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Despite this, Mandell Ganchrow, a former Orthodox Union president and longtime leader of a major pro-Israel political action committee, recently posted an item on his Web site suggesting Obama’s early exposure to Islam could make him a danger to Israel.

“In the Jewish religion when someone is far away from observance, however at a certain time he has a spark of Jewishness, we call it a ‘pintele Yid’ — a smattering, or a deep-seated unconscious attachment to one’s roots,” Ganchrow wrote. “With a Muslim father, and being surrounded in his early youth in a Muslim environment, is there such a thing as a ‘pintele Muslim,’ with deep-seated feelings which could color decisions re: terrorism and the Middle East?” ~The Jewish Week

Via Sullivan

This wouldn’t be quite so ludicrous if Obama had ever shown the slighest hint of disagreeing with most U.S. policies in the Near East and had ever gone beyond beyond standard left-liberal criticisms of the treatment of Palestinians.  Of course, except for Iraq (which a rather large number of non-Muslims who actually knew something about the Near East also opposed), he hasn’t.  I have argued before that this perception of an affinity for Muslims or attachment to the Islamic world would hurt him politically, and that it was crazy for him and his supporters to keep emphasising his foreign roots and attachments.  Whatever else you want to say about this, it really isn’t a vote-getter. 

I would like to use some of my personal history to explore just how ridiculous this line of criticism of Obama is.  First, as any long-time readers know, I am not a fan of Obama and I think he would make a terrible President.  The problem with his foreign policy views is not that they are too passive or “friendly” (or whatever counts as a grave sin in the eyes of such people) to Near Eastern and Islamic countries, but that he is essentially indistinguishable from the foreign policy consensus views of Washington, except when he overcompensates out of fear of looking “weak” by proposing sending American forces into Pakistan whether or not Islamabad agrees.  In other words, when he isn’t being merely conventional, he may be more dangerous than the people we have in power now.  This is not the result of his family background or upbringing, but a result of his inexperience and his misguided ideas about the U.S. role in the world that many of his colleagues share. 

As has been brought up elsewhere, for a very short time (about six months) I professed Islam (albeit pretty idiosyncratically–I doubt if my “conversion” would have ever been recognised as a proper one), mostly out of an attraction at the time to a somewhat coherent monotheism that was neither Jewish nor Christian, since I had been raised with no real religious education and had been conditioned by my multiculti private schools to an aversion to Christianity about whose teachings I knew relatively little and which I understood even less.  After a few years of syncretistic dabbling in various religious literatures, I came to Islam, mostly through the English translations of Rumi and the like, but rather like the dabbling before it this was not, on reflection, a serious conversion and it was one I could never enter into fully.  (Incidentally, anyone who would like to make more out of this than that is wasting his time.)  In a way slightly similar to Obama’s conversion to Christianity, I approached Orthodoxy at first intellectually that then became more firmly grounded in a practicing Orthodox parish.  So while I have no sympathy with Obama’s politics, I have found the persistent effort to label him falsely as a Muslim or crypto-Muslim, when he very definitely decided, as I did, to become a Christian (however liberal a denomination he may have joined), and the credulity of stupid voters to believe this falsehood, to be obnoxious.  There are dozens of reasons not to support Obama.  But the problem is not that he was raised for a few years in Indonesia with an Indonesian step-father or that his grandfather was a Muslim, but that he actually claims that living for a few years in Indonesia in his youth and having a Kenyan grandmother still living in a village in Kenya give him relevant foreign policy experience.  The problem is not where he grew up, but that he is substituting a kind of symbolic capital for expertise.   

As for the effect of my brief time as a self-described Muslim on my policy views, my attitude towards the world overseas had been poisoned much more by reading The Economist and The Wall Street Journal than by reading the Qur’an.  I had far more sympathy for Bosnian Muslims and Chechens as an ignorant American teenager than as a putative Muslim thanks to interventionist agitation on their behalf.  By the time of this brief Islamic phase, I had stopped thinking of foreign policy as a morality play in which other countries could be simplistically portrayed as incarnate evil.  Indeed, perhaps this kind of thinking only really works for thoroughly secular people who must find their great moral struggles in politics rather than in asceticism and worship.  Who knows?  In any case, Western media reported incessantly that the perpetually evil Slavs were the villains of the story, and that  it was as simple as that, and, young, foolish kid that I was, I believed them.  Mujahideen in the Balkans?  Why worry?  Truthfully, as a result of reading Chronicles more regularly, becoming better educated in European and Near Eastern history and becoming more familiar with Christianity, I began to move away from the pro-jihadist positions of the WSJ, Weekly Standard and the like, while the war against Yugoslavia and its aftermath finally brought me around to the non-interventionist views that I have held ever since.  I base my current views on what is in the American interest and how justice obliges us to act towards other nations.      

If there were anything to this idea that Obama’s experience of growing up around and among Muslims (for a relatively shot period of his life in his earliest youth) would have an effect on his policy views, he would have to have policy views that were not virtually identical with every other conventional Democratic hawk.  

P.S.  Ross, Yglesias and Ambinder talk about Obama and the Muslim charge.

Wisdom from the matrimonial banquet scene: “Tell them about your degrees and your family, that is very important, but don’t mention your father’s glaucoma.”

My earlier remarks on the matrimonial banquet phenomenon are here. 

I appreciate Mark Krikorian’s fair description of my post criticising this idea of his about how to combat and defeat “radical Islam.”  We are still in disagreement about his proposal, but let me say a couple of things about his response.  He wrote:

Islam will change, but only (or at least sooner) if we pursue some variation of what Larry Auster calls “separationism.” “Separationism” is the isolation of Islam from the rest of the world through military action, restrictions on immigration, and other means, presumably including a radically more aggressive search for alternative automobile fuels.

I grant Mr. Krikorian that Islam will change, as any religion with so many adherents spread across the globe would inevitably change over time, and it has changed before.  The first difficulty is that certain kinds of Islam already have changed in the past, and many of the changes wrought by revivalism and Salafism have been to take Islam in quite the opposite direction of the “moderate” Islam Mr. Krikorian envisions emerging in the aftermath of this apparently militarised embargo of the Islamic world.  As a kind of glorified sanctions regime, it would have many of the adverse, undesirable effects of a sanctions regime.  Militarised embargoes are also not generally known to help bring down their targets, but rather reinforce the more hard-line and radical elements inside a country while the population is cut off from the outside world and forced to fall back on whatever the local authorities tell them.     

I think the separationism described here (with which I do not entirely disagree, at least as far immigration is concerned) would certainly cause a change in the Islamic world.  It is not clear to me, however, that the change would necessarily be the kind Mr. Krikorian hopes to see.  If such an isolation of the Islamic world from the West were possible, the isolation of that world from the rest would never be complete in any case, as large parts of the rest of the world are not interested in isolating themselves from the Islamic world.  India cannot isolate itself from that world without cutting itself in two and closing itself off from markets for its labour.  China would probably opportunistically try to fill any void left by Westerners.  A policy of isolation combined with military action would seem to combine the worst of both worlds, since it would reinforce the most violent instincts among jihadis and build up sympathy for them while rejecting any alternative connection.  It would be our Cuba policy writ large, but with an added refusal to take in refugees.  I suppose the idea here is to create sufficient internal pressures within the Islamic world such that something gives way in dramatic fashion, but if the end result would be to encourage internecine strife inside this isolated Islamic world it seems as if this would simply strengthen the worst elements and produce an Islamic world in far worse shape, politically, socially and economically, than exists today.  Everything that fuels jihadism would remain, and the indigenous forces that oppose it would probably have been swept away and purged in the process. 

Pluralistic though it was, Islamic Spain was no democracy. ~Alexander Kronemer

Additionally, Kronemer writes of a generic “Islamic Spain,” as if there were no difference between Umayyads, Almoravids and Almohads.  The latter two dynasties were decidedly much less interested in perpetuating whatever toleration and good intercommunal relations there had been before, and they were, in fact, much more fanatical.  It is remarkable how these dynasties play no role in Kronemer’s description of the worsening relations between Christians and Muslims in Spain.

There was no manger, Christ is not the Messiah [bold mine-DL], and the crucifixion never happened.  A forthcoming ITV documentary will portray Jesus as Muslims see him. ~The Guardian

I don’t know whether this is a mistake by The Guardian or by ITV’s documentary, but a mistake it surely is.  Set aside for the moment that the phrase “Christ is not the Messiah” sounds really stupid (since Christos means “anointed one” and thus Messiah), and consider the claim behind it.  The claim is that Muslims do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, which is incorrect.  The relevant point, obviously, is that they deny His Divinity and do not recognise His Divine Sonship in His role as Messiah.  This is one of the two major points of disagreement between the religions, and it is rather central to how Muslims see Jesus.  One would have thought that a report on a documentary designed to foster some minimal understanding of the Islamic view would have managed to get this much right.

