[Austin-ghetto-list] (no subject)

[James Holland]

I wrote this as part of an exchange with an old friend who's active in
another list, and who expects this kind of thing from me, so that both the
specific references and the twelve-gauge tone are addressed there, not here.

That said, since I do feel this strongly I thought it was time I weighed in.

Jim

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The "antiwar" rhetoric in our current crisis is so specious and self-serving
that one hardly knows where to begin.  In the first place, I certainly don't
take refuge in the terms "peacenik" and "wimp."  I'd prefer to leave easy,
straw man style characterizations to the other side.  The same goes for the
adroit use of selective evidence.  There's no great anti-Muslim emotion in
this country, however much it may make anyone feel morally superior to think
so.  Of course there are going to be shrill columnists, but they're a
minority. What matters is what the country's policy is, about which more in
a bit.  There is also no wave of anti-Muslim violence.  In a nation of 260
million people it was a foregone conclusion that there were going to be
isolated attacks on mosques, the people who go to them, and the people who
look as though they might go to them, but they've been so few that each one
had national press coverage.

No, I rather think of those who counsel "bringing the criminals to justice"
as intellectually lazy moral equivocators who in the current chess game can
think a maximum of two moves ahead and who don't have the mental discipline
to really examine Islam, what it is, what its beliefs are, what the
provenances of the Koran and Hadith are, what Western scholarship has to say
about either, and what the internal political dynamics of the Middle Eastern
countries truly are.  Worst of all, most of the loudest seem to share the
silly assumption that if it only hadn't been for our hideous, unspeakable
crimes this attack wouldn't have happened. We have to "understand why we're
hated."  Which means sharing that emotion, although most won't admit their
anti-Western bias to themselves.

Let's look at what the argument really is.  In dealing with the
perpetrators, so the received opinion goes, we shouldn't "be on their
level," so we have to "bring the criminals to justice."  This way of
thinking doesn't even reach one move ahead.  Presumably, under U.S. law, the
charges would include all accessories before and after the fact.  How many
people are that?  It's many, many, many, more than actually were on the
planes.  And then, assuming a guilty verdict (do you want to be on the
jury?) we would then begin the appellate process, accompanied by a ongoing
chorus of tsk-tsk from this country and abroad.   Of course the very
argument hoists those who make it by their own petard, because if any
foreign head of state's name arose in sworn testimony there would be a prima
facie case for an outright war declaration.  There's so much else that's
ridiculous about the idea that I don't want to waste any more time on it,
but there's much more that could be said.

The questions of the nature of Islam and of American "guilt", on the other
hand, need to be explored with far more thoroughness and honesty than we're
getting from those who cry peace, peace, when there is no peace.  Back to my
original question: how many people who say "Islam is a religion of peace"
have actually read, or even looked at, a Koran?  You can ponder it right now
at http://www.hti.umich.edu/k/koran/ .  Try a keyword search with
"unbeliever," for example.  Allah is not a happy camper.  There are gentle
passages, of course.  Those are the ones we hear occasionally, briefly, very
briefly, quoted.  But there are many others which are not, and they're all
delivered in the first person.

The day after the attack...the day after!  three hundred Muslims (not real
Muslims?) were demonstrating here in Houston in front of the Alley Theatre
where Salman Rushdie was giving a reading.  Some were calling for the
reintroduction of the Fatwa.  Want to talk about law? Isn't it a crime to
incite to murder?  But of course, we have to "understand their rage." And we
have to understand that their values are perfectly acceptable in Western
society as part of "diversity."  I don't think it's an accident that the
Rushdie affair is being studiously ignored right now by the Higher Wisdom
brigade.   Christopher Hitchens, no right wing warmonger, put it perfectly.

"What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what
Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but
what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its
scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. "

Well, maybe, the rejoinder goes, but we outrage their sensibilities, so
their hatred is justified.  We just have to understand.  Right.  The
Vietnamese do not hate us.  The Africans do not hate us.  The Mexicans, from
whom we took a fifth of the country, may not all like us, but they don't
hate us.  What is it about Islam?  What exactly accounts for this constant
background noise of screaming rage?  Again, the ready answer is at hand.
That's not the "true Islam."

But who defines that?  And, more importantly, why is this mentality even the
False Islam?

Which brings us back to the Koran.  Why doesn't the peace brigade address
the question of the differences between it and the Bible, Christian or
Jewish?  Do they understand the implication of what Muslims believe about
it?  That every Sura except the first is Allah speaking directly? That the
book is itself an iconic object?

There's relatively only a little of the kind of Higher Criticism around it
that the Bible has had full steam for a century and a half, and that little
has to be sought out. Take a look at www.secularislam.com.  I'm no expert,
but it isn't necessary to be one to see the potential for disaster.  It
isn't just the content, which is volatile enough, but the Koran's status as
a sacred object on its own which is the lit cigarette in the powder
magazine.  How could we possibly reject the word of Allah when the Truth is
so self-evident? After all, it's Allah Himself talking to us.  Of course
it's blasphemy to challenge the Truth.

Well, okay, the response goes, maybe they're a little extreme, but it's a
"battle of ideas, not of guns," and "violence only breeds more violence,"
and we "shouldn't put ourselves on their level," and "war solves nothing,"
and we're all at equal risk for Aids.  Here it is: we are not the victims of
a crime in law, we are on the receiving end of a declaration of war.  Oh,
but that has to be a by a state.  Tell that to the people who did it.  They
consider it war.  If that's what they say it is, then that's what it is.
And, again, it ought to be obvious that even by the "peace" logic that if
any state is an accessory, before or after in any way, then that state has
committed an act of war.

