Lt. Gen. John H. Vines, who is set to take command of American ground forces in Iraq, has assigned a series of books on Islam to his staff members. Here are comments on Vines' choices from Jihad Watch Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald:
The Reading List of General Vines deserves further detailed study. There are two books by Esposito. There is one by Karen Armstrong, whom, one would have thought, is by now regarded as a complete buffoon. There is something about Islam for Dummies. There is a book by the jejune Sandra Mackey on Iraq, when either the Letters of Gertrude Bell (those from Baghdad up to 1927, when she killed herself), or Philip Ireland's book published in 1939 would have helped -- and best of all would have been the essay on Iraq by the native of Baghdad, Elie Kedourie, published in Islam in the Modern World.Nothing by Lewis. Nothing by Kedourie. Nothing by J. B. Kelly, not even that essay "Of Valuable Oil and Worthless Policies" which, while it dates in the section on the Soviet threat, does not date as a description of the misperception of Saudi Arabia. The spirit of ARAMCO propagandists still lives.
What is good about the Reading List is that it is so bad, so truly bad, that eyebrows should be raised all over Washington. Who compiled this list? Who carefully allowed in, as the single sop, the Naipaul, but left out the Lewis, the Kedourie, the Kelly? Who left out any serious essays on the nature of Islam, on Jihad? How are the Infidel soldiers supposed to comprehend the hostility that is felt towards them, even though they are only there to "rebuild" Iraq? For if they cannot understand that hostility -- which is in every textbook, every mosque, every madrassa, every Arab satellite channel, every Qur'an and volume of the Hadith and every life of Muhammad, they will be eternally confused. And confusion and incomprehension, or miscomprehension, leads to demoralization.
Here is an example of a little colloquy reported by NPR Correspondent Deborah Amos this