The Qur’an (Sura 3:48) says (Pickthall translation):

(And remember) when the angels said: O Mary! Lo!  Allah giveth thee glad tidings of a word from Him, whose name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary…

Idh qaalat al-malaika ya Maryam inna Allah yubathiruki bi-kalimat-in minhu ismuhu al-masih-u ‘Isa ibn-u Maryam…

But after the inevitable failure of Islamic movements to provide an adequate response to the challenge of modernity, what will Muslims embrace? The only thing left, at that point, will be the ever elusive “moderate Islam,” a new, modernity-compatible faith that retains the name of Islam but jettisons all the substance (kind of like mainline Protestantism).

But Muslims have to come to that conclusion on their own, by living under regimes that will exemplify that failure (like Iran). Our hearts-and-minds efforts, like the north poles of two magnets, can only repel Muslims from drawing the necessary, inescapable conclusion that Islam, as it has existed for 14 centuries, is a failure as an ideology and way of life in the modern world. ~Mark Krikorian

No offense to Mr. Krikorian, but does he really think that Muslims are going to conceive of their religion as an “ideology” and “way of life” that have failed?  If they believe, as I assume they do, that their religion is the final revelation of God to humanity, it will take a lot more than its “inadequacy” to adapt to modernity to persuade them to abandon it.  The substitute will also have to be a lot more powerful than the Islamic equivalent of the via media. 

The lesson of mainline Protestantism, to follow his comparison, is that religion without substance and conviction is dead and uninspiring and doomed to stagnation and irrelevance.  People flee it as they would from the plague.  Those inclined to belong to religious communities are going to seek out communities where there is a sense that the religion they practice is true and edifying.  Looked at this way, Islamic revivalism and fundamentalism stand a much better chance of spreading and thriving, much as Pentecostalism has been doing for many decades, which means that the failues to adjust to modernity will simply persuade even more people to follow a revivalist and fundamentalist path.  For every person who thinks that a religion needs to be updated to match the modern world there will always be at least one other who thinks that it is the modern world that must be adjusted to the dictates of the old time religion, and probably more than one.  It seems to me that one of the handicaps of a lot of Westerners in understanding the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is the idea that such fundamentalism is not modern.  It is anti-modernist, but it is itself a modern phenomenon that addresses the needs (or seems to address them) of people today.  To say that it does not result in good results by the standards of our modernity is to miss the point entirely–the people who embrace such fundamentalism do not want such results, or if they do they want them less than they want the certainty and deliverance offered them by revelation. 

Via Pithlord, I see that Prof. Bainbridge has commented on this story about a Dutch bishop proposing that Dutch Catholic churches use the name Allah in their services “to ease tensions between Muslims and Christians.”  Pithlord is, of course, right that the concession, such as it is, is actually only a linguistic one.  Allah does mean God, or literally “the God” in Arabic.  As far as it goes, the change is fairly innocuous as a matter of literal meaning, but therefore all the more unnecessary and symbolically discouraging in that it is another example of Dutch natives accommodating and assimilating themselves to the immigrant communities rather than vice-versa.  The Islamic understanding of God is obviously quite different and opposed to that of Christians, but the bishop was not proposing introductions of Qur’anic passages, such as Ma qataau-hu wa ma salabu-hu during Communion and La taqu thaalatha during the Sanctus.  It is a trivial proposal in a way, but this makes it all the more foolish and pointless.  It is the ultimate in condescending tokenism while also managing to introduce a pointless change into the liturgical life of the bishop’s flock.  Should Anglicans begin saying Khuda Hafiz to make their Muslim neighbours feel more at home? 

It is not exactly an embrace of relativism, as Prof. Bainbridge fears, but it is fairly stupid all the same.  It is an example of the embrace of rather pointless symbolic gestures that are intended to foster ecumenical dialogue and such, but which routinely backfire and are viewed either as insults, attempts to muddy the waters or even aggressive attempts at appropriating someone else’s beliefs.  Do you suppose that a Muslim in the Netherlands will have a better view of non-Arabic-speaking Christians if they begin using the name Allah?  Would this not, in fact, inspire some resentment against those using this name to refer to the Trinity or to Christ Himself, when Muslims recognise neither the existence of the former nor the divinity of the latter?  At best, it would not achieve the intended goal, but would become one more episode in European Christianity’s own self-marginalisation.  

Update: On the other side of the world, there is apparently no small controversy over the changing usages from Khuda Hafiz to Allah Hafiz, as this older article also relates.  I had noticed that Allah Hafiz had been cropping up in more and more Bollywood movies over the past few years, but I suppose I had not realised that this reflected such significant changes in South Asian Islam.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any [bold mine-DL]. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.

Is there something beyond the solidarity of the decent that ought to have impelled every commentator and editorial page in the U.S. to express unequivocal support for Sir Salman this week? ~Tim Rutten

Something occurs to me as I read this.  The first point has to be that everyone has already taken Salman Rushdie so terribly seriously for decades that many people are perhaps more than a little tired of hearing or talking about him in any context.  Goodness knows I am.  I have some difficulty feeling very sympathetic for someone who, given his background, knew perfectly well that his words would incite the responses they incited and went ahead and wrote them anyway, all the while claiming great victimhood in the process.  Obviously, the man should not be threatened with death for what he writes–that is the bare minimum fundamental to a free society–but one reason you may see fewer excited apologies for Rushdie is that he had to be a fool to write what he wrote, knowing full well what it would mean to Muslims.  Will we still be running around declaring our admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali in this fashion thirty years hence?  With any luck, we will have forgotten all about her, just as we may one day be free of having to hear about Salman Rushdie’s ego. 

The second point is that this claim of a “great silence” by Mr. Rutten is complete nonsense.  There have been plenty of papers that have been decrying the threats made against Rushdie, just as many people defended the Jyllands-Posten when its editor chose to publish the “Muhammad” cartoons.  More examples could undoubtedly be found, if I were inclined to waste more time tracking them down to disprove Mr. Rutten’s false hyperbole, but if both the Sun-Times and the Chronicle can agree that Britain should stand by its decisison there would seem to almost be a broad consensus across the gamut of mainstream opinion in support of Rushdie’s knighthood, or at least in support of Rushdie’s right to write whatever he might wish to write.  If it has not become a week-long obsession for all media outlets, perhaps this is because the headline, “Innocuous event occurs, Muslims claim deep offense, begin rioting” has become rather predictable and uninteresting.  Why, just today we have two columns rallying to Rushdie’s defense (while complaining about the supposed lack of concern everyone is showing), and I have yet to see anyone in this country saying that Britain should withdraw the knighthood under pressure or justifying the Muslim response to it.  If there really is less commentary on this than on other controversies, perhaps some people don’t say much about a topic because the situation seems so clear that there is no need to say anything else.  Mr. Rutten does understand that there are other things going on that may actually be more important than controversy over Salman Rushdie’s bauble, yes?  

Rutten’s memory of the controversy last year seems distinctly skewed:

You may recall that most of the American news media essentially abandoned Rose and the Danes to the fanatics’ wrath, receding into cowardly silence, as mullah after mullah called for the cartoonists’ death, mobs attacked diplomatic and cultural offices and one Muslim country after another boycotted Danish goods.

Well, no, I don’t recall that exactly, because I’m pretty sure this did not happen, just as I’m pretty sure Rutten doesn’t know what he’s talking about with respect to the response of the American news media to the recent controversy.  The only thing worse than the phoney tolerance and sensitivity that he attacks in his article is the even phonier intolerance against non-existent phoney tolerance.  It’s absolutely right to mock the pretensions of multicultis when you can actually uncover them engaging in pretentious, faux tolerance  of outrageous things.  When the reality seems to contradict this criticism, it comes off as just so much lazy media-bashing.  It would be like my saying, “Why don’t American academics speak out against the absurd attempt by some British academics to boycott Israeli academics?  This is outrageous!”  That would sound pretty good, except that many American academics have spoken out against the boycott.  If I were someone who wanted to engage in some lazy attacks about the inherent anti-Israel bias of the American academy, because this already confirms my prejudices about the academy, I would not bother to have found this out, just as Mr. Rutten seems intent on doing with the media in this country.   

