 17th century English Civil War. They address the obvious question: “If war is not the answer, what is?

The practical instruments of negotiation, aid, and development assistance, the psychological instrument of respect for human dignity and equality, and the political instruments of human, juridical, and civil rights provide a more effective, just, and moral answer.

I agree with all of those “instruments” when they are practicable. But in the (hopefully rare) situation where they do not work, applying them actually backfires. Remember Gandhi’s famous non-violent resistance (suicidal) advice to the Jews when dealing with the Nazis — which, alas, too many instinctively followed. Such techniques only work when dealing with people who have a liberal conscience (like the British in India). When dealing with political cultures that seek dominion at any cost, such kindness registers as weakness and triggers aggression, not reconciliation.

Later today I will be on a committee examining a thesis on the failures of the US Intelligence Community in dealing with the “civilizational Jihad” of the Muslim Brotherhood against the United States. It is a staggering tale of political correctness that renders us dupes to demopaths who have learned to use every principle we treasure in order to dupe us into allowing them to flourish.

CAIR’s mission statement sought “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” This sounds wonderful, but is not the true intent of the organization. The reality is that this is another organization within the [Muslim] Brotherhood running a deception campaign. The Brothers’ real objectives are to use CAIR as an instrument to influence the United States by mounting a public relations campaign under the guise of a civil rights campaign. The Brothers know how to use words and issues in ways that Americans want to hear. In one of the documents there [in the material entered in evidence at the “Holy Land Foundation” trial] is reference to a dictionary of terms that will placate the American public.

If they ever need any help, going to the “Friends’” site will give them all the buzz-words they need.

While meditating on these issues, I ran across the following piece in the Jerusalem Post by Caleb ben-David, one of their more reflective writers. It illustrates the problems of “peace advocacy” in prime-divider cultures where violence — male violence, to be redundant — is a norm.

Apr 24, 2008 12:23 | Updated Apr 25, 2008 1:39
Snap Judgment: The last journey of Pippa Bacca
By CALEV BEN-DAVID

The killing earlier of this month of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, “Pippa Bacca,” has received little media comment outside the country of her birth, Italy, and that of her death, Turkey.

It should, though; Bacca was apparently a very special kind of “performance artist,” who saw her life, or at least the way she chose to live it, as her “brush,” and the whole world as her canvas. Tragically, the end of that life turned out not in the way she intended - nor left behind exactly the message that she had hoped it would convey.

Bacca, 33, set off from Milan last March together with fellow artist Silvia Moro on what they dubbed a “Brides on Tour” journey, with both wearing white wedding dresses and taking separate routes from Italy through southern Europe and the Middle East, with the intention of meeting up together at the end here in Jerusalem sometime this month.

The central point was to promote peace and faith in one’s fellow man, in part by doing the entire trip via hitchhiking. Although to many the idea of a single woman thumbing rides through some of the most conflict-ridden regions of the globe sounds more than a little naïve and dangerous, this apparently was the very point. The Web site they created for the “Brides on Tour” project declares: “Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings, and man, like a small god, rewards those who have faith in him.”

Alas, on the way Bacca met a man who had a very different outlook, and in early April her corpse was discovered near the Turkish town of Gebze, southeast of Istanbul. Traced through his use of her cellphone, a local man was later arrested and confessed to her rape and murder shortly after he picked her up.

“We cannot blame all Turks for this incident,” Bacca’s mother told the Turkish press. “No one could have predicted my daughter would encounter such a maniac.”

Of course not - though a Western woman hitchhiking alone through the Turkish hinterlands surely must be aware of a very real element of risk.

I would be a little less understated in responding to this poor mother’s comment: “What are you talking about? Anyone with any knowledge of honor-shame, alpha-male behavior and its enormous power in cultures like that of Turkey could have predicted precisely this.” Of course, her sister, quoted in the NYT, anticipated my comment and refuted it:

“Just read any newspaper — people get killed for playing music too loudly, and women get raped in the subway; there are fiends everywhere,” Ms. Pasqualino said. “This was not a question of Turkey or of religion.”

Not surprisingly, the comment was echoed by Turkish and Italian officials. And it may be true in some sense, although I do think the odds vary depending on the culture.

Bacca’s murder generated widespread revulsion in Turkey, sparking demonstrations by local women wearing placards declaring, “We are Pippa,” and demanding the government take greater steps to ensure that unaccompanied women in the streets are free from harassment.

This gets to an interesting tension within these cultures of male-dominance. Women generally live lives of quiet desperation. If Bacca’s murder were to give them voice, it would not have been in vain. But for that to happen, not only would these women need to speak up, but the international press would have to cover this story in its details and thereby shame Turkish officials into taking real measures.

Bacca’s artistic collaborator Moro, who cut short her own trip after her friend’s murder, told The New York Times she “still hoped to take to the road to finish the performance. Otherwise it would be a failure, and I don’t want the message to fail.”

“I am not disowning the project,” she added firmly. “This tragedy only highlights how difficult peaceful relations are and how much work there is still to do.”

This is classic messianic behavior in a state of cognitive dissonance. When your premise has been disproved, keep pursuing the goal, which is more important than reality testing.

INDEED. I sincerely hope Moro does carry on (with greater precaution) her and Bacca’s project, even the performance they were planning to stage in Tel Aviv at its end, when they were planning to ceremonially wash their wedding dresses.

Their journey, said Moro, was intended to show that “by overcoming differences and lowering the level of conflict individuals and cultures could come together… Meeting people was the key.”

But if their project is to retain its artistic integrity, it should honestly take into account Bacca’s tragic fate, and incorporate it into the work and the meaning it seeks to convey. And surely that message is that sometimes faith in fellow man and a desire for peace is not enough in this world; often it is wise, if not essential, to combine those elements with strong doses of hardheaded - and hearted - caution and concern, pragmatism and patience. If not, the end result may turn out to be not only failure, but violent failure that ends up defeating the very message of trust and peace the original effort was meant to convey.

