Take, for example, the following: 1) Israelis are like Nazis, and 2) The Holocaust didn’t happen. So the Nazis aren’t bad, but the Israelis are like them.

The resolution to the logical contradiction has to do with the emotional pleasure making the statements provides:

• Saying the Israelis are like Nazis is a form of moral sadism that not only attacks Jews, but demeans them in the eyes of anyone who believes the Nazis did commit genocide.
• Saying the Holocaust didn’t happen is another form of sadism which any Palestinian who wanted to extend the most elementary empathy to Jews might appreciate since they are immensely indignant at any effort to question just how bad they have suffered, or the role of Israel in that suffering.

There was a similar moment, oft repeated, when the Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor (who had good experiential evidence for the remark) saying that Islam was inherently violent. The Muslim response? Riot, kill, maim: “How dare you call me violent!”

Now, in Israel, where Member of Knesset Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al) and others have petitioned the court for a temporary injunction blocking an anti-Islam video ridiculing the prophet Muhammad on Google and YouTube, we have the following from a supporter (H/T: DC):

“Islam is a religion of love, living together like brothers, and good livelihood. It’s lies what they said, and anyone who said anything bad about Muhammad needs to have their tongue cut out,” said Zatmi Ali, one of the supporters of the ban.

Again, content doesn’t matter. It’s all about what feels good: to praise Islam and to assail anyone who contradicts that praise.

Don’t you dare diss me. I’ll diss you right back.

No wonder that, although they are in principle dedicated to brotherly love (at least among Muslims) and good livelihood, in practice Muslims are so often at each other’s throats, and by a vast majority, are poor and wretched in their livelihood.

Some readers may feel that I’m being hostile to Muslims, even Islamophobic. But I challenge you to come up with a non-Muslim example of this kind of emotional “logic.” And while you can probably find some (especially in psychotherapeutic discussions), I’ll bet that the other people(s) who express this kind of utterly self-indulgent thinking don’t think that it’s a good idea to say such things too loudly.

For an honor-shame culture, Muslims these days sure are shameless. Maybe it has to do with the success of the intimidation of the rest of us. After all, instead of Muslims being the laughing stock of the global community, the Pope was assailed by good people for provoking the Muslim reaction.

Who would have thought that for lack of a sense of humor, the Western world might commit suicide?

The so-called “Democratic West” today faces significant challenges both from other cultures, and from critics generated from within. Some of these challenges involve typical competition from rival societies, and helpful self-criticism from members of our own societies. But some represent lethal attacks, both from the outside and from within, and we seem to have exceptional difficulty telling the difference between beneficent and malevolent discourse. This talk is both about the Athenian principle of Parrhesia (“free speech”), and an illustration of it.

Let’s begin with why speech is almost universally not free. In most cultures it is allowed, expected, even required that alpha males shed blood for the sake of honor… if not another’s blood, then one’s own blood (as in seppuku). If you criticize those in power, they will make you pay; if they do not, they lose face and their power immediately begins to wane. People self-censor to avoid suffering the inevitable consequences. In such cultures, violence and intimidation pervade; indeed in tribal warrior cultures, one is not a “man” until one has killed another man. And you’re surely not a man if another demeans you publicly and you do not respond.

But the free tongue is silenced not only by political violence, but by group solidarities. Here we also find the working of a deep-rooted solidarity that insists on silence: “my side right or wrong.” Here we have community pressures in punishing violators: failure to side with “one’s own,” brings shame, and effectively excommunicates the offender. If I do not avenge my relative, I am not a man. Thus any breaking of ranks, even if done on principle, will bring accusations of cowardice not only from the opposing clan, but more devastatingly, from relatives.

And finally we silence ourselves: if one will shed blood to counter unwanted criticism, how much the more will one not reveal embarrassing things about oneself. As a principle, one might describe public self-criticism – admission of fault, sin, failure – as something people avoid whenever possible. As a French friend of mine said, “in France no one admits they were wrong; it’s a sign of weakness.” Public self-criticism is like chewing broken glass; virtually no one does it voluntarily.

The overall point I want to make here is that given these cultural and personal dimensions, the principle of “freedom of speech,” or differently put, the art of giving and receiving public criticism, is actually opposed by an extraordinary array of forces. Its accomplishment, therefore, takes far more than merely legislating free speech or a free press. If the cultural dimensions, both individual and group, are not addressed, no legislation will make a significant difference. Obviously and thankfully, we all self-censor, but the degree of self-censorship, especially in political issues, makes a key difference in the cultural “atmosphere.”

Which brings me now to one of the crucial accomplishments of Athenian society in the middle of the first millennium BCE: the extension of the right of parrhesia, to the public as a whole, or isegoria.

The Athenians, as they developed their democracy increasingly identified Parrhesià with courage. Notes Foucault: “the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk.” When the Chinese courtier, in a famous legend, brings his coffin to court the day he intends to tell the emperor he disagrees with him, he is a parrhesiastes; so was Diogenes when took on Alexander the Great. If a teacher tells a student the truth, it is not Parrhesià; if a student tells a teacher the truth, it is. By the end of this talk, I’ll let you decide whether I have exercised Parrhesià.

But Parrhesià also has a non-political dimensions — you admit the truth to yourself even if it threatens your self-image, or, more dangerously, offends your community. The ancient Cynics practiced a style of Parrhesià that on principle flaunted convention, and spoke provocative truth no matter what the social consequences. (According to one version, they got their name because, like dogs (kyon, kynos), they behaved without any shame (anaideia), sleeping and making love in the street.) As Janis Joplin put it to a generational revolt kicked off by the “Free Speech movement” in Berkeley: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Or as Diogenes put it, combining his lack of shame with his sharp and free tongue: “other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends to save them.”

My fifteen minutes do not allow me even a short survey of how this idea played in history, but I want to emphasize three interlocking issues that made this extraordinary development possible. First, as opposed to cultures of consensus, ancient Greece was one of Agon, competition on all levels including verbal, producing it exceptional literary achievements – philosophy and theatre. Second, Isegoria, or the extension of parrhesia to every member of the polity, including – most exceptionally – manual laborers. Without this, no democracy. To quote Thucydides, one of the great practitioners of Parrhesià, slightly out of context: “to be happy means to be free and to be free means to be brave.”

But above all, isegoria calls for an exceptional level of trust in the collective and individual abilities – and courage – of the demos to exercise Parrhesià wisely. For that to happen, the strongest must exercise a quiet courage, not that of the boastful warrior, but of he who submits to verbal disputes, resolved by the public consensus. Parrhesià as a common right demands that alpha males develop an exceptionally thick skin; it means that people must endure not just criticism but even ridicule without striking back violently. It means an exceptional level of psychological security. This is perhaps the least explored and most significant dimension of the problem, but I think it fair to say, that many Athenians of the fifth century BCE possessed this quiet if exhilarating courage.

Of course there’s an enormous payoff to self-criticism: it allows exceptional learning curves because it permits one to examine and avoid past mistakes. It makes meritocracy possible since all public figures are subject to criticism and, if necessary, to replacement. It makes any kind of science and history possible. So this combination of self-criticism, free speech, and public dispute play a critical role in the emergence of modern society, with its scientific disciplines, its historical consciousness, its egalitarian and meritocratic principles, its tolerance, its free press. And in the astonishing success that democratic culture has experienced in the modern world, free speech and press have become “universal human rights.”

Demopaths and Parrhesiaphobia

But for all the pleasant and accomplished pictures one can draw of ancient Athens, or the modern world, it remains true that the price for these accomplishments is something highly painful and unpleasant: as I said, tolerating Parrhesià and engaging in the public self-criticism it demands, is, on both an individual and collective level, akin to chewing broken glass. Most cultures don’t tolerate parrhesia, on the political or on the social plane; and they all have elaborate ways of enforcing the silence they demand on behalf of the powerful.

One of the major errors that we, the products of modern culture, make – and most especially academics who are raised in a culture of public self-criticism – is to assume that the benefits so outweigh the costs that everyone understands and accepts the principles of Parrhesià. But I want to argue today that the opposite is true, that despite widespread legislation on freedom of speech and press, most societies manage to throttle those freedoms in “informal” unofficial ways. My own experience with the French media over the al Durah affair suggests that even one of the modern birthplaces of democracy has problems with a free press.

Perhaps the culture that has reacted most powerfully to the spread of Parrhesià in the world today is the Arab world. Indeed, from an historical point of view, comparing the Arab world today with the situation in the 12th cn, one might even argue that it has regressed in its encounter with the modern world, indeed it seems to have developed a form of parrhesiaphobia, in which the existence of free speech constitutes an existential threat – to culture and to religion. And the most acute expression of this parrhesiaphobia is found in the neo-Islam that has gained increasing strength over the last generation.

Since 1989, with the Salman Rushdie affair, Jihadi Muslims have engaged in a series of assaults on the principles of freedom of speech in the West. In every case these efforts at bullying the West have succeeded. The two most striking came in the 21st century: the Muhammad Cartoon Affair, and the Pope’s comments on violent Islam, both of which provoked violence intended to silence the critics of Islam. As the signs carried in a violent demonstration outside the Danish embassy in London read: “Slay/Behead/Butcher those who insult/mock Islam.”

Clearly these folks do not believe in freedom of speech. But they do demand freedom of speech, and we provide it. In the case of the Danish embassy protest, British cops defended the rights of Muslim extremists who announced the forthcoming European Holocaust: “Europe you will pay; extermination is on its way.”

This has made us, rightly, a joke to those radical Muslims who want to reinstate Sharia law. When the pope said Islam is inherently a violent religion and Muslims rioted around the world, the joke – and the shame – should have been on them. Instead, the very people who illustrate the pope’s remarks get to laugh when our intelligentsia pressures him into making an apology.

Indeed, I think our excessive adherence to a kind of post-modern political correctness in which we dare not judge the “subaltern” underdog, in which we grant a kind epistemological priority to the “other,” has created a new phenomenon, what I’d like to call “demopathy,” a variant on the ancient Greek plague of demagogy. Demopaths demand democratic and human rights even though they have no intention of granting those rights to others. As one Muslim put it on Belgian radio: “I demand from you according to your principles, the freedom of speech that I will deny you according to my principles.”