A digression on this business of the proposed boycott of Israeli academics and universities: I can think of few more stupid and counterproductive efforts to a) force policy change in another country and b) advance whatever cause it is the people engaged in this boycott believe they are advancing.  Even if we all agreed that Israeli policy vis-a-vis Palestinians ought to change (and I think it should), what possible good would it accomplish to punish Israeli academics and educational institutions with international boycotts?  Are they the ones setting policy?  Of course they aren’t.  On the contrary, their members may well be among those pushing for different policies of the sort that the would-be boycotting academics want to see adopted.  Punishing Israeli academics for the mistakes or even crimes of the Israeli government is like holding Turkish academics accountable for the repression of the Turkish state, even when that repression is directed against those academics themselves.  It would be like other nations forbidding British scholars from participating in conferences because they oppose the policies of the Blair Government in Iraq, or banning American researchers from their work overseas because of something the Bush administration has done.  This is an insane, unprincipled approach and one that is almost certain to perversely strengthen domestic political support for the policies the boycotters wanted to change, as it also lends to these policies  now the respectability of being associated, in a roundabout way, with the cause of Israeli academic freedom.  Incidentally, why has Tim Rutten not actively denounced this boycott?  Silence is a scandal, or so some pretentious columnist once told me.

Rutten also mentions the higher numbers of journalist deaths during the last few years in the Iraq war than had happened during Vietnam, asking:

Why so little attention to this toll?

So little attention by whom?  Journalists have been paying quite a lot of attention to the deaths of their colleagues in Iraq and around the world in the last few years.  Indeed, it has been one of the distinguishing features of the Iraq war and has been the cause for a fair amount of reporting and commentary in its own right. 

If you want to find a cause for why this has received less attention, look to the usual suspects who actively vilify all of journalism as the repository of disloyalty and anti-patriotism and who consistently inspire in their audiences contempt for news reporting by complaining about its insufficiently pro-war content.  Can you imagine the outcry against ”the MSM” if they were to spend a lot of time focusing on the deaths of journalists in Iraq?  You can almost imagine some Hugh Hewitt clone, if not the master himself, saying, “Serves ‘em right for refusing to report all the good news in Iraq!”  We would see a lot of commentary talking about how these stories about journalists’ deaths are proof of why the media are undermining the war effort, and that this “explains” why the journalists are subverting the cause out of loyalty to their fellow journalists.  The thinking here would be that if the war is getting journalists killed, this would give journalists some special incentive to help end the war.  Any media critic would immediately recognise the absurdity of this, since it has been the major media that have made sure to make the possibility of withdrawing from Iraq seem absolutely crazy and irresponsible, but that wouldn’t matter to those who are already invested in the idea that all journalists in this country yearn for our defeat.  Additional coverage of the deaths of journalists would simply confirm this prejudice.   

The four defendants were identified as Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen and native of Guyana who was arrested in Brooklyn. Authorities said Defreitas was the former airport employee. 

They said two suspects were in custody in Trinidad and Tobago, and identified those two as Abdul Kadir, a citizen of Guyana and former member of its parliament, and Kareem Ibrahim, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago.

The fourth was named as Abdel Nur, described as a citizen of Guyana. They provided no other immediate information on Nur’s whereabouts, but said Kadir and Nur were associates of Jamaat Al Muslimeen, which was behind a deadly coup attempt in Trinidad in 1990.

“Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow … they love John F. Kennedy like he’s the man … if you hit that, this whole country will be mourning. You can kill the man twice [bold mine-DL],” Defreitas said in another conversation, it said.

“Even the twin towers can’t touch it,” referring to the September 11 attacks in another comment that the law enforcement authorities said was recorded last month. “This can destroy the economy of America for some time.” ~Reuters

Ross notes that we have been fortunate recently in having very stupid enemies.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this Defreitas was not what you might call a fully assimilated newcomer.  If Defreitas was already a naturalised U.S. citizen, it is not hard to imagine that there are other Defreitases operating beneath the radar.  It makes amnesty seem rather foolish, doesn’t it?   

It is worth noting that the only planned attack (and it was only in the “planning stages” at that) against American targets originating from Latin America had its beginnings in Guyana and Trinidad.  These are not the normal bogeymen of interventionist fearmongering (they are both next to Venezuela, but that is about as much connection as there is).  This makes some sense, since 10% of Guyana’s population is Muslim and around 6% of Trinidad and Tobago’s population is Muslim.  (Interestingly, Guyana is also 35% Hindu–it makes sense, given the past British connection, but I confess I had no idea this was the case.) 

The much-feared “triangle” in southern South America is a border region where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, and it is one part of the continent that interventionists have been screaming warnings about (when they haven’t been engaged in their favourite pastime of Venezuelophobia).  These would all be countries with very, very few Muslims, and this “triangle” would seem to be an area that has so far, at least as far as the public knows, not generated any threats against the United States.  Perhaps if more anti-jihadists were more focused on anti-American enemies, rather than worrying about Hizbullah fundraising, we might begin to develop some sort of coherent and intelligent policy to oppose them. 

The foundation published Ramadan’s book To Be a European Muslim in 1999, and it enjoyed a modest success. To Be a European Muslim was regarded as a thoughtful argument for healthy new relations between old-stock non-Muslim Europe and the new-stock immigrant Muslim population. Daniel Pipes in the United States was among the expert observers who offered applause–though, if you visit Pipes’s website, you will see that, ever since his initial review, Pipes has been posting additional remorseful observations about how wrong he was, and what could possibly have gotten into him? ~Paul Berman

Berman’s essay, which is more like a small book, on Tariq Ramadan may or may not be worth reading in full (I have just waded in and I am not sure that I will finish), but this remark about Pipes was interesting.  Pipes is, of course, the embodiment of neocon Arabophobic Islamophilia.  No, I’m not kidding.  When they do not happen to live in the immediate vicinity of the Levant, Islamic fundamentalists have had few better allies–both conscious and unwitting–than neoconservatives.    

Pipes himself peddles all the standard pro-Islamic myths or exaggerations: Islam as “religion of peace,” Islam as guardian of Greek learning in the middle ages, medieval Islamic civilisation as a Golden Age of rationality and tolerance, and so on and so forth.  He is also ardently in favour of attempts to forcibly “reform” the Islamic world from the outside and supports all efforts to crush as many Arab states as possible in the process.  He believes that Islam is essentially good, but has gone awry somewhere and must be pummeled and shaped by outside intervention to return to its pristine goodness.  It is impossible to understand the creation of a word like “Islamofascism” without understanding just how deeply neocons have embraced this myth of the peaceful, enlightened Islamic world and their narrative of a small fraction of that world that has gone astray.  While the word is intended to conflate and confuse multiple, mutually opposed groups and states, this conflation is done for specific policy reasons, one of which is to target all forces hostile to Israel and to create an ideological identifier for all of them.  The word itself implies and its users constantly reiterate that Islam itself is fine and no problem at all; there is nothing inherent in it that should or could lead to what they called “Islamofascism.”  As they are obsessed with telling us (and as Joseph Bottum insists on claiming again now, citing Bernard Lewis), modern jihadis are not just supposed to be theoretically totalitarian but can be tied to 20th century totalitarian ideologies as a matter of intellectual genealogy, and furthermore they will claim that jihadism is a political ideology.  Hence Islamofascism, which is something that a secular audience can more readily grasp.  Last year I proposed an explanation for why neocons do this:

For secular people like these prominent neocons, it is horrifying to consider the possibility that some people have motivations that cannot be explained in secular language, because they, lacking in religious imagination of any kind, are at a loss to even begin to really understand what motivates a jihadi.  Even when they acknowledge the supposed goal of Paradise or the religious nature of the duty these people believe themselves to be carrying out, it is always with a certain level of incomprehension, almost as if they cannot really accept that anyone not attached to some intelligible ideology firmly bounded in this world really exists.  Their inability to understand the religious desire for transcendence in some of its most appalling forms stems, I suspect, in no small part from their own depressingly optimistic and immanentist ideology.  Their inability to understand a drive for religious purity and intolerance of other religions as anything other than fascism stems in part from their own reflexive commitments to religious pluralism and a latent or not-so-latent hostility to dogmatic Christianity: everything not on the side of pluralism and “freedom” somehow all gets pushed into a big box called fascism.     

