Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer in FrontPage on just one of the many academic Saidists who make it virtually impossible to find the truth about the jihad ideology in an academic setting today: Mark LeVine.
Sheikh Hassan Yusef of Hamas has extended an olive branch: “This may surprise you,” he said Monday, “but a ‘hudna’ — a cease-fire, should be between two sides who agree to live together side by side. Such a ‘hudna’ could be for 10 years and could be extended.” This will doubtless be music to the ears of large segments of the American punditocracy, and to no one more than to Mark LeVine of the University of California at Irvine. Last summer LeVine declared in a widely-reprinted article: “It is time for the United States to declare a truce with the Muslim world, and radical Islam in particular.” He explained that “a truce (Arabic hudna), rather than an increasingly dangerous ‘clash of civilizations,’ is the only way to avoid a long, ultimately catastrophic conflict.”LeVine acknowledged that “this may sound like a naive, even defeatist statement,” and that was an understatement. For the traditional Islamic understanding of a hudna, which Sheikh Hassan almost certainly had in mind, doesn’t consider a truce a foundation for peaceful coexistence, but a temporary measure to allow Muslim forces to gain strength. The Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence stipulates that there must be “some interest served in making a truce other than mere preservation of the status quo.” The only “interests that justify making a truce are such things as Muslim weakness because of lack of numbers or materiel” — which the time of the truce would allow the Muslim forces to remedy — “or the hope of an enemy becoming Muslim” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.16). So LeVine, in calling for a hudna with “radical Islam in particular,” is in effect recommending that the United States suspend the war on terror so that Osama bin Laden and company can come back again in a few years with renewed strength and virulence.
Such naivete and defeatism would be unworthy of notice were it not for the fact that LeVine is a rising star of the academic Left. The Orange County Register gushed that he “has worked in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Egypt and North Africa” and that he “speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, French and Italian. He can read German. He taught himself Farsi. He’s a religion scholar, so he’s fluent in the Bible and the Quran. He’s most notably educated in modern Middle Eastern history, in Islamic culture and on why globalization is complicating already complicated things.”
LeVine packages all this erudition with fashionable cool: the Register admiringly called him a “long-haired blond American hippie” and was moved to paroxysms of boomer glee by his resume as a musician: “LeVine is also an accomplished enough guitarist to have played live with Dr. John and on one of Mick Jagger’s solo albums. He’s spent time on stage with Johnny Copeland, Chuck D, Albert Collins and Ben E. King. He played Woodstock in 1994. And there was that one glorious afternoon in 2002 in Los Angeles when he and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant lapsed into mutual Arabic.”
When not hobnobbing with aging rock glitterati, LeVine attempts to revive the fortunes of fading stars of a different sort. Four days after 9/11, he complained that “figures like Noam Chomsky or Edward Said” were “shunned by the mainstream media here…When was the last time a voice like theirs was on the NewsHour or Nightline?” LeVine makes no mention of the fact that Chomskyites and Saidists have placed Middle East Studies departments in American universities into an ideological straitjacket that would have made Stalin blush — a straitjacket that LeVine himself seems to find quite comfortable. He has, after all, himself carried the message of his poor shunned heroes Chomsky and Said onto NewsHour (several times) and the O’Reilly Factor, as well as (inevitably) National Public Radio and other more or less mainstream outlets. LeVine has made these discredited humbugs cool again.
Of course, you don’t get to be a wunderkind these days for nothing. LeVine owes his status to his willingness to place the responsibility for the strife between the West and the Islamic world squarely on the shoulders of the West. American hawks, he says, have built a myth around Osama: “age-old clichés, truisms and convenient misconceptions about the Middle East and Islam have been wrapped around the persona of Osama bin Laden to drum up patriotism and beat down questioning voices.” They have used this myth to mask their imperialist intentions; despite mounting evidence of the true dimensions of Saddam’s murderous tyranny, LeVine is certain that America has no good motives for being in Iraq, and looks to the UN as Iraq’s last hope: “Can Iraqi society challenge the violent calculus of US military planners and insurgents alike with a vision of a future free of occupation and autocracy, corruption and extremism? More than wishing the Iraqis well, the international community needs to get its hands dirty to ensure that they have a fighting chance.”