Most are less honest: like the Muslim Brotherhood front, CAIR, they loudly demand that Muslim rights be respected, even as they protect and foster Muslim radicals. As long as we are dupe to these hypocrites, we undermine the precious heritage that we retrieved from ancient Athens and have so admirably enshrined as the normative standard in the world today.

Let me conclude by noting three things: First, I suspect that much of our misplaced “respect” for offended Muslims has less to do with genuine respect than with fear, and that rather than defer to his or her rage by going out of our way not to provoke them, we need to tell them to get a thicker skin. If you do a Venn diagram of what we would do were we generous to a fault and what we would do if we were afraid, the two circles would overlap almost entirely. The Muslims who intimidate us are not fooled by the conceit: they know we are afraid. And in showing this fear we strengthen the radicals and undermine the genuinely moderate among them.

Second: beneath our exaggerated deference lies not only fear but contempt, a kind of racism of low expectations in which we fail to rebuke Muslims – whether for engaging in the violence or justifying it – because we do not think they can handle it. And just as they know we’re afraid, not respectful, they also sense our contempt. What a combination of traits designed to provoke the enduring hatred in that “other”!

Third: as the ancient Athenians noted, Parrhesià is defined by courage, something of which our intellectual elite today around the world is in sore need. I firmly believe that this cultural clash between Islam and the West need not be a clash so much as a thrash of civilizations, that if we show some respect for ourselves and our values, and for Muslims as human beings capable of rising above honor-driven sensibilities, we can resolve many of these issues in the realm of the discourse rather than weapons. The Athenians taught us both that Parrhesià is the key to democracy, and that “the secret to that freedom is courage.”

And to any Muslims who hear or read these words, and might take offense, let me add to Diogenes comment about biting my friends, William Blake’s Proverb of Hell: Opposition is true friendship. Don’t walk away hurt; let’s talk.

See update below on Naomi Ragen’s criticism of the pope for betraying Christians.

Getting it wrong with the Pope
Posted by Isi Leibler on May 18th, 2009

Any discussion amongst Jews relating to the Catholic Church invariably triggers off emotional responses. But even taking this into account, the rage displayed by some Israelis against the conduct of Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Israel was unwarranted.

I have no particular axe to grind for Catholics. I have consistently deplored the inclination of Jews engaged in interreligious dialogue to grovel and compromise basic Jewish principles in order to advance their careers in interfaith activity. Nor do I minimize the centuries of bloody persecution of the Jews orchestrated by the Church which laid the foundations for the Holocaust.

Moreover, I have never hesitated criticizing Pope Benedict, in particular his support for the beatification of Pope Pius XII having regard to the latter’s cowardly silence and questionable role during the Shoah.

I am also highly critical of the numerous blunders and misjudgments by the pope for which incompetent or bad advisors do not absolve him. This applies particularly to the bizarre rehabilitation of the excommunicated bishops including unrepentant Holocaust denier Richard Williamson.

However, when the pontiff finally realized the extent of his blunder, he did not hide behind the mantle of papal infallibility, but penned an anguished letter conceding that he had erred and expressed powerful condemnation of Holocaust denial.

Despite the shortcomings of the current pope, we must not overlook the radical revolution the Catholic Church has undergone since the 1965 Nostra Aetate Declaration of the Second Vatican Council. That led to annulling the odious replacement theology, rescinding the accusation of Deicide against the Jewish people and even swallowing the theologically bitter pill of acknowledging the renewal of Jewish statehood.

These changes occurred at a time when we sought to forge new alliances. Whereas the Catholic commitment to Israel and the Jewish people is a far cry from the unequivocal passionate love extended towards us by Evangelical Christians, the Catholic Church today represents an important ally in the global struggle against anti-Semitism.

This is especially so now when our traditional leftist and liberal allies have effectively forsaken us.

Extraordinary courage

Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Polish-born Pope John Paul II possessed warm personality traits that many Jews found attractive. His emotional disposition contrasted with the cold, academic and dour personality of his successor.

But leaders must be judged by their acts not their personalities. And during his visit Pope Benedict explicitly reiterated that “the Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to a genuine and lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews.”

Many of us fail to appreciate that an ally is not obliged to share all our values. Pope Benedict is the Catholic pontiff, not a Jewish activist.

Yet it took extraordinary courage for him to decide of his own free will to visit Israel, conscious that he was entering such a huge minefield. Even if some of his speeches lacked the sensitivity and emotional appeal associated with his predecessor, this does not justify the primitive pillorying to which the pope was subjected by the Israeli media.

There were even occasions when Joseph Ratzinger’s Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht background were raised without pointing out that his parents were anti-Nazi, that every German youngster at the time was obliged to become a member of the Hitler youth, and that he had deserted the army.

At Yad Vashem, his speechwriters should have drafted a less theological and tepid address and endeavored to deal with his German past in an open manner. His family record displays no grounds for embarrassment and in 2006 at Auschwitz he had movingly related to his German background.

The condemnations directed against him for not “apologizing” for his past were grotesque. In contrast to the dignified welcoming remarks by Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen who never flinched in directly expressing his concerns to the pope about the beatification of Pius XII, other Rabbis began beating up on him.

Shas Rabbis and some of their associates even called for a boycott prior to his arrival. He was also harshly criticized by the worldlier Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau, who despite subsequent more balanced remarks, should have known better.

But to his credit, Pope Benedict carried on. He repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism, which he describes as “a sin against God and man.” When he spoke about the Shoah, he was criticized for referring to victims being killed rather than murdered and for not apologizing.

Despite the inadequate Catholic responses during the Shoah, one can appreciate the pontiff’s determination not to agree that his Church should accept responsibility for the Nazi murder of six million Jews. In his moving departure speech at the airport he totally vindicated himself.

Besides that, he also made important statements breaking new ground that were hardly even mentioned. The most dramatic was his announcement that all missionary activity amongst Jews would be terminated.

Pope is not a Zionist

Whilst we have grounds for being critical about the politically correct statements the pope made for the benefit of the Palestinians, we should note that he was consistent and also failed to even mention the persecution Christians are undergoing. Yet at the outset of his visit at Mount Nebo, he probably surprised his Jordanian hosts when he referred to the “inseparable bond” between the Catholic Church and Judaism.

He also praised Israel for safeguarding absolute freedom of religious practice. At an interfaith meeting when PA representative Sheikh Tamimi launched an obscene anti-Israeli tirade, the pope and his entourage demonstrated their feelings by walking out.

We must appreciate that the Pope is not a Zionist and his primary obligations are to his religion, his Church, his bishops and his 1.5 billion followers. It was thus not surprising that despite repeated calls to the Palestinians to renounce violence, he expressed biased pro-Palestinian remarks which irritated us. We were also disappointed that he failed to deal with the Iranian threats.

However, we should also take into account that many of his pro-Palestinian remarks paralleled statements currently being expressed by spokesmen of the Obama administration. Nevertheless, his comments were considerably less offensive than the standard condemnations directed against us by the Europeans.

We should perhaps note the stark contrast of Pope Benedict’s visit to Pope Paul Vl’s visit to the region only half a century ago in 1964, when he could not even bring himself to mention Israel by name.

We should reserve our wrath for outright hostile Christians like those in the Anglican Church and bodies affiliated with the radical World Council of Churches who insist that Judaism has no role and whose sanctimonious hypocrisy, employment of double standards and vicious attacks against the Jewish state are beyond contempt.

If these churches were even remotely as friendly as Pope Benedict, we would be embracing them.

There is a need for us to control our emotions. We should take into account the tremendous progress the Church has achieved in combating anti-Semitism and building bridges with our people. That should not inhibit us from speaking up and expressing our concerns about negative Catholic policies. But we should actively encourage popes to retain their constructive preoccupation with Judaism and the Holy Land and continue strengthening relations with the Jewish people.

Is Liebler going soft? Has he been hanging out with David Rosen? Is this a one-quarter full cup?

UPDATE: For a radically different take, which focuses on the Pope’s betrayal of Arab Christians, rather than his behavior towards Jews, see Naomi Ragen’s ferocious critique (HT/ Joshuapundit, whose commentary I include at the end).

What the Pope Taught the World

The Pope’s recent visit to Bethlehem was one of the most blatant displays of capitulation to terrorism that has been seen in recent years. How well I remember the way Christians were treated by Arafat’s henchmen, including Mahmoud Abbas his right hand man, during the Intifada. The Christian community was decimated, and is now only twenty percent of the population, when it was once the majority. Christian girls were kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. Christians were kicked out of their homes by gunmen, who used Christian neighborhoods to set up sniper nests from which they shot into Jewish homes in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, and passing cars on the road (Dr. Shmuel Gillis, on whom I patterned the hero of my book, The Covenant, was killed on his way home from treating cancer patients at Hadassah Hospital by such a sniper.)

And then there was the siege of the Church of the Nativity. The priests and children held hostage by Arafat’s gunmen. The church desecrated. Priests holding up signs at the windows to Israeli soldiers “Please help us!”

The Pope, standing side by side with Abbas, chose to forget these things. His words: “Mr. President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders.”

This is the voice of a religious leader, a moral force in the world? For choosing to forget all that happened to Christians in one of Christianity’s holiest sites, he has chosen the way of appeasement, not peace. Of cowardly acquiescence to evil, instead of forthright defense of the helpless. He has nothing to teach us Jews. Indeed, he has nothing to teach Catholics. The only people who may learn from him are Muslim terrorists. And the lesson is clear. The leader of the Catholic world –once again– in the face of evil, has decided to side with the oppressors against the oppressed.

One would think a German Pope would have something wiser to impart.

To which Joshuapundit added:

Well said, Naomi. The irony of this Pope standing next to Arafat’s Holocaust denying number two in Bethlehem,where Abbas and Arafat presided over the decimation of a once majority Christian town is a permanent stain on the Church.