Precisely. In other words, when one pursues peace only through negotiations when dealing with a bloody-minded foe, one ends up strengthening the very forces one hopes to overcome. PCP strengthens Jihad.

Strangely enough, I thought of Pippa Bacca this week while attending a press conference in Jerusalem featuring former US president Jimmy Carter discussing his own recent travels and encounters in the region, with the likes of Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal.

This was performance art of its own kind - “ex-president on tour” - that was also all about promoting peace in the region. Again, meeting people was key, as was giving them the benefit of the doubt and taking them at their word, even when in contradiction to good sense. Fortunately for Carter, the conditions under which he traveled virtually guaranteed a safe final arrival in Jerusalem to close his trip.

If I am inclined under these circumstances to be far more generous to Bacca’s wanderings, it is in the certainty that at least in her case there is no doubt her motives were entirely good-hearted, and that the only possible harmful outcome of her trip was to herself, which regrettably did come to pass.

Pippa Bacca was a dreamer - and yes, perhaps so is Jimmy Carter. Peace, of course, is always worth dreaming about. But the longer I live in this country, and this region, the more convinced I become that peace is not made by the dreamers, but the realists, especially weary and wary old warriors such as Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, King Hussein, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak.

Peace is not made by simply choosing to have faith in other people - which one should - but by taking reasonable precautions that if that faith is not rewarded, the end results will not be cruelly catastrophic. Though I appreciate her idealism, this to me is the real meaning of Pippa Bacca’s final journey.

Andy Bostom has a response to my post on the Bostom-Künatzel debate. He has asked me to stick to substantive issues, which I agree is where we need to go in this discussion. I will, however, make a couple of asides about rhetoric [in brackets] since Andy’s tone has, on occasion, created unnecessary friction. Here are my responses.

Richard the Reconciliation-Hearted
April 6th, 2008 by Andrew Bostom

Actually, I’m mostly known as Richard Artichokeheart.

Has Medievalist Richard Landes chosen his arguments all that wisely?

[Let me guess, that’s a rhetorical question the answer to which is… no. :-) ]

Richard Landes, invoking understandably, his background as a Medievalist, with a special interest in millenarian movements — attempts a thoughtful “reconciliation” of what he attributes to be the positions of Matthias Kuntzel, and myself, vis a vis Islamic Antisemitism. But Landes’ discussion has two fundamental flaws.

[Normally, one first goes over the strengths of the argument before going for the weaknesses, but okay. Andy’s a no-nonsense guy.]

First, Landes ignores (and likely does not appreciate) Kuntzel’s complete failure to understand the jihad,

[Although this is not purely a matter of substance, it is significant. I neither ignore, nor fail to appreciate the issue, nor do I think it appropriate to use terms like “complete failure to understand” (even if it’s true, which I don’t think it is).]

which lead Kuntzel to opine, remarkably (on p. 13 of his book “Jihad and Jew Hatred”),

The [Muslim] Brotherhood’s most significant innovation was their concept of jihad as holy war, which significantly differed from other contemporary doctrines and, associated with that, the passionately pursued goal of dying a martyr’s death in the war with the unbeliever. Before the founding of the Brotherhood, Islamic currents of modern times had understood jihad (derived from a root signifying “effort”) as the individual striving for belief or the missionary task of disseminating Islam. Only when this missionary work was hindered were they allowed to use force to defend themselves against the unbelievers resistance. The starting point of Islamism is the new interpretation of jihad espoused with uncompromising militancy by Hassan al-Bana, the first to preach this kind of jihad in modern times.

There is simply no way to reconcile this statement with either classical Islamic doctrine — entirely consistent with Al-Banna’s views — or the tragic, but copious historical evidence of how jihad campaigns, in accord with this doctrine, were (and continue to be) conducted across, Asia, Africa, and Europe. I amass incontrovertible evidence of this living doctrine and history in the The Legacy of Jihad.

There are, in fact, several ways to reconcile these statements with the ample documentation of Bostom’s work. First, note that Küntzel refers to “Islamic currents in modern times.” Küntzel may, indeed, underestimate the importance of Jihad as holy war in Islamic tradition, and overstate the “innovation” of the Muslim Brotherhood when it comes specifically to Jihad, but that hardly means that the Muslim Brotherhood’s reformulation of Jihad doesn’t contain important new elements that included an anti-modern anti-Semitism typical of fascism and Nazism. It’s one thing to say Küntzel underestimates the vigor of an earlier Jihadi and anti-Semitic tradition in Islam, quite another to dismiss his argument that Hassan al Banna’s and the Mufti’s version had new elements that, even if they existed before (see below), took on new and ominous forms.

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Keith Pavlischek has an interesting meditation which begins with a discussion of a debate between Andy Bostom and Matthias Küntzel about the nature of Islamic anti-semitism. This debate has recently turned even more vituperative, alas, as a result of a book review by John Rosenthal of Klaus Gensicke’s Klaus Gensicke. Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten in Policy Review. Pavlischek’s opening discussion focuses on the debate’s substantive issues and highlights their significance.

Jihad, Jew-Hatred, and Evangelicals and Jews Together

By Keith Pavlischek
Thursday, March 27, 2008, 6:14 AM

An instructive and fascinating debate has erupted over what at first glance may seem an academic point. The debate is between Matthias Küntzel, the author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, and Andrew Bostom, the editor of The Legacy of Jihad and author of the forthcoming book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History.

The debate is not over whether contemporary Islamism is vehemently anti-Jewish but over the historical roots of that Jew-hatred. Küntzel locates the current rabid Jew-hatred specifically in the influence of Nazi ideology. Bostom, alternatively, insists that the legacy of Islamic Jew-hatred is far more ancient and deeply rooted in classical Islam. Bostom assembles a wealth of historical material and concludes, “According to the full range of hadith concerning the Jews, stubborn malevolence is the Jews’ defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature.”

Contemporary Islamic Jew-hatred, according to Bostom, cannot simply be linked to the influence of Nazi propaganda but rather with an entirely explicable reaction to the very existence of Israel. Explicable, that is, given Islam’s traditional hostility to Jews. According to Bostom, “The rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude.” He then quotes his mentor, Bat Ye’or, who explained: “Because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.”

