What You Can’t Say About Islamism
American intellectuals won't face up to Muslim radicalism's Nazi past
by Paul Berman
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704862404575351354230485696.htmlIn our present Age of the Zipped Lip, you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement:
You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.
You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.
And you are not supposed to mention that, by inducing a variety of journalists and intellectuals to maintain a discreet and respectful silence on these awkward matters, the Islamist preachers and ideologues have succeeded in imposing on the rest of us their own categories of analysis.
Or so I have argued in my recent book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” But am I right? I glance with pleasure at some harsh reviews, convinced that here, in the worst of them, is my best confirmation.
No one disputes that the Nazis collaborated with several Islamist leaders. Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, orated over Radio Berlin to the Middle East. The mufti’s strongest supporter in the region was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna, too, spoke well of Hitler. But there is no consensus on how to interpret those old alliances and their legacy today.
Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic philosopher at Oxford, is Banna’s grandson, and he argues that his grandfather was an upstanding democrat. In Mr. Ramadan’s interpretation, everything the Islamists did in the past ought to be viewed sympathetically in, as Mr. Ramadan says, “context”—as logical expressions of anticolonial geopolitics, and nothing more. Reviews in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker—the principal critics of my book—have just now spun variations on Mr. Ramadan’s interpretation.
The piece in Foreign Affairs insists that, to the mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler was merely a “convenient ally,” and it is “ludicrous” to imagine a deeper sort of alliance. Those in the National Interest and the New Yorker add that, in the New Yorker’s phrase, “unlikely alliances” with Nazis were common among anticolonialists.
The articles point to some of Gandhi’s comrades, and to a faction of the Irish Republican Army, and even to a lone dimwitted Zionist militant back in 1940, who believed for a moment that Hitler could be an ally against the British. But these various efforts to minimize the significance of the Nazi-Islamist alliance ignore a mountain of documentary evidence, some of it discovered last year in the State Department archives by historian Jeffrey Herf, revealing links that are genuinely profound.
“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion,” said the mufti of Jerusalem on Radio Berlin in 1944. And the mufti’s rhetoric goes on echoing today in major Islamist manifestos such as the Hamas charter and in the popular television oratory of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a revered scholar in the eyes of Tariq Ramadan: “Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker have expended nearly 12,000 words in criticizing “Flight of the Intellectuals.” And yet, though the book hinges on a series of such genocidal quotations, not one of those journals has found sufficient space to reproduce even a single phrase.
Why not? It is because a few Hitlerian quotations from Islamist leaders would make everything else in those magazine essays look ridiculous—the argument in the Foreign Affairs review, for instance, that Qaradawi ought to be viewed as a crowd-pleasing champion of “centrism,” and Hamas merits praise as a “moderate” movement and a “firewall against radicalization.”
The New Yorker is the only one of these magazines to reflect even briefly on anti-Semitism. But it does so by glancing away from my own book and, instead, chastising Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch champion of liberal values. In the New Yorker’s estimation, Hirsi Ali’s admiration of the philosopher Voltaire displays an ignorant failure on her part to recognize that, hundreds of years ago, even the greatest of liberals thought poorly of the Jews. And Ms. Hirsi Ali’s denunciations of women’s oppression in the Muslim immigrant districts of present-day London displays a failure to recognize that, long ago, immigrant Jews suffered oppression in those same districts.
But this reeks of bad faith. Ms. Hirsi Ali is one of the world’s most eloquent enemies of the Islamist movement. She makes a point of singling out Islamist anti-Semitism. And the anti-Semites have singled her out in return.
Six years ago, an Islamist fanatic murdered Ms. Hirsi Ali’s filmmaking colleague, Theo van Gogh, and left behind a death threat, pinned with a dagger to the dead man’s torso, denouncing Ms. Hirsi Ali as an agent of Jewish conspirators. And yet, the New Yorker, in the course of an essay presenting various excuses for the Islamist-Nazi alliance of yesteryear, has the gall to explain that, if anyone needs a lecture on the history of anti-Semitism, it’s Ms. Hirsi Ali!
Such is the temper of our moment. Some of the intellectuals are indisputably in flight—eager to sneer at outspoken liberals from Muslim backgrounds, and reluctant to speak the truth about the Islamist reality.
The Age of the Zipped Lip
Michael J. Totten
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/326241Paul Berman takes the thesis of his outstanding new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, to the pages of the Wall Street Journal and dubs the age we live in that of the Zipped Lip.
“You are not,” he writes, “supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.”
As he said to me on the phone when I interviewed him in May, the mere mention of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy in the Arab world and its lingering effects in our day “gets people red in the face.”
Lest you think there aren’t any lingering traces of Nazism in the Arab world, along comes Wiam Wahhab, a former member of Lebanon’s parliament, and confirms that there are. “I like the Germans,” he says in an interview on Al-Jadid/New TV, “because they hate the Jews and they burned them.” Then he laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s heard in a week.
