The topic of the day is obviously the massacre at Fort Hood. The news agencies have rather a hot potato in the essential fact of this story, namely that an apparently radicalized Muslim, a member of our own armed forces, launched a murderous attack upon servicemen who were about to be deployed to fight fundamentalist Muslims.
There will of course be those who will present the accused as nothing more than an angry, disaffected, garden-variety “mucker” — we must respect Islam, after all, and all diversity is always good, no matter what — but it is hard to see this as anything other than what it clearly is: an act of jihad, provoked by the intolerable stress of mixed loyalties: to the U.S. Army of which he was a member, and to his Muslim faith and brothers. It would be less ambiguous in the public eye, perhaps, had he donned an explosive vest for the job in the signature style of jihadist martyrs, but both cause and effect are nevertheless the same.
This story is not going to go away, nor should it. There is now going to be a terrible strain between liberal multiculturalists, who will see any reaction to this murderer qua Muslim as racist Islamophobia (it is neither), and those flyover-country sorts who will argue that it is folly to have an increasing number of devout Muslims embedded in an army (or for that matter a nation) that is at the forefront of the latest spasm of this ancient and sanguinary conflict with Islam. We are about to see a loud argument taking shape.
19 Comments
I would hope that the argument be an intelligent one, but this issue will have everybody arguing, so there will be a lot of craziness going back and forth in the loud discussion about to take place.
So, let’s get ready.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
“…Two years ago, a devout Pakistani cab driver told NightWatch that if Allah called him or any devout Muslim to go on jihad and to kill his family and even the riders in his cab, he must do it immediately. He made that statement calmly as a matter of fact, while driving north on US 1.
This was not the statement of an insane man, but of an educated man with a degree in engineering who was making ends meet; a devoted family man and a good cab driver. NightWatch asked whether the phone was ringing just now. He replied he did not yet hear the call. …”
http://nightwatch.afcea.org/NightWatch_20091105.htm
That’s your source of information on “apparent radicalization”? How surprising . Happy, are you, to have another excuse to express your Islam-paranoia (they’re out to get you, no really!). It might be what you’ve called it, then again, it might not be. Nor have you given an inch to the obvious: that being a Muslim in the military makes you an outcast, and given that so many of you right-wing radicals (not you of course), explicitly and repeatedly call the war against terror a “clash between civilizations” between the West and Islam, how can you not expect a Muslim to choose a side? If you divide the world, you will have a world divided.
The problem as I see it here is that initial default assumption that he performed this atrocious act because he was a Muslim. He’s already guilty in your eyes. It is not that strains of Islam are not to blame for this of course, but that doesn’t make it right.
Why don’t you just go ahead and say that you want to kill all the worlds Muslims? Or at least deport them.
Really, you’re such a xenophobe. A smart, intelligent, insightful xenophobe. Its like a gaping hole in your brain. Corrosive acid.
“When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal,” said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. “But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad.
“howsurprising”, you wrote:
An insightful comment, and I couldn’t agree more.
The “gaping hole” in your brain, however, is your insistence on overlooking that nobody does a better job of that than Islam, which makes such a division quite explicit: it divides the world into the dar-al-Islam, the house of submission to Allah and His laws, and the dar-al-harb, the house of war. Islam does a more effective job of “dividing the world” than any other ideology, which is one of the many, many reasons it is basically incompatible, in proportion to its religious purity, with liberal Western culture.
And are they wrong? When a Muslim slaughters members of an infidel army while shouting “God is great” (as, for example, the 9/11 hijackers did), after having spent the morning in traditional Muslim garb handing out Korans, why on earth would you assume that it is not an act of jihad?
I’m not a xenophobe (though I thank you for your other kind words). The word refers to an irrational fear of strangers. My opposition to an increasing admixture of Islam in our culture, however, is not due to its strangeness — I am far more familiar with Islam and its teachings than most Americans are — but due to its incompatibility. And my concern that a growing Muslim presence in the West will have undesirable consequences is hardly irrational. So please drop the ad-hominem “phobia” stuff.