One crucial implication of all this is that the Israeli-Palestinian “problem” has less to do with any particular policy pursued by Israel than with the Jew-hating ideology intrinsic to Islamist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood (not to mention the Islamic Republic of Iran). Also, the deep-seated Jew-hatred of the Islamists should disabuse us of the notion that the threat of Islamism will wither away with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

I don’t intend to weigh in on the particulars of the Küntzel-Bostom debate, except to note that it has profound implications for how we name the enemy. Do we call them Islamofascists, which tends to suggest their current form of Jew-hatred is originally modern? Or do we call them Jihadists, suggesting a more ancient and intrinsic connection to Islamic theology and political understanding (with consequently diminished prospects for reform)? In any case, the debate is instructive, with both sides presenting plausible (and not mutually exclusive) explanations.

I agree here with Pavlischek. Not only are these issues crucial, the positions are not mutually exclusive (hence my dismay at the stridency of the debate). All of the books here discussed support the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm (Israel is a theological blasphemy to an honor-shame form of religiosity that can only feel good about itself when it debases its parent religion); and challenge the Western cognitive egocentrism of the Politically Correct Paradigm that insists on seeing the conflict as one of rival nationalisms that, hopefully, can be resolved by compromise. Indeed, those tempted by the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis would do well to ponder Pavlischek’s comment: “the deep-seated Jew-hatred of the Islamists should disabuse us of the notion that the threat of Islamism will wither away with the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The rest of the article treats the matter of Jewish discomfort with Christian support for Israel. That is an entirely different issue, about which he has some interesting things to say, despite completely ignoring the major source of the discomfort — i.e., the underlying apocalyptic beliefs that fuel some of the most passionate support for Israel, beliefs that make the Zionist fervor a time-bound phenomenon, an instrument in the hastening of Jesus’ return, at which point Jews will vanish from the earth either in the battle of Armageddon or by converting to Christianity.

The debate between Küntzel and Bostom, despite the excess of heat it has generated, also sheds important light. Küntzel’s point is that although there is a long history of Jew-hatred in Islam, since Hassan al Banna, and even more, since the establishment of Israel, that hatred has shifted from what I call anti-Judaism (”we” are right and proud because you are wrong an humbled) to anti-Semitism (your very existence threatens us, we must exterminate you before you destroy us). This is the shift that the Nazis made in their turn to what Goldhagen calls “exteminationist anti-Semitism” and Friendlander calls “redemptive anti-Semitism” — i.e., salvation comes from wiping out the Jews. I think, it is correct to see the rebirth of Jihad in the 20th century as a) a virulent form of anti-Semitism that incorporated much of the European tradition — blood libels, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc. — even as its earlier traditions of Jew hatred provided the fertile soil for this transfer.

Bostom may well be correct in showing that even this kind of genocidal thinking existed, if not in precisely the form it now takes, throughout Islamic history. My own suggestion here is to view this exterminationist anti-Semitism as the product of apocalyptic time: that’s how it operated in Christianity (e.g., the slaughters of the First Crusade), and how it operates now in Islam. Fundamentally, as far as I can make out, Bostom and Küntzel agree on a key point: the existence of Israel has driven Muslims, long accustomed to throttling and humiiating Jews, into paroxysms of hatred. Today, for Muslims drenched in the frustration and humiliation of a tiny Israel resisting their efforts to restore the true nature of the world order and return the Jews to dhimmi status, it has morphed into a desire to kill all Jews everywhere.

So if we want to understand the dynamics, we are best advised — I think — not to look for a permanent state of genocidal Jew hatred, nor for a once-only appearance in the modern world, but for its episodic emergence in paranoid apocalyptic moments when Muslims (or Christians) think they are fighting a Jewish enemy that refuses to accept its place at the bottom of the hierarchy (as in the case of modern Zionism), and that the genocidal element takes on a particular power when Muslims and Christians believe that they are engaged in the apocalyptic battle of the Endtimes.

Hopefully this suggestion may permit us to move on to the important discussion of what is going on in Islam today, and how we can deal with it.

This piece, which appears at the Counterterrorism blog, strikes me as short on details and somewhat superficial. But it does address an issue of primary importance, well worth keeping on our radar screens. If anyone has references to further material on the subject, please cite it.

Left-wing Extremists and Salafi-Jihadists in Europe: Brothers in Arms?
By Assaf Moghadam, July 15, 2007

In recent months, a confluence of several events fueled speculation among some German officials that left-wing extremism in Germany is on the rise and may even turn to violence reminiscent of the terrorism practiced by the Red Army Faction (RAF) in decades past. Although Germany’s Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, today rejected rumors of a renewal of left-wing terrorism in Germany as baseless, one still wonders whether Europe may witness a reincarnation of left-wing terrorism in the near future. Is it possible that left-wing groups and Salafi-Jihadist networks in Europe may cooperate in the future? To that end, it is worthwhile to examine some of the similarities between left-wing extremism rampant in Germany during the late 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s on the one hand, and the Salafi-Jihadist movement on the other.

Several events provided impetus to the renewed debate surrounding left-wing extremism in Germany. On March 25, 57-year old Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a member of the “second generation” of the RAF, was released after spending the last 24 years in a German prison for her role in the killing of nine people. A former colleague of hers from the RAF, Christian Klar, asked for an early release, only to be rejected by President Horst Köhler after the latter found him to be unrepentant. German fear that left-wing extremists are planning major disruptions at the forthcoming summit of the G-8 in Heiligendamm heightened concerns of a left-wing terrorist resurgence. In early May, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz, VS) of the state of Baden-Württemberg, Johannes Schmalzl, noted that the “old spirit of the RAF” was wandering across the “leftist scene.”