Now, this man isn’t mainstream. He belongs (of course) to the Hezbollah-led “March 8″ coalition, which is apparently incapable of winning an election or getting its way except by using or threatening violence. And he claims that the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon — which was set up in 2005 to investigate the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri — is an Israeli-American plot to destroy the country. He’s firmly in the minority camp.
Still, can you imagine any American politician from either the House or the Senate, from either the Republican or Democratic party, saying something like that and yukking it up on TV? It would be the instantaneous mother of all career-enders. Wahhab’s career, though, won’t suffer one bit as a result of his saying this.
It’s not that everyone in Lebanon approves of the Holocaust, but enough people do that he’s not embarrassed or ashamed to say that he does. Supporting Hitler’s “Final Solution” isn’t taboo there the way it is here. Supporting Israel is a far bigger offense. Some Lebanese people do support Israel, and some have even taken up arms alongside Israelis; but if they don’t keep quiet about it in public, they’ll suffer serious consequences.
A country where you’ll get in more trouble for supporting Israel than for supporting the Holocaust is a country with serious political problems. Lebanon is among the least anti-Semitic of all the Arabic-speaking countries. Most and possibly all the others are worse.
I understand why many of the intellectuals Paul Berman takes to task have a hard time dealing squarely with this. It’s disturbing. The implications are frightening. And it’s doubly disturbing to those of us who have some affection for the Arab world and wish it well. I’ve spent more time in Lebanon than in any country in the world after the United States, and it’s the only country aside from America that I briefly called home. Yet the facts are the facts. Those of us who would rather see the Middle East flourish than suffer will not see that happen until these poisonous ideas are stamped out or shunted aside. Pretending it has already happened will not make it so.
Islam: Unmentionable in D.C.
Reuel Marc Gerecht
http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/76249/islam-unmentionable-in-dcThe recent suicide bombing against Pashtun tribal elders in Mohmand, a region not far from Peshawar, the capital city of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, made my mind return to conversations I’d had in Peshawar in 2000. Westerners could then roam the non-restricted areas of the province without much fear. Peshawar, which was a hotbed of Islamic militancy, still offered the full range of Pashtun cosmopolitanism: international hotels where VIP natives and foreigners could get alcohol; lots of Internet shops where locals emailed their relatives abroad and scanned porno sites; and video-and-DVD stores where you could easily get contraband copies of newly-released Hollywood blockbusters or, with a bit more effort, skin flicks. It was a lively, dirty, dilapidated, but relatively well-organized city (the British empire lived on) swamped with Pashtun Afghans who greatly preferred life there to the boredom, poverty, and religious unpleasantness of Taliban rule north of the border.
What I liked best about the place was how easy it was to have conversations about Islam. Westernized businessmen and officials, journalists, imams from neighborhood mosques, the ordinary faithful after prayers, rug merchants, taxi drivers, soldiers, and die-hard Islamic militants pumping iron in god-awful gyms would all proffer their opinions about the faith, America, Christianity, Jews, and Osama bin Laden (most applauded the man). Pakistanis become intellectually serious pretty quickly. And even among the hesitant, it didn't take that long before you could have an energetic conversation about what many Westerners would describe as sensitive issues. After the attack on the USS Cole in Aden in October 2000, everyone there knew that bin Laden and the Taliban’s leader Mullah Omar had found some common ground. By and large, the Peshawaris saw jihad against the United States as understandable and acceptable, and those who agreed, and those who didn’t, weren’t offended when an American asked them about the earthly manifestations of their faith.
I haven’t returned to Peshawar since 2000, but it’s a good guess that the same conversations are to be had, though undoubtedly in greater variation, since jihadist violence has now savaged Pakistan. It’s an odd situation: Throughout the greater Middle East, frank discussions about Islam are easier to have than they are in Washington, D.C.—especially among government officials. Ask someone in the Obama administration about jihad and, unless the official knows the conversation is off the record—and sometimes even if it is off the record—that official likely will become a bit panicked, nonplussed, and try to change the subject.
It’s been 18 months since Mr. Obama became president; thirteen months since he gave his Cairo speech and rolled out his “New Beginning” approach to the Muslim world. Primary result: In the nation’s capital, conversations have become boring, lightweight, and sometimes inane.
Although it’s deeply politically incorrect to say so, intellectually, things were better under the Bush administration. President George W. Bush struggled briefly with the issue of whether it was okay to use the word “Islamofascism.” I’m against its use but it’s not philosophically absurd to use this term in describing some of the modern Islamic movements that sprang from the Egyptian Hassan Al Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood and the subcontinent’s great modern theologian Abul Ala Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami (Maududi was quite open in his admiration of fascism’s inspirational capacity). President Bush’s public use of the term one time provoked considerable debate in the West and in the Middle East. Mr. Bush’s more adamant embrace of democracy-exporting rhetoric provoked even more discussion. Such controversy was all for the best. Muslim-versus-Muslim debate is always more robust when the West, especially the United States, is also actively engaged in the discussion. Whether the invidious subject is slavery, female genital mutilation, Sharia’s draconian corporal punishments (hudud laws), women’s rights, corruption, jihadism, “oriental despotism,” or representative government, intra-Muslim ethical deliberations on most of these subjects have been provoked by Westerners and Westernized Muslims taking issue with prevailing practices.