In any case, it is not surprising that Pipes would have had a soft spot for someone like Tariq Ramadan, especially pre-9/11, because in the late ’90s encouraging Muslim immigration into Europe (like encouraging Third World immigration into any Western country) was quite natural for neocons, who were, after all, leading advocates of intervening in the Balkans on behalf of Muslims (no bigoted Westerners were they!) and calling for Turkish entry into the EU.  (The argument for Turkish entry was a twofer for the neocons: they were able to idealise a “democratic” Islamic country while also mocking the small-minded Europeans.)  Just as they have winked and nodded approvingly at Chechen terrorism, they endorsed the entry of mujahideen into Europe for the greater glory of killing Serbs.  Just as it had been fashionable in England to romanticise the Algerian rebel Abd al Qadir because he was killing Frenchmen (though they would take a rather dim view of locals rebelling against their authority some twenty-five years later), it became acceptable to write admiringly about the self-determination of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims.  Neocon outrage against jihadis, such as it is, is really more that of a jilted lover than that of a dedicated foe.  When they lament the jihadi threat, you can almost hear them saying, “Come on, guys, we’ve had such good times together.  Remember when the KLA staged the Racak massacre and we pretended to believe it?  That was great.  We should get the gang back together.”

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.” ~The Boston Globe

The Globe story tries to make the statements cited in it into something rather more sinister and manipulative than I think they actually are.  No doubt, these candidates want to demagogue terrorism and they are trying their best to do that, but the quotes the article cites do not give the impression so much of deliberate obfuscation as simple ignorance and confusion on the part of the speakers.  Read the rest of this entry »

A bit late to the D’Souza-bashing party, Cathy Young reviews The Enemy at Home and concludes (as everyone already had four months ago) that…Andrew Sullivan is wrong about people on the right in general and the reaction to D’Souza’s book in particular.  In the course of a review that ends with the (terribly surprising) conclusion that a contributor to Reason supports freedom, she gets really carried away and says something strikingly similar to what Kevin Drum had said about a remark by Glenn Beck, which had echoed part of D’Souza’s thesis:

In effect, D’Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company agree with the familiar sentiment that the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms.”

It is a strange article indeed that can use the phrase, “D’Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company” without a powerful sense of irony.  It would be like a conservative saying, “Lindsey, Sager, Rockwell and company,” as if these people were really all part of the same group of “libertarians” who were arguing for a common position.  As I argued at some length back in February, saying that Muslims “hate us for our freedoms” is almost completely the opposite of saying that they object to Western cultural decadence.  Everything hinges on the implications of the two different statements: one implies that we are virtuous and innocent and have been inexplicably wronged because we carry the torch of liberty, while the other says that we are a sinful, wretched lot who have been chastised by the secular equivalent of God sending the Assyrians against us.  The former assumes that there is nothing wrong with us at all, their response is wholly without cause and irrational (or is essential to who they are and therefore unchangeable and also not worth trying to understand in any depth) and “they” react violently against “us” because “we” are the embodiment of more or less pure secular good and “they” are the embodiment of pure secular evil.  The latter view assumes not only that “we” are capable of error and corruption, but that this moral corruption has additional consequences beyond social disorder, family disruption and degeneracy at home.  With these two responses you can begin to discern the difference between nationalists and conservatives.  According to the latter view, one of the other consequences to cultural decadence is the outraged reaction of traditional societies subjected to the fruits of that decadence by way of globalisation.  There is some validity to this line of argument, but it hardly explains everything (and D’Souza is the only one who is trying to use it to explain everything vis-a-vis the Islamic world). 

As I said before, where D’Souza goes badly wrong–because he is desperately covering up for interventionist foreign policy–is to pin the blame entirely on the export of cultural liberalism, rather than seeing this as an aggravating factor that simply intensifies the hostility generated by other things, such as U.S. foreign policy, and he then gets even more ridiculous when he proposes the solution that we team up with “traditional Muslims” for ecumenical jihad against the godless pagans and the supposedly distinct “radical Muslims.”  This issue becomes timely, since we are once again debating the absurd charge of “blaming America” that has been aimed at Ron Paul, because he insists on recognising that bad, provocative policies have bad (albeit unintended) consequences.  Giuliani’s response to Ron Paul is very similar to the general response to D’Souza in the common thread of Republicans’ objecting to “blaming America,” but notably D’Souza has continued to enjoy the support and benefit of the doubt of many conservatives, even those who think he is deeply mistaken.  D’Souza enjoys this relatively better treatment because he does not pin 9/11 in any way on U.S. foreign policy, which means that the Republicans who have contributed to the errors of this foreign policy are off the hook.  D’Souza “blames America first,” but the America he blames is that of the coastal megalopoleis, “Blue” America, which is a relatively more acceptable target for the conservatives who are trashing his book.  Of course, GOP orthodoxy is that you should never “blame America” in any way, by which they mean you should never engage in criticial thinking or criticism with respect to anything to do with the U.S. government or American culture in relation to the rest of the world, so that it is still in poor taste to trace 9/11’s causes back to cultural liberals (even though all of the D’Souza critics would otherwise be happy to trash these people all day long as traitors and the like).  At other times, it may be acceptable to bash cultural liberals in the most vehement ways, but that is something that “we” keep in the family.  The idea seems to me: don’t argue in front of the Muslims, but maintain a front of unity and solidarity to the outside world.

There is evidence that our involvement in the Middle East has made some people living in the region angry enough to want to kill Americans. That fact doesn’t automatically dictate what our foreign policy should be, nor does it follow that if we were to leave the region tomorrow that Islamist terrorism would cease to be a problem. But it shouldn’t be beyond the pale to bring up. ~Jim Antle

Jim’s post makes many important points.  I have to agree that Ron Paul failed as a matter of debating tactics when he did not try to finesse the answer to play to the emotions of the crowd, but then Ron Paul never finesses his answers to play to the emotions of the crowd.  This is why he is frequently right and doesn’t get swept up in mass hysteria.  When his colleagues were foolishly plunging ahead on Iraq–which most of Paul’s current critics still believe to have been the right thing to do, which ought to obliterate their credibility at once–he was virtually alone on his side of the aisle in opposing the war.  The mindless Republican near-unanimity that took us into Iraq persists and causes most Republicans to fail to think critically about the nature and purpose of our foreign policy.  If Giuliani appears to have “won” the debate yesterday, he and the other candidates have made it clear in their Paul-bashing that the GOP is a party that favours myth and visceral emotionalism over serious thought.  Such is the deplorable nature of mass democracy that this sort of party might still do well in an electoral contest, but I think most of the country has grown sick of this stuff after all these years and the majority has been trying to purge its system of this toxic irrationalism.  Little noted in all of the post-debate commentary were Paul’s remarks that 2006 was lost because of the war and the majority of the country is against the standard GOP view: political realism, to say nothing of sane policy, dictates that the candidates offer some evidence of adjustment and reflection that actually amounts to more than mentioning “Islamic fascism” or “extremism” every three sentences.

As much as I and others who support Paul are thrilled that he is out there challenging these other candidates, it does make you ask the question: what would make anyone believe that a party that is 70% or more behind the Iraq war is going to be receptive to a lesson in how fundamentally they have departed from their own foreign policy traditions?  If the calamity of Iraq has not sobered them up, what good will history lessons do?  Even if they will acknowledge that this departure from tradition is true, they won’t want to hear that they have fallen into the ditch of hegemonism.  Denial in action is an awesome thing to behold.  Besides, many of these are people so far gone that they think that criticising policy as flawed and dangerous and “blaming America first” are the same thing.  (Incidentally, accusing someone of “blaming America first” is simply the code that these people use when their adversary engages in cultural or political criticism that they cannot answer with argument and feel compelled to resort to flag-waving and sloganeering–it is an ideological reflex totally divorced from thinking.)  Many can’t even manage the most elementary distinction between government and country, regime and people, and so cannot begin to grasp that opposition to ongoing policy implemened by the state is almost always motivated by devotion to the country’s welfare. 

Of course, it’s possible that departing from the Near and Middle East entirely would not bring an end to jihadi attacks on American targets.  Not likely, but possible.  Lessons from past insurgencies suggest that the attacks cease when the policies or actions that have been met with violent responses have been stopped.  It seems to me that you could make an argument that, say, having friendly ports in the Gulf is significant enough for our national interests that our government would be irresponsible as a matter of national interest to yield to demands that we never use those ports or base anyone in those countries.  I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that argument, but that is the kind of argument that someone would need to make to even begin to sound credible in defending an interventionism that provokes terrorist responses.  The benefits of intervention would have to clearly outweigh the costs that it brings with it.  The point normally made by non-interventionists is, of course, that the costs are almost always much higher and there are almost never any meaningful benefits for America.  In response interventionists say, “The sacrifice is worth it.”  They don’t elaborate, because I imagine they’re not even sure what they mean when they say this.  Anyway, there would need to be an argument that could credibly say that remaining in Iraq for the foreseeable future is so vital to the American interest that it is worth the risk of Iraqis (or some other jihadi motivated by anger over our presence there) one day possibly launching terrorist strikes on American soil.  Obviously, it’s nowhere near that important to America.  Continuing the Iraq war creates additional unacceptable and unnecessary risks for American security that can be eliminated by ending the war. 