Similarly, LeVine suggests that Israel has created Hamas — with no mention of the violent and absolutist jihadist sentiments expressed in Hamas’s charter, or of the suicide bombers whom Hamas celebrates as heroes for their murders of Israeli civilians: “Not just Palestinian activists, but foreign peace activists and even Israelis are routinely beaten, arrested, deported, or even killed by the IDF, with little fear that the Government of Israel would pay a political price for crushing non-violent resistance with violent means….Not surprisingly considering this dynamic, a poll I helped direct earlier this year revealed that Hamas has now surpassed the PLO as the most popular Palestinian political movement.”
It’s peculiar and even ethnocentric to place the blame for present conflicts on two Western democracies, and thereby deny to the great non-Western forces in the conflict anything but a passive, reactive role, but in this LeVine is following the line of his two infamous mentors. Said, of course, made his name by ruling out of polite discourse as racist and imperialist anything in the slightest degree critical of Islam or the Muslim world — including any honest examination of the roots of Islamic radicalism in traditional Muslim teachings about jihad. And as the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, Chomsky wrote: “September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention” — not to the motivations and goals of radical Muslims, but “to what the United States Government does in the world and how it is perceived.” Borrowing a homespun metaphor from a former Israeli intelligence chief, Chomsky warned: “If America insists on creating more swamps, there will be more mosquitoes, with awesome capacity for destruction.”
Glaringly absent from this analysis, and from most of what LeVine also writes, is substantive respect for these “mosquitoes” as actors in their own right in today’s great global drama — not just reactors to whatever America or Israel has done now. The teachings of traditional Islam and what modern imams around the world actually say about jihad come in for scant consideration in LeVine’s writings. Yet American power, the occupation of Iraq, and the continued existence of the State of Israel do nothing to explain the rise of the first modern Islamic terror group, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt in the 1920s — two decades before the founding of Israel and long before “No blood for oil!” became a Leftist rallying cry. American power, Israel, and the occupation of Iraq have nothing to do with the great jihads of history, the most spectacular and successful of which were waged not when the Islamic world was impoverished and oppressed, but when its military might and cultural attainments were the envy of the world. The ideological kinship between today’s jihadists and those of bygone days is another subject which, however worth pursuing, has never preoccupied LeVine’s writings — although it reveals more than a little about the larger motives and goals of today’s global jihadist movement.
Mark LeVine, then, for all his vaunted scholarship, is guilty of the very crime that his revered Said leveled so devastatingly against the genuine scholars he smeared as racist “Orientalists”: he sees America and the West as the only real actor on the world stage, and discounts or overlooks altogether (even as he chats with them in their native tongues) what the indigenous peoples are saying — except insofar as it confirms the Leftist caricature of America victimizing the world for its economic benefit. As his star continues to rise, if he gets his way not just Israel but America also may enjoy the peace of a hudna with the global jihadists — and both will discover to their dismay that that peace was just the calm before the storm.
OT
You can watch "bridges tv" online as long as you have a high speed connection
http://www.bridgestv.com/home.asp#
I was just watching the islamic news, they were just thanking the police cheif that fasted, a pakistani muslim pilot (small planes) that purchased 737 manuals on ebay was visited by the FBI and (in the words of the anchor) unfairly questioned by them without a lawyer, a muslim employee of Bell South has just won his case with the help of CAIR so that he may leave work to pray on fridays and during the day...wow its the US aljeezera without the gore. I wonder if the FBI is logged on.
Ignoramuses such as this Levine geezer are begining to fade drastically, their arguments and opinions are becoming stagnant, the intelligent ones among them are repeating the same sound-bites, and using the same baseless, closed-minded arguments as the dumbest liberals, and every day we see more positive things happening in Iraq (and the more we see the very real hatred and savagery of muslim jihadists) the lefts whining and screeching about "Iraq being more dangerous", "no WMDs", "US imperialism", "oppressed muslims", and limb-hacking jihadist nut-fucks being dubbed "freedom fighters", they become that little bit less credible.