President Obama’s operating philosophy toward the Muslim world appears to be that being “offensive” towards Muslims can’t be good for Muslim–non-Muslim relations. Mr. Obama’s dispensation more or less follows the arguments made by a wide variety of liberal intellectuals while Mr. Bush was president. To wit: The Iraq war (though not the Afghan war), Guantanamo, rendition, waterboarding, and Mr. Bush’s existential presence (his Christian Evangelical essence) accentuated the Muslim–non-Muslim divide, thereby contributing to anti-American anger and the manufacture of holy warriors. We never knew how many holy warriors Mr. Bush produced, but the implication was lots.
And the black Barack Hussein Obama would do wonders to fix all this. In the immortal words of The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, Mr. Obama’s “face” would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.” In December 2007, Mr. Sullivan asked us to consider this hypothetical: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image,
America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm…. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.” What does one do with this extreme mirror imaging of one’s one biases into the minds of foreigners? Senator John McCain obviously didn’t know how to handle it. (But I have a suggestion: In 2010 Mr. Sullivan and I should travel together through Pakistan, visiting the Pashtun and Punjabi breeding grounds of jihadism and see how President Obama’s “face” is doing.)
The history-annulling quality of this “New Beginning” line of thought (Islamic militancy has a very long history; it attracted many of the Muslim world’s best minds to its standard long before President Bush destroyed Saddam Hussein; being a black Christian son of an African Muslim is much more important and estimable in America than in the Middle East) really should have encountered a bit more resistance from those who knew the Muslim world.
But time is quickly cruel. Although Mr. Obama could make a recovery among devout Muslims, he appears to have become more or less irrelevant to fundamentalist discussions—except on the issue of Israel/Palestine where there is considerable disappointment. (President Obama was supposed to come down hard on the Jewish state; that he has not done so has significantly diminished his “change” appeal among both religious and secular Arabs). Radicalization among
American Muslims seems to have actually increased during Mr. Obama’s presidency and, if this is true, it would be dubious to suggest that anything Mr. Obama has done provoked that increase. The radicalization of Europe’s Muslim community—probably still the greatest jihadist threat to the West—doesn’t seem to have changed course because Barack Obama is in the White House.
The number of die-hard jihadists may have gone down in the Muslim world since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but if this is so it is undoubtedly because (1) the United States military and allied armed forces have killed and imprisoned jihadists more quickly than they could reproduce and (2) Arabs and Pakistanis—the two big constituencies for Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations—have seen so much Muslim-on-Muslim bloodshed in the Middle East and Central Asia in the last decade that they have begun to recoil from the organizations that once fascinated so many of them. Muslim militants aren’t children. They know a hell of a lot more about their faith than do American presidents who assert that “Islam is a religion of peace.” (What Islam is, as with Christianity and Judaism, is an evolving question, but it’s not just Muslim holy warriors who don’t care for the Prophet Mohammad being depicted as a pre-modern peacenik.)
Since the inauguration of Mr. Obama, the Saudis certainly haven’t reformed their massive, state-financed export of virulently anti-Western Wahhabi ideology, or their own school books, which still depict Jews and Christians as being pretty far down the evolutionary ladder. Mr. Obama’s outreach to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was certainly used as a rhetorical battering ram by Iran’s pro-democracy dissidents; but these dissidents no longer shout "U ba ma" (“he is with us”) in Persian since it became obvious that the president really only wanted to talk to Mr. Khamenei about his nukes, not about representative government. Needless to say, the supreme leader’s Islam is not the Islam of Barack Obama, who declared in Cairo, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” (Is it possible that President Obama discussed the “negative stereotyping” in his private correspondence to Khamenei?)
Now it’s possible that President Obama’s play-nice approach to the Muslim world won’t leave us in any worse shape than we were in when he arrived in the White House. It is, however, questionable. When Mr. Obama’s attorney general twists himself into knots trying to avoid juxtaposing the word “Islam” with the word “terrorism,” and when the president’s senior counterterrorism advisor gives speeches on Islam that would be more appropriate on “Sesame Street,” you gotta wonder whether the dumbed-down level of public Washington discourse is the visible sign of internal bureaucratic rot. In any case, we would do well to remember the observation that Princeton historian Michael Cook made about Islamic history:
"It was the fusion of … [an] egalitarian and activist tribal ethos with the monotheist tradition that gave Islam its distinctive political character. In no other civilization was rebellion for conscience sake so widespread as it was in the early centuries of Islamic history; no other major religious tradition has lent itself to revival as a political ideology—and not just a political identity—in the modern world."