This is the real question of any policy debate: every approach entails risk of one kind or another, and the wise and prudent man tries to find the policy that involves the least risk while securing essential national goods.  Part of the debate then involves determining what those national goods are.  Some people think voting Arabs belong in this category, while most do not.  Some think that propping up an openly sectarian government friendly to Iran is worth the lives of American soldiers, while opponents of the war do not.  Some believe that ruining our military in the sands of Iraq is essential to winning the “war on terror,” while others disagree.  Who seems to be more in the right? 

The Vice President was a great one for talking about risk before the invasion–the risk of inaction was too great!  Well, as it turns out, the risk of inaction was substantially less than he claimed and much more in line with what opponents of the invasion said it was.  It doesn’t require someone to be a dedicated America Firster to know that the current policy advocated and defended by the majority of the Republican candidates, most Republican voters and this administration is failing to secure American interests and is exposing this country to increased, unnecessary risks.  Our presence in Saudi Arabia, which did directly contribute to the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, has now been replaced by a presence in Iraq that seems to have no logical or obvious conclusion and which also seems to be serving no obvious American interest.  Ron Paul proposes trying to shield America from these unnecessary risks, and for this he is routinely denounced and belittled by this supposed “big tent” party that is brimming with ideological diversity.

It is amusing to watch the gaggle of these other Republican candidates hold forth about the threat of Islam (Giuliani now claims to be some sort of expert), when they seem to have absolutely no historical perspective on any of this.  Tancredo expressed this view most absolutely when he cut to the heart of the issue: “…whether Israel existed or didn’t, whether or not we were in the Iraq war or not, they would be trying to kill us because it’s a dictate of their religion, at least a part of it, and we have to defend ourselves.”  Tancredo is sort of right, and yet also so horribly wrong that I cringed when I heard this. 

Is jihad an integral part of Islam?  Yes.  Will there always be those who pursue jihad and try to subject non-Muslims to Islamic rule?  Yes.  Of course, where and under what circumstances jihadis will be doing this are all determined by any number of other factors.  There are jihadis in Kashmir, but not terribly many in Gujarat–perhaps that has something to do with the political disputes over Kashmir?  There are or have been jihadis in the Caucasus, Kosovo and Bosnia, but not terribly many in Indonesia, which may have something to do with violent contestation for power in the former.  It seems plain that jihad comes to the fore when Muslims are caught up in conflict with non-Muslims, but otherwise the “dictate of their religion” remains more or less dormant.  So, I put it to the majority of Republicans, why would you pursue policies that seem intent on provoking more conflicts with Muslims if you are interested in quelling jihadism and undermining its appeal?  Either you have no idea what you are doing, in which case the rest of us should not heed your advice, or you are going about seeking the right goal in entirely the wrong way.   

Jihad has existed in its fully formalised and elaborated form for approximately one thousand years, and yet jihadis (very broadly defined) took an interest in attacking Americans only in 1979.  For some reason, Maghrebi Muslims were not gathering themselves into boats to raid the Jamestown settlement in a trans-Atlantic razzia.  For some reason, the ruler of Morocco was among the first to recognise the independence of the United States; one of our earliest treaties was with the Moroccan monarchy.  There was a war against Tripoli to secure our shipping in the Mediterranean, which was a war against piracy.  From 1805 until 1979, it is exceedingly difficult to think of many episodes when the “dictate of their religion” so motivated zealous Muslims to attack Americans.  As ties with Israel have deepened and our military profile in the region has increased, jihadi attacks have also increased.  Now, as the old saying goes, correlation is not causation, but it is awfully curious that Muslims studiously overlooked a ”dictate of their religion” for most of our national history in our dealings with them and only happened to rediscover them at the moment that we embarked on policies that were not all together friendly to at least certain Muslim groups and states.  Of course, we have enjoyed geographical distance from the Islamic world, and as inhabitants of this continent we have a certain luxury of distance that our cousins in Europe do not have, which is why it is so perplexing why anyone would actively promote a narrowing of this distance to bring us into ever-greater contact with people who are, in Mr. Tancredo’s estimation, out to kill us.  The point is, surely, even if Tancredo were right (and he largely is not right), we would be far better advised to limit our points of contact with the Islamic world in every imaginable way than to expand them through ever-wider rounds of intervention, democratisation efforts and the like.  Even by the standards of the wild Republican vision of the conflict with jihadis, the Republicans have been going about things in almost entirely the wrong way. 

The history of Islam from the beginning has been one involving much strife, bloodshed and the invasions of non-Muslim lands, and anyone talking about this should harbour no illusions on this score (I certainly don’t), but as a result of political fragmentation of the Ottoman territories after WWI there has been no Islamic polity capable of projecting power or significantly threatening Europe or any of the countries bordering the Islamic world.  The pathetic political and economic weakness and general geopolitical irrelevance of the Islamic world (Luttawak is right on this) has contributed to the eruption of mujahideen on the borders of that world where there are relatively small-scale conflicts.  Terrorism and even the pursuit of an “Islamic bomb” are the responses of a world desperately outclassed and outmatched in almost every measurable way by its neighbouring civilisations.  Those who have been on the losing end of global cultural and economic transformations almost always grasp for the sword and try to redeem their losses through power–the American conservative movement can understand this response a little too well, I think–and thereby confirm their own lack of deeper reserves of strength.

Of another excessively hyped and misunderstood, albeit real, threat, George Kennan said 54 years ago:

They [anti-communists] distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal.  They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat.  They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago.  They insist on ascribing to the workings of domestic communism evils and frustrations which, in so far as they were not part of the normal and unavoidable burden of complexity in our life, were the product of our behaviour generally as a nation, and should today be the subject of humble and contrite soul-searching on the part of all of us, in a spirit of brotherhood and community, rather than of frantic and bitter recrimination.  And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.  (from George Kennan: A Study of Character by John Lukacs, p. 193-194)

Though not entirely applicable to the present situation, this quote points to many of the flaws in what passes for a lot of anti-Islamist or anti-jihadi thought today.  If Kennan was the anticommunist anti-anticommunist (where he was opposed to communism, but also strongly critical of populist, ideological anti-communism), perhaps the time has come for an anti-jihadi anti-anti-jihadist.

Religious leaders from all the major faiths, who disagree on some of the most fundamental questions, managed to put aside their differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming. ~Michael Kinsley

Right.  I believe the Catholics began collecting a tithe to pay for hitmen to take him out.  This is insane.  It is one thing to say that many other religious leaders may have said (I have no idea whether they had anything to say about the matter one way or the other, but I am extremely skeptical that they said anything) that Rushdie was incredibly stupid to engage in militantly public apostasy from his inherited religion, given what he knew about that religion’s prescriptions for apostasy,  but to say that leaders “from all the major faiths” agreed that Rushdie “had it coming” is just ridiculous. 

Did the Dalai Lama say, “Rushdie really had that fatwa coming!”?  Did Pope John Paul II send a note to Khomeini saying, “Nice fatwa–I agree!”?  Presumably the United Methodists burned his image in effigy out of solidarity with their Muslim brethren, yes?  Give me a break! 

Incidentally, in the wild and wacky world of liberal religious tolerance, it would normally be considered a move of ecumenical generosity to side with Islamic religious authorities against those who denigrate their teachings, except when they supposedly side with those authorities against someone who has discovered the evils of religion.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali, si, Western critics of Islam, no.  One is an enlightened visionary breaking out of the oppressive coils of patriarchal oppression, and the others are “Islamophobic” nuts, even though they often say more or less the same things.

Frankly, I do admire Romney’s consistency, it shows professionalism - some candidates don’t even know what talking points their campaigns communicate. However, I’d like to hear Romney’s view on the fact that democratic elections in the Middle East in the past few years have quite legally, and under US-sanctioned balloting, increased the political clout of Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine), and the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt). ~George Ajjan

This was a point I didn’t get to in the post where I united two of my favourite hobbyhorses (bashing Romney, mocking people who talk about Islamofascism).  Now I can add two more of my preoccupations to the mix: questioning the wisdom of democratisation in the Near East and rejecting optimism. 