Pope Benedict may not have consciously decided to side with the oppressors against the oppressed, but he has decided to accomodate, appease them and not confront them -which amounts to the same thing. That kind of moral deliquency is exactly how Pius XII dealt with the Nazis.

Once again, as with the media and the academics, intimidation comes into play and has enormous impact on what is said and done, what we know about and what we don’t. And to think that James Fallows still thinks that al Durah couldn’t have been staged because someone would have leaked it…

By the standards of modern tolerance this is problematic however one reads it, even if whoever refers only to Muslims. After all, isn’t secular, civil society about the marketplace of ideas, even religious ones, and isn’t the highest form of any religion voluntary, adherence from conviction and love, not from fear and coercion?

But if whoever refers to everyone, Muslim and not, it goes beyond “problematic” to “slap in your face” when the sign is hung out — with translation — to “welcome” the head of another religious tradition on a highly public occasion.

There were other passages from the Qur’an they might have cited, for example:

Surely, those who believe, those who are the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians – whosoever believed in Allaah and the Last Day, and worked righteousness, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
[al-Maa’idah 5:69]

But for many (all?) Muslims, the former passage supersedes this more tolerant one. The generosity of acknowledging that God will be merciful to those who worship him in their own fashion disappears once Islam is completely revealed, according to an internet site that presents itself as moderate. (Note that on the question of whether non-Muslims deserve to live the same religious authority uses of the very passage here dismissed as depassé.)

Newsworthy sign? Indicator of a mood? Something Westerners should know about?

Apparently not (except for Fox News). My search for images of the pope’s visit to Nazareth finds no such image published by the news agencies. It’s all holding hands with Muslims and Jews and singing odes to peace and tolerance.

Let’s call it the Sieple approach to dialogue, embodied here in the apologetic words of the AJC’s rabbi for interfaith dialogue, David Rosen. In response to criticism of the pope’s disembodied speech at Yad Vashem. (Note that the Pope’s visit to Yad Vahsem was itself overshadowed by the Pope’s refusal to visit the museum where a display criticized Pope Pius XII for his behavior during the Holocaust, the same pope that Benedict XVI would like to beatify.) Rosen both defended the pope and pointed to Nazareth as a counter-point of the real spirit of his visit.

Rosen said that he regarded the criticism of Benedict as “not really fair” and noted that before the pope departed Israel on Friday, he decried anti-Semitism in unequivocal terms and made many of the points critics said were missing from his speech at Yad Vashem. If there’s a pattern, Benedict’s admirers say, it’s that his public relations skills are not as strong as his theology — but that he tends to make up ground once he recognizes a problem.

Doubters, Rosen said, should look at the pope’s involvement in a broad interfaith meeting held in Nazareth. Representatives treated their different religious traditions “as a sort of blessing and enrichment, and not as a sort of tension and strife,” he said.

That’s certainly the message of hope that our media also convey with their pictures. As one reporter put it, “Pope slowly learns to dialogue with Muslims.”

But the bottom line is, like “peace” negotiations, it’s the West fantasizing a partner who isn’t there.

As a preliminary, let me quote some of Darwish’s book on the issue of Muslim views of the “other” (courtesy of my Kindle):

In Islam, my religion at that time, we looked at ourselves and others very differently. “They are sinners…. Non-Muslims are sinners…. We are Muslims.” They are guilty, but we are innocent. Muslims and non-Muslims were never considered as equals in anything, not even in our imperfections as human beings. The Qur’an and the Hadith were consumed with the idea of kaffir (non-Muslim) representing “evil” and Muslim representing “good,” which caused a split in how human beings were perceived-as good and bad, superior and inferior, human and sub-human. Our Islamic education stressed the inequality between Muslims and kaffir. Kaffir is the dreaded word used against others and also against Muslims who deviate or do not follow Allah’s commands to the letter. Kaffir means “infidel,” or a person who goes astray.

She then goes on to quote both the interview with Choudary that I featured in the previous post and another with Imam Abdul Makin in an East London mosque, who, asked why Allah would tell Muslims to kill and rape innocent non-Muslims, replied, “Because non-Muslims are never innocent. They are guilty of denying Allah and his prophet.”

Darwish continues:

As to Muslims who disagree with the above views, they are also considered kuffar. On March 15, 2008, two Saudi writers, Abdullah bin Bejad al-Otaibi and Yousef Aba al-Khail, each called for a reconsideration of the Wahabi notion that all non-Muslims are kuffar, prompting a top religious figure, Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, to call for their deaths in a fatwa published on his Web site.

That is the great divide – the notion of innocence and guilt, sinners and non-sinners, Muslim and non-Muslim-that every Muslim is commanded to believe and act upon. It is how we were trained to perceive others and explains why the majority of Muslims today are silent about Islamic terrorism. The Muslim outlook regarding the rest of humanity shapes how Muslim society thinks and acts politically and culturally at all levels. That is why the two Egyptian Christian boys Mario and Andrew together with the Christian minority in Egypt have suffered for fourteen hundred years. And that is also why almost all Egyptian Muslims have been stripped of their empathy for and support of Christian Egyptians and therefore fail to stand up for their basic kaffir human rights.

With this profoundly illiberal mindset in mind, let’s look at Tamimi’s behavior and remarks.

Muslim cleric slams Israel to pope, raising anger
11 May 2009 18:27:07 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Alastair Macdonald

JERUSALEM, May 11 (Reuters) – A senior Palestinian Muslim cleric fiercely denounced Israeli policy in Jerusalem in the presence of Pope Benedict on Monday and appealed to the pope to help end what he called the “crimes” of the Jewish state.

The speech, at the end of a meeting between the pope and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy engaged in contacts among the three main religions in Jerusalem, angered both the Vatican and Israel’s chief rabbinate, which said it would boycott the dialogue forum until the Palestinians barred the cleric.

Referring to Palestinian Muslims and Christians, Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi said: “We struggle together and suffer together from the oppression of the Israeli occupation.

“We look forward together to liberation and independence and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”

The incident further marred the start of the German-born pope’s five-day tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories, after criticism by some Jews that a speech at a Holocaust memorial did not go far enough to mend Catholic-Jewish rifts.

Pope Benedict, in his own speech to the gathering of priests, rabbis and sheikhs, praised their efforts to seek common values and mutual respect to overcome differences in religious practices that “may at times appear as barriers”.

The final speaker from the platform at an auditorium in a Roman Catholic institution was Tamimi, the chief judge of the Muslim religious courts in the Palestinian territories.

In uncompromising language, he welcomed the pope to “Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Palestine” — a direct riposte to Israeli claims to the same city — and enumerated many of the complaints Palestinians have against Israel.

“DESECRATION”

He said Israel had “desecrated” the Old City’s holy sites since capturing it from Jordanian forces in the 1967 Middle East war and was defying international law by demolishing homes, seizing land, building Jewish settlements and erecting a series of walls and fences that had turned the city into “a prison”.

Tamimi won a round of applause from some of the assembled clerics for comments referring to Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip in January in which 1,400 Palestinians died.
Addressing the pope at the end of a six-minute address, he said: “Your Holiness, I call on you in the name of the one God, to condemn these crimes and press the Israeli government to halt its aggression against the Palestinian people.”

(If anyone has access to a translation of the full remarks, please let us know.)

But we don’t need a full transcript to get a sense of what’s going on here. This isn’t just a rant, it’s a rant turned upside down. Tamimi’s claims are inverted statements about Judaism and Islam.

“Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Palestine” is not just a riposte, it’s a bad joke. There was no such thing as “Palestine” nor was Jerusalem an eternal capital of anything in neither Arab nationalism nor Islam. The meaninglessness of “eternal” in a statement with “Palestine” (as an Islamic or Arab phenomenon) is obvious to anyone who bothers to know some history.

Indeed, the only way that Jerusalem has any “eternal” meaning for Islam (and by that, for Palestinians), is through the fundamental dependence of Islam on Jewish narrative for its very existence… again not something that Tamimi wants to hear about.

Does Tamimi know it’s a joke? Or is he so imbued with a Muslim sense of priority over all human history that he can rewrite it in “good faith”? Is he so convinced that no one among the “infidel” will dare challenge him, that he can say, as the French put it, n’importe quoi [anything]?

As for his description of how the Israelis have treated Jerusalem since they captured it in 1967, it describes how the Muslim Arabs treated the city from 1948-1967: in addition to his list of demolishing homes, seizing land, and erecting [a] wall that had [tried to] turn the city into “a prison”, and restricting access of worshippers (not just Jews, but Christians who recognized Israel, and Arab Israelis, Christian and Muslim), the Jordanian Muslims systematically vandalized and desecrated Jewish sites — including using Jewish gravestones as urinals.

The story of how Muslim Arabs treated their part of Jerusalem after the Naqba is a lesson in the spiteful hatred that consumes those who lose the zero-sum games they enthusiastically embraced, those who are humiliated on a grand scale and can play out their resentments on a small one.

But for Tamimi, that’s history that a) is perfectly legitimate — it was, after all, Muslims punishing Jews, and b) not to be brought up because, in front of “others” it doesn’t look good, it’s embarrassing. (And of course, any infidel who has the nerve to bring it up, deserves the hostility he’s already earned.)

In another summary of Tamimi’s remarks we find further examples of the crass invective involved in trying to get the Christians to gang up with the Muslims on the Jews:

He welcomed the pope to Jerusalem, which he called ‘the eternal political, national and spiritual capital of Palestine’. He referred to Muslim history in Jerusalem. Muslims and Christians must work together against Israel, he said: ‘We struggle together and we suffer together from the injustice of the Israeli occupation and its oppressive practices, and we look forward to freedom and independence’. He referred to Israel’s West Bank separation barrier as the ‘racist wall’, saying it ‘turned it (Palestine) into a giant prison and keeps Muslims and Christians from praying in their churches and mosques’. On Gaza: ‘in its (Israel’s) aggression in the Gaza strip it violated human rights in a way unprecendented in this era’. [Tamimi said] ‘His holiness the pope, I call on you in the name of the one God to condemn these crimes and pressure the Israeli government to stop its aggression against the Palestinian people’.