Osama bin Laden, a rebel if there ever was one, is much older than he appears. We would do well also to remember that the libraries in Iran’s dissident-rich universities and the homes of the country’s increasingly secular intellectuals are full of books that are chapters to the exquisitely invidious but enormously productive dialogue between the West and Islam. And great books, like great statesmen, are almost never nice.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.
The Hidden Costs of Jew-Baiting in England
Jew-baiting has become something of a sport in England, as Brits feed the monster — radical Islam — that devours them
By Richard Landes
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-hidden-costs-of-jew-baiting-in-england/?singlepage=trueLondon is an amazing place, full of vitality, intensity, foreign tourists and residents, a patchwork of pluralism. Talk to the average person, and nothing seems amiss: this cab driver, having driven in London for 40 years, sees no significant change in the neighborhoods he travels through; this financier sees no signs of intimidation; this shopper, this tavern-hopper, this man on the bus, lives in an interesting and relatively normal world. A superficial walk through the [Regent’s] park gives the distinct sense of normality.
But talk to the Jews, and you get a different story. The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists held a conference here this week. The topic: Democratic and Legal Norms in an Age of Terror. Panels discussed everything from the Goldstone Report, to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, to “universal jurisdiction” (lawfare against Israelis brought in foreign courts). Here, in the Khalili Lecture Theatre of the SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies), Jewish lawyers discussed a grim reality whose only public appearance on an everyday basis is the drumbeat of calumny that a boisterous elite — NGOs, journalists, academics — rain down on Israel.
Perhaps the most startling of the sessions concerned the BDS movement. Jonathan Rynhold, from the BESA Center at Bar Ilan, and Anthony Julius, author of Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, both presented a picture of British anti-Zionist activity whose intellectual and moral foundations were profoundly irrational, a dogmatic will to stigmatize and destroy Israel that responded to no argument about proportion (what about other places?) or reason (you make no moral demands of the Palestinians). And behind that lies a much weightier volume of negative feeling, a kind of unthinking animosity that expressed itself in its most banal form when a woman explained to Julius: “We all know why the Jews are hated: you marry among yourselves and live in ghettos like Golders Green and Vienna [sic].” In so doing, she put her finger on the most widespread subtext for hostility to Jews – “they think they’re the chosen people.”
Daniel Eilon, an English barrister, explained to me one of the mechanisms. It isn’t real anti-Semitism. In fact, most of the stuff that comes out against Israel is intellectually hopeless — phony narratives based on fantasy “facts.” This is really just good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. It’s saying things in all righteous innocence that you know will hurt the Jews to whom you address the criticism. The problem for the Brits (and the Europeans in general), he pointed out, is that historically, there’s never been a particularly high price to pay for Jew-baiting. Now there is.
What my friend referred to with this last remark is lucidly analyzed by Robin Shepherd in his recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel. The elephant in the room, of course, is radical Islam — the people who interpret being “chosen” by Allah as a charter to dominate the world and submit everyone, willingly or not, to Islam. They’re the people no one dares bait; and they’re the folks who take full advantage of every deference to press for more. Daily aggressions from violent gangs constantly expand the territories where the Queen’s writ does not run. In tempo with the retreat of British law and enforcement, Sharia advances from internal community affairs (explicitly on the model of Jewish religious courts) towards the policing of community boundaries and claims on the state for special treatment. The British — like so many other Western nations –mainstream the extremists and marginalize the moderates. As Nick Cohen put it: “The world faces a psychotic movement and won’t admit it to themselves.”
A documentary filmmaker reveals a double assault on freedom of speech: on the one hand, everyone is terrified of peers calling them Islamophobes; and on the other, anyone who does something negative on Islam puts his or her life in danger. When I respond animatedly to her point, she looks around nervously and signals for me to lower my voice. How often did my British informants tell me in hushed tones about being intimidated!
News agencies send their journalists to special courses in self-defense for how to deal with hostile situations. How much of this responds to the pervasive dangers of doing journalism in Muslim countries, and how often does it come up in those areas where the Queen’s writ does not run? One such journalist who works for the BBC reports that when a mob turns ugly, they are told to stand back to back, palms open, pointing down and out — a posture of non-threat, but also one of subjection.
And of course, the best protection is positive coverage. Most of the time, “but we’re from the BBC” works to allay Muslim hostility: it’s code for “we’re on your side.” But for some crowds, even that’s not enough.
The result of this pervasive intimidation that comes from both peers and enemies is a body politic that feels no pain. Like a victim of CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain), the British public receives only vague hints of the assaults on its body. A widespread omerta operates in the mainstream news media, guaranteeing that many, if not most aggressions go unreported, or in a code — Asian street gangs — that only those looking for clues will notice. Aggregator sites online offer deeply disturbing collections of news items.
As a result, Brits look away while their Muslim communities are taken over by fascist zealots who enforce dress and behavior codes, who silence dissent, and who mobilize a resentful youth with violent hatreds. For these men, infidels are by definition guilty, deserving rape and lethal assault, as part of Allah’s justice. Douglas Murray’s study of twenty-seven Muslims, targeted by zealots, reveals the workings of a community hijacked by thugs.