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Richard North has an important post up entitled: Who Will Give the True Picture? In it he ruminates on a wide range of issues concerning coverage of the Iraq war, both from the American and British perspectives. Among others, he cites an important article by an American Major in the US Army, Gerd Schroeder, who writes about the extensive and available news of positive developments in Iraq which the MSM, if they mention it, spin negatively. Concludes Schroeder:

Accurate, meaningful information that spans the full spectrum of subjects, including good news as well as bad is critical to getting a true picture of the war. If the information is slanted too far one way as it is now, the consequence will not just be defeat of the US, but could lead to mass murder and instability throughout the Middle East, Africa and the world at large. That does not mean that it will happen, but an American defeat would have a chilling effect on our allies and embolden our enemies.

Eloquently, but not sufficiently strongly put. Allow me to rephrase: British and American withdrawal from Iraq will register on the screens of Jihadis the world over as a stupendous victory as in the response of Ayman Zawahiri, as important — if not more — that the victory of Bin Laden and the Mujihaddin in Afghanistan in 1989, which has launched the current wave of global Jihad. Global Jihad Warming will shoot up several degrees, tepid supporters will become more fervent, fervent supporters emboldened to new aggressions. And after Iraq, which will descend into an apocalyptic bloodbath, the major victim will be Europe, with its restive and increasingly aggressive Muslim populations, and their latest non-ethnic (i.e. honkey) recruits. As Henri Desroche said about millennial movements, they “take” like forest fires, and once they do, one cannot “put them out,” only hope to direct them, to have them burn out with as little damage as possible. While our presence in Iraq makes those fires burn brighter (and our media play a key role in that), our departure would be the equivalent of pouring oil on precisely those areas which permit the flames to jump to other forest land.
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Daniel Goldhagen has an excellent discussion of the problem of “humiliation” and Jihad. While for polemical reasons he may be dismissive of “humiliation” as an explanation of Arab/Muslim “rage,” his overall point — there’s much more to the problem than “humiliation,” is crucial, especially when it comes to policy options. I’ve highlighted particularly significant passages and added some notes.

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Issue #4, Spring 2007

The Humiliation Myth
Humiliation doesn’t explain terrorism; the spread of Political Islam does. A response to Peter Bergen and Michael Lind.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

As Peter Bergen and Michael Lind ably demonstrate in their recent article [”A Matter of Pride,” Issue #3], the notion that poverty causes terrorism – and that, absent poverty, terrorism would diminish radically – is a fallacy. Indeed, the “myth of deprivation” is so manifestly inadequate that it is worth asking whether its supporters actually believe it or whether, instead of confronting the complexities of terrorism’s causes and the difficulty of combating it, they prefer to mouth a platitudinous perspective that poverty causes all ills and that alleviating poverty (which will not happen soon) cures them.

It’s actually worse: I think most people want to believe that poverty causes terrorism because we Westerners think we have the formula for “curing” the problem thus understood. “Throw money at it.” That’s the French solution with their “lost territories.” Goldhagen’s right that we won’t be alleviating poverty soon the world over. But we think we can solve it in places where we decide to push hard (the so-called “Middle East Marshall Plan”). Of course, when “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” — when we throw money at impoverished cultures that, often, are the product of their terrorist “leaders” — we end up engaging in what Pamela of Atlas Shrugged, in a conversation with David “poverty causes terrorism” Korn in a conversation at the OSM/PJ Media launch called “extortion.”
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Le deuxième “procès Al-Durah” a pour objet une manifestation qui s’est déroulée en octobre 2002 devant les locaux de France 2. Un documentaire de la chaîne ARD, l’homologue allemande de France 2, venait de montrer la désinformation spectaculaire par Charles Enderlin et la malhonnêteté criante de son caméraman Talal Abou Rahmeh. France 2 en bloqua la diffusion en France, alors que celle-ci aurait du être quasiment automatique, s’agissant d’un sujet qui concernait la France. Il en résulta une manifestation de protestation, à l’appel d’un vaste regroupement d’associations, juives ou pas, qui décerna, à France 2 et Enderlin, le “prix de la désinformation”. Parmi les divers appels, un site web appela à manifester contre “les mensonges et l’énorme manipulation” de France 2. Pour défendre sa réputation, France 2 a entamé des poursuites contre celui qu’elle accuse d’être responsable du site web, pour “atteinte à l’honneur et à la considération de M. Charles Enderlin”.

Sans doute, Américains ou Israéliens jugeront tout cela complètement fou, et je serai d’accord avec eux. Une des raisons pour lesquelles les juges de ces affaires de diffamation ne consacrent qu’une après-midi à l’audition des témoins et aux argumentaires des parties est qu’il y en a plein d’autres en attente. Alain Finkielkraut, une des rares voix sensées et courageuses de la France d’aujourd’hui, a cinq procès sur le dos, pour des propos qui, aux États-Unis, seraient débattus ouvertement dans les médias.

Mais la législation française sur la diffamation favorise grandement les plaignants, et de tels propos tombent sous le coup de ces lois. On pourrait alors supposer que la question sera de savoir si c’était vrai ou faux, si la cour prend en considération des éléments de preuve. Était-il exact de parler de mensonges et de manipulation ?

C’est cet espoir qui avait rendu si optimistes ceux d’entre nous mêlés à cette série de trois procès en diffamation autour de l’affaire Al-Durah à la sortie de la première audience. Le procureur l’avait dit clairement, les allégations étaient infamantes. Mais, ainsi qu’elle l’avait exprimé clairement, la justice voulait que l’on se demande “est-ce exact ?” et si oui, il s’agirait alors de critiques légitimes.

Dans la mesure où je m’intéresse tout spécialement au rôle central que jouent la critique publique et l’autocritique dans la mise en place et la pérennité de la “société civile”, cette question - la possibilité pour les citoyens de critiquer des personnages de la vie publique - me semble vitale à un moment de son histoire où la France est confrontée au défi culturel si grand que représente l’absorption de millions d’immigrants musulmans, généralement aussi mal disposés envers la société civile française que peu enclins à l’autocritique.