Tamimi shook the pope’s hand as he left the podium and the meeting broke up as scheduled immediately afterwards.

There’s a disagreement about who shook whose hand. Anyone with info, please let me know. I think it’s (very) significant who offered first.

The director general of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, Oded Wiener, said: “Sheikh Tamimi embarrassed the pope.”

He said Tamimi, a familiar and fiery figure in Palestinian public life, had pressured the Catholic organisers to be allowed to speak and that the Jewish members would no longer take part in a long-standing, three-way interfaith dialogue until the sheikh was barred from attending.

“The Chief Rabbinate will not continue it as long as Tamimi is part of the Palestinian delegation,” Wiener said.

An infidel who demands to be treated with respect. The nerve. Of course, in dialogues, the Muslims are the difficult partner to get to participate — Jews and Christians can’t wait to talk — so everyone indulges them to get them to join.

As for the pressure Tamimi put on the Catholic organizers, I’d love to know what demopathic ploys he used. We could probably write a phrase book from them.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said: “The speech by Sheikh Taysir Tamimi was not scheduled by the organisers of the meeting. In a meeting dedicated to dialogue, this intervention was a direct negation of what a dialogue should be. We hope that such an incident will not damage the mission of the pope aiming at promoting peace and also interreligious dialogue.” (Additional reporting by Labib Nasir and Tom Heneghan)

Comments

Barry Rubin rightfully puts this in the context of Tamimi’s earlier treatment of Pope John-Paul II, and still more significantly, in the same general discourse that the late pope heard from his Syrian interlocutor, Bashir Assad, the son of the late Baatist (ie, supposedly secular) dictator, Hafez al Assad:

The Jews “tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and…tried to betray and kill the prophet Muhammad.”

This is classic medieval scapegoating language. “Let’s join together to wipe these people out, since they were awful to both (your) Jesus and (our) Muhammad.”

In other words, Tamimi, as the Pope had the discernment and courage to realize, is precisely not a dialoguer. But, alas, as Rubin also points out, Tamimi is a good representative of what might strike a normal liberal as a contradiction in terms: a mainstream extremist.

Indeed, Sheikh Tamimi’s larger discourse — Israeli crimes in abusing Palestinians, the world’s greatest victims of human rights abuses, is part of an aggressive demographic Jihad that puts the Eurabian phenomenon in the shade. Rubin points out some of Tamimi’s earlier deeds:

… [A]s chief Islamic judge in Hebron, he was deported by Israel temporarily in 1980, the day after terrorists killed six Jewish theological students in that city.

His wife and those of the two others deported appealed the action to an Israeli court. The ruling came down in favor of the other two but not for Tamimi because such a strong case had been made about his incitement to violence.

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, at the time a military official governing the West Bank, said this about Tamimi:

“If we had not deported them, the whole area would have slid into chaos. The settlers would have reacted to the murder and the Arab population would have reacted in return. Simply absolute anarchy. Sheikh Tamimi was an agitator of the worst kind…..”

So here we have it: Tamimi is a master of incitement. He can jack up a population with his lethal narratives, create a sense of outraged victimization, of hatred for those who deliberately did this to “us,” and fan the flames of desire for revenge at all costs. He is a catalyst for the most violent kind of social chaos… the kind of discourse I imagine had its way of Europe during the first Thirty Years’ War (1618-48).

No wonder he is in favor of — he issued a fatwa for — the sacred right of the Palestinian refugees to “return.” Without it, no peace agreement is possible. And of course, with it, and the ability of Tamimi and others to weaponize such populations, it’s a recipe for a war the Arabs cannot win by the normal means.

Indeed, it represents a virulent version of the demographic strategy of Eurabia — inject the population, then weaponize it against the host.

For Tamimi, none of this is exceptionable; on the contrary, it is the voice of Islam:

“I wanted to express the suffering of our people and to show the occupation’s procedures against the Palestinian people,” Tamimi told The Associated Press. “If I represent Islam at a meeting for dialogue and I don’t speak, am I just a piece of furniture?”

And, of course, there are plenty of people ready to take his side in defense of the victims of Gaza — replete with grossly inflated statistics about civilian casualties.

So whatever the pope did in response to Tamimi’s demopathic rant, let us consider it a beginning. It is time to diss the dissers, not as flamboyantly and provocatively as they diss, but quietly, with dignity, and above all, with firmness. It’s time to insist that Muslims start acknowledging some basic historical narratives shared by anyone who bothers to look reasonably dispassionately at the evidence.

In this case, quietly but firmly remind them of the rather disgraceful way Islam has treated sacred places they’ve seized — e.g., Istanbul. (Of course, their past behaviour is only disgraceful by the standards of modern human rights — by honor-shame standards, either destroying or taking over the sacred sites of your defeated enemy is a sign of power and glory).

But the standards Tamimi invokes to accuse Israelis is the standard by which past Muslim behavior is disgraceful and that is (supposedly) the standard of the global community to which Tamimi pleads his case.) In other words, by “Muslim” rules, the Israelis have behaved with remarkable forbearance when they had the power to destroy and desacrate Muslim sites.

If enough people from the West and from other cultures begin to call out the demopaths, out of sheer quiet humiliation, the Arabs would cease to make such ridiculous claims. It might well have a remarkable moderating effect on the kind of inflammatory discourse that flows so readily from Arab and Muslim spokesmen.

But among many (most?) Muslims, where Islam’s incalculable superiority to all other religions justifies the dominion of Muslims over all other people, such reciprocity not only does not exist, it actually borders on heresy (see her chapter, “Life behind the Muslim curtain”). Indeed, by some Islamic (or only Islamist?) definitions, Muslims are by definition innocent and non-Muslims are by definition guilty — they have rejected the perfect teachings of the prophet PBUH — and therefore deserving of punishment. This is the ideology behind Jihad.

For a good example of the shock of a European faced with this implacable double standard which turns the condemnation by Muslim “moderates” of “killing innocent (i.e., Muslims)” in terror attacks on its head, watch this interview on the BBC (HT/Islam in Action):

One could hardly have a better example of the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. With this in mind, here’s an article about Jordanian Muslims demanding an apology from the pope for insulting their religion.

Pope’s address disappoints Muslim leaders

AMMAN (AFP) — Jordanian clerics expressed disappointment that Pope Benedict XVI in an address to Muslim leaders on Saturday failed to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam.

“We wanted him to clearly apologise,” Sheikh Yusef Abu Hussein, mufti of the southern city of Karak, told AFP after the pope’s address in Amman’s huge Al-Hussein Mosque.

“What the pope said (in 2006) about the Prophet Mohammed is untrue. Islam did not spread through the power of sword. It’s a religion of tolerance and faith,” Hussein said.

Now I find this fascinating. The Muslims want an apology from the pope for saying that Islam spread by the sword, when it did in virtually every place for its first three generations, and many (most?) Muslims glory in the fact. On the contrary, Sheikh Yusef abu Hussein wants the pope to acknowledge that Islam is a religion of tolerance and faith (whatever the latter term means)” when it has little history of tolerance – certainly by modern standards, the best it can do is religious apartheid with its dhimmi system.

What can such an “apology” mean? It can’t possibly be sincere, since, from the perspective of a non-Muslim, it’s clearly not true. (I except from this issue of sincerity the PCP dupes who really do think Islam is a tolerant religion, and could make such an apology sincerely.) But from the Muslim point of view, anyone familiar with the glorious place of Jihad in the history of Islam, can’t possibly take this seriously. Indeed, were the pope to repeat the words they want to put in his mouth, they’d be laughing themselves silly.

On the contrary, what I think we are looking at here is a demand that the pope prostrate himself before the Muslims in an act of subjection; that he behave like a dhimmi and apologize for criticizing (i.e., in an honor-shame culture, insulting) Islam.

The dishonesty of the apology is all the more poignant here: by acknowledging Islam as what it is not, the pope at once impugns his own intellectual integrity, and underlines his subservience to Muslim demands. He becomes a propagandist for the enemy.

On the contrary, the Muslim world should be apologizing to the pope for going on a violent rampage, burning churches, in response to his comments – thus proving the relevance of a 14th century Byzantine emperor’s perceptions to today – and for the killing of a nun in the most dastardly fashion. Don’t wait for it. This is not about reciprocity.

The pope had in 2006 quoted a medieval Christian emperor who criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as “evil and inhuman.”

Actually this is a poor rendition, which makes the pope’s remarks look both insulting and gratuitously vague. (Now why would Agence France Presse do something like that?) The original quote ran as follows:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

Why didn’t AFP say “a medieval Christian emperor who criticised Muhammad’s teachings on Jihad and the use of violence and coercion to spread Islam as evil and inhuman”?

The pontiff apologised at the time for the “unfortunate misunderstanding” but ahead of his visit to Jordan the kingdom’s main opposition party, the Islamic Action Front, said the pope was not welcome unless he again apologised.

Note that the Islamic Action Front is, as the article explains below, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to turning the entire world into a Sharia state, with Europe as a principle target. The idea that they want an apology in order to get a genuine and respectful dialogue going is just a joke. They want groveling.

“What the pope said was not an apology,” said Hammam Said, the overall leader of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood and University of Jordan professor.

“We want the apology to be clear just like the insults to Islam were clear. He should acknowledge his mistakes. That’s our position and the position of all Jordanians.”

The Brotherhood is represented in the lower house of parliament by its powerful political arm, the Islamic Action Front.

“We had hoped the pope would take into consideration the feelings of Muslims,” said Sheikh Jamal Jumaah of the city of Madaba after the pope’s speech in which he urged reconciliation between Christians and Muslims.

“He is a guest of the Muslims and we expected him to say one word. It’s not too late. He can still apologise.”

Prince Ghazi bin Mohammed, Jordanian King Abdullah II’s advisor on religious affairs who hosted the pontiff during his visit to the mosque, was more conciliatory.