The trials and tribulations of Afshan Azad, the Bengali Muslim-born actress in the Harry Potter films, beaten and threatened with death by her family, illustrate the depth of the community pressures. Her brothers’ failures to bring her to heel (or kill her) endanger their lives: “We are going to get trouble from the community now. It is bad news for our safety, her safety. My younger brother is going to get harassed at college. All our family is going to be harassed by the community because of this.” The tribal community rules, even in college.
So while a large and growing population falls under the grip of a Mafioso culture with an imperialist ideology of world conquest, the British look away. The “prestigious” London School of Economics disinvited Douglas Murray from speaking, lest his presence provoke violence. Paralyzed by an inability to discuss the problem, they become a train-wreck in slow motion. The lavish expenses that the government has paid out to immigrant families, which has at once increased their numbers and stilled their rage, is now run out. Budget cuts of up to 40% across the board will only exacerbate the frictions, and if the government pours money into appeasing the Muslims, they will alienate the British working class losing their benefits.
Which brings us back to Jew-baiting. As Shepherd explains in his chapter on Islam in Europe, this is a European-wide phenomenon that is directly related to the fear of criticizing Muslims. Anti-Zionism is the key extremist discourse by which jihadis radicalize communities and mobilize warriors for Allah’s armies. The disturbing figures for how many British Muslims support terror, think Muslims did not commit either 9-11 or 7-7, think the law should punish people who insult Islam, and think that apostates from Islam should die should not be read the way we read political polls in the West. These minorities are the dominant voices in their communities, if only because they use their terror tactics against fellow Muslims far more readily than against outsiders.
So while their enemies advance, the British elites are like deer in the headlights, incapable of speaking up for even their own principles of free speech and tolerance. Intimidated into silence about Muslims, somehow, they find their voice in denouncing the “real” genocidal evil empire: Israel. Thus some wax eloquent, like the Methodists with their thinly-disguised, resentful supersessionism; and others wax violent, like the anti-Zionist vandals, who damaged hundreds of thousands of pounds of property and got off scott free to the cheers of a Green MP.
Of course, every sin these brave ideologues accuse Israel of committing is done a thousand-fold by the very people who generate their demonizing narrative — the radical Muslims. It is these zealots who interpret their chosenness as a warrant to rape and massacre, to dominate and humiliate infidels. They are the toxic communitarians who believe in their side right or wrong, to the death — not the Jews, who can’t stop publicly beating their breasts about all their sins. Indeed, one of the mysterious factors in this madness is the role played by Jewish anti-Zionists, who, in Julius’ memorable phrase, are “proud to be ashamed to be Jewish.”
Instead of taking note of such sobering perspectives, Western anti-Zionists shy away from the dangerous and painful but legitimate and necessary criticism of Muslim radicals. They prefer the easy, cost-free baiting of any Jew proud enough to feel that his or her own people deserve a state. Instead of turning to the Muslims and saying “why can’t you express a fraction of the self-criticism of the Zionists?” they prefer to repeat the most toxic accusations against the Jews and claim: “I’m not saying anything that Jews haven’t said.”
They are the true Islamophobes — afraid to criticize Islam, eager to join in its chorus of hatred.
And in this act of demission before the Islamist challenge, British opinion makers and shapers also submit to their own bullies, their own zealots who push the Jew-baiting beyond the weekend sport of the salons, into the professional arena of anti-Zionist activism. When the founders of Hamas in 1988 penned their genocidal charter that explicitly targeted all infidels, little did they suspect that within twenty years, those infidels would chant “We are Hamas!” in the streets of London. Who could hope for a more useful infidel than that?
In the European past, Jew-baiting may have seemed relatively cost-free. After all, humiliate a Jew and the worst he’ll do is hector you. Sure, sometimes the sport got out of hand, and killing Jews en masse, or forcing them to convert, or kicking them out may have deeply damaged the economy and empowered repressive forces, like the Inquisition, to go after other religious dissidents. But who really noticed?
Today, however, the situation has changed dramatically because Europe doesn’t just run the risk of internal failure, but getting vanquished by an implacable and merciless foe. By failing to denounce toxic Muslim communitarianism and instead adopting its shrill discourse of demonization about Jews, Brits feed the monster that devours them. If it continues apace, if the British do not make Muslim civility towards Jews the shibboleth of assimilation to a free and democratic culture, they risk losing that civil polity entirely. As always with real anti-Semites, the Jews are only their first target.
Can Britain wake up in time? And if and when it does, can it swallow the painful price of giving up its addiction to Jew-baiting? Or will it be, as some close observers think, the first country in Europe to succumb to Islamism? Walking through the delightful streets of London, watching a brilliant performance of Henry IV Part II at the reconstituted Globe Theatre, passing by a multi-cultural mass of dancers by the embankment at night, viewing the vibrant energy of the city, one has little clue to the problem.