Of course it's true that we shouldn't make the Afghan people suffer.  We
shouldn't "lash out violently".  Well, who says we are going to?  Why, the
antiwar movement, that's who, talking to themselves.  (Sorry, I forgot about
the New York Post) In fact, the case has been made that that's exactly what
the attackers wanted, and didn't get.  Bush was damn careful in his speech
to distinguish between the Taliban and the majority of the Afghan people,
who by most accounts loathe the Taliban.  Since nobody in the government has
advocated a bloodbath there, which would be pointless and stupid by the
coldest of reasoning, I don't see any reason to say much else on that point.
And to say that "war solves nothing" is more of the same.  Sometimes it
solves a lot, and a demonstration that we are capable of retaliating with
precision will speak volumes.  A good bit of the quietist position rests on
the totally unproven idea that reacting with precision is exactly what we
can't do.

I think that this assumption that we can't win is really the most circular
argument of all.   To which I can already hear the reply, oh, but even if we
do "win," that only means more terrorists will spring up in their place.
Yes, but that misses my point, which is that we'll demonstrate that we're
not what they think we are, unable to respond except by mass killing or
meaningless cruise missile attacks.  If the antiwar movement believe that
themselves, so be it.  Possibly they're right.  But if they're wrong, and I
think the overwhelming evidence is that they are, then we will have failed
to even try to stand up for our most basic principles.  Cant phrase?  No, it
isn't.  We have to show the extremists that we have the resources to defeat
them.  Oh, and I can hear it now, but we can't use weapons in a war of
ideas.  Yes we can, when one of the basic "ideas" in question is whether
this country has the will to stand up for its way of life.  Oh, but we
compromise that way of life when we resort to violence.

This is where we came in.

The fanatics do indeed drown out the reasonable people.  "The best lack all
conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Is that more
of a problem in the West, or within Islam?  That the majority of Muslims are
law abiding, loyal and horrified by the attack goes without saying, but that
remark ignores the question of who determines the internal cultural
currents.  I just saw the statement, by Stephen Schwartz, who has the
requisite pieces of paper,  in Sunday's Telegraph, that as many as 80
percent of Muslim clergy in this country are Wahhabis, one of the most
extreme tendencies in the religion and the one which dominates Saudi Arabia.
If so, that's not good. Shouldn't we at least know if that's true?  How do
you or I or any other non-Arabic speaker know what's being preached?  One
fact we do know, which is that this country has no media allies in the
Arabic language world, where there's no such thing as an independent press.
The Saudis and Egyptians, our "friends," let the most insane invective run
free against us as a way of deflecting attention away from the failings of
their own corrupt societies.  We are blamed for every failing there and
accused of being the string-pullers in fantastic conspiracies.   The
American public then sees the flag and effigy burnings and reads the
oh-so-reasonable explanations in English.

It's an article of faith of course among the high minded that Middle Eastern
economic misery is the ultimate fault of the West.  We do in fact have a lot
to answer for, but we're not, and we haven't been, the basic problem.
Again, take a look at Islam itself.  The putative glorious flowering of
civilization in medieval times was to a large extent derivative, and the
Islamic conquest itself short circuited the interplay of economics and
national development that led to Western capitalism.  They came late to
capitalism, if at all, and because of, not in spite of, the Western
incursion.  At best the process is incomplete.  You don't do business with
the lowest bidder, you do it with cousin Achmed.  It's no accident, for
instance,  that the Bin Ladens are billionaires because they got the inside
track with Saudi construction.  What if that had been spread out?  What if
those countries had true market economies?  What if they had independent
judiciaries, enforceable contracts, freedom of public discussion, and, yes,
freedom of belief?  Would we still be the targets of so much hate?

Belief in "cultural relativism" now, in this crisis, is as bad as appeasing
the Nazis.  We will have world peace when, and only when, the Western values
that Hitchens lists prevail in the Islamic world.   It is an absolutely
basic requirement.  Why is it that the people who recite "we are one planet"
refuse to face up to the consequences of what that means?  We can live with
a lot, but we cannot live with millions of people who believe in death for
blasphemy.

The relativists are also poor historians.  The defenders of Islam start
their analyses at convenient dates.  Their history of cultural encroachment
starts with the Crusades, for instance, not with the earlier deliberate
building of a mosque on the site of Solomon's Temple, to cite just one
example.  And their sense of religious freedom only goes in one direction.
Veiled women have to be permitted in the West, for instance, in spite of the
obvious interference with public safety (any thug could dress that way) but
no Christian, Jewish, or any other kind of worship may take place in Saudi
Arabia.  In fact, let me ask you to imagine: what if that country in
particular weren't the way it is?

If the Saudis and the Islamic world in general weren't so strident to begin
with these questions wouldn't come up.  People who go on and on about how we
threaten their way of life start with their cultural assumptions.  How many
times do we hear about their "humiliation?" The South Asians and Chinese
were shamed as well.  They took their independences and moved on.  What's
the difference?  And who do the Islamic hard core think they are to tell the
rest of the world that their rabid intolerance has equal standing?  This, of
course, is where the utterly irrelevant comparison with Medieval
Christianity is inevitably raised. (What about the Inquisition, as though
heretics were being burned today on O'Connell street in Dublin) Yes, yes, if
you paid your taxes you were tolerated in the tolerant Islamic world (as
long as you weren't something other than Christian or Jewish).

Not by these people today, and there is no verbal persuasion that can reach
them.  We are in an absolutely basic fight.

Jim Holland