L’étonnant retournement du tribunal lors du premier procès contre Philippe Karsenty, après la recommandation du procureur d’abandonner les charges (car l’accusé avait fourni suffisamment d’éléments à l’appui de ses dires, et la gravité du sujet autorisait une certaine rudesse de ton) m’a clairement fait comprendre qu’il s’agissait moins des faits que de la réputation des acteurs de premier plan, France 2, première chaîne publique, et son correspondant vedette, Charles Enderlin.

Le jugement - qui sera prochainement traduit et commenté sur ce site- maintient la fiction de s’en tenir aux faits, mais les considérants, l’argumentation et l’accent sont mis sur Karsenty et visent à protéger Enderlin. J’ai acquis le sentiment que les juges ont fait leur le langage biaisé de France 2, dans leur document de 19 pages. Et la même équipe juridique développe les mêmes thèmes dans le deuxième procès : la réputation sans tâche de France 2 et d’Enderlin, le silence des autorités israéliennes, la personnalité louche de l’accusé et suspecte de ses témoins.

Je ne peux m’empêcher, malgré les nombreuses différences, de penser au dilemme de l’affaire Dreyfus — honneur ou vérité ?

Et si l’affaire Dreyfus était franco-française au départ, puis internationale par sa dimension antisémite et sa signification pour les Juifs, nous sommes ici en présence d’une affaire internationale qui a des implications pour la France, de par le rôle de ses médias dans la diffusion de l’accusation Al-Durah, et en raison de sa spécificité culturelle (et maintenant juridique) qui empêche la vérité de se faire jour.

En fait, les conséquences sont incalculables. Si vous voulez comprendre comment le jihad mondial - une idéologie de haine qui ne le cède en rien à la haine génocidaire des nazis - a pu se développer à ce point ces dernières années, il faut analyser comment les médias français (et au-delà les médias du monde occidental) ont à la fois, d’un côté, diffusé et accrédité les discours les plus hostiles contre Israël et les Juifs, et de l’autre minimisé les violences antijuives qui en ont résulté.

Comment le monde occidental pourrait-il déceler dans l’affaire Al-Durah un appel au jihad mondial, quand le New York Times, par exemple, en 2002, cite un prédicateur jihadiste palestinien qui appelle à l’extermination des Juifs dans le Monde entier en ces termes : “Les travaillistes, le Likoud, ils sont tous les mêmes, ce sont tous des Juifs…” en omettant un appel au génocide qui termine avec la phrase “…tuez-les tous partout où vous les trouverez” ?

Comment les Français pouvaient-ils savoir qu’en oblitérant la culpabilité de l’Holocauste avec l’image Al-Durah, ils agitaient le drapeau du jihad devant leurs immigrés musulmans ? Leurs médias leur ont dissimulé les actes mêmes qu’ils ont largement contribués à provoquer. Le 2 octobre 2000, au lieu de rendre compte des violences antijuives à travers la France et l’Europe qu’avait déchaînées la diffusion, deux jours plus tôt, de la séquence Al-Durah, le journaliste de France 2, à Paris, annonçait que des “colons” à Naplouse avaient tué une petite fille de 2 ans, une information qui est apparue dénuée de fondement même à des sites pro-palestiniens (donc tout à fait crédules). On peut retracer le cheminement de la diffusion des images Al-Durah à l’irruption quasi immédiate d’une “rue arabe” violemment antisémite dans les lieux publics et les universités d’Europe, jusqu’à l’Intifada des banlieues qui hante la France, avec en perspective des cauchemars inimaginables.

Et d’ailleurs, alors que je suis à Paris pour assister à ce procès (22-27 octobre), les banlieues s’échauffent à nouveau. Avec cette nouveauté, l’incendie de bus. S’emparer d’un autobus, faire sortir (ou pas) les passagers et le brûler. Un pas de plus dans la bataille pour les territoires qui oppose les “racailles” de ces quartiers d’immigrés à la République française. Il y a désormais en France des zones où ne sont plus garantis la scolarisation, la loi et l’ordre, représentés par la police ou les pompiers (ce sont aussi, et non pas par hasard, des zones de trafic de drogue) et maintenant, les transports en commun qui permettent aux habitants de ces quartiers qui travaillent d’en sortir. Et ces “territoires perdus de la République” se dégradent et s’étendent à la fois, à mesure que les bandes maffieuses gagnent constamment en agressivité. Encore un écart grandissant entre territoire avec culture productive, d’abondance et un territoire de culture auto-appauvrissante, de carence, qu’on se plait à appeler l’apartheid quand il est question d’Israéliens et Palestiniens.

Et les Français semblent incapables de seulement comprendre, et encore moins répondre, à ce à quoi ils sont confrontés. Leurs médias et leurs élites répètent avec insistance que c’est un problème de pauvreté et de racisme (c’est à dire la faute de la société française), qu l’islam n’a rien à y voir (nonobstant, par exemple, les cris Allahou Akbar, et la survenue des troubles pendant le Ramadan). Pendant mon séjour à Paris, un reportage télévisé relatait l’affreuse histoire d’Ilan Halimi, un Juif français torturé à mort par un gang de barbares (c’est le nom qu’eux-mêmes se donnaient) qui téléphonèrent à ses parents pour leur lire des versets du Coran alors qu’ils pouvaient entendre les cris de leur fils en arrière-plan. Cette histoire en dit long sur l’organisation culturelle de ces quartiers, sur l’étendue de l’empathie ou le poids de la loi du silence qui empêcha, pendant plus de deux semaines, les voisins, qui entendaient les hurlements, de prévenir la police. Et pourtant, pas une seule fois le mot “islam” ne fut prononcé dans ce reportage.

Un ami sociologue a emmené une fois une équipe de CNN dans ces territoires perdus (connus sous l’euphémisme de quartiers difficiles) et un gamin évoqua devant eux le Hamas. Un autre le fit taire. Cache-t-on quelque chose d’important ?