Or is watching this joyful celebration akin to seeing a fat man with a serious cholesterol problem dine on his deep-fried fish-and-chips and wash down those tasty truffles of moral Schadenfreude that so grieve the Jews and comfort the resentful?
Richard Landes is a Professor of History at Boston University.
Jihadism and Antisemitism
The struggle of the Islamists looks back upon decades of anti-Semitic tradition
By Matthias Küntzel
http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/jihadism-and-antisemitismWhat kind of political ideology pushed Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 perpetrators, into acting the way he did? It is precisely this question that the German weekly Der Spiegel put to those friends of Mohammed Atta who were members of his Koran group at the Hamburg Technical University .
Their answers were remarkable: "The members of his Koran group attributed a 'Nazi weltanschauung‘ to him“, according to Der Spiegel. "In his opinion, Jews were the wire-pullers not only of the media but also of the financial world and of politics as well. Jews, as he saw it, were behind America's Gulf War, were behind the Balkan wars, were behind the Chechnyan war, were everywhere. ... He considered New York City to be the center of world Jewry. Mohammed Atta wanted to establish a theocracy between the Nile and the Euphrates which would be free of Jews; his war of liberation had to start in New York.“ (Spiegel No.36/2002, p.117)
Mohammed Atta's obsessive hatred of Jews, shared by his al Qaida instructors and financiers, was obviously the key motive for the massacre of so many innocent people in Washington, D.C. and New York City.
That is not at all surprising, for this pattern of suicidal mass-murder had already taken place before 9/11: On 1st June 2001, two months previously, a member of the Palestinian Hamas movement killed himself and 21 other young people in front of a discotheque in Tel Aviv. On 9th August 2001, another Islamist went into the overcrowded Pizzeria Sabbaro in Jerusalem and blew himself up, killing 16 people.
Actually, there should have been a feeling that there might be a connection between these three attacks immediately after 9/11.
There is, however, not much debate about the anti-Semitic motives of the 9/11-perpetrators. This is all the more amazing since the history of Islamism has verified in no uncertain terms the interrelations between anti-Jewish hatred and Jihad.
In contrast to a widespread belief, this polito-religious movement did not come into existence during the 1960's but during the 1930's.
The success of this movement was not inspired by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism. Up to 1951, all its campaigns to mobilize the people had not been directed against colonial powers but against Jews.
It was the Organization of the Moslem Brotherhood, founded in 1928, which established Islamism as a mass movement. The meaning of this organization for Islamism is comparable to the meaning of the Bolshevik party for Communism in the 20th century: Up to now it is the point of reference in terms of ideology and it is the organizational core, which decisively inspired all following islamist tendencies including the al Qaida network and which is inspiring them to this very day.
It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism as a resistance movement against "cultural modernity“ and triggered the call for a Sharia-based new order. But the Brotherhood did not conduct its jihad primarily against the British; it did not conduct it against the French or against the Egyptian elite who had collaborated with the British. Instead, the jihad movement of the Brotherhood was focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews. In 1936 they had only eight hundred members but in 1938 they had expanded to an amazing two hundred thousand. Between these years, however, only one big campaign took place in Egypt which targeted Zionism and the Jews exclusively.
This campaign was set off by a rebellion in Palestine which the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, had initiated. "Down with the Jews!“ – "Jews get out of Egypt and Palestine!“: these were the slogans of the mass demonstrations which the Brotherhood had organized in Egyptian cities as a result.
Their leaflets called for a boycott of Jewish goods and Jewish shops.
In their newspaper al-Nadhir they started a regular column called "The danger of the Jews of Egypt.“ There they published the names and addresses of Jewish businessmen and the publishers of allegedly Jewish newspapers all over the world, attributing every evil – from communism to brothels – to the "Jewish danger“. A lot of patterns of action as well as slogans thus had been borrowed from Nazi Germany. In addition, the Brotherhood made a call to its followers "to be available for the Jihad in defense of the Aqsa-mosque in all parts of Egypt“. This call was unusual and completely new within the Moslem world at that time.
For the Moslem Brotherhood has been the organization which firstly created the idea of a belligerent jihad and the longing for death as an Islamic model for modern times. As early as 1938, Hassan al-Banna, the charismatic founder of the Brotherhood, presented his idea of jihad to the public by publishing an article entitled “The industry of death“. This headline, however, did not refer to the horror of death but to death as an ideal to long for. Hassan al-Banna wrote: "To a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come.“
This slogan met with enthusiasm within the "Troops of God“ as the Brotherhood referred to itself. Whenever their battalions marched down the boulevards of Cairo in a semi-fascist formation they burst forth into song: "We are not afraid of death, we desire it… Let us die in redemption for Muslims.“ This idea of jihad was not formulated in modern times until the 1930's; it had been interwoven with the anti-Semitic impulse from the very beginning.