And I certainly don’t wish to kill all Muslims, or, for that matter, any Mulsims who aren’t trying to kill us — though it wouldn’t bother me in the least if the Islamic meme itself would go extinct forever. I am not expressing here antagonism toward people, but towards an ideology. As for deporting Muslims, to do so in the case of those Muslims who will continue to press for an increasing Islamization of the West wouldn’t bother me at all. And I certainly cannot see any reason whatsoever why we ought to import any more of them.
1) Columbine, Timothy McVeigh, Waco, the Korean kid, Son of Sam, the two guys who shot random strangers in Washington a few summers ago, the guy who shot up an office just yesterday in Florida: none of them are Muslim, and suggesting that their ethnic or religious backgrounds are the cause of their dementia makes no more sense than claiming that Islam is somehow responsible for Hasan.
Let’s take out Occam’s razor here. I am sure that being a Muslim in the Army is no piece of cake: it’s probably like being the fat kid in third grade. Hasan had a very stressful job, dealing with returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress. He was about to be sent to Afghanistan. The most likely explanation is that he just lost it and cracked. I’m not saying that this is anything other than a horrifying and sickening event, but to draw larger conclusions from it is intellectually flaccid.
I don’t know how many thousands of Muslims serve in the Army, but if there were an actual connection between Islam and random violence, then you would see this sort of thing fairly often. However, this is the first time that such an event happened, and even outside the Army, random violence by Muslims is so rare in America as to be virtually non-existent. Extrapolating from the individual to the group is meaningless; if a trend exists, you find it by looking at the entire group to determine how prevalent the putative trend is.
2) There is no idea so bizarre that you can’t find enthusiastic adherents somewhere on the Internet, and in my view this clash of civilizations business is one of those ideas. You can look here, in Gates of Vienna (often quoted here), and similar sites to find those who are convinced that we’re involved in some epic conflict, sure to end someday in apocalypse. I think this sort of thing is typical of how the Internet contributes to the polarization of thought: people form self-referential groups of like-minded individuals and filter out opposing views, convinced by their respective amen corners that the rest of the world simply can’t see what is blazingly obvious to them. The future is unknowable, and hence you can’t debate stuff like this, as there is no evidence which will prove anyone right or wrong.
However, if such a conflict exists, we’re winning, and we’ve pretty much always won. Over the course of history, the West has done far more damage to Islam than they’ve done to us. We currently occupy two Muslim countries; they occupy none. We’ve got the weapons, the money, the technology, and the expertise. They don’t have much except an oil supply, which non-Muslim countries like Brazil, Russia, and Nigeria have. So while there will always be people who would like to do us harm — and some of them are Muslim — I think it is fruitless to point to an incident like Fort Hood as another epochal event in a continuing titanic conflict. It’s just a twisted and violent individual who lost his bearings and — due to the easy availability of assault weapons — ended a number of lives and ruined many more.
Peter, I doubt after all this time that either of us is likely to make headway with the other, but I will point out an elementary flaw in your reasoning, and a few factual errors.
First of all, that some people commit mass murder for reasons other than religion does not support the conclusion that no such acts are motivated by religion. Some are, some aren’t.
Second, this is NOT the first time a Muslim serviceman has slaughtered fellow soldiers; do your homework.
Third, regarding the “guys who shot random strangers in Washington a few summers ago”, none of whom are Muslim: are you referring to John Allen Muhammad, who changed his name from Williams when he joined the Nation of Islam?
Random violence by Muslims in America is comparatively rare in America, as you say, though becoming less so; it is not so rare elsewhere. Let’s keep it as rare as we can here.
I don’t doubt that Mr. Hasan was an unhappy and tormented man. As I noted above, his dual loyalty to Islam and the US Army seems to have been an intolerable strain. Loyalty to Islam appears to have won out. Lots of people in the Army are under various sorts of stress; but the only recent examples of murderous attacks on fellow soldiers have been by Muslims.
