Islam + Fascism?

Two recent articles highlight the need to be clear about the nature of the threats facing the world from radical Muslim ideologists, or what Christopher Hitchens rightly terms Islamofascists. Rejecting criticism that this term is ahistorical (fusing ideologies from different eras) or unjustly singles out one religion, Hitchens defends the term:

The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Interestingly, he does not shy from noting that Islamofascism, while a right-wing and religious movement also regularly appropriates the language of the Left.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements.

No doubt this - combined with a desire to see the collapse of the US and the Western capitalism that it represents - explains in part why many in the Left have secretly rooted for a group whose game plan and values they would normally excoriate. Sadly, these generally well-meaning and liberal leaning people, do not realize to what extent their support and inability to confront this threat endangers all that they hold dear. Worse, it sacrifices to totalitarianism precisely those who the liberals think they are helping.

As Bernard Lewis recently noted, Islamofascism is first and foremost a threat to Muslims in the same way that both Bolshevism and Fascism were a threat to their societies. Unfortunately, it did not take long before these ideological "deformations" threatened the rest of the world as well. (See article in The Sun)

Hitchens echoes this and points out that both radical Islam and Fascism:

...evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy.

Characteristically, Lewis is even more blunt:

"It's misleading to say we are engaged in a war against terrorism," Mr. Lewis said. "If Churchill had told us that we were engaged in a war against submarines and war craft, we'd be in a different world today. Terrorism is a tactic, it is not the enemy."

Academia Amok

Once again, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is right on target. Check out his recent Jerusalem Post article on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's upcoming visit to Columbia University (click here). Here are some of his important points:

In reference to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's assertion that the invitation was in keeping with, "Columbia's long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum of robust debate."

Shmuley notes:

Of course, that is nonsense. Does anyone seriously believe that Columbia would invite a politician or scholar who denied that American slavery took place, or alleged that its effects on African-Americans was benign or exaggerated? Would Columbia host a Grand Wizard of the KKK who called for African nations to be wiped off the map?

And yet, Ahmadinejad is far worse. Not only has he denied the Holocaust and called repeatedly for Israel's destruction, he has gone beyond words and worked hard to put his plan into action.

As for double standards, he recalls that:

TWO YEARS ago, Harvard President Lawrence Summers lost his job for insinuating that women were not as intellectually competent in math and science as men. Yet Ahmadinejad presides over a government that brutally suppresses women, inflicting corporal punishment if they so much as go out in the street without a head covering. But none of this has prevented him from being feted by American academia.

Most interestingly, he clearly shows that the world (and sadly, in this particular case, academics) are directly complicit in providing cover for this nutcase and his dangerous viewpoints.

When I read about the Holocaust, I often ask myself how the world allowed Hitler to rise to prominence. After all, humanity bore continuous witness to the hatred and venom that spewed from his evil tongue against Jews. Did the nations of the world not isolate him as soon as he began frothing at the mouth?

But in light of Ahmadinejad being invited, on his last visit, to address the Council on Foreign Relations, and to speak at Columbia University on this trip, I now get it. Whatever Hitler said, nobody took him seriously. They treated his rantings as a tasteless form of benign entertainment. They found him darkly amusing. It took the incineration of six million Jews and the destruction of much of Europe to discover that, ultimately, the joke was on us.

I guess I should no longer be surprised that Abu El-Haj was recommended by Barnard (Columbia's sister institution) for tenure.

Peace at all Costs?

So it took a little while for the actual outlines of this deceit to come through, but here is how the Palestinian spinmeisters have decided to try to get around thew incontrovertible fact that the Hamas government has not met the minimum requirements of the international community or the Quartet.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat noted that Abbas, not the Palestinian government, would lead negotiations with Israel. In asking Haniyeh to form a new government earlier this week, Abbas reiterated his commitment to all agreements signed with Israel, including the pact of mutual recognition, Erekat said.

"Since the negotiations ... are under the jurisdiction of the president and the PLO, it should be noted that the president reiterated the commitment to these principles," he said. (See here)

So, as I predicted here, Abbas would, "run cover for Hamas". Is there anyone who is fooled by this in any way. Hamas has reiterated that it will never recognize Israel's right to exist or cease from the murderous activities they call "resistance". And, just in case anyone doubted that Hamas was going soft, the recent homicide bombing in Eilat showed their commitment to this type of dialogue. Sure, the act was carried out by Islamic Jihad and the Fatah spin-off Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, yet it was denounced by Abbas and lauded by the Hamas government.