“I would like to thank you for expressing regret over the lecture in 2006, which hurt the feelings of Muslims,” Ghazi told the pope.

“We realise that the visit (to Jordan) comes as a goodwill gesture and a sign of mutual respect between Muslims and Christians.”

The visit to Jordan is Benedict’s first to an Arab state as pontiff and marks the first leg of an eight-day tour of the Holy Land that will also take him to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Apparently “truth” has no relevance. If it insults me, even if it’s true, I cannot tolerate the insult. Hard to find a better illustration of honor-shame culture: “My side right or wrong; any public criticism is an assault on my being.” Good luck Pope Benedict.

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?

Let’s look briefly at what the Pope said.

Here is some of the most relevant material in the speech. He starts with a famous quote from the Koran, and then quotes the late 14th-century Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II:

The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

Criticism of the Pope’s Speech: James Stodder’s Decent Response

Now I can certainly understand some people responding to these reflections with a sense of “the pot calling the kettle black.” Granted Christianity does have a long and turbulent love-affair with philosophy — shared for a measure of time by Islam — but this is, after all, the religion one of whose early theologians exclaimed (something akin to) “I believe because it is absurd.” It is also the religion whose great Catholic theologian, Augustine, articulated an elaborate explanation for how coercion is not only legitimate but effective in converting people… a religion that spread much of its dominion by first taking over the sword-weilding institution (Roman Empire) and then spreading the faith further by either the sword, or, after the collapse of “Christian Rome” through “top-down” conversions in which, once the king-bee converted, everyone had better convert “or else.” The good emperor was hardly heir to a kingdom built on sweet reason.

So noted a classmate of mine, Jim Stodder, on our class list. In a thoughtful analysis, he lays out the humane and generous understanding of how the Pope’s words were unfair, one worthy of a modern progressive thinker:

Benedict is clearly CONTRASTING Islam with spiritual-reason in this piece, although Islam is not his major focus. I think the entire context is actually somewhat more damning of Islam than the widely distributed quote, since it archly suggests that

a) the reservations Muhammad had about conversion by force were only emphasized when his new faith was in a position of weakness, but not thereafter, and
b) that Islam maintains a profoundly irrational-transcendent view of god — with the implicit question of whether this is related to its traditions of violence.

[NB: As far as I understand, few historians of Islam would deny the dramatic difference between the early Mecca and later Medina phases of Muhammad's career, that the expressions of tolerance mark the early, a-political phase when Muhammad could only depend on his ability, as a prophet of the imminent Last Judgment to win over followers by appealing to their conscience, and that the violent Jihad corresponds to the later, politically potent phase. As for some operative link in Islam between a meta-rational God (which is something of a "no duh" for any believer) and violence, that strikes me as weak explanation. I would sooner go for honor-shame dynamics -- political dominion as "proof" of true belief, lack of dominion as humiliation -- as an explanation of that violence, but that doesn't mean that such dynamics don't receive their theological garments.

Manuel II was one of the last Byzantine emperors, and his recorded conversations with a Persian Muslim supposedly took place while Constantinople was under siege around 1400 -- and doomed to fall to Turkish arms about 50 years later. So his view of militant Islam must have been colored by the fight for his life and realm. Benedict notes this context.

I don't like sentences like "doomed to x, y, or z, fifty years later," even if they describe events centuries ago. Too deterministic. Moreover, the analogy with today's world faced with an aggressively expansive Islam -- will you accept that possibility, JS? -- may well be significant in just this sense. Is Europe doomed to fall to Islam in the next 50 years as some like Bernard Lewis seem to think? Or can it do something to save itself?

But while justifiably criticizing the use of force in religion in his speech, nowhere does Benedict mention the comparable crimes of Christianity; e.g. the Crusaders massacring Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, or the Inquisition's persecution of Muslims, Jews, and 'conversos'.

In summary, if he really wanted to open up a wide conversation about the inadmissibility of force in religion -- to not just mention Muslims but to INCLUDE them in the conversation -- I think his words were very badly chosen. It's not that I see anything to disagree with particularly in what he says, as far as it goes. But the speech is startling in its omissions.

I think it is important to have a balanced view of this. I was at a meeting last night where some fellow was complaining about how 'extraordinarily thin-skinned the Muslims are'. I think they have some reason to be pissed about this one....

... [A]s the Pope, he was making a terrible strategic error in being so publicly provocative about the nature of Islam. In the current ‘clash of civilizations’, this error is much more serious than Summers’ provocation [i.e., his remarks about women and science].

As I said, this is a very generous view. “Let’s not accuse them of bad faith… let’s be self-critical if we want them to be so… let’s invite them into a conversation… let’s not pour oil on the fires of religious conflict.” It expresses a characteristic indignation at the Western critic of Islam, and the projection of a good-willed Islamic “dialogue partner” out there whom we are offending with our needlessly “provocative” criticisms.

But under current conditions, no matter how well-intentioned it is, I think it qualifies for candicacy in the “dupes of demopaths” category. I say that not because I think all Muslims who are engaging in dialogues are demopaths, nor because all non-Muslims who think they have sincere friendships with Muslims are dupes. I say it because of the way this kind of thinking “inscribes itself” (to use the pomo term) in a larger public discourse.

Three Muslim Responses

We have two broad Muslim responses to the Pope’s words and one minor one: 1) violent outrage, 2) indignation and 3) a mature criticism and self-criticism. And the pattern follows closely that of the reactions to Danoongate: in the Muslim world, violence — angry demonstration, death threats, attacks on Christians (including a nun!), hate speech and demands for abject apology — and in the Western world, where Islam is not majoritarian, we have indigant expressions of shock and horror at the Pope’s Islamophobia.

Violence

I don’t have to go over the violent reactions in detail They are known to most readers of this blog and can be found listed at the Wikipedia article on Pope Benedict XVI Islam Controversy. Among the more shocking include the burning of churches in many places including Gaza and the West Bank, and most of all, the killing of Christians in Iraq, and the gunning down of an elderly nun in the back in Somalia, shortly after a prominent cleric called for killing the pope:

“We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion,” he said in Friday evening prayers.

“Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim,” Malin, a prominent cleric in the Somali capital, told worshippers at a mosque in southern Mogadishu.

“We call on all Islamic Communities across the world to take revenge on the baseless critic called the pope,” he said.

Self-Criticism and Shame at the Behavior of Fellow Muslims

I will return to this idea that any Muslim anywhere should kill anyone who offends the prophet below. In the meantime, note the language: hunt down, kill, revenge… From the perspective of any apologist for Islam in the larger global community that cannot exist without peaceful co-existence, this is pretty embarrassing and primitive stuff. And yet, rarely among those who try and “explain” Islam to the outside world do we have the one that might match my classmates for maturity, something on the order of:

“I am so mortified by the reaction of my fellow Muslims whose behavior proves how correct the Pope’s words were… indeed, they may be more accurate today than when Manuel II made them over 700 years ago.”

Among the brave few, Irshad Manji takes a strongly self-critical Muslim stance:

(CBS) As a faithful Muslim, I do not believe the pope should have apologized. I’ve read what’s been described as his inflammatory speech. Actually, he called for dialogue with the Muslim world. To ignore that larger context and to focus on a mere few words of the speech is like reducing the Koran, Islam’s holy book, to its most bloodthirsty passages. We Muslims hate it when people do that. The hypocrisy of doing this to the pope stinks to high heaven.

Yet some Muslims have gone further. In the West Bank, churches have been firebombed. During a big protest in London, placards proclaimed “Islam will take Rome.” In Somalia, a Catholic nun was murdered shortly after a Muslim cleric urged violence against the Vatican.

Coincidence? I think not.

And thinking is what the Quran encourages. It asks Muslims to reflect far more than to retaliate. Even if someone mocks your religion, the Koran says, walk away. Later, engage in dialogue. Wasn’t that the pope’s point?

We Muslims should remember that God told the Prophet Muhammad to “read.” My advice to fellow Muslims: Read the pope’s speech — in its entirety — and you’ll see that his message of reason, reconciliation, and conversation would make him a better Muslim than most of us.

But beyond this exceptional woman who’s working on a modern form of Islam, and who does have some brave “followers” and “fellows,” but is largely shunned if not threatened by many Muslims, it’s slim pickings.

We get close to something like restraint if not self-criticism in a news item came from Iraq where, as noted above, at least two Christians were killed in the wake of Muslim call for revenge at the pope’s remarks:

As to the official response from the Iraqi government, Dr. Ali Al-Dabagh, official spokesperson for the government in Iraq called on Iraqis to exercise restraint and act wisely in response to statements by the Vatican Pope, in which he criticized Islam. Al-Dabagh said in a press conference, “The Iraqi government asks all who love God’s prophets and messengers to not act in a way which would harm our Christian brethren. They are our partners in this nation and are not to be judged by the statements of the Pope. The problem is that the Pope attributed behavior of some Islamic leaders of a certain era in history with Islam and its beliefs. If we were to look back in history, we will also find Christian leaders who committed crimes in the name of the cross. We do not hold Christians responsible for these actions since they were crimes of singular deviant leaders. What is needed now is an international agreement to punish all who insult God’s religions.

On the other hand, it was a Christian Iraqi paper that carried the story, not a major Muslim Iraqi paper; and that last line is quite a doozy. Religions of the world unite and punish blasphemers? Ummm, I’m not sure this particular Muslim quite gets it. Modern democracies are civil societies, based on voluntary participation, not coerced subjection.

Maybe Emilio Karim Dabul made some really self-critical remarks… he certainly could have.

But these still lone voices so rarely say publicly what they whisper in private, as Dabul says:

Well, I’m sick of saying the truth only in private – that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated on the world at large.

Now that was in the context of a long-overdue apology from Arab-American Muslims for the behavior of their co-religionist on 9-11. But it applies to the rest of the issues from Rushdie to Danoongate to the Pope’s remarks, to all the ways in which Islam tries to bully the West into submission.