What troubles me is the persistence on the Left of the idea that jihad is a notion embraced only by a violent splinter of the Ummah who have “hijacked” Islam. As Andrew McCarthy writes here:
This is a clash of civilizations, Peter, and there are other weapons in play besides guns and bombs, or even money. And it is nothing new; it has been going on for a very long time. But again, I doubt either of us will make much headway with the other: you think I’m a crabbed, bitter, reactionary, crypto-Nazi Islamophobe, while I think you are the Platonic Form of the multi-culti peacenik Pollyanna liberal, and that you are willfully blind to the scope of this serious problem.
Crypto? Did I say crypto?
Let’s divide the world into the mythical “West” and the mythical “Islamic World”. That both of these are far from homogeneous (religiously, ethnically, culturally, etc.) we shall conveniently ignore– as is standard practice in how we individuate our social worlds, and in the narratives we tell each other about the other. The closer some out-group is to your in-group (assume, say, a partial ordering), the finer one’s discrimination– witness the almost comical feuding between adherents of subtly different doctrines on the nature of Christ in the second and third century eastern Mediterranean, and their lumping of everyone outside of their small world barbarians and pagans. Most liberals don’t discriminate between various kinds of conservative, no do conservatives between the various kinds of liberal or progressive– not because they can’t, or from some lack of awareness even, but because they don’t, as a matter of practice.
So, let’s divide the world between the West and the Islamic World (living inside this fantasy for the moment). It is clear that our discourse reinforces these differences, in particular discourse favoring narratives of clash of civilizations or irreconcilability between them. By emphasizing difference, we encourage difference. I mean on both sides. And that means the West too, and the narratives you employ on this blog. It’s not like either side is embracing the other, saying, “come here brother.” I don’t mean those shallow brands of multiculturalism practiced and encouraged by institutional bureaucrats and overly-naive xenophiles, nor the extreme and facile “self-hatred” of those who engage solely in social reflexive criticism (sometimes its healthy, but sometimes its corrosive). I mean embracing others by finding common ground that puts religious difference (indeed, even religiosity) in the background rather than the foreground.
So, for the purpose of analysis, we can divide the world and ask ourselves, who is the greatest threat to whom? At the level of cultural influence- who has the greater influence? Certainly Islam has found adherents among the blacks, for whom religious conversion serves simultaneously as a means of attaining a new assertive race-neutral global identity and casting off what is perceived as a Christian passivity, a white-man’s slaver religion. But Islam’s appeal in this case has a lot to do with our past (and present) racial sins; if Islam has a substantial influence in the U.S. Black community, the West has only itself to blame. Beyond that? Piecemeal at best, or due to large number of ghettoized immigrants. Europe has a lot of great kabab, but then again, it is often adapted to local tastes (e.g. with cabbage/saurkraut in Poland). I’ve never watched an arabic or Islam-oriented television show in the U.S., I’ve never watched shows produced in the Islamic world and transplanted here. Afghanistan has a contest show I hear based on American Idol. Oh wait, that’s the other way around. Afghanistan does export opium though. Hmmmm. Oh I get dates and apricots from Turkey. And of course, we’re all following the latest fashion from Istanbul and Dubai, right? Who has political power in the Middle East? Western corporations, businessmen, Western arms dealers, Western supported/propped up governments (e.g. Egypt/Israel/Turkey) with human rights abuses all over the place. Even where there’s not, one wonders if it is. Not to mention Western funded renegade organizations we use to try to overthrow non-friendly regimes (look at what Western engagement has done in Afghanistan and Iran for the last 60 years has got us. Terrorists.). Who has military bases in Saudi Arabia, the holy of holy land? U.S. infidels… to say that these people aren’t provoked…
American TV and cinema (and hence the best and worst it has to offer) is distributed across the world. Arabic youth want to dance the nasty and post sex videos online. We brought the Muslim world the Internet and a variety of ideas and influences that threaten to disintegrate the existing social order (a mixed bag of course). This inspires reactionary extremist response. In an age of bombs, internet, and plane travel, this makes it a world-wide problem. The threat of too rapid cultural change (especially in ways that press too hard on sensitive sexual, gender, and kinship related taboo and practice) makes such reactionary extremism inevitable, especially in the context of inequalities in wealth enabled by Western need for oil, and the extremely low-standard of living for the bottom makes everything unstable explosive situation (Al Qaida was of course a movement among the wealthy,, that’s another matter).