Pour des raisons très différentes, mais tout aussi mauvaises, tant les élites intellectuelles françaises que les gamins des cités souhaitent relativiser l’énorme attirance du jihad mondial pour cette sous-classe. Cet attrait n’est pas celui de la discipline de la religion musulmane, mais d’un culte de mort, haineux, destructeur et nihiliste qui séduit une population enragée de son impuissance humiliante dans le monde moderne. Que ces quartiers où fermente ce ressentiment soient actuellement musulmans ou pas, l’histoire des révolutions suggère que, le moment venu, des reculades françaises surgiront, sous une forme violente, les ambitions millénaristes de l’islam. Comme le note le sociologue James Scott*, dans son livre, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, le millénarisme est une “expression cachée véhémente” qui n’attend que l’occasion de faire irruption dans le débat public.

On pourrait comprendre que les “racailles” veuillent apparaître comme des damnés de la terre légitimement courroucés, qui ne cherchent qu’à s’insérer équitablement dans le jeu républicain, des opprimés qui réclament plus d’argent, plus de programmes d’aide, moins d’exclusion. Mais que l’élite universitaire française privilégie cette interprétation et jette l’anathème sur quiconque a le front, ou le courage, de les contredire me semble bien suicidaire. Une société civile, démocratique/républicaine, libre, ne peut se maintenir avec de telles alliances de démopathes (les émeutiers qui invoqueraient des “revendications” démocratiques) avec leurs dupes (les intellectuels qui s’en font l’écho).

Prenons le cas Finkielkraut. Il est poursuivi pour avoir déclarer que les émeutes dans les banlieues ont des motivations antirépublicaines, et que ces “jeunes” sont nihilistes. Ses détracteurs considèrent ses propos comme de l’incitation à la discrimination, comme quand le ministre de l’intérieur Nicolas Sarkozy les a qualifiés de “racailles”. Les faiseurs d’opinion accusent les Cassandre d’être responsables des problèmes qu’elles décrivent.

Et derrière ça se trouve ce que les Français vigilants appellent l’esprit munichois (en référence à la politique conciliante avec les nazis mise en œuvre en 1938 à Munich par Daladier et Chamberlain). Un ami qui réside dans un des faubourgs les plus calmes me rapportait sa conversation avec un policier. Les ordres sont “surtout pas de bavures !” Pas de vagues, pas d’erreurs. Ils redoutent que la mort d’un “jeune” de banlieue remette le feu aux poudres, comme l’électrocution des deux adolescents l’an dernier. Les autorités françaises vivent dans la crainte d’une nouvelle flambée aussi dure que la précédente. Aussi n’interviennent-ils pas tant que les “jeunes en colère” ne vont pas trop loin.

Ces jeunes, en dépit de leur peu d’instruction (ils ne parlent pas l’arabe, et, bien souvent, à peine le français) ont instinctivement assimilé les leçons de l’Intifada palestinienne : attaquer l’ennemi juste assez pour lui nuire, mais pas au point de provoquer de véritables représailles ; pousser toujours au-delà de ce que les autorités tolèrent (ordinairement, l’incendie de voitures, maintenant, embuscades de policiers). En attendant le martyr espéré, que la France les gratifie d’un enfant innocent massacré par des forces de répression fascistes, un petit Mohammed Al-Durah français, qui leur servirait d’alibi à toutes les violences, y compris l’attentat suicide.

Au final, les Français redoutent qu’il leur arrive ce qu’ils ont tant contribuer à faire aux Israéliens.

Ironie de l’histoire, les Français (et leurs amis européens) ont mis tout le monde en danger en reprochant avec véhémence à Israël de tenter de réprimer l’Intifada jihadiste de 2000, dénonçant, du haut de leur piédestal moral, des “représailles disproportionnées”, non seulement illégitimes à leurs yeux, mais même rappelant les atrocités nazies. Quand les attentats suicides se sont multipliés, les médias français et européens, les dirigeants et les manifestants les ont tous excusés, ou glorifiés, comme pleinement justifiés par la perversité (supposée) des Israéliens. Mais ces derniers, dont les forces armées ont une énorme capacité de retenue, ont placé la barre si haut qu’il serait bien difficile, et dangereux, aux Français de les imiter. Et maintenant, les populations musulmanes de la France (les Français ne savent même pas combien de musulmans vivent parmi eux, ni même qu’ils ont une population “musulmane”) ont intégré l’idée que tuer un de leurs enfants autorisait à faire exploser les civils français.

C’est ainsi. Si Israël est un poste avancé de l’occident à l’âge du jihad mondial, par la violence et par la démographie, la France, elle, fait tout son possible pour faire pencher la balance du côté du jihad. Abusés par des médias de mauvaise foi, pleins de bonne conscience, les Français diabolisent la société civile qui tente de résister au jihad, discréditant tout ce qu’ils font pour se défendre, et idéalisant une société sous l’emprise d’un culte de mort nihiliste, justifiant tous les actes visant à étendre leur guerre d’annihilation. Si Sartre était encore vivant, n’en aurait-il pas la nausée ? (Hélas, j’en doute.)

Aujourd’hui les Français sont pris à leur propre piège, mais ils ne s’en rendent pas encore compte.

Il faut à Dieu une bonne dose d’humour pour placer les Français dans une position où ils devront reconnaître, pour leur survie qu’”Israël est notre alliée, et nous avons beaucoup à apprendre des Israéliens, envers lesquels nous avons été particulièrement injustes.”

Une civilisation peut-elle se perdre par manque de sens de l’humour quant à ses propres défauts ? J’espère toujours que non, mais pour le moment, ce n’est pas gagné !

Note :
* James C. Scott sociologue américain spécialiste des modes d’expression des minorités opprimées

The Pope’s recent remarks have set off a particularly revealing firestorm of criticism. Distracted by the Al Durah trial, I haven’t paid close attention until now.

Dismaying is probably putting it mildly. At a distance, one gets the following impression. The Pope expressed disapproval of Jihadi “thinking” in Islam; Muslims the world over expressed vigorous if not violent objection to the Pope’s remarks; and responsible Westerners waxed indignant at the pope’s unnecessary provocation. Under the double pressure of a politically-correct public sphere and a violent or threatening Muslim “street,” the pope apologized.