"So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate," said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza.

In case you have not been following closely, the Eilat bombing happened in a local bakery during regular work hours - hardly a military target. Eilat has never been "occupied territory" and to be frank, it can hardly have ever been considered "Palestinian". Yet this is what falls under the category of "legitimate resistance" the kind which Hamas is loathe to abandon for the sake of peace.

The conventional wisdom was that if only Israel left the territories, then it would be possible to sit down with the Palestinians and reach an agreement. Finally, Israel said let's test this premise and leave part of the territories - the Gaza strip. The Palestinian response to this overture has been the election of Hamas, rocket attacks, weapons tunnels and incitement to violence. Worse, they have made it clear that they would not be satisfied with anything less than ALL of the territory that presently comprises Israel. If the Eilat attacks are not a definitive proof of this mindset, then I don't know what is.

If the world community accepts the new Palestinian coalition government without agreement to "honor" (and not just "respect") former agreements, without recognition of the right of the State of Israel to Exist and without any renunciation of terrorist violence, then those Israelis who have all along said that it was foolish to trust the International community were right. Though I personally hope these naysayers will be proven wrong, yet for some reason I am beginning to suspect that they won't.

Occupation and Control in the Jewish Quarter

Here is a classic example of what happens when you send someone to report on a part of the world they know little or nothing about. Perhaps not surprisingly it comes from the BBC -Deep Tension Over Jerusalem Holy Site by Matthew Price.

The report is a first person account of the recently inaugurated excavations near the Dung Gate in Jerusalem. After describing the exasperation of an Israeli colleague who declares that, "Its just a ramp", Price proceeds to disagree and writes an article to explain to the obviously dimwitted Israeli that it's really, "all about control."

That control lies at the root of the problem is glaringly self-evident because, as Price is quick to note, the whole of East Jerusalem (and hence the Old City) is territory (illegally?) occupied by Israel.

As far as Palestinians are concerned, and to be fair most of the world, the Old City - which lies in East Jerusalem - is occupied territory.

While the inherent irony of a Brit explaining the "real" intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict to an Israeli is totally lost on Price, he would do well to read some history or even just a map of the Old City. The Dung Gate is not only the way leading to the Wailing Wall, it happens to be the only gate leading directly into the Jewish Quarter - a part of the city "with a nearly continual Jewish presence since Roman times".

Why "nearly continual"? Because during the 1948 War, when Jordan illegally occupied the Old City, it proceeded to expel all the Jews. Perhaps this was because throughout the past 2,000 years the Jewish community was the largest community in Jerusalem. Perhaps it was simply ethnic cleansing to ensure that the city be judenrein. In any case, for 19 years, Jews were not allowed to pray at the religious sites and could do nothing as those sites were systematically desecrated. For 19 years there was no Jewish "control" of the Jewish Quarter. For Mr. Price to hearken back to those days demonstrates once again that there is nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge.

Finally, as the article approaches its denouement, Price waxes poetically:

The church bells began to ring out. Then the muezzins started up, calling Muslims to prayer. When I first came here I heard these sounds and felt hopeful.

Surely these were the sounds of co-existence? Now I just hear the sound of centuries of competing claims to this city.

Notice that the sound of church bells does not initially bring forth any negative associations in the writer's mind. Of course the Jewish component of this imagined Nirvana of coexistence is left up to the reader's imagination.

The AJC and "Progressive" Jews

Here is another article concerning Jewish criticism of Israel by Stanley Kutler.

The American Jewish Committee has endorsed an article by professor Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University linking "progressive" Jewish thought to a rise in anti-Semitism. The article pointedly castigates Jewish critics of Israel's policies, and argues that such criticism questions the very right of Israel statehood. All this, Rosenfeld — and the AJC — insist, fuels anti-Semitism. It is a false proposition.

Not surprisingly, Kutler presents a "straw man" argument that makes one wonder if he bothered to read Rosenfeld's article or whether he is hoping that no one else will so that he can get away with this canard. Rosenfeld does not implicate ALL "progressive" Jews or even ALL criticisms of Israel.

