Augean Stables

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.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.”

(more…)

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.
(more…)

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.”
(more…)

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