This reactionary extremism on the part of many Muslims (which of course has done no other Muslims favors in public opinion), is mirrored by reactionary Islama-phobias in the West, inspired by cultural change in the West. The source of that cultural change in the West is a mixture of immigration and indigenous cultural change enabled by technological revolutions and the ever-greater influence of national and international corporations and special interest groups (including particularly those pushing for gay rights, etc. which push heavily on deeply held social mores related to sex, gender, and kinship). So, of course, you have neo-Nazis and the like. But you also have run-of-the-mill folks who just don’t like immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims in particular (Cubans are ok because they spend so much time hating on Castro…).
( :
howsurprising, do you have a point of some sort in amongst all of that? If I can sniff one out at all, it seems to be just the same tired old cant about how all the ills of the world are due to the sins of the white man (a litany of misdeeds that apparently even includes inventing the Internet).
Here’s my point, and it’s a simple one: Islam and Western culture don’t mix well, and an increasing Muslim presence here in the West isn’t doing us any good. We have a rather ancient and excellent culture of our own here in the West — one that I’m fond of and proudly loyal to — and I don’t see why in the world we should feel obligated to “embrace” and “respect” an ideology that seeks to subjugate or destroy it.
That there is a distinction between the Western world and the Islamic world is hardly a “fantasy”. It is, rather, a glaring, persistent, and ancient reality, and, as I mentioned above, this distinction is a central tenet of Islam itself. Your idealistic notion of a world in which the totality of pious Muslims will enjoy “embracing others by finding common ground that puts religious difference (indeed, even religiosity) in the background rather than the foreground”, however, is such a fantasy — as has been amply demonstrated for the past 1,400 years. It is also, in my opinion, a naive and dangerous one.
It fascinates me that on the one hand you glibly justify violent extremism as a natural and appropriate (“inevitable”, even!) way for Muslims to respond to cultural change, but then castigate me as a vile Islamophobe when I react aversively to the prospect of the cultural change in the West that is taking place as a result of an increasing Muslim presence, particularly in Europe. Meanwhile, I’ll point out that my own response is simply to write relatively mild-mannered blog posts suggesting that we might want to think twice about our policy of radical multicultural inclusiveness and limitless immigration, whereas the Muslim reaction takes the form of riots, calls for the suppression of free speech, and the mass murder of innocents.
Likewise, it hardly seems consistent that in one breath you decry the “facile ‘self-hatred’ of those who engage solely in social reflexive criticism”, and then in the next you’re off to the races, doing exactly that: engaging in self-hating, reflexive social criticism of our own culture and its “sins”.
You should review what exactly it is you think you are arguing against here, and try to do so a little more coherently; your last is really nothing more than a rambling and unfocused rant. The only assertion I made in this post was that I think it is likely correct to view this massacre as an act of jihad.
You are welcome to comment here: you are obviously intelligent, and you write quite well. But do try to be pithy — and if you want to rebut some position of mine, then please, at least, try to understand it first, and try to stay on topic.
Really Malcolm. I don’t think my comment deserved your ire (or your gross misrepresentation). I will grant that the last half was less coherent (I was typing in a hurry)
My first point simply denies that the categorical opposition is adequately grounded in ethnographic fact:
1. Our discourse supposes a ‘scheme of individuation’ such that we individuate two socio-cultural entities: the Islamic World (henceforth I) and the Western-Christian World (henceforth W).