Indignation at the Pope’s Words, Apologetics for the Violence

The real problem is not with wild masses ready to get violent whenever their leadership, via their almost irremediably demonizing media, whip them into a frenzy, be it with fake pictures of a Muhammad-as-pig cartoon, or faked pictures of Israelis killing little boy in cold blood.

The real problem lies in the realm of “dialogue,” in the encounter between Muslims who claim to speak for their own community in discourse with the West, on the one hand, and the responsible Western leaders and intellectuals on the other. Here we find something disturbingly close to demopathy.

CAIR, for example, suggests that Muslims and Catholics should use the Pope’s unfortunate remarks as a spur to dialogue. Of course, that dialogue hardly looks at the problems with Islam but insists on an apologetic, missionary Islam in which:

Jihad is a central and broad Islamic concept that includes struggle against evil inclinations within oneself, struggle to improve the quality of life in society, struggle in the battlefield for self-defense (e.g. — having a standing army for national defense), or fighting against tyranny or oppression. ‘Jihad’ should not be translated as ‘holy war.’

Note here an interesting slide. We start out with the apologetic definition of Jihad — inner struggle against evil inclinations, self-improvement and social betterment — but then move quickly into more explicitly violent forms of struggle — self defense (i.e., the Palestinians having a standing army), fighting against tyranny and oppression. Well, if we define tyranny and oppression as the rule of infidels over Muslims, or as modernity with its corrupting mores, then we have an easy slide into global Jihad the violent way. So why shouldn’t Jihad be translated as “holy war”?

The Quran, Islam’s revealed text, condemns forced acceptance of any faith when it states: ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion.’ (2:256)

Muslims are also asked to maintain good relations with people of other faiths, and to engage in constructive dialogue. ‘And dispute not with the People of the Book (Christians and Jews) except with means better (than mere disputation)…but say, ‘We believe in the Revelation that has come down to us and in that which came down to you.’ (29:46)

Never mind that these assertions systematically ignore not only our current urgent problems the West has with an insanely aggressive Islamic Jihadi movement — that claims that everything it does is “defensive” and that makes a mockery of the apparently enlightened principles here expounded — but this statement even ignores the remarks of the medieval Emperor who was responding to the verse about “no compulsion in religion.” It’s hard to imagine a more evasive answer to so serious a problem. CAIR is not calling for dialogue — they have no intention of listening to what non-Muslims think and feel and experience about Islam, certainly anything critical. They just wants to tell us what we should think.

The equivalent organization in Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain made a more indignant remark:

One would expect a religious leader such as the Pope to act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor’s views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism,” Muhammad Abdul Bari, the council’s secretary-general, said. “Regrettably, the Pope did not do so.”

Now if this is not demopathic discourse, then what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander — the Muslim Council will surely denounce terror threats from Muslims as unacceptable expressions of Islam that cannot lead to harmonious relations between Islam and any non-Muslim group.

Instead, his attitude towards Islamic zealotry and violence is to justify it, indeed use its potential emergence as an open threat to the British:

“Some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they are all terrorists, and that encourages other people to do the same… If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists, 700,000 of them in London. If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive,” he added.

Now this is stunning. Dr. Bari, who so regretted the Pope’s inappropriate behavior is now telling us that if you criticize Muslims — demonize in his terms — then they will all turn into terrorists. Pretty amazing. No Western progressive would ever speak so carelessly about all Muslims being all potential terrorists. And here we have it as a warning. Nothing about how appalling the tendency to get violent among Muslims, no disapproval. On the contrary, any problem with Muslims in Britain is because of the British non-Muslims demonizing this unhappy minority. And these unfairly criticized citizens, reluctantly to be sure, might all become terrorists and seek to kill their fellow Brits because they’ve been…

What? What’s the complaint? What’s the provocation?

Some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they are all terrorists…

And presumably that makes them “despondent and aggressive.” Again a clue to what “defensive” means. I’m unaware that the two (opposite) emotions are so predictably linked that you have to expect that if you treat people with suspicion and hostility that they will blow you up in suicide attacks. [By the way, by those standards -- demonizing and treating them all as terrorists -- wouldn't the Israelis have the right to wipe out the Palestinians? Or is this only a one-way right of response?]

As Melanie Phillips remarks

What was this ‘demonisation’of Muslims? Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist branch, said ‘thousands’ of British Muslims were being watched by police and MI5 over suspected terrorist links. Was Mr Abdul Bari’s reaction to this dismaying news one of shock and shame that his community was harbouring such an enormous threat to Britain, and his earnest pledge to root this out wherever he found it? It was not. It was to threaten Britain that its entire Muslim community of two million would turn into terrorists and attack the country of which they are citizens. Mr Abdul Bari is the head of Britain’s largest Muslim representative institution. What was the response of the British media or politicians to this abuse of his position by threatening violence by an entire minority community against the British state? Silence. If anyone is demonising Britain’s Muslims, is it not Mr Abdul Bari?

[Hopefully. But the rest of them are not really speaking out, are they?]

And this is not a joke; it’s a huge problem. Given that the British non-Muslims don’t have a clue as to what’s going on in their nation’s mosques, that a new survey shows that one out of ten British Muslim students wouldn’t tell the authorities even if they knew of a plot (one has to imagine that the figures in such a poll are, if anything, low) and that 24% of Muslims polled think that under certain circumstances it is legitimate to carry out terror attacks in defense of Islam, it seems understandable that the Brits might be looking askance at their Muslim communities right now. (To paraphrase my classmate, “I think we have some reason to be concerned about this one…”)

I think the real focus here belongs on the terms “demonize” and “Islamophobia.” Both are primarily demopaths terms, used by Muslims who have almost nothing to say about the staggering levels of demonization at work in their own religious and political cultures, while showing the most remarkable incapacity to handle criticism from outside. They are “remarkably thin-skinned,” and contrary to Jim Stodder’s (and Karen Armstrong’s and James Carroll’s) reading of matters, it is not at all appropriate for us non-Muslims, and especially us Westerners with a hard-earned social capital that prizes freedom of speech — and hence of the right to disagree, to criticize, even to accuse — to abdicate our rights here… lest we insult the Muslims.

Honor-Shame: The Intolerability of Insult

Listen to the language of outrage among the Muslims to the Pope’s remarks:

“the result of pitiful ignorance” about Islam or a deliberate distortion of the truth, said Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of the strongly Islamic party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister. “He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” Mr Kapusuz added. “Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks, is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.”

Apparently, for Mr. Kapusuz, two wrongs do make a right. Insulting language is the order of the day… “pitiful ignorance” [actually not too inaccurate]… “mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages” [which the Turkish Muslims can lay the strongest claim to having left behind... and even that's hardly conclusive]… “unfortunate and insolent remarks… Hitler and Mussolini.”

I find the term “insolent” the most telling. These comments ring true as the angry response of someone who feels he (and his people) have been insulted.

Another Turkish Muslim, an Imam, picked up the same notes:

“The Pope’s aggressive, insolent statement appears to reflect both the hatred within him towards Islam and a Crusader mentality. I hope he apologises, and realises how he has destroyed peace.”

Insolent, again. And the classic demopath’s move: you are responsbile when things go bad; we Muslims bear no responsibility for the destruction of peace, we are only responding to your inexcusable provocations. As Abu Saqer, a Gaza Imam, responding to the violence in Gaza made the classic demopaths claim: my violence (which I condemn) is your fault.

“We are deeply sorry for these acts that we condemn,” [Abu Saqer] said. “But I am sorry that this little racist [the Pope] did not think of the consequences upon the Christians in the Arab world when he insulted our prophet. It is an open war – the Muslims against all the others.”

In Pakistan, the Parliament issued a statement on the issue, again sounding all the same tropes:

“The derogatory remarks of the Pope about the philosophy of jihad and Prophet Muhammad have injured sentiments across the Muslim world and pose the danger of spreading acrimony among the religions”

All this is the language of honor-shame, the language of someone with a very thin skin quick to anger and violence when criticized. And this issue of Muslim honor goes very deep. As one apparently modern Turkish journalist put it, it unites all Muslims behind the extremists:

“Even the most moderate and Westernized Muslims will not tolerate insults to the Prophet Muhammad,” writes Tulin Daloglu, commenting on Pope Rage from the moderate side of Islam, in The Washington Times. “Each offense unites Muslims against Western prejudices and rejection — and the extremists gain more credibility.”

This notion that criticism is insult, unbearable insult, is a classic expression of honor-shame cultures, which give the insulted the right to shed blood to preserve his honor. Thus, Anjem Choudry, an extremist British Muslim explains that Muslims have the right to retaliate:

The Muslims take their religion very seriously and non-Muslims must appreciate that and must also understand that there may be serious consequences if you insult Islam and the prophet. Whoever insults the message of Muhammad is going to be subject to capital punishment.

Hence the profusion of death-threats, declarations of Holy War, assurances that the green flag of Islam would soon fly from the Vatican, days of rage, and attacks on Christians including the murder of an elderly nun, and attacks in the Palestinian territories.

Nor are these specifically pope-related threat and outbursts of violence the only problem. For an example of the astounding a-symmetrical nature of the Muslim attitude, look at the Nigereian case of a Muslim man who accused a Christian woman of worshipping a “useless Jesus” when she refused his sexual advances, but when she returned the insult and spoke of a “useless Muhammad,” the man set off rioting that drove 5000 people from their homes.

The Pope’s “Apology”

Faced with such responses, and roundly denounced by Western intellectuals who faulted him for his provocative remarks, the Pope made something of an apology:

At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a Medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought. Yesterday, the Cardinal Secretary of State published a statement in this regard in which he explained the true meaning of my words. I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.

Not surprisingly, no one was happy with the results. Those who had looked to the pope for real leadership in the struggle against global Jihad felt betrayed, especially by his remarks about how this “in no way expresses my personal thought…” while the Muslims knew a weasely excuse — I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings — when they saw one.