There are three consistent positions one can take on the question of democratisation:

1) Democratisation is good for the peoples of the Near East and is naturally bound to create a more pro-Western, pro-American, pro-Israel Near East (see Turkey for why this one is wrong).

2) Democratisation is probably bad for American and Israeli interests, but must be pursued for the long-term development, security and sanity of the region.  See interwar Europe, Latin America at almost any time in the last 200 years or modern Africa as counter-examples of the rather terrible results when fragile developing democracies are created in inhospitable times and climes, whether they are being established in badly tribally, ethnically or religiously-divided nations or in nations with insufficient experience with the norms and practices of democratic governance.

3) Democratisation is an inherently destabilising and all-around bad idea that is both inappropriate to the nations of the Near East now and for the foreseeable future and fundamentally dangerous to international security.  In this view, the “global democratic revolution” may even be potentially far more dangerous to the peace of the world than global communism.

Naturally, Republican elites, including Romney, have generally endorsed #1 and have been gradually moving towards #2 as they have begun to count the costs and have been forced to acknowledge that nothing pro-American is emerging in the democratic or quasi-democratic regimes arising in the region.  Those Republicans who once endorsed #1 and have since thrown up their hands in despair do not usually move over to #3, but very frequently retain their powerful faith in democracy as an engine of peace, freedom and development (looking over the hideous history of the most democratic century in history, I really have no idea why they think this).  They are incapable of doubting the virtues of democracy and soon adopt a fourth position, which might be called the Ralph Peters view or the “damn ingrates” position: democratisation in the Near East was a fine and noble idea, and we are fine and noble people for trying to implement it, but those stupid Arabs just couldn’t get their act together, so let’s just kill as many as we can.  This is sometimes hard to distinguish from the advocates of the #1 position, since the #1 folks also tend to be very vocal about killing as many Arabs as possible (see Ledeen and “crappy little country”-against-wall-throwing approach to foreign policy or Rice and “birth pangs of a new Middle East”).  It is amazing to watch the transformation of some of these unbounded optimists, who were not long ago preaching the universality of human dignity, into the most cynically monstrous of amoralists, who now believe that the Iraqis failed us, because they weren’t able to pick up on the fly in a war zone something that takes hundreds of years to nurture, cultivate and develop.  This is a powerful confirmation of the potential evils of optimism: no one is more savage and cruel than an optimist disappointed by the people he was going to save through his naive idealism.

Coming back to Romney, it is intriguing that he at once takes the far-out confrontational posture of a “Gathering Storm” Santorum vis-a-vis Iran, while at the same time listing the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the general jihadi foe that must be fought.  That ends up putting Romney in the odd position of defending the Syrian government as a “moderate Muslim government” as he breathes in, and then implicitly damning them by targeting Hizbullah as another part of the jihadi foe as he breathes out.  Even though the Syrians oppose one part of the ”worldwide jihadist effort” in repressing the Brotherhood, we will no doubt be told that they are also part of the “worldwide jihadist effort” because they lend support to Hizbullah, which tends to show just how useless and unwise this sort of rhetoric about a “worldwide jihadist effort” really is.  It is safe to say that anyone who thinks that there is a “worldwide jihadist effort” that includes both the Brotherhood and Hizbullah working for the same goals is playing directly into the hands of those, such as al Qaeda, who want nothing more than to convince as many Sunnis as possible that Washington is intent on indiscriminate war against Muslims everywhere.  Nothing better aids jihadi propaganda that presents them as champions of an Islam besieged all over the world than clumsy, ham-fisted descriptions of a “worldwide jihadist effort” that validates the jihadis’ own description of the nature of the war.  Romney wants us to play the jihadis’ game, and in this he is hardly alone on the right–shouldn’t someone be asking why Romney wants to fight the war on the enemy’s terms?  

Rather than exploiting the cleavages that exist between different kinds of Muslims and different groups of jihadis, as a savvy George Kennan-like foreign policy thinker might propose, the insane plan of leading Republican candidates and the party leadership is to keep reinforcing the image of a monolithic, unified “worldwide jihadist effort.”  The net result of this thinking will be that America will have that many more implacable enemies to fight and we will have missed that many more opportunities to turn jihadi against jihadi and use natural Baathist hostility to the same to our advantage.  Rather than playing on national and sectarian divisions and exploiting opposition between relatively secular Muslims and their religious counterparts, talk of a “worldwide jihadist effort” helps to push these groups into collaboration where none existed before.  Of course, having created this collaboration, it will then be taken as proof by these same clever people that these groups were “inevitably” going to ally with one another because of their fundamental agreement with one another.   

Mitt Romney’s War: the total conflation of all Islamist movements. Not only is the Muslim Brotherhood not a jihadist organization, but its very lack of jihadiness is what spawned Ayman Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Suffice it to say that there is no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which goes a long way toward explaining why there is no concerted “worldwide jihadist effort” by these groups to establish one. ~Spencer Ackerman
Via Drum

Ackerman is right that Romney’s remarks in the debate make no sense, but they are worse than he thinks.  Not only is there “no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Hizbullah presumably wouldn’t even want  a caliphate at all, since the last intertwining of Shi’ism and ideas of having a khalifat as such was in Fatimid Egypt more than a few years ago.  Plus, the Fatimids were Ismailis (though not, strictly speaking, Seveners), and Hizbullah today is from the Imamiyyah or Twelver Shi’ite branch, which makes the likelihood of this predominant strain in Iranian and Lebanese Shi’ism indulging dreams of a restored caliphate in Cairo (where virtually no Shi’ites today dwell) even more remote.  

Not that anyone is keeping score, but I would like to point back to a pre-debate post in which I zeroed in on Romney’s foreign policy and historico-cultural ignorance on display in his speech at Yeshiva University.  In the debate Romney offered up the same “gibberish,” as Drum called it, that he offered in the speech.  Few, if any, have called him on it in the past when he has said ridiculous things about “the enemy,” and so he keeps on repeating them, because they give him the superficial appearance of knowledgeability and understanding.  There are no candidates on the Republican side, except perhaps Ron Paul, who would either know to correct Romney or who would feel any strong desire to do so.  In the view of most of the candidates who were up on that stage Thursday, Hizbullah and Hamas must be our enemies because they are Israel’s enemies, and so any lazy or overbroad concept that unite them all together under a single umbrella term will do. 

For some of the ridiculous candidates (Brownback and Huckabee), and the Rick Santorums of the world, the catch-all idea is “Islamic fascism” or “Islamofascism,” a phrase and a word respectively so stupid that they must win some sort of prize for being the most stupid of the current century.  Romney shares in their profound confusion (or deliberately misleading rhetoric) for the same reason: all these diverse and disparate groups must be brought together under a single, frightening label and they must be made out to be enemies of America, whether or not these descriptions are plausible, true or reasonable.  As has been stated by some of the biggest supporters of the term Islamofascism, its value lies in its vagueness and its all-purpose application: everyone even nominally Muslim or remotely authoritarian can be classified as an Islamofascist, whether he is a Baathist, a member of al-Ikhwan, or a partisan of Hizbullah.  As May said in September of last year:

The problem, as I see it with using the term “Bin Ladenism”: It can’t be applied to the ideologies of the ruling Iranian mullahs, Saddam Hussein loyalists or other Baathists (e.g. in Syria).

In other words, the word we use to describe our enemies must be meaningless in order to accommodate the maximum number of enemies.  If there were ever a politician who was perfectly suited to an age in which words should be entirely malleable and subject to the political needs of the moment, it would have to be Romney.  Romney and rhetoric about Islamofascism were made for each other. 

In Istanbul last Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the nomination of Abdullah Gul as president of Turkey. In Paris next Sunday, Nicolas Sarkozy will very likely be elected president of France.  These two events are geographically distant but closely connected in political terms. Together they explain a bald fact of life: Turkey is not going to join the European Union. And they also illustrate one more contradiction—and failure—of the neoconservative project. ~Geoffrey Wheatcroft

There is a relationship between the events unfolding in Turkey and France, and happily both do signal setbacks for the politics and policies neocons in America would like to see in these countries.  But tying these events in with neoconservatism is a bit overdone.  Goodness knows I would love any opportunity to point out yet another example of neocon failure, but this time their failure, such as it is, is a pretty small part of the story.  The protests against Abdullah Gul represent the profound schism within Turkish politics between the predominantly secular elite and urban middle class and the rural masses and the working class.  The neocons might never have existed, and this would still have happened.  Sarkozy’s rise is the result of a backlash against the rather more multiculti, hands-off approach to questions of immigration and assimilation (and, related, law and order) that France had sought to pursue under both Socialist and Gaullist governments.  The 2005 riots discredited lax law enforcement and the lax approach to integration and made Sarko the man to watch, because he alone among top-level French politicians seemed to understand that this was a burning issue (no pun intended) that had to be addressed, both for his own political advantage (naturellement) and for what he considered the good of the country.  Likewise, these events internal to France would have occurred in one form or another had The Weekly Standard never wasted the life of a single tree by being printed. 