2. Actual ethnographic data show that this scheme of individuation is a gross over-simplification in that:
2.1 Cultural traits vary in relatively smooth gradients across regions.
2.2 Individual societies, communities, religions etc. are not monolithic entities, but that there is considerable in-group variation, along multiple dimensions (e.g. in religious belief).
Yet our discourse has consequence, because we act upon those things we believe, and we believe in the categories presupposed by our modes of reference.
However, to grant the hypothetical reality of I and W, one must ask, which party is most vulnerable to political and cultural dominance by the other? I argued that the political, economic, and cultural realities is that W currently impinges on I more than I on W:
3. W’s influence on I exceeds I’s influence on W. These influences include: projection of political power, projection of economic power, diffusion of cultural elements (e.g. fashions, books, movies, television, political ideologies, science, technology).
Do not misread 3 as a condemnation. It is merely an observation of empirical fact.
I then observed that rapid socio-cultural change creates various kinds of resentment. There are winners and losers, and previously stable social patterns disintegrate. Economic instability exacerbates this. I might further observe that an imbalance of power and influence itself can create resentment. From (3) it follows that with reasonable probability that I’s resentment along these’ lines will exceed that of W.
I then pointed out that this kind of resentment is causally correlated with reactionary political movements, such as the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East. This is a separate question as whether Islam as a religion is capable of providing ideological motivation for the distinctive expression of Islamic fundamentalist movements. Clearly it can and does. I neither excused Islamic fundamentalism, nor Islam in general from culpability. I did not appreciate your claim that I do.
Having said that I indicated that resentment-fueled reactionary movements and/or attitudes exist in W there still exist resentments in W fueling reactionary movements. However, given (3) it seems unlikely that I is the cause of that resentment. I argue that:
4. W is changing, rapidly, under its own largely internal dynamics, and this change results in resentment and reactionary movements in W of various kinds.
I think that reactionaries in W cannot come to terms with the W-internal cause of their resentments, and blame external entities (or entities such as immigrants held to be external) such as I (and various immigrant groups)
I resent! being told that I am engaging in self-hate by apportioning responsibility in some measure to both parties. There is nothing wrong with reflexive critique (indeed, it is necessary to the function of a democratic society). To think otherwise is absolutely foolish.
Neither did I ever justify violent extremism. I sought to explain it.
Finally you talk about me being naive about Muslims embracing the other. I find your response fascinating; did you miss my point? I said that it does not occur because we engage in a discourse that presumes irreconcilable differences between I and W. But perhaps in your haste you assumed that WE meant W, and not W and I both? But as a method for dissolving the conflict, I argue that one find common ground that diminishes the importance of various (e.g. religious) differences.
I’m for the larger project of diminishing the importance of religion altogether.
H,
First of all, I’m also “for” the larger project of diminishing the importance of religion altogether; as an atheist myself I believe the supernatural claims of the major religions to be almost certainly false.
I am not sanguine about the prospects, however. Formerly Christian Europe has managed the trick quite nicely, it seems, with one result being that secular Europeans are breeding at below-replacement levels, while highly religious immigrants are displacing them at a rate of about five to one. In my opinion religion itself is a product of group-level selection, and I am increasingly inclined to think that secularism may therefore be maladaptive: that in a word amply populated with strongly cohesive religious communities — communities that, unlike ours, have a full-blooded confidence in their righteous and God-given superiority, and no malarkey about ‘tolerance’ — secularism amounts, in a Darwinian sense, to unilateral disarmament.
Certainly I agree with your assertion that the influence of ‘W’ on ‘I’ is enormous. How could it not be? The progress of Western civilization has brought revolutionary transformation in nearly every aspect of human existence: communication, travel, science, medicine, politics, philosophy, etc. etc. — and of particular historical significance, warfare. The “modern world” is more or less entirely the product of post-Enlightenment Western culture. This has, over the last few centuries, discomfited ‘I’ considerably, for the reason that to a mind furnished with, and conditioned by, Islamic memes, it makes no sense whatever that the Ummah should be defeated, or for that matter eclipsed to any degree whatsoever, by infidels, given the perfection of the guidance and knowledge provided the faithful by the Koran and the Hadith.
