The always-egregious and virulently anti-Christian James Carroll has done it again in this Boston Globe column (thanks to "Allah"), sweeping away mountains of evidence of the Islamic sincerity and motivations of the global jihadists:
Even though the war on terrorism is indeed, as the president said, a "crusade," it has nothing real to do with Islam either, although Islam is surely its target. Not Islam as it actually exists in dozens of different settings and cultures across the globe, but an imagined Islam that exists only in the troubled minds of a people who project "evil" outward and then attack it. Alas, it is an old Christian habit.The war, meanwhile, answers the Bush administration's need to justify an unprecedented repressiveness in the "homeland," and simultaneously prompts widespread docile submission to the new martial law. But more deeply still, by understanding ourselves as a people at war, we Americans find exemption from the duty to face the grotesque shame of what we are doing in the world.
So the final truth about this war is that there is no real enemy (although we are creating enemies by the legion). There will be no victory. I resume this regular column by declaring, President Bush was right.
The sheer idiocy of this takes my breath away. As if invention and projection were responsible for the jihadist statements and actions I post here routinely. Carroll comes off here as one of the most bizarrely paranoid of all conspiracy theorists, seeing the sinister hand of Bush (and Halliburton, I guess) everywhere jihad flares around the globe. I wonder how the President manages to keep the jihad going in Thailand, Indonesia, Kashmir, the Philippines, and Nigeria, all the while bringing it to a boil in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel. That Bush must be far more intelligent than most Leftists usually admit, eh, Jimmy?
OT: Here is a great little summation of the evils of cultural relativism:
In his excellent book, The Killing of History (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000)Keith Windschuttle says, among many other intelligent things, as follows:
"The late Ernest Gellner pointed out the basic logical flaws in cultural relativism. In his book Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Gellner showed that relativists are saddled with two unresolvable dilemmas. They endorse as legitimate other cultures that do not return the compliment. Some other cultures, of which one of the best known is Islam, will have no truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally confident of the universalism of their own beliefs which derive from the dictates of God, an absolute authority who is external to the world and its cultures. They regard a position such as postmodern cultural relativism as profoundly mistaken and, moreover, debasing. Relativism devalues their faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural relativism is, first, an endorsement of absolutisms that deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it claims to respect." (p. 301-2)
A little Bat Ye'or, Habib Malik, Walid Phares, Armand Abel, a little K. S. Lal and Jahundath Sarkar, a little Margoliouth and a little Snouck Hurgronje, and a little -- well, fill it in yourself, because you can be sure James Carroll has never bothered to read any of these people. Why should he? He knows. Armstrong and Esposito and some very nice Muslim friends have kept him fully informed. He doesn't need to know about the Sudan, or the "jihad" -- Col. Ojukwu's own words -- that was conducted against the Ibo Christians and led them to declare the independence of Biafra. He doesn't need to know about the 1804 Jihad declared in West Africa, nor the one declared by Abd El Kader in North Africa, nor the one of the Mad Mahdi in the Sudan (say, just why has George Bush been tricking those Arab Muslims into killing 2 million Christians in the south for the last 20 years -- do you think he knew he was going to run for office, and just had Halliburton set the whole thing up?) And what about the jihad-genocide against the "giavour" -- the Infidel Armenians, conducted in 1894-95 by Turks and Kurds, and then, having warmed up, with much greater ferocity and fury, in 1915? And what about the world-wide Jihad declared in 1915 -- has Carroll ever heard of it? What does he make of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, or the tens of thousands of Buddhist and Hindu temples, and hundreds of thousands of artifcats and manuscripts, destroyed by the Muslim conquerors of the Greco-Buddhist civilization of Central Asia, and of India itself? How does he explain it? Does he think that Aurangzeb was the exception, and Akbar the rule? Does he even know who Aurangzeb (aside from that play by Dryden) was, or Akbar? Has Mr. Carroll read, and re-read, and studied, the Qur'an, and the hadith in the recensions of Bukhari or Muslim? Could he tell us what "isnad" is? Or why the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya matters, for example, when Yassir Arafat mentions it constantly? What does he make of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb? Does he think it is a joke, all made up by crazy people who write for National Review? Leaving aside Bush -- put Bush out of it entirely -- does he not feel an obligation to learn, really learn, about Islam before making pronouncements with such self-assurance? Some of us have had to spend, or waste, precious months and years, learning about it. And we don't have columns. He has a responsiblity to learn for himself -- not to accept substitutes. And he should really start, let us say, with the most important contemporary student of dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or, her three books and her articles at www.dhimmitude.org, and then he might go on to Ibn Warraq, and his books, especially "Why I Am Not a Muslim," and the articles by him, and by many others, at www.secularislam.org. Then, and only then, is James Carroll entitled to have an opinion.
"Whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak." Listen to Ludwig.
The nutburger left has been saying ever since Reagan was president that the eeeeeeeeevvvvvvillllll Republicans would OF COURSE want us to get into war, because we need "a good war" to pull this country together and, of course, jump start the economy. (But don't tell' em WWII ended the depression, no siree.)
Now the idea is that OF COURSE we needed a new enemy since the USSR is defunct, so natch we invented radical Islam.
Mentally, the left has left the building.
Ahhh, yes. And the Leftists, liberal democrats, and looney left teachers soak it up with glee. One wonders, as their own clothing sops up their blood as they lay in the aftermath of a Major attack on Boston, if they will finally figure it out...
One month and 24 days to the election. We have to get it Right! 4 more years!
Curious that James Carroll recognizes that the adherents of one religion can certainly be whipped up to view the adherents of another religion as enemies to be harmed or destroyed. That, after all, was what "Constantine's Sword" was all about (it has some idiotic words on Islam, of course). So why should Carroll, a priori, believe that Islam is not at least as dangerous a belief-system as, he argues, Christianity has been? Whatever one thinks of his work in this area (I prefer the passionate Roman Catholic Scots historian Malcolm Hay, whose "The Foot of Pride" has been reprinted as "Europe and the Jews," and his short book on Pascal/antisemitism is also good)? Why does he, without any real investigation, give Islam a pass? This is not scholarship. This is a belief, a devout belief that because Bush is EVIL, and everyone around him is EVIL, it is therefore not possible that there really is something about Islam, for which we have 1350 years of evidence.
What is it Jay Leno would say, if Wittgenstein can't make himself heard? Get over it.
(I put the below comment in the wrong thread - really wanted it here.)
I thought everyone knew that the Left hates western culture? Why would these comments come as a surprise? The western culture we live in has a bedrock of law based upon the Judeo-Christian ethic. Modern liberal thought wishes to remove these influences from our culture, in order to replace them with so called secular ( i.e. “rational”) constructs. Try as you might, you cannot make headway against rationalism as the primary arbitrator of human existence. The simple fact of “garbage in – garbage out” makes no headway. How about: everything you know is wrong? If it wasn’t – we would not need progress. Almost everything we know about the physical universe has changed in the last twenty years – former experts are ridiculed. How could they (previous experts) be so blind and stupid, right? It is the same in all field of human endeavor, what we know now – is most assuredly wrong. If what we know is wrong, how can you base a rational construct of an ideal civilization on something you know is wrong? There is no underpinning to human rationality. Liberals base their ideas on what they think is right, but they are not God, and so – they do not have the slightest clue what will really happen if we go down their road. No one here walks on water anymore, not for a few thousand years at least.
I matriculated from a Jesuit university with a Masters in Teaching in the mid ninety’s. Multiculturism was really gathering steam in education at that point. I believe I was the only token neocon in the whole program. I mostly paddled upstream trying to point out the flaws of such reasoning, but to no avail. My argument was “ What happens when two cultures are toxic to each other?” was met with the assertion that “we will choose the more humane course at points of conflict “, thereby substituting their own cultural prejudices upon cultural groups. Whatever they choose is OK, the rest have to submit. This is tyranny by another name.
Look, this is too philosophical. We just have to realize that the left is doing what it does best – using the pen to disarm those stupid conservatives again. Just like the Jihadists, they lie, because it gets them what they want. I have seen no evidence to support the idea that the left is using reasoned debate for anything but obscuring the issues. They never come to a point, and are impossible to pin down. They change the subject or attack the people proposing the counter argument in a personal way – which has nothing to do with the issue at hand. I truly believe that the agenda of the elite in the USA is to destroy our country’s culture so that it can then be made over into their vision of utopia. The problem is that their vision is flawed by their reasoning – and will only result in blood and martyrs.
IT'S NOT A WAR ON TERROR!!!!! It's stupid to continue to call this a war on terror. Terror is only a tactic. Why do they all make this mistake????
Of course we can't win a war against a tactic. Any fool knows that. However, we can and must win the war against the jihadists because to do so will mean the end of us all.
Carroll apparently doesn't understand this. The American people won't understand until the mainstream press uses the correct terminology. They do continue to lie and obscure. Their reasoning is inexplicable. Are they so obtuse or are they on the side of enemy?