The left are their own worsed enemy, really, they have no idea that the only people they are convincing with their shite, are other like-minded (or like-mindless) morons who go to the same dinner parties, or watch the same shows, read the same papers/magazines...etc; no-one else. And those that were neutral are getting sick of these self-righteous cretins telling them what opinions to have, and what they're allowed to think all the time.
This is what gets me about Edward Said style screeds and manifesto.
While excoriating the West for its imperial history, a history that the West acknowledges and has repented, he dresses in sugar and honey THE IMPERIALISM OF ISLAM WHICH DEVASTATED LANDS RELIGIONS AND CULTURES ENSLAVED PEOPLE SMASHED THEIR PLACES OF WORSHIP AND WIPE OUR ENTIRE CIVILISATIONS
The Zoroastrians were wiped out of history in Persia by the Islamic imperialists. And yet Said depicted Muslims as fluffy cuddly teddy bears who never did anything wrong.
Today, Muslims still have the arrogant imperialistic mindset of the old Jihadis, they still glorify their "empire" and rule, when they brought with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, "civilisation" to the scumbag cavemen of the non Islamic world.
Edward Said and his disciples are ipso facto supporters of Islamic imperialism and complicit in the perpetuation of Jihadi violence, white washers of the bloody history of Islamic imperialistic aggression and violence, the imperialism that lives and breathes and slaughters in Darfur today.
This point should be made over and over again. Academics and scholars should address in an holistic way the methods and modes of inquiry that Said applied to westen imperialism in his book "Orientalism"...subject Ibn Batuta and those arrogant imperialists of the Islamic world to the same test to show the persistent and asphyxiating nature of ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM
Tie these words together, Islam and Imperialism, so they become associated in the minds of the world, enquire, investigate, bring the history back to life, do not let the Saidists white wash the cruel and thuggish history of Islamic expansionism. Highlight the essential bigotry of Islam that proclaims all other faiths as inferior, show the hypocrisy of them claiming Islam as a benign force persecuted by the West. Islam has been a supreme persector throughout its history.
Get the word out.
The ideological straight jacket that Said and others have placed on Middle East studies is an analogue to that the admirerso of Mao (a Hitler who had no Jews) put on Chinese studies during the 1970's. Unfortunately, though, as contacts between the US and China grew and as China experienced cycles of internal dissidence that grew increasingly critical of the Communist Party, the American Sinological community retreated. In journalism, for instance, Fox Butterfield, who went to China as much as a pilgrim as a journalist for the NYTimes, left and wrote one of the early, penetrating criticisms of the pre-reform Communist regime. Perhaps when the Iranian regime cracks and there is a major Los vom Islam in one or more core Islamic countries led by people raised as Muslims themselves, the voices of Said and Chomsky will appear very foolish.
This is a reason why I would prefer to back off from confrontation with the Islamic world and eschew any attempt to reform Islam from the outside. A whole civilization is grappling with problems it has long needed to confront, and there's bound to be trouble and unpleasant fallout. Without a US or other Western commitment to "crusade" against it, one of the chief casualties of the Islamofascists may very well be Islam's image with its own adherents.
This article caught my interest. Here is a person who represents something essential in any modern marketing strategy, including that of the leftist/Islamist alliance- image matters. That explains the title of Mr. Spencer’s article “Mark LeVine: Noam Chomsky as Rock Star”. Of course ideas matter too regardless of whether or not they are substantive.
Mr. Levine is a professor of modern Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies at UC, Irvine. I am concerned about this after briefly reading his views from several 'Google' http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/28/news-levine.php sites. I don't need to go very much further to see that he is a biased player in the area of his chosen profession and a potentially dangerous one at that, considering his position of responsibility as a professor.