Both events do repudiate core ideas of latter-day neoconservatism: that nations are a function of shared ideals and “values” and nothing more; that Muslim populations can and should be smoothly and easily incorporated into the West and/or that Islam and democracy are readily compatible; that mass, non-Western immigration is a good in and of itself and must be maximised.  Either in Turkey or in France or sometimes in both countries, these ideas are not doing very well at the moment.  However, all of the actors in these events are not thinking about the neocons at all, except when they completely misunderstand what a neocon is and think that Nicolas Sarkozy, who is a kind of French Thatcher if not even a French Pat Buchanan in certain ways, fits the bill.  In fact, the failure of Turkish entry has as much to do lately with Turkish hyper-nationalism, the continued denial of the Armenian genocide, the prosecutions of dissidents who insist on talking about the genocide and the state-encouraged murder of Hrant Dink as it has to do with anything related to AKP per se.  Turkish poverty and booming demographics would make the EU wary of admitting the country regardless of anything that was happening in Turkish politics.  Except for the despicable coat-holding that the administration does for such genocide denialism, one cannot actually pin any of that on the neocons, either, though their general silence and implicit hypocrisy on this matter are amazing.  They ignore genocide denialism while they are only too happy to meddle in every foreign crisis by calling it a genocide and demanding that something be done about it. 

So it is true that neoconservatives tend to be unduly enthusiastic for Turkish entry into the EU.  They seem to like to encourage anything that would weaken and/or destroy Europe, especially when it comes to Christians in Europe, and they continue to operate under the strange assumption that advocating for Turkish entry into the EU will somehow win America a nice finish in the Global Muslim Opinion Derby.  This is like the sad spectacle of Republicans voting for Puerto Rican statehood in a lame attempt to win Hispanic votes in California and Texas, when these voters don’t care about Puerto Rico, or the sadder spectacle of selling out on immigration in a desperate bid to win over Hispanic voters who don’t like illegal immigration anyway.  How many times have we heard the neocon lament: “Why don’t these Saudi and Egyptian Muslims appreciate all that we’ve done for the Albanians?”  Um…maybe because they‘re not Albanians?     

In the end, Mr. Wheatcroft does not demonstrate any clear connection between neocons and the secularist resistance to Gul or the voters’ support for Sarkozy.  He only vaguely outlines the connection between Turkish membership in the EU and Sarko’s popularity.  The connection is obvious, if we understand that Sarko’s popularity is driven in no small part by French anxiety about Muslim and African immigration.  If French leftists think of Sarko as a “neocon with a French passport,” they obviously don’t understand neocon views on immigration.  Mr. Wheatcroft mentions that the war has inflamed Turkish anti-Americanism, which is true, and it has encouraged the worst tendencies of the Turkish hyper-nationalists in viewing the Kurdish population as a fifth column and traitors, but if anything opposition to American policy in Iraq and opposition to an independent Kurdistan have served as things holding together such disparate political forces as the hyper-nationalists, the CHP and AKP.  Turkey is badly politically divided, but with their war the neocons have given all Turks something they can all hate together.  In the end, neocons are not even on the stage in these dramas.  Indeed, they have become entirely irrelevant to large parts of the world they would try to rule, and that may be the most damning indictment of them one can make.

Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts [bold mine-DL] must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. ~Edward Luttawak

Yet there are quite a few people who speak and act as if they were experts on the Near and Middle East who show little or no comprehension of this totalising quality of Islam.  This all-encompassing nature of Islam is not a jihadi trick or part of their propaganda–it is supposed to be one of the more appealing aspects of Islam, because it proposes to have the right answer for every sphere of life. 

Just consider how many people want to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt that Islamist rule is somehow compatible with constitutional rule.  These would be the people who think real constitutional or liberal government is possible in the Islamic societies of these regions.  It might be possible to have some sort of mass participatory Islamic republic (such as, say, Iran), replete with candidates and maybe even parties, provided that everyone involved understood the unassailable position and final authority of Islam.  A constitution in which Islam was not established and empowered as the religion of the state seems highly unlikely.

Ironically, the correct comparison is to the Republican Party in the United States. This is a political party that draws much of its support from the political mobilization of Christian sentiment. ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias is responding to a Michael Rubin item here, which was an update on his original post about anti-AK rallies.  The comparisons with Christian Democrats and Republicans alike are pretty sorry, and I’ll tell you why.  AK is an allegedly ”reformed” Islamist party, which means that it has changed absolutely nothing about itself except for its packaging and rhetoric.  Christian Democratic parties are typically very secular outfits in practice, even if most of their voters are still nominal or active churchgoers.  The Republicans are even more secular in practice and more secular in the makeup of their constituencies in that even most “conservative Christians” in America are political secular liberals through and through when it comes to the relationship between government and religion.  Yes, there is a part of the GOP that is itself fairly religious and this occasionally carries over into the party’s policy prescriptions in very limited ways, but this part does not even constitute the substance of the whole.  

AK is a party of political Islam, voted into power by Islamist voters and they make up virtually the entirety of the party.  AK (standing for the Turkish for Justice & Development: Adalet ve Kalkinma) is the redesigned, “acceptable” form of the National Salvation, Welfare, Virtue, Felicity and Motherland parties that came before it.  The constituencies of these successive parties are essentially the same–Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul as a member of Welfare.  If Islamist governments are generally undesirable or ultimately incompatible with constitutional government, the Turkish AK government must be found similarly wanting.  It might be that Kemalism is doomed to collapse and an Islamist Turkey is unavoidable, so it might be wise to learn how to live with that kind of Turkey, but pretending that AK is just the GOP or CDU with a headscarf is not the correct response.   

Or, as I wrote a couple years back:

The example of Turkey is not heartening, as it took a full seventy years from the establishment of the republic before a mostly free election could result in the election of a government the majority truly desired, and even that government was soon thrown out on account of its Islamism. Only by minimising its Islamism in public and in its rhetoric has Mr. Erdogan’s party been allowed by the army and the constitutional court to remain in power–this is hardly the ideal situation to hold up as proof of a successful synthesis of Islam and democracy. Turkey’s secular republic has succeeded in becoming more democratic to the extent that it has because its republican reforms very deliberately circumscribed the role of Islam in public and political life. The two are inherently incompatible–one must give way for the other to advance…

No, it was secular nationalism that killed them, the pseudo-religion that exalts the Turkish nation. ~Morning’s Minion

Undoubtedly pan-Turanism and Turkish nationalism masquerading as Ottomanism were profoundly significant ideological factors in driving the genocide, and I wouldn’t even object to allowing that they were the most significant factors for the architects of the genocide.  In addition to pointing to the basic Muslim identity of the irregulars, both Turkish and Kurdish, who carried out most of the actual looting and killing, I would point to an important feature of the ideology of the CUP leadership that is very often glossed over in many traditional accounts of this group.  Taner Akcam, who will probably not be mistaken for a “right-wing culture warrior” (though I might fairly be described as such), wrote in his masterful A Shameful Act on the Islamic background to the genocide:

In addition to the general subjugation of all its subjects, the Ottoman state specifically oppressed and discriminated against non-Muslims.  Indeed, in the course of Ottoman rule, long-standing assumptions of Muslim superiority evolved into the legal and cultural attitudes that created the background for genocide.  This is not to say that the Ottoman Empire rested only on violence, but that without a grasp of the particular circumstances of the Muslim-non-Muslim relationship, we cannot understand the process that led to a decision for a “final solution” to the Armenian question….The Muslim-Christian clashes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Armenian genocide must be considered against this background.  Accordingly, the view that relative peace prevailed prior to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, [sic] is not only incorrect but also misleading. (p.19-20)

And again:

Solidarity among the empire’s Muslims, no matter what, was the psychological product of decline and disintegration coupled with the belief of being surrounded by hostile forces desiring the state’s elimination.  Thus Pan-Islamism was transformed into state ideology.