All of this created enormous tension within Islam itself. How were they to respond to these defeats and setbacks at the hands of the unbelievers? For some pragmatic Muslim thinkers, the answer has been to adopt the methods and techniques of the West. But this has always been unacceptable to orthodox Muslims, because at the core of the strength of the West is its foundation in secular law, empirical science, and individual liberty. Secular law — the separation of church and state, the ‘rendering unto Caesar’ that is permitted under Christianity — is arguably heresy in Islam, a doctrine that goes at least as far back as the thirteenth century, when Ibn Taymiyya articulated the idea of tawhid, the unity of God.
Taymiyya expressed that unity in two forms: unity of sovereignty (God is the sole creator and ruler of the world), and unity of worship (God is the only suitable object of worship and obedience). To obey man-made laws, then, is effectively to worship and submit oneself to Man, rather than God, and is therefore apostasy. It is important to understand that this is not a fringe viewpoint; it is a clear and logical theological conclusion, and one held by millions and millions of Muslims around the world.
Given this, Muslims then sought to account for the accelerating failure of Islam to prevail against the infidels by suggesting that the problem was caused by insufficient fidelity to the teachings and example of the Prophet, and by corruption and drift. The answer, then, would be to rely only on the Koran — the literal and infallible word of God — and on the example provided by the life of the Prophet himself, and his companions. Everything else — in particular all modern ideas, influences, and innovations — must be discarded. This is salafism, and this is why Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the modern Western world. Sure, there will always be secularizing, “moderate” Muslims — the founders of Pakistan and modern-day Turkey were such men — but they are not the problem. The problem is the persistent gravitational pull toward retrograde fundamentalism that will always exist in any Muslim commmunity. Under any rigorous examination of Islam, secularism and “moderation” are heresy, plain and simple.
You wrote:
I agree with this, in part at least. ‘W’ is changing, rapidly, and the shift in internal dynamics is due in large part to the discarding of traditional cultural pride by a self-negating fetish of multiculturalism, and of moral and cultural relativism.
I, at least, am one reactionary who has quite thoroughly come to terms with the W-internal cause of our problem here in the West, and I do not blame Muslims for their opportunism; they are simply taking advantage of our new weakness, as any opponent would — particularly one with the long-smoldering resentment of Western superiority that ‘I’ has borne for centuries. No, though I may criticize Islam as a religion and ideology utterly unworthy of the “respect” that is demanded of us by the Ummah and its well-intentioned pawns here in the West, I reserve blame for the idiotic policies of fawning obeisance, supine appeasment, and open-door immigration that have characterized the West’s attitude toward Islam in recent decades. I don’t blame Muslims for trying to bring Shari’a to Europe; they’ve been trying to do that, after all, since the Middle Ages, and we should know by now that this is simply what Muslims do. No, I blame Europe, for throwing open the gates.
Finally, you wrote:
I remain confident that this is an utterly naive and unrealistic wish, for the reasons I have outlined above. The best we can hope for, I think, is to build strong fences, and I think it’s high time we got to work. Fortunately, I think this is beginning to sink in all over Europe, as is the magnitude of our multiculturalist folly — but it is still such a polarizing topic, and still so radioactive in the halls of government and academe, that the discussion of it is unfortunately still dominated by extremists like Nick Griffin of the BNP. We need to be able to have a frank discussion of these realities without being reflexively and unthinkingly tarred as racists and xenophobes (of which I, for example, am neither).