In some quarters, the challenge is not to Israel’s policies, but to its legitimacy and right to an ongoing future. Thus, the argument leveled by Israel’s fiercest critics is often no longer about 1967 and the country’s territorial expansion following its military victory during the Six-Day War, but about 1948 and the alleged "crime," or "original sin," of its very establishment. The debate, in other words, is less about the country’s borders and more about its origins and essence. One of the things that is new and deeply disturbing about the new anti-Semitism, therefore, is precisely this: the singling out of the Jewish state, and the Jewish state alone, as a political entity unworthy of a secure and sovereign existence. (Bold Added)

Clearly, Rosenfeld, is not referring to ALL the critics of Israel (e.g. "In some quarters...") or ALL criticisms of Israel, but rather to criticism that the, "challenge is not to Israel's policies, but to its legitimacy and right to an ongoing future." Or critiques that, "single out" the, "Jewish state, and the Jewish state alone". I fail to see what is false about these propositions.

Critiques of the type that hold Israel by a different standard (whether a bad or a good standard) are racist. Racism against Jews is known by the term Anti-Semitism. As such, people (whether Jewish or otherwise) who promote the ideas mentioned above - i.e. advocating the destruction of Israel, or those who hold Israel solely accountable for all the problems in the Arab-Israeli conflict are without a doubt Anti-Semites. Being Jewish does not mean that they have been magically innoculated at birth.

Even stranger than Kutler's assertions above (yes, I know it is hard to believe possible) is the following paragraph:

The committee's real targets are "progressives" — which is their shorthand for Democrats and opponents of George W. Bush's dubious adventure into Iraq. Along with its favorite stable of commentary writers, the committee has been an ardent advocate for the Iraq war, fixed with a vision that it would bring forth a new Middle Eastern order. But the war and the vision have failed, and, ironically, at some cost to Israel's interests.

Aside from the fact that this comes off as what psychologists call "projection" , it has little to do with this paper and is verifiably false. In fact, Bush is never mentioned in Rosenfeld's paper and the only reference to Iraq is about a Turkish movie portraying Jewish doctors harvesting Iraqis for organs. This is a crass attempt to undermine Rosenfeld's argument by making the majority of American Jews feel that he is referring to them. After all, Kutler certainly knows that 86% of Jews voted Democratic and against Bush in the last election. (To read Rosenfeld's paper, click here.)

Finally, Kutler digs up "dirt" on the AJC from over 60 years ago and uses this to both psychoanalyze and tar the organization.

The American Jewish Committee's history reveals a convert to Zionism, one filled with the worst of proselytizing zeal. Before 1947, the committee was a powerful divisive force precisely because it so adamantly opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Its founders would marvel at the committee's evolution. ... Finally, the committee changed course in 1946, as its membership expanded with a substantial number of East European Jews and their descendants.

He has the chutzpah to say this as if nothing happened circa 1946 to forever silence the pre-war debates between Bundists and Zionists. For someone so obviously smart as the professor, it is kind of suprising that he has obviously never heard about the Holocaust. Perhaps that explains his "enlightened" perspective.

There is much more that is fundamentally wrong with this opinion piece, but I don't have all day to right these wrongs. Wait, was that last sentence meant as a swipe at Eastern European Jews?

The Democracy Solution?

Amir Taheri, the Iranian born Middle East commentator has an article in this month's Commentary magazine sets his sights on the Iraq Study Group (ISG) and presents what he believes are the "real" or root problems of the Middle East.

Fifteen years ago, after the first defeat of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker faced the question of how best to exploit the American victory as a means of stabilizing the Middle East. The obvious course would have been to deploy the immensely enhanced prestige of the United States, backed by its unprecedented military presence in the Persian Gulf, to help create new and durable security structures in a region regarded as vital to American national interests.

How might this have been done? The U.S. could have urged its Arab allies to introduce long-overdue reforms as a step toward legitimizing their regimes and broadening their domestic political support. At the very least, the U.S. might have urged the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to end their decades of intramural feuding and forge a broader alliance with Jordan and Egypt. This, with American support, might have helped create a new balance of power in the region to counter the ambitions of adventurist regimes like Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

But nothing of the sort was ever considered in Washington. Instead, as Baker declared in September 1991, the administration would go for “the big thing”: that is, finding a solution to the century-old conflict between the Jews and the Arabs. The result was the Madrid conference, an impressive show of heads of state but, as the decade’s subsequent events would prove, a wholly counterproductive exercise in peacemaking.