For this reason the attacks, mainly against the Armenians, had the nature of pogroms.  The state unleashed its attacks on the slightest provocation, calculating that this would bind Muslims more closely to the empire.  The Austrian ambassador to the Porte reported that Muslims were being armed and set into action against Christians, calling this a policy a “Muslim Crusade.”  From reportss of the various diplomatic missions in Istanbul and eyewitness accounts, it is clear that the massacres of 1894-96 were centrally planned. (p.44)

And again Dr. Akcam wrote:

For all their differences, these divergent currents–Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism, and Westernism–shared one core premise: the nationalism of a dominant ethnic group, which was understood to mean the Turks. (p.49)

Elsewhere he stresses the flexibility of the CUP in stressing different aspects of their ideology according to perceived need; when it helped to speak of jihad, they spoke of jihad, and when it helped to speak in racialist terms, they spoke as racialists.  Whichever way you slice it, this was a nasty bunch.  They were motivated by a number of different senses of their rightful superiority over Armenians and other minorities, one of which in this case was Islam, albeit an Islam as mediated through a particularly Turkist filter.

Speaking of “right-wing culture warriors” and the Armenian genocide together is notable for another reason, since relatively few “right-wing culture warriors” over here have any familiarity with the genocide and even fewer care very much.  I have noticed that almost the only people who have shown any interest in what I have had to say about the genocide have been on the left or center-left.  It is not for nothing that it is the Democrats who consistently push for recognition of the genocide, if only because Armenian-Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic.  Christian conservatives, who might theoretically be natural allies for the Diasporan Armenians in this area, seem to be generally uninterested in the question. 

Depressingly, any sense of solidarity with Armenian Christians that one might think Christians in this country would or ought to have is virtually non-existent.  For obvious reasons, American Jews are much more aware of the genocide and they tend to be more involved in promoting knowledge about the Armenian genocide.  Likewise, the slaughter of the Assyrians undertaken at around the same time is also largely unknown to American Christians, just as the sorry fate of today’s Assyrians is overshadowed by an unfortunate commitment to Mr. Bush’s War.  This deplorable neglect of Near Eastern Christians is repeated time and again across much of the American right.  The response tends to be one of ignorance, indifference or some mixture of the two, so I would be very interested to see more “right-wing culture warriors” at least paying some lip service to remembering the Armenian genocide.

So Sarko and Royal have advanced, pretty much restoring French presidential politics back to its dreary pre-2002 normality, even though the major parties have hardly done or even said much to suggest that they are understand the deep apathy and disgust with government of so many of their citizens.  There are obviously two important differences between now and 2002.  The first is the existence of a sizeable center vote (18% for Bayrou) over which the major parties must compete.  The second is that Sarko has apparently found a way to pilfer Le Pen’s voters without actually doing all that much to get them, because Le Pen has thrown away his immediate political support from France’s native working-class population for the sake of making a bargain with the Muslims for the future.  The oft-mentioned 8% of Muslims backing Le Pen and Le Pen’s open embrace of the cause of the people who tried to burn sizeable parts of France to the ground probably went over badly with his natural constituencies.  Go figure.

Unfortunately, the competition over the center will make both Sarko and Royal pursue ever-less interesting and ambitious proposals.  It is not really that much in doubt that Bayrou himself and the people likely to have supported him are going to fall in line behind Sarkozy.  Given that Royal is fairly batty by anyone’s standards and evidently not very knowledgeable about the rest of the world, the election is Sarko’s to lose and he is not going to lose, as I said last week.  Sarkozy will extend the Gaullist/UMP control of the presidency at least through 2012.   

A few wrote to remind him [Pope Benedict] that, as far as “reason” was concerned, it was Arab rationalists like Avicenna and Averroës who, with their commentaries on Aristotle, had saved Greek thought from obliteration during Europe’s undeniably dark Dark Ages. ~Jane Kramer

Via Reihan

This would be nice, if it were true.  Yes, Muslims preserved the Greek learning that they found in the lands they conquered, but it wasn’t as if Greek thought was ever in danger of “obliteration,” since the vast majority of Greek literature and history was preserved by the, er, Greeks in Byzantium.  Muslims were especially keen on philosophy and scientific texts, and these they made use of and recopied down through the centuries, which then facilitated their introduction into western Europe.  But they had little use for the playwrights, poets and historians, whose works we have primarily because of the Byzantines, who were also preserving the philosophical and scientific texts at the same time. 

It might also be worth noting that Avicenna and Averroes were notoriously “unorthodox” by the Islamic standards of their day with beliefs about the eternity of the world and the like standing in direct contradiction to Islamic revelation.  One of these philosophers felt the need to imagine truth as running on two tracks that did not intersect very often: the truths of reason and revelation were both true, but they were not going to fit together or be reconciled.  Even when Islam had a place for philosophy, it was never as a “handmaid” to theology, but usually more in the role of a scullery maid who would be allowed to scrub the floors as long as she made sure to stay out of the master’s way.  The obvious points would be that al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes represent a limited phenomenon that rather underscores and proves Pope Benedict’s Regensburg observation about the nature of Islam.  These three, with perhaps a couple others, represent the greatest achievements of Islamic philosophy for its first six centuries, but they are relatively few in number and ultimately had much less significance for the overall development of Islamic thought than the jurists and mystics had.  There was a moment when a kind of actually Islamic rationalism was on the rise, and it was squashed in the ninth century and never really fully reappeared.  Even then, it was a highly eccentric movement within Islam and one deemed to be wrong on fundamental questions of theology, as indeed it would have to have been if the divinity of Qur’anic authority was going to be confirmed. 

Mark Krikorian is optimistic that we are not approaching a point of no return with respect to amnesty and mass immigration.  I think he is probably too optimistic.  He cites as a supporting example Muslim support for the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.  As Mr. Krikorian writes:

Jeez — if Arabs can vote for a guy like Le Pen, then a Republican Party that is optimistic and welcoming toward immigrants, but firm in its support of muscular enforcement and lower numbers, shouldn’t have any problem holding its own among Hispanics, especially if we reduce new inflows and let our still-strong (compared to Europe) assimilative forces do their work. 

Certainly there is a kind of irony of the old paratrooper who fought in Algeria making a deal with the children and grandchildren of some of the people he fought against, but as The New York Sun reported two months ago Le Pen had started moving towards an alliance with French Muslims.  As a cynical move to latch on to the fastest-growing population in the country, it is very clever.  As a massive sell-out to the entire platform to which the National Front was supposedly dedicated, it is hardly a very encouraging example for restrictionists in America.

The Sun article also said:

The National Front is surprisingly popular among Muslim immigrants or second-generation Muslim citizens. For all its campaigning about immigration, Mr. Le Pen’s party has always extended support to Arab and Islamic causes abroad, from Saddam’s Iraq to Arafat’s or Hamas Palestine, and from Al Qaeda to Iran. And it is as firmly anti-American and anti-Jewish as the Muslim community itself tends to be.

Even taking this with the grain of salt that any reporting about Le Pen in the Sun requires, it makes sense that there are other, non-immigration positions that draw Muslim voters to support the FN.  Le Pen making a deal with the Muslims in France is the equivalent of surrender and collaboration in the hopes of creating favourable conditions for yourself in the new order.  It is rather less encouraging news and feeds into pessimism that Europe really is finished if some of the most vehement opponents of mass immigration from the south are effectively throwing in the towel.  

Being critical of Israel is hardly unusual on either left or right in Europe, and opposition to the Iraq war is also hardly unique, but Le Pen has always been consistently much more, er, vehement in his denunciations of both.  By comparison, I know of very little in the Republican Party platform that would actually trump the many natural advantages the Democrats have with a growing Hispanic immigrant population.  Enforcement and reduced numbers probably are somewhat popular with second or third-generation, more assimilated Hispanic voters, but there is too little working in the GOP’s favour with these voters otherwise. 

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t have enforcement and reduced numbers (we certainly should), but it is to say that it will not be possible for the GOP to have its cake and eat it, too.  Le Pen’s example can only encourage the “pro-amnesty Republicans” who hope to make a deal with Hispanic voters.  If the French example is any indication of what will happen here, it also means that there will eventually be a tipping point when restrictionists will find themselves so badly outnumbered that they may feel compelled for other reasons to de-prioritise immigration restriction and try to join forces with the people they have been working to keep out of the country.  

If you were a traditional Muslim, would you want to associate yourself with people who were constantly attacking your prophet, your holy book, your values, and your religion? ~Dinesh D’Souza

Well, obviously not.  I don’t expect them to do any such thing.  It is the neocon Islamophiles who think they can “win over” part of the Islamic world against t