The anti-Semitism of the Brotherhood, therefore, was not only influenced by European ideologies but by Islamic roots as well. Firstly, Islamists considered, and still consider, Palestine as being an Islamic territory ("Dar al-Islam“) where Jews are never allowed to run one single village let alone a state. Secondly, this new front line between Muslims and Jews evoked old memories of the early history of Islam. Islamists, for example, try to legitimatize their aspiration to drive out or kill the Jews of Palestine referring to the example of Mohammed who, as the legend goes, succeeded not only in expelling two Jewish tribes from Medina during the 7th century, but killed the entire male population of the third tribe and sold all the women and children into slavery. Thirdly, it was exactly this enmity which seemingly proved right the saying of the Koran that Jews are to be considered the worst enemy of the believers.
It was not until May 8, 1945, however, that the ideological rapproachment between the Muslim Brothers and the Nazis reached a peak. This became obvious as early as November 1945. During this very month the Muslim Brothers committed the most fervent anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt's history: The center of anti-Semitism was beginning to shift from Germany into the Arab world.
Demonstrators penetrated the Jewish quarters of Cairo on the anniversary of the Balfour-declaration. They plundered houses and shops, attacked non-Muslims, devastated the synagoges and set them on fire. Six people were killed, some hundred more suffered injuries. Some weeks later the Islamist's newspapers "turned to a frontal attack against the Egyptian Jews, slandering them as Zionists, Communists, capitalists and bloodsuckers, as pimps and as merchants of war, or in general, as subversive elements within all states and societies“ as Gudrun Krämer put it in her study about "The Jews in Egypt 1914-1952“.
One year later, the Brotherhood made sure that the friend of Heinrich Himmler, Amin el-Husseini, who was being searched for as a war criminal, was exiled and granted a new politicial domain in Egypt. In his capacity as Mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Palestine National Movement, this obnoxious person was not only one of the closest allies of the Muslim Brotherhood since the beginning of the 1930's but at the same time within the Arabic world the most ardent supporter and perpetrator of the annihilation of European Jews.
Granting amnesty for this prominent Islamic authority symbolized at the same time in great parts of the Arab world vindication of what he did.
From now on, Nazis criminals who were being sought after in Europe poured in droves into the Arab world. Masses of copies of the most infamous anti-Jewish libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were published in the following decades by two well-known former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat. The unlimited solidarity of the Muslim Brothers with the Mufti and their anti-Semitic riots against Jews only a few months after Auschwitz showed clearly that the Brotherhood either ignored or even justified Hitler's extermination of European Jews.
The consequences of this attitude are far-reaching and characterize the Arabic-Jewish conflict up to the present time. How do Islamists explain international support of Israel in 1947? As long as they ignore the fate of the Jews during World War II they have to revert to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Thus the creation of the Jewish state is seen by them as being an attack by the USA and the Soviet Union an the Arab world which had been maliciously incited by the Jews. Accordingly, the Brotherhood interpreted the UN-decision of 1947 concerning the partition of Palestine as being an "international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under the influence of Zionism.“ It seems to be unbelieveable but it is nevertheless true: Shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Islamists tried to brand the Jews as the true world-ruling power. This mad notion of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, which in Gemany has been suppressed since May 8, 1945, not only survived but got a fresh impulse in 1947 in an Arabic world where the Muslim Brotherhood in the meanwhile were able to muster a million supporters.
This new impact of Nazi-like conspiracy theories becomes particularly obvious if we look at the Charta of the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine which calls itself Hamas. This Charta, adopted in 1988, represents one of the most important Islamist programs in present times, by far exceeding the conflict over Palestine.
Here, Hamas defines itself as being a "universal movement“ whose jihad has to be supported by Muslims all over the world. Correspondingly, their enemy is not only Israel but "world Zionism“ or, as the Nazis called it, "Weltjudentum“. Hamas, according to its Charta, is "the spearhead and the avant-garde“ in the struggle against "world Zionism“.
Their paper gives the impression that its authors wrote it while sitting in front of an open copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for it attributes really every "evil“ in the world to "world Zionism“. According to the Charta "the Jews were behind the French Revolution as well as the Communist Revolutions.“ They were "behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate … and also were behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading in war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state.“ They "inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council … in order to rule the world by their intermediary. There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.“ The original of this Charta finally appears in Article 32: The program of the Zionists "has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.“
It is tempting to ridicule such lunacy, just like Hitler's jabbering was ridiculed in times past. It is, however, just this inane picture of Jews as the evil ones and the villains of the world which instigates the mass-murdering of civilians within Israel or the USA. and which motivates the Islamists' enthusiasm about it.
In such a murderous realisation of what their Islamist programs call for, Hamas and al-Qaida are resuming the Nazi-compatible policies of Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem while receiving storms of applause by Islamists all over the world.
Against this very background, is it still amazing that those persons who got to know Mohammed Atta when participating in his Koran group attributed to him a "Nazi weltanschauung“? Can it be a surprise that Osama bin Laden accuses "the Jews“ of "taking hostage America and the West“ given the fact that a founder of Hamas, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, was at the same time the most important teacher and patron of al Qaida's leader? But why isn´t there any serious debate about this anti-Semitic dimension of 9/11?