It makes all the sense in the world that this article appears in David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, considering his emphasis on educational leftism and indoctrination in American universities-of which Mr. LeVine will certainly contribute to with the aid of a cheerleading press.
The danger I see with Mr. LeVine is of the usual bias and distortions specifically designed to shape public opinion with regard to Muslims and the Islamist agenda, which if the title of his book "Why They Don't Hate Us" is any indication, seeks to explain and blame in all the usual fuzzy ways that should have been long ago discredited.
But it gets better. His resume is full of references to hi musical prowess and experience as a performer in various Blues, Jazz R&B and Hip Hop groups. With all his musical experience and adventure, i.e., "Living next door to Hamas mosques, standing against bulldozers, dodging terrorist bombs, I wonder what exactly qualifies him to be the voice of a new generation of mid east professors?
He certainly appears to be leftist, pacifist and utopian, choosing to ignore Islamic history of the last 1,450 years and instead focuses, as his title implies, on "Modern Middle Eastern" history, seemingly ignoring all the rest as though Islam is a fickle and easily distracted as the Western mind-set. Of course modern history to him is all together separate and distinct from the tenants and teachings of Islam in the Koran, Hadith and other sources. Historic experience with Islam world wide, does not indicate a pattern to this professor who has apparently lived extensively in the region and surely has seen that much of the Islamic worlds problems originate in the Islamic world.
Being promoted like a prophet by his “progressive” backers who embrace his message; "We need an Axis of Empathy", is not that difficult a feat considering the media and academic bias that insists despite all reason and experience that such appeasement can only lead to our eventual destruction which I have not had the time to see if he even addresses.
He covers his rear by making the grey-blanket statement that "the idea that most Muslims hate the United States or the West is a useful fabrication that helps fundamentalists on both sides...". Such a comment is designed to give the impression that we in the West, in Europe or America for example, have anything remotely resembling Islamic fundamentalists, i.e., bloody beheading jihadists and radical hate spewing clerics as a natural by-product of our civilization.
It is typical putrid leftism and disinformation, spread by a focus group caricature, self-designed to appeal to Gen X and Y hipsters . He is peddling intellectual dishonesty and morally relativistic fantasies as illustrated by his article "10 Things to know About Terrorism", ( http://www.alternet.org/story/11647 ). Notice the Chompsyesque stab at equating America not only as a terrorist state by virtue of its own definitions of the term, but also a chief enabler and supporter of terrorism throughout the world.
This recalls the Chomsky film I saw recently in Munich where "Chompers" himself famously states about America, "Want to stop terrorism? It's easy, stop being a terrorist!" How can LeVine possibly be taken seriously when his idol is an anti-American leftist and his solutions refuse to admit the problem without blaming those who are resisting the jihad?
The greater danger of course is that this cool "gig" seeking performer/"I feel your pain" professor, has the power to influence an entire generation to blindly accept as truth, this man’s flawed and above all biased, understanding of Islam and its eventual cultural hegemony over the Western world.
A Critical Voice of the new (cough) Generation:
http://www.meaning.org/levinebio.html
My "Article" above had a few typographical errors in it so I am reposting it again (Sorry).
This article caught my interest. Here is a person who represents something essential in any modern marketing strategy, including that of the leftist/Islamist alliance- image matters. That explains the title of Mr. Spencer’s article “Mark LeVine: Noam Chomsky as Rock Star”. Of course ideas matter too regardless of whether or not they are substantive.
Mr. Levine is a professor of modern Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies at UC, Irvine. I am concerned about this after briefly reading his views from several 'Google' http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/28/news-levine.php sites. I don't need to go very much further to see that he is a biased player in the area of his chosen profession and a potentially dangerous one at that, considering his position of responsibility as a professor.
It makes all the sense in the world that this article appears in David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, considering his concern about educational leftism and indoctrination in American universities-of which Mr. LeVine will certainly contribute to with the aid of a cheerleading press.