Turkish State Minister Mehmet Aydin criticized the pope’s comments before reporters in Istanbul by saying, “you either have to say this ‘I’m sorry’ in a proper way or not say it at all. Are you sorry for saying such a thing or because of its consequences?” A number of other Muslim leaders likewise accused Benedict of evading apology.

As Dry Bones put it quite aptly (hat tip TB):

And the story is far from over.

The Western Response: The Magnanimous as Dupes?

The real problem, however, stems less from the response of the Muslim world — at this point fairly predictable — as much as from the responses of the Western intelligentsia, including not only my classmate James Stodder, but public figures like Karen Armstrong and James Carroll. In a Boston Globe column, he writes scathingly of the Pope:

President Bush famously used the word “crusade,” then backed away from it. But playing by bin Laden’s script, Bush launched a catastrophic war that has become a crusade in all but name. Now Benedict has supplied a religious underpinning for that crusade. Claiming to defend rationality and nonviolence in religion, the pope has made irrationality and violence more likely, not less. Bush and Benedict are in sync, and bin Laden is grinning.

Classic liberal spin: the Pope, in denouncing the Muslim tendency to violence, is responsbile for provoking violence. (Never mind that Carroll misquoted the Pope’s citation of Manuel II to make his remarks even worse than they were.) “The pope has made irrationality and violence more likely, not less..” In this very formula lies the rub — as if not talking about Jihad and other forms of (pervasive) Muslim violence would make violence less likely, rather than, by assuring them that no one will object to their bullying, making it just as likely. We Westerners fail to understand that the most likely scenario in either case — whether we’re nice or confrontational — is more Muslim violence. Global Jihad is not anywhere near abating.

Not that Carroll is wrong about his critique of the Pope, which cuts deep into his posture of pontiff of reasoning, non-coercive Christianity. Pointing out how much this is a modern fantasy that does not even recognize the role of secularism in forcing Catholicism kicking and screaming into the modern world and the renunciation of coercion — the last “heretic” executed by the Inquisition was Cayetano Ripoll in 1826! — he emphasizes the way Benedict XVI has whitewashed the Church to the detriment of both the Muslims and the Jews. Notes Carroll:

The pope’s refusal to reckon with historical facts that contradict Catholic moral primacy has been particularly disturbing in relation to the church’s past with Jews. Last year, he said Nazi anti-Semitism was “born of neo-paganism,” as if Christian anti-Judaism was [sic] not central. This year, at Auschwitz, he blamed the Holocaust on a “ring of criminals,” exonerating the German nation. By exterminating Jews, the Nazis were “ultimately” attacking the church. He decried God’s silence, not his predecessor’s. A pattern begins to show itself. Forget church offenses against Jews. Denigrate Islam. Caricature modernity and dismiss it.

All serious matters to contemplate, especially for those cheering on the Pope. But I don’t think it justifies the conclusion which, whether Carroll intends it or not, makes unacceptable concessions to violent Muslim honor.

In all of this, Benedict is defending a hierarchy of truth. Faith is superior to reason. Christian faith is superior to other faiths (especially Islam). Roman Catholicism is superior to other Christian faiths. And the pope is supreme among Catholics. He does not mean to insult when he defends this schema, yet seems ignorant of how inevitably insulting it is. Nor does the pope understand that, today, such narcissism of power comes attached to a fuse.

Let’s shift from a hierarchy of faith — obviously a problem, but possibly an impossible one to solve since most true believers think their faith is the best — to a hierarchy of violence. After all, that’s what really matters. What one privately thinks about his or her religion’s superiority only becomes a serious problem for others when one tries and shove it down their throats.

Granted the Pope’s remarks can be considered insulting from a variety of points of view. But modernity, tolerance, and the renunciation of violence demands a high threshhold of insult before provoking violence. “Narcissism of power” may characterize the Pope’s remarks, but infantile narcissism of violent power characterizes the Muslim world’s vocal leaders.

And while Carroll has no problem tossing out psycho-critiques of the Pope’s and jumping all over his own Catholic Church, he steps on eggshells when it comes to the Muslims. After all, how long would the author of The Sword of Constantine have lived had he been a Muslim writing about the appalling role of Muhammad’s Sword in shaping a religion in desperate need of reform in the 21st century? In 800 words, not a one criticizing the existence of this fuse with which he ends his critique.

Classic Western progressive behavior: lambaste your own tradition, avoid upsetting your enemy. (Does Carroll even understand that a) the “fuse” to which he refers are autonomous moral agents, not objects subject to some kind of “law of physics,” and b) those folks who do respond so predictably and explosively are his enemies?)

The Bad Joke, Dhimmis not Laughing

What’s appalling here is that our bien-pensant intelligentsia don’t understand what’s going on. Immersed in their world of progressive egocentrism, eager to excuse Muslim violence as “understandable responses” to “unfair criticism,” they don’t seem to have any idea of the theater on which these issues are playing out. The New York Times, for example, welcomed the Pope’s apology, complimented the Muslim leaders who accepted it and urged more dialogue, further criticizing “Benedict’s skepticism of dialogue with Muslims.” No, “Muslims and Catholics should put aside the pontiff’s ill-considered comments and move forward in a conciliatory spirit.” As if, on the other side, aside some tiny minority of mad Jihadis, Muslims were just waiting eagerly for open and frank dialogue.

But many Muslims have difficulty with the basic rules of religious dialogue, partly because they see the forum primarily as a theater of missionizing, partly because of Taqiyya, partly because their own insecure certainties (question to James C.: “narcissism”?) make it extremely difficult to adopt the openness required. Imagine the honest reaction of a Muslim to the following “9th Commandment” of religious dialogue:

Persons entering into interreligious, interideological dialogue must be at least minimally self-critical of both themselves and their own religious or ideological traditions. A lack of such self-criticism implies that one’s own tradition already has all the correct answers. Such an attitude makes dialogue not only unnecessary, but even impossible, since we enter into dialogue primarily so we can learn–which obviously is impossible if our tradition has never made a misstep, if it has all the right answers. To be sure, in interreligious, interideological dialogue one must stand within a religious or ideological tradition with integrity and conviction, but such integrity and conviction must include, not exclude, a healthy self-criticism. Without it there can be no dialogue–and, indeed, no integrity.

These are modern demands… precisely those that the honor-shame driven Islamic identity of yore and today find unacceptable, indeed blasphemous. But apparently the good folks at the NYT don’t know about this. Earnest, well intentioned, committed to world peace and understanding, they chide the pope for only wanting it his way.

They don’t get the joke. Cartoonists, and the denizens of the blogosphere do:

So some Muslims are burning churches, murdering nuns, and threatening more war, assassinations and bombings because someone quoted a text that called them violent? It’s kind of a sick joke, and one shouldn’t laugh. But in a nasty way, it’s funny.

As Holding Them Acccountable noted:

In what sounds like a joke by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show”, Muslims in the Middle East have reacted to the comments last week by the Pope about Islam being too violent by… forming a new terrorist group, burning down churches in the Gaza strip, and targeting Christians for attacks.

And AskMom:

Besides the obvious and irrefutable logic of the Pope’s remarks, besides the historical truth, there is the deliciously modern irony of the situation. Because he calls the Jihadists butchers, they want to slaughter him. Because he asks for reason, he is the subject of insane threats and hatred. Because he asks them to forsake violence, his imagine is burned and his people are attacked. Because he argues for religion to walk hand in hand with free will, they wish to enslave him. Jihadists are Hell’s own joke for our age, but only the village idiots are laughing. Only the jester’s relatives are pretending to get all the subtle, sophisticated nuances of the prank.

So why are so few laughing and so many urging calm and respect for a religion whose spokesmen consistently and utterly unself-consciously adopt ludicrous positions?

Muslim Bullies, Western Dhimmis: The Islamization of the West

The problem here, as with MSM coverage of the Middle East conflict, emerges from the problem that, no matter how well intentioned, if the Western players are working from a mistaken paradigm and choosing their words according to a therapeutic model — how can I have the “right” effect on these folks? — then this may backfire. Indeed, whether the model is PCP1 — they are just like us and if we’re nice to them they’ll respond in kind — or the model is PCP2 — they are the justifiably aggrieved colonized, we are the guilty colonialists — speaking soft words of confession, concession, and conciliation make sense. Don’t aggravate them. Soothe them. We’ll be generous, lead the way with our self-criticism and openness, and they will join us. So no matter how ludicrously they behave, whatever you do, don’t insult them by pointing it out.

[Note from me to them: Why Bother? We'll back off anyway.]

But if the proper paradigm is one in which the dominant forces in the Muslim world today — the ones we hope to soothe with our eagerness not to offend — are spreading Islam globally through a combination of “peaceful” means (Itjihad) and violent ones (Jihad) can produce the very violence it aims at disarming. For those dedicated to Islamic expansion, our concessions register not as signs of generosity, but as forms of weakness and susceptibility to intimidation. In Muslim terms, when we go out of our way to avoid upsetting Muslims, when we give up on our hard-earned modern freedoms to criticize, the inquire, to probe, to express our opinions, when we choose not to publish or not to carry books that might offend them, we are acting, voluntarily, as Dhimmi. We are, in their eyes, subject people, protected from death by our submission to their will.

For this kind of Islam

“The only dialogue we will accept is when all other religions agree to convert to Islam.”

Dan Pipes has laid out the case for the increasing Dhimmi behavior that lies behind the latest Papal incidence. He lays out six instances, starting with the utterly unexpected attack on Salmon Rushdie in 1989 until this current papal controversy. He sees several patterns:

These six rounds show a near-doubling in frequency: 8 years between the first and second rounds, then 5, then 3, 1, and ½. The first instance – Ayatollah Khomeini’s edict against Mr. Rushdie – came as a complete shock, for no one had hitherto imagined that a Muslim dictator could tell a British citizen living in London what he could not write about. Seventeen years later, calls for the execution of the pope (including one at the Westminster Cathedral in London) had acquired a too-familiar quality. The outrageous had become routine, almost predictable. As Muslim sensibilities grew more excited, Western ones became more phlegmatic.