In Germany, even the thoughtless revelation by Der Spiegel of Atta's weltanschauung met with no response. Up to the present there is even no German translation of this most important document of Islamic anti-Semitism, the Charta of Hamas, or of the essay "Our struggle with the Jews“ by the most famous writer of the Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, which was published in 1950.
This and the fact that the Charta of Hamas has been completely ignored by journalists and politicians who vainly tried to figure out the motives behind the suicidal mass-murder of innocent people in Israel or the USA. makes clear that the following words of one of the most distinguished researchers of anti-Semitism, Leon Poliakov, cannot be emphazised too strongly: "Those who don´t denounce anti-Semitism in its primitive and elementary form just because it is so primitive and elemental will have to put up with being questioned about whether or not they are giving secret approval to anti-Semites all over the world just because of that.“
Civil Rights and Armed Self-Defense
Understanding Clarence Thomas' extraordinary concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago
Damon W. Root
http://reason.com/archives/2010/07/09/civil-rights-and-armed-self-deOn December 11, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Virginia v. Black. At issue was the constitutionality of a Virginia statute that prohibited the act of cross burning, a ban the Court later struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. As is often the case, Justice Clarence Thomas was preparing to cast a lone dissenting vote.
“It’s my understanding that we had almost 100 years of lynching and activity in the South by the Knights of Camellia and the Ku Klux Klan, and this was a reign of terror and the cross was a symbol of that reign of terror,” Thomas told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben during oral arguments. In his dissent a few months later, Thomas dug even further into American history, citing sources ranging from a scholarly encyclopedia of the Ku Klux Klan to contemporaneous reports of cross burnings, lynchings, and other acts of racist terrorism to make the case that cross burning was an act of thuggish intimidation that deserved no protection under the First Amendment.
It wasn’t the first time Clarence Thomas weighed in on America’s long and bloody history of racism—and it wouldn’t be the last. In his concurring opinion last month in the landmark gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago, Thomas held that the right to keep and bear arms is fully applicable against state and local governments via the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the process, Thomas provided a sweeping history of the 14th Amendment’s roots in the anti-slavery movement and its original purpose as a shield against the predatory actions of the former Confederate states, who sought to deny the civil, political, and economic rights of black Americans and their white allies—including the right to keep and bear arms.
This focus on African-American history left more than a few liberal commentators scratching their heads. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy—who recently said he would like to “knock every racist and homophobic tooth” out of the mouths of Tea Party activists—was shocked by the stirring words of the conservative justice. “This was no muttering from an Uncle Tom, as many black people have accused him of being,” Milloy wrote, perhaps alluding to his own previous unguarded thoughts about Thomas. “His advocacy for black self-defense is straight from the heart of Malcolm X.”
Had he followed Thomas’ career more carefully, Milloy would have discovered that the justice’s views stretch back even further than that. Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald draws from a long and uninterrupted line of civil rights activists who preached the virtues of armed self-defense. The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, for instance, who famously urged President Abraham Lincoln to arm the liberated slaves against their former masters, was an outspoken champion of gun rights in the decades after the Civil War. American liberty depends upon “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box,” Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Without these privileges and immunities of citizenship, “no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Blacks therefore required all three.
Similarly, Mississippi doctor, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist T.R.M. Howard saw no reason to separate the struggle for racial equality from the case for armed self-defense. A founder of the pioneering Regional Council of Negro Leadership and a longtime ally of the NAACP, Howard acted as unofficial head of security during the highly publicized murder trial that followed the death of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African American savagely murdered in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Among other duties, Howard transported Till’s grieving mother, Ebony reporter Clyde Murdock, Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.), and others who gathered to observe the trial to and from the courthouse each day in a heavily-armed caravan. Back at his large, lavishly provisioned home, Howard slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. Like Douglass before him, Howard understood all too well the deep ties between the white supremacist regime and a disarmed black populace.
Even non-violent civil rights activists carried guns for self-defense. John R. Salter, one of the organizers of the famous 1963 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, declared simply, “I'm alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms.” As Salter recalled in 1994, he always “traveled armed” while working as a civil rights organizer in the Deep South. “The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay,” he wrote. “Years later, in a changed Mississippi, this was confirmed by a former prominent leader of the White Knights of the KKK when we had an interesting dinner together at Jackson.” As gun rights scholar Dave Kopel put it, Salter’s gun ownership allowed him “to stay alive in order to exercise his First Amendment rights to advocate for enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
It is altogether fitting, therefore, that the lead plaintiff in the landmark decision restoring gun rights to their proper place in our constitutional system is a 76-year-old African American grandfather and Army veteran who simply wants “a handgun in my house for my protection,” while the most constitutionally sound opinion in the case cites Frederick Douglass and was written by the Court’s one African-American justice.
To put that another way, McDonald v. Chicago is a resounding victory for both the Constitution and the civil rights struggle. Too bad it took such a long time coming.
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