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/events/engineering-islam-from-faith
This paper analyzes a socio-technical scheme for developing faith in contemporary Indonesia. The paper describes how Islam is being mobilized to facilitate the neoliberal reform of state-owned enterprises planned for privatization. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research, most of which took place at state-owned Krakatau Steel in Cilegon, Banten, I show how what Indonesians call “spiritual reform” is mobilized to address the crisis posed by the end of faith in development. Faith in development refers to state-directed development and the post-colonial project of nationalist modernization and industrialization. The paper describes how spiritual reformers interpret the Qur’an, Islamic history, and Muslim religious practices to make Islam compatible with principles for corporate success found in human resources management texts, self-help manuals, and life-coaching sessions. In elaborately narrated and vividly illustrated PowerPoint presentations the prophet Muhammad is represented as an “ideal CEO” and the five pillars of Islam are reinterpreted as directives for business success. I conclude that this assemblage of the twilight of nationalist development, religious resurgence, and transnational economic integration provides insight into an alternative means to understand and analyze globalization. Whereas most social scientists treat globalization as either a space, an era, a culture, or a system, this new approach focuses the actual practice of globalization.
howsurprising, it’s customary, when pasting in content from other sources, to use quotation marks.
I have no doubt that there are lots of projects out there that are going to bring Islam into the 21st century in various ways.
“I walk in the woods with a friend. I encounter a hungry looking lion; it appears ominous and roars violently. I reach for my weapon. My friend says: “Peter that is not right! You are “lionphobic”.”
I am! When a lion appears hungry, ominous, and roars violently I believe that its intentions are to eat me. And if I wish to survive this encounter, then I am justified to reach for my weapon: lionphobia or not.
Those who believe Radical (I prefer the word ‘Fascist’, but we may quarrel over the wording) Islam intends to wipe out Western people, values, and culture should reluctantly, but firmly, admit that they are “Islamophobic” and explain that by being so they mean that they are justifiably concerned that those who are, join, or in any way sympathize with Islamic Fascism mean to do exactly what they say they will do, given the opportunity.
Reluctantly, because such concerns are liable to spill over to affect many quite innocent Muslims and being sensitive and humane creatures as we aspire to be, we wish desperately to avoid overgeneralizations, profiling and the sort of hate that typifies Islamic Fascists (hence these debates, which incidentally have no echo in the halls of Islamic Fascists). For better or worst we have these values (freedom, tolerance, religious plurality, the marketplace of ideas, intelligent and civil debates, etc.,), all which Islamic Fascists pledge to send to hell, and so we are reluctant to hastily abandon them while we defend ourselves against annihilation. Hence, reluctantly, but…
Firmly, because when a lion is hungry and roars violently one is justified to assume it intends to eat you and will in fact do so. Islamic Fascists pledge to wipe out western people, values, and culture and they show it by their actions: this is the hunger, the ominous and violent roar. The last time the world ignored a similar pledge, it cost humanity tens of millions of people and untold suffering.
I ask the “gentle” people: do you or do you not believe that when those who are, join, or sympathize with Islamic Fascism pledge to eliminate Western people, values, and culture mean it?
If you do believe they mean it, then the debate between the gentle and the concerned is simply a matter of means. But we agree about the end: i.e., since Islamic Fascism means what it says, we should take all effective means to defend ourselves.
If, on the other hand, you do not believe it, then you need to explain why? Why do you think that a hungry looking lion that roars ominously and violently ready to attack you does not really mean it?
Islamophobia, lionphobia…a red, but dangerous, herring!
Peter! Good to see you here again. (Readers, this is philosopher Peter Lupu, a different “peter” from our old sparring partner “the one eyed man”; he has commented here before on other topics.)
Thanks for that excellent comment. If I have a single quibble it is that “phobia”, in accepted parlance, refers to an irrational fear, and that is the sense in which it is used, pejoratively, by the Left against those they tar as “xenophobes”, “Islamophobes”, etc.
But there is nothing irrational about fearing a hungry lion, or a hungry Islamist.
Malcolm,
Fun seeing you again too.
Those who yell ‘Islamophobia’ need to argue first that the fear is irrational. Hence, my question at the end of the post. And the argument cannot be: “Well, look the lion did not eat you yet. You are justified to be lionphobic only after he eats you.”
Pleasure talking to you, Malcolm
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2009/11/07/official-timing-of-hasan-s-gun-purchase-shows-of-course-he-planned-this.aspx