The two key analytical assumptions that led to Madrid were, first, that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the issue, the Ur-issue, of Middle Eastern politics and, second, that all the other issues in the region were inextricably linked to it. Despite everything that has happened in the interim to disprove these two assumptions, they still underlie the thinking of diplomats today. Most recently, they were repeated almost word for word in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) headed by the very same James Baker.

As Taheri rightly points out, this fixation on the Arab-Israeli conflict as the central or "Ur-issue" is a type of reductionism that borders on wish-fulfillment. Worse, it not only serves to divert attention from the very real internal problems that exist throughout this region, it privileges the discourse of those Arab elites who have made their careers by using the Arab-Israeli conflict to avoid much-needed introspection and reform. Moreover, the subtext to this approach is that it places the onus on the Israeli side, and is widely recognized as shorthand for "Israeli concessions". It presumes that an ever-shrinking Israel would suddenly bring peace and development to a region that British Prime Minister Blair has dubbed the "arc of crisis"

In this article, Taheri asserts that as pieces of former empires, none of the countries comprising this arc, "enjoys fully defined or internationally recognized borders" and then (quite didactically) goes about describing every contentious oasis or claim of suzerainty from Kashmir to Western Sahara. While it is certainly relevant to a more comprehensive understanding of the region that, "22 full-scale wars over territory and resources, not one of them having anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians" have been fought, in the end this is less than half of the story.

Taheri hints at irredentist claims in passing, but hardly does them justice. For example, the Kurds - which according to the Wikipedia article on them number some 35 million individuals - are mentioned only as part of a longstanding border dispute and cross-border guerrilla war between Turkey and Kurds in Northern Iraq. With all the attention focused on Israel's denial of "legitimate self-determination" to the Palestinians, one might be excused for not knowing that it is, "the Kurds [that] make up the largest ethnic group in the world who do not have a nation-state of their own." (See Wiki)

In the end, the solution that Taheri offers for the region is democratization as, "the only credible strategy ... and the only hope..." since,

"... with the exception of Israel and with the partial exception of Turkey, the entire Middle East lacks a culture of conflict resolution, let alone the necessary mechanisms of meaningful compromise. Such a culture can only be shaped through a process of democratization. Only democracies habitually resolve their conflicts through diplomacy rather than war, and only popular-based regimes possess the political strength and the moral will to build peace."

Taheri is certainly not the first or only one to promote this perspective. Condoleeza Rice and the Bush administration have made this point the primary thrust of their Middle East efforts. At her 2005 speech given at the American University in Cairo, Rice famously said, "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither" (to read the speech in its entirety). Thomas Friedman points out in his book, The World is Flat, that the difference beween an impoverished Muslim in India and an impoverished Muslim in Pakistan is that when the Indian Muslim sees the house of a rich person, he says to himself , "One day I will BE that man" whereas the Pakistani Muslim thinks, "One day I will KILL that man". According to this argument, India's secular democracy, provides young Muslims with equal opportunities and the means to have their voices heard. While this "solution" to the region's myriad problems is clearly well-meaning and even based on solid research that has shown that democracies do not go to war against each other, it flounders upon close scrutiny.

If the experiences of Algeria, Lebanon and Gaza are any indication of how "Democracy in the Middle East" would look, then it is clearly a subversive force that promises even greater instability and bloodshed. In a region characterized by the rifts of tribalism, that is lacking in a tradition of minority rights or tolerance for dissenting opinions (let alone mechanisms for power-sharing), this approach promises to be disastrous. Moreover, while I believe that every heart yearns to be free of tyranny and oppression, what struck me most about the above statement (besides its reductionism), is that it is a classic case of cultural imperialism to assume that Western democratic institutions are the solution to this region's woes. Besides, if we are to believe Taheri that the, "the entire Middle East lacks a culture of conflict resolution, let alone the necessary mechanisms of meaningful compromise", then any Democratic undertaking will necessarily be a top-down imposition.

As such, it is hard to see why "free and fair elections" in Iraq would prompt Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq to lay down their arms and embrace each other as brothers. I find it also highly unlikely and naive to think that democratization in the Middle East will lead to the acceptance of the State of Israel. Frankly, as Taheri points out in this article, Israel is in most ways peripheral to the pervasive and deep-seated problems that typify the region. Nonetheless, as history has repeatedly shown ... at the end of the day, it IS actually more convenient and easier to simply blame the Jews for all of your problems.

(To read the entire article click here.)