The danger I see with Mr. LeVine is of the usual bias and distortions specifically designed to shape public opinion with regard to Muslims and the Islamist agenda, which if the title of his book "Why They Don't Hate Us" is any indication, seeks to explain and blame in all the usual fuzzy ways that which should have been long ago discredited. One can almost hear Professor LeVine singing "Kumbyah" around the fire.
But it gets better. His resume is full of references to his musical prowess and experience as a performer in various Blues, Jazz R&B and Hip Hop groups. With all his musical experience and adventure, i.e., "Living next door to Hamas mosques, standing against bulldozers, dodging terrorist bombs”, I wonder what exactly qualifies him to be the voice of a new generation of mid east professors?
He certainly appears to be leftist, pacifist and utopian, choosing to ignore Islamic history of the last 1,450 years and instead focuses, as his title implies, on "Modern Middle Eastern" history, seemingly ignoring all the rest as though Islam is a fickle and easily distracted as the Western mind-set. Of course, modern history to him is all together separate and distinct from the tenants and teachings of Islam in the Koran, Hadith and other sources. Historic experience with Islam, world wide, does not indicate a pattern to this professor who has apparently lived extensively in the region and surely has seen that much of the Islamic world’s problems originate in the Islamic world.
Being promoted like a prophet by his “progressive” backers who embrace his message; "We need an Axis of Empathy", is not that difficult a feat considering the media and academic bias that denies despite all reason and experience that such appeasement can only lead to our eventual destruction which I have not had the time to see if he even addresses.
He covers his rear by making the grey-blanket statement that "the idea that most Muslims hate the United States or the West is a useful fabrication that helps fundamentalists on both sides...". Such a comment is designed to give the impression that we in the West, in Europe or America for example, have anything remotely resembling Islamic fundamentalists, i.e., bloody beheading jihadists and radical hate spewing clerics as a natural by-product of our civilization.
It is typical putrid leftism and disinformation, spread by a focus group caricature, self-designed to appeal to Gen X and Y hipsters . He is peddling intellectual dishonesty and morally relativistic fantasies as illustrated by his article "10 Things to know About Terrorism", ( http://www.alternet.org/story/11647 ). Notice the Chomsky-esque stab at equating America not only as a terrorist state by virtue of its own definitions of the term, but also a chief enabler and supporter of terrorism throughout the world.
This recalls the Chomsky film I saw recently in Munich where "Chompers" himself famously states about America, "Want to stop terrorism? It's easy, stop being a terrorist!" How can LeVine possibly be taken seriously when his protégé is an anti-American leftist and his solutions refuse to admit the problem without blaming those who are resisting the jihad?
The greater danger of course is that this cool "gig" seeking performer/"I feel your pain" professor, has the power to influence an entire generation to blindly accept as truth, his flawed and above all biased, understanding of Islam and its eventual cultural hegemony over the Western world.
A Critical Voice of the new (cough) Generation, LeVine’s Resume:
http://www.meaning.org/levinebio.html
I'm relieved that this is not the same Mark Levine who is a jazz pianist and author of The Jazz Piano Book and The Jazz Theory Book. In all honesty, I have no idea what that Mr. Levine's politics are, but I'd hate to find out he was of the same ilk as the Mr. Levine that you describe.
Kaffir Boy (and everyone else):
Ibn Warraq did a good job of taking Said apart. The article is posted at www.isisforum.com/articles/debunking.htm, and Ian Baruma and another professor further skewered Said with their book, "Occidentalism" by hoisting him with his own petard.
Mark LeVine, the Pied Piper of Irvine: So young, so hip, so LAME.
BTW, another great public service announcement, RS. Up until I read this piece I was blissfully unaware of Mr. LeVine - I thought all that hot air blowing out of the West was the El Nino.
It’s peculiar and even ethnocentric to place the blame for present conflicts on two Western democracies, and thereby deny to the great non-Western forces in the conflict anything but a passive, reactive role...
Exactly. This trend has disturbed me for some time.
Because if terrorism is the West's fault, doesn't that assume that Westerners are the only ones with any free will? If we are pulling the strings, doesn't that assume that other human beings are simply puppets?