This routinization of both Muslim violence and Western “backing down” have immense implications. We have increasingly lost our ability to express ourselves, and to some extent we don’t even know it; they have gained great confidence in their ability to intimidate us. Now we do it to ourselves, pre-emptively.

BERLIN, Sept. 26 — A leading German opera house has canceled performances of a Mozart opera because of security fears stirred by a scene that depicts the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad, prompting a storm of protest here about what many see as the surrender of artistic freedom.

In the scene that offended Muslims and led to security fears, a king places the severed heads of religious leaders on chairs. The Deutsche Opera Berlin said Tuesday that it had pulled “Idomeneo” from its fall schedule after the police warned of an “incalculable risk” to the performers and the audience.

The company’s director, Kirsten Harms, said she regretted the decision but felt she had no choice. She said she was told in August that the police had received an anonymous threat, but she acted only after extensive deliberations.

After all, no one would ask an artist to risk his life for mere artistic expression! And since the Islamists have shown a startling willingness, indeed enthusiasm, for destructive suicide, we would do best to pre-empt their wrath.

Nor are these concerns either misplaced, nor exaggerated. A French philosopher who made some derogatory — but not necessarily inaccurate — remarks about Muhammad in an article in the Figaro (also here) on September 19, now lives in police protection, having left his home with his family, because Islamist websites urging that he be killed have posted his home and work address and maps on how to get to his house and photos.

Je suis maintenant dans une situation personnelle catastrophique. De nombreuses menaces de mort très précises m’ont été adressées, et j’ai été condamné à mort par des organisations de la mouvance al-qaïda. L’UCLAT et la DST s’en occupent, mais… je n’ai plus le droit de loger chez moi (sur les sites me condamnant à mort il y a un plan indiquant comment venir à ma maison pour me tuer, il y a ma photo, celle des lieux où je travaille, des numéros de téléphone, et l’acte de condamnation). Mais en même temps on ne me fournit pas d’endroit, je suis obligé de quêmander, deux soirs ici, deux soirs là…Je suis sous protection policière permanente. Je dois annuler toutes les conférences prévues. Et les autorités m’obligent à déménager. Je suis un SDF. Il en suit une situation financière démente, tous les frais sont à ma charge, y compris ceux eventuels d’un loyer d’un mois ou deux éloigné d’ici, de deux déménagements, de frais de notaire, etc… C’est bien triste. J’ai exercé un droit connstitutionnel, et j’en suis puni, sur le territoire même de la République. Cette affaire est aussi une attaque contre la souveraineté nationale: des lois étrangères, décidées par des fanatiques criminophiles, me punissent d’avoir exercé un droit constitutionnel français, et j’en subis, en France même, grand dommage. (Letter to André Glucksmann.)

Similarly, in the USA, we have a publishing firm withdrawing its commitment to publish a book on Suicide Terrorism — no insignificant topic — because of fear of Muslim retaliation, specifically in terms of the response to the Pope’s problems. Phyllis Chesler wrote me the following:

My colleague, the psycho-analyst Dr. Nancy Kobrin, with whom I have written four major articles, wrote an important book about the psycho-analytic roots of Islamic suicide terrorism for which I wrote the Introduction. It was due out in November of this year. Less than 48 hours ago, her publisher, Loose leaf Law, a major publisher of law enforcement and counter-terrorism titles, cancelled her contract. They became quite frightened in the wake of the Muslim mistreatment of the Pope and said that they feared they could not protect their staff people were trouble to arise. Her book is very important, unique, and fills in the missing part of the story about Islamic terrorism. She is the latest casualty of the West’s appeasement of Muslim violence. (Email correspondence from Phyllis Chesler — more on this soon.)

Pipes concludes his survey of waxing Muslim violence and intimidation provisionally:

No conspiracy lies behind these six rounds of inflammation and aggression, but examined in retrospect, they coalesce and form a single, prolonged campaign of intimidation, with surely more to come. The basic message – “You Westerners no longer have the privilege to say what you will about Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an, Islamic law rules you too” – will return again and again until Westerners either do submit or Muslims realize their effort has failed.

In other words, the Jihadis are thinking:

“Your behavior — your generous, self-critical, accommodating, appeasing concessions to us — encourage us in our efforts. We will destroy your civilization because you love life and we love death. And you are not willing to sacrifice your lives for your freedoms, and we are willing to sacrifice our lives for your deaths.”

Our problem is that while our ancestors fought to the death for our freedoms of speech and artistic expression, we are not willing to risk our lives to maintain them. We have become so accustomed to the pleasures of a “rational,” positive-sum society, that we cannot imagine why anyone would want to take so zero-sum an attitude as to make a performance of opera a matter of life and death.

Of course in so doing, we both betray those “pleasures” by cheapening them, and we lose touch with our own heroic origins. Opera performances played a powerful role in the revolutionary culture of 19th century Europe, especially in 1848. They were connected to “real life” and civil liberties. Today, we can just pick another tune to perform.

Concession as Provocation

But if we so respond, we should not imagine that those watching our deeds, the very folks who bully us with their contempt for life, are nodding with approval because we’re nice and eager to respond it kind. It’s because we’re submissive. That’s why no matter how many times the pope mumbles clear apologies, the Muslim leaders are not satisfied. These “apologies” are servile ceremonies, public transcripts that clearly delineate hierarchies of dominance and submission. Of course they can’t get enough of them. Every one soothes their wounded pride and tells them that they are winning. So every one encourages the next one. And we underestimate their significance at our own peril.

And were this a mere matter of face — which so many in the West want to believe — then our generosity would be appropriate. But if it is millennial, we are in serious trouble. What if, behind the aggressions and the bullying, the proleptic demands of Dhimmi behavior, the wild fugues of demopathic hysteria and murderous violence, we find gargantuan appetites for religious dominion, messianic dreams of a globalization? And when we become familiar with the appalling contempt for all who do not share the vision — Muslim and infidel — we begin to realize that if there is a suffocatingly hegemonic globalization to fear, it is global Sharia, then we begin to understand that our concessions constitute extremely dangerous provocations.

Hence, terrorism can spread at an astonishing rate in these last years, not only (or even) because of Western armies in Iraq, but because by failing to identify it we unwittingly pour oil on its flames. Thus, shortly after the Economist tells Europeans not to worry overmuch about Eurabia, The London Times lets David Selbourne inform its readers about a struggle we have already lost. On one level, it’s akin to a waking dream — utterly unreal — and, as Margeurite Yourcenar said about the Munster millennial madness, “suddenly, impercebtibly, turning into a living nightmare.”

Dealing with Honor-Shame Cultures in conflict

What to do? We have incredible fire-power and all the bureacratic capacity to rid ourselves of this pest. But despite what our fashionable post-colonial historians tell us, we achieved that fire-power in crucial part by developing a civil society that renounced the kinds of brutal defenses against millennial threats that mark more primitive societies. Unlike the Romans, who executed any popular visionary, whether he was violent or not, or the Qing, who killed tens of millions ridding themselves of the Taiping, or even the Western allies who killed many a civilian German in ridding the world of the Nazis, we don’t want to attack Muslims. We want to get at the really dangerous ones.

Which is why the “apologetics” of demopathic Muslims for the Jihadis — “it’s your fault if our fanatics are upset” — so confuse the situation. If we don’t learn to tell the demopaths from the real moderates in the coming years, the bloodbath will be horrific no matter who wins.

How does a culture, whose ethical imperatives have taken it so far from the open calculus of honor-shame that it gets slapped in the face and thinks that by turning the other cheek it has shown its moral commitment, deal with a demopathic foe that thrives on the logic of honor, shame, and revenge? Moral autism, as good as it may feel, is cowardly — it flees the relationship into a cosmic coffin of self-righteousness. It’s at once condescending to the point of racism — we expect no moral effort from you — and suicidal.

So what do we do? How do we fight a war with an enemy whose very primitivity escapes our notice no matter how insanely violent they get, whose games of territorial expansion and face-offs do not register on our screens even as they accelerate alarmingly? How do we defeat an enemy who would — had they our fire-power — kill us without hesitation (they do the best they can with what they have, like suicide terrorism), without killing them?

The only way out that I can see is not a self-deceiving “magnanimity,” but real verbal courage, not by “sparing” their touchy, thin-skinned egos, but by confronting them and learning to deal with the consequences. For example, the French petition to defend Robert Redeker calls on all the Muslims and Muslim organizations of Europe to denounce this act publicly. That’s a good start, a good way to separate the demopaths — we use “human rights” to advance our agenda and are only interested when it defends our “rights” — from the democrats.

We are all on the front line in this war, and at this point the danger of terrorism is still numerically way below the danger of traffic accidents and even avian flu. But our careers, our reputations, our friendships, and ultimately, our lives are at stake for speaking out. And yet that is precisely what we must risk. The stakes are worth more than any of our personal calculus.

So the next time the Muslims ambassadors, with the full weight of both Jihadi intimidation and politically correct public opinion behind them, come demanding an apology from the pope, let the pope rebuke their outrageous audacity. Instead of expressing his “total and profound respect for all Muslims,” let him say:

How on earth can I have respect for you when you have none for yourselves, when you try and bully people into showing respect and you show none yourself? When you demean others with the basest kind of hate-mongering and demonizing, and yet grow violent at the slightest criticism? When you fail to denounce the mad violence from your own religious leaders and zealots, but denounce any expression of hostility from others? Who do you think you are, demanding apologies and offering none?

But in order to say that to our Muslim neighbors who ply us with stories of their religion of peace and bristle at our fair questions about their bloody borders and bloody innards, we would need both self-respect and courage. And in so doing, we might even find that there are decent Muslims who agree with us.

In these darkening days, may we begin to discover that self-respect and courage, and the voice that can save us all from the spreading madness. Who knows, maybe when they perform Opera at risk to their lives, both the artists and the audience will find a dimension to art beyond narcissism and pleasure, begin to get in touch with the heroic dimension of our own past, become heros of civil society.