Of course, the second stage of this story — the Muslim response — is nothing less than a very bad joke. “Call me violent? I’ll show you! I’ll riot and rampage until you stop calling me violent!” This is the kind of silliness even a five-year-old can get.

But the “adults” are not laughing, at least not in public. So what happened?
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Youssef Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born American reporter for the NYT and the Wall Street Journal, wrote a remarkabe op-ed for the New York Sun on the nature of the Islamist threat to Muslims and “infidels” alike. (Hat tip Antidhimmi)

America and Islam: Collision Inevitable?

BY YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
June 19, 2006

In its war on terror, America is unquestionably on a collision course with Islamic fundamentalism. The question is how far Islamic fundamentalism is from a collision with Islam itself, as interpreted today by the vast majority of ulemas, imams, theocratic schools, and many of its 1.1 billion followers.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the world has learned a great deal about politicized Islam, which has spawned Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, and jihadis. And it has become clear that Islam needs a serious self-examination.

The rejection of others - which is a basic foundation of Islam that is built into Islamic texts and practices - makes it impossible to divorce the religion from the violent impulses it inspires.

Would that this were clear to many. Speak with a religion major at a major American university, and you’ll probably hear that Islam is fundamentally different from Islamism and Jihadism, that the terrorists had hijacked the religion… you get the idea. My question to Mr. Ibrahim and to everyone: To just how many people has this “become clear”? How often has anyone heard anyone say that the basic foundation of Islam is the rejection of “others”?

Here are some important reasons why Muslims need to re-evaluate where religious practice ends and tyranny practiced in the name of Islam begins.

1.While Islam may appear a tolerant religion in many verses of the Koran, that tolerance is highly conditional on the submission of others to Muslims’ collective will. The holy book is full of references to those who are not Muslims as “infidels.” The Koran speaks in incredible detail of the need to do battle with infidels, to isolate them from the masses of believers, and to persist in efforts to convert them. Thus, as the Koran repeatedly states, the good practice of Islam cannot be limited to the worship of God or service to society. It must encompass spreading the faith, even at the edge of the sword.

2.Virtually all Muslims, including self-described moderates and liberals, believe what the Koran and the Hadith affirm: that Islam was God’s final monotheist revelation. As such it supersedes, indeed cancels out, all previous revelations. It follows, then, that those who belong to any other faith are in need of conversion. In its much venerated and often quoted Sura 9:29, the Koran specifically defines those who are not Muslims and live under Muslim rule as “Dhimmis,” people who under Islamic law “must surrender to the pacts contracted between non-Muslims and their Muslim conquerors.” That concept should absolutely be revisited and revised by Muslim scholars if we are to believe they want peace. The burden of proof of tolerance falls heavily on the nation of Islam.

This strikes me as a critical point. The NYT recently ran an adulatory article about “moderate Muslims” in America. No wonder Ibrahim had to go to the Sun to publish this piece despite decades of work for the Times. It concluded with these remarks by Imam Zaid Shakir, one of the two featured “moderates.”

He said he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, “not by violent means, but by persuasion.”
“Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country,” he said. “I think it would help people, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it’s helped a lot of people in my community.”

Now I am not questioning Mr. Shakir’s sincerity in saying that his conversion to Islam has done him good, that it helped him; nor that it can, has and will help others. But the idea that therefore the US should become a Muslim country, that one size fits all, strikes me as the most outrageous megalomania, particularly given the abysmal record of Muslim societies. This is a man who once cheered the Taliban. He claims to have changed, to have given up his violent ways. But apparently, the terrifying examples of “Muslim countries” like the Taliban and Iran (to take a Sunni and Shii example), have not even dented his commitment to the theocratic principles of Islam. This is “moderation” only in comparison with the violence of the Taliban, not anything that we would understand as moderate and tolerant. My guess is that Shakir has more in common with Tariq Ramadan than with Youssef Ibrahim.

As for the journalist who wrote this up, either she is abysmally ignorant of what this remark means — that any Muslim who is honest with you about his or her desires, is engaged in the treasonous endeavor of wanting to overthrow the constitution of the United States — or she (and her readers) are so relieved to find someone that sounds moderate, and so incredulous that such an endeavor would ever succeed, that she is willing to throw it in as a toss-off line at the end of her paean of praise.

3.The aggressive demarcation of Muslims and infidels runs through all Islamic religious texts and speeches communicated to the faithful in millions of mosques across the globe. It is accompanied by much lament over the loss of Spain and chunks of Europe once part of the Muslim empire. The whole notion that Islam is an umma, or nation, unto itself that cuts across borders and comes before nationalities, bears the seeds of menace. Indeed, Muslim immigrants in Western nations are encouraged by their preachers to prevail in their societies and “spread the faith.”

Islam as practiced today in virtually all Muslim countries does not fashion itself merely as a spiritual value, but as a conquering force with a need to dominate - not so far from the next step of Islamic fundamentalist theology, which motivates jihadis.

In millennial terminology, Ibrahim is pointing at the tendency of millennial apocalyptic scenarios (i.e., the means by which the corrupt and evil world is transformed into the millennial kingdom) to turn from transformative to cataclysmic. It’s only one step from Dawa (conversion through preaching) and Jihad (conversion by the sword), and that step most often comes when Dawa no longer works… then our moderate preachers cease to be Mr. Nice Guy. (There’s an amazingly apologetic book on the Wahhabis (Wahhabi Islam : From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad) by a “post-Orientalist” which emphasizes that the Wahabbis are not unrelentingly violent, they believe in trying Dawa first.)

This overwhelmingly hostile orientation, relayed to the faithful by texts and preachers, has led to Islamic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which is barricaded in deep isolation but uses its huge wealth to export reactionary Wahhabi ideologies to the world, setting up madrassas, mosques, and theological seminaries across the globe.

In Europe, America, Canada, and Australia, it has been easy for Muslim fundamentalists to take over Muslim immigrant communities because Islam promotes confrontation with others. Mosques, religious schools, and the imposition of the veil are tools of domination, not assimilation.