What lies and flagellations will we endure to maintain the illusion of control?
For some one as allegedly " educated " and " leftist" like Mark Lavine to turn a blind eye and accept by silence the social customs of fundamentalist Islam, were talking here the execution of women for the mere act of having sex and dismembering people for shoplifting, just goes to show what a CONSERVATE he is!
If he had been around in during the American Civil War he would have condemed the Iperalist North and ignored the slavery of the Confederate South...........Would have!?! There is still slavery going on in the Muslim world to this day!
He apparently thinks time should just be frozen in place a appease religious bigots and fanatics and has never heard of something called PROGRESS.
But he none the less sees himself as a " progressive " whom none the less has a distain for such.
Nossy
Reading Mr. LeVine's thoughts brings to memory that perennial classic "The Treason of the Intellectuals" ("La Trahison Des Clercs") by Julien Benda... *
Benda's analysis of men like LeVine and E. Said is startlingly clearly in his dissection of the types of people who preach peacefulness' to the powerful:
"...there is the pacifism... which does nothing but denounce 'the man who kills', and sneers at the prejudices of patriotism. When I see certain teachers... whose whole case against war consists of saying highwaymen are no more criminal than leaders of armies, and in laughing at people who kill each other because one party is dressed in yellow and one in blue, I feel inclined to desert a cause whose champions oversimplify things to this extent..." --- "...these strange friends of justice are willing to say: 'I always maintain my country is in the wrong, even when it is right'. Here we see the frenzy of impartiality, like any other frenzy, leads to injustice."
That is precisely what I hear from LeVine and Said and their co-suicidalists or Muslo-fascist apologists: a "frenzy of impartiality" (when it comes to vilifying their host nation, and when soft-pedalling their own side's crimes).
The powerful nation/alliance is ALWAYS wrong, in their view. Just because, to have power, means theft. (An offshoot of Proudhon's old saw "Property is theft.")
The 'supressed' subtext is always that: the weak, thus, are de facto 'noble', -just by being less powerful. And, that they should be supported in the strategy of humbling the current power. And thereby led into power, themselves.
Where the Utopian Restored Caliphate will be gentle and modest in its claims for dominion over the entire human race. And where all can live in one universal broherhood, guided by God's rules (Sharia).
And, if you don't like it?
Well, you just need to be given 'the freedom to change your mind'. And learn the Truth. And listen to the Holy Rules.
And, if you prefer not to?
Then you are a "kulak" (in the good old Stalinist era), or "landlord" (under Mao) or "city dweller" (under Pol Pot)- or infidel.
There will be refreshing camps ("Arbeit Mach Frei") where you can labor until the delusion lifts. (Laboring under a delusion takes on a whole new meaning.)
They remind me of drowning men who hysterically hit you in the face as you swim out to rescue them.
Why they wish for the Civilization -which permits them the luxury of critical thought- to end, I am unable to fathom.
Nihilism is usually only attractive to adolescents. ('Sturm und Drang' fantasies are a tonic to anhedonic kids.)
Maybe they just like to be the faux "Davids" against the trumped-up "Goliath"?
Maybe "the chicks" like it?
Or tenure committees?
Or?
(*For comic relief [and the plodding tediousness of a one-track mind] here is a plagiarized 'turned on its head' link to an Edward Said piece stealing Benda's title, and bending it to mean the exact opposite:
http://weekly.arham.org.eg/1999/435/op1.htm
Mark Levine is a socialist hypocrite and sadly,he is probably a jew.
If he lived in an islamic country,he would not be able to express his views as freely as he does now,if he went to Iraq ,Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia,he would probably be beheaded...
What's your take on Chomsky, keithjoy? Are you willing to publish it here?
*goes back to packing* Nothing like moving in the middle of winter....
Adela:
It's "LeVine" not Levine. The capitalization may be an affectation or he may French (and, perhaps, many generations back, Jewish).
Whatever his origins, or that of others who share his opinions, it is indeed incredible that liberal/left/democrats can find common cause with the ultimate anti-liberals (Islamists).