These issues must be dealt with. Much of the task falls to Muslim scholars in Muslim nations, and the work is imperative. Darkness, fear, and xenophobia are the understudy of terror.

The West does not have to bend backward. Indeed, it is time to push back - at the edge of the sword, if need be.

How does a religion which, for over fourteen centuries, considered the uncovertable infidel as to be killed or dominated, which has profoundly dysfunctional relations with the autonomous religious “other,” come to terms with a world in which getting along with the “other” is part of the basic elements of civil society?

No wonder as globalization has become more intense, Muslim reaction has gotten more violent. Not to get millennial about this, but the world has until 2076, the year 1500 in the Muslim calendar, to get Islam to at least begin the momentous shift from imperial to civic modes of interaction. As Ibrahim suggests, it’s primarily the work of Muslims, but those willing to do the work need help from us, and that means we push, we ask hard questions, we embarrass the apologists and strengthen the real moderates. Of course that means telling the difference between demopaths and moderates. No easy task, no more urgent one.

Conspiracy theory in Arab/Muslim world

It is something of a commonplace that the Arab and Muslim media are full of conspiracy-thinking. Indeed, anyone bold enough to defy Edward Saïd’s prohibition on seeing Arabs as different from Westerners, remarks among the most salient features of Arab culture a propensity to conspiracy theory: Everything is part of a plot; every motive has secret and malevolent motives. The frequency with which even quotidian political events are conceived as the playing out of conspiracies confirms what observation also notices: this is a culture where the political axiom “rule or be ruled” dominates.

Nor is this kind of thinking a recent phenomenon. After WW II, for example, the Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jews, in particular, their foundational conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found earnest welcome in the Arab world. It provided the perfect escape from facing the nature of their failure to wipe out any trace of an independent state made by dhimmi. This same need to explain their humiliating failure by blaming the conspiratorial malevolence of others accounts for why one of the major disagreements in the Arab world today is whether the US is a pawn of Israel or vice-versa.

Dan Pipes’ 1998 book, The Hidden Hand, describes the role of conspiracy theory in the Arab world. There he finds a mentality that pervades almost all forms of thought, that contributes fundamentally to both the insolubility of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the economic stagnation of the Arab world. But he also finds that conspiracy theory works primarily as a depressant: the forces are so great, the Arabs such victims, that nothing can be done. Pipes finds this quality among the most damaging:

Imagining conspiracies of malicious, omnipotent adversaries can induce a profound sense of hopelessness. After all, how can an enemy so shrewd, so powerful, and so vast be challenged? At the same time, how can one negotiate or compromise with such an implacable and evil force?

Since 2000, however, things have changed significantly in the Arab world on two major levels. First, the intensity, variety and sophistication of the conspiracy has risen exponentially. The elaborate film and TV series that depict the most horrendous, bloodthirsty Jewish conspiracies to destroy Arabs and Islam have brought public discussion of these themes to a new and vivid prominence. Similarly the variety of conspiratorial narratives, taken over from the Europeans (e.g., blood libels) and given new twists (e.g., Humantashen made with Christian or Muslim boys’ blood), appear in prominent and respected mainstream media. Any glance at the contents of many of the most mainstream of Arab media (from the PATV to Al Jazeera, to al Ahram) reveals an intensity of paranoid hatemongering conspiracism with few parallels in recorded history. Indeed, some future, impartial judge will probably find the early 21st century Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism was even more fevered (if, hopefully, less effective) than Nazi anti-Semitism.

Right after 9-11, 60 Minutes ran a piece on the conspiracy theory that the Mossad was responsible (can’t find this, pretty sure it was CBS). The narrator expressed astonishment not at the existence of such a rumor, but its pervasiveness, even in educated circles, even in non-Arab countries (he was attending a wedding in Pakistan). That TV program should have been a wake-up call to the problem of an entirely different mentality operating in the Arab and Muslim world, where conspiracy is not relegated to the commoners, but publicly embraced by the elites. Even in moderate, pro-Western Muslim circles one finds an almost naïve recourse to CT. In a recent statement by the apparently genuinely moderate Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) [they’re against Sharia law]), their spokesman, Tariq Fatah, expressed relief at the recent pre-emptive arrest of the terrorists in Canada, and, while attacking Muslim extremists, let this comment slip:

It is ironic that Muslim extremists are portraying themselves as anti-imperialist, when in fact Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are nothing more but a creation of the CIA.

Note how the conspiracy theory – with all its profound misunderstandings of how things “work” – allows Mr. Fatah to deny any Islamic dimension to the imperialism of Al-Qaeda.

But in addition to new intensity since 2000, we also find an even more alarming switch from passive to active. Indeed the emergence of global Jihad has accompanied, fed, and ridden on the wave of this intensified conspiracism. One might suggest – I would – that the turn of the millennium has shifted the gears of the Muslim world from passive to active, that the narrative of conspiracy that had previously had so soporific an effect now offered the very rhetoric of incitement to aggression.

This shift to the offensive, already in motion among certain, relatively marginal jihadi figures like Abdullah Azzam and Bin Laden and organizations like Hizbullah, Hamas and al Qaeda, first encountered success in the public arena with the outbreak of the Intifada in the Fall of 2000. The previously marginal found eager ears for conspiracist narratives that incited to action, not to fatalism, militant Islamism and global Jihad. From that point on a new and more aggressive form of Conspiracy theory took on world-wide proportions: from the outbreak of the Intifada, to the convening of the Durban conference, and 9-11. It continues to spread, from the Middle East to Europe, the USA, Far East Asia, etc.

Like most active cataclysmic conspiracy theory (there is a massive conspiracy out there and we can and must fight it), this one has heavy doses of apocalyptic rhetoric, symbolism and, accordingly, absolutist logic. Suicide terrorism first receives its terrifying justification in the framework of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil; and after 2000, receives large majorities of support in opinion polls. In other words, in the Arab world, conspiracy theory has, since 2000, both taken over even more of the public sphere – i.e., taken over the mainstream – and gone active… a highly ominous development.

Next: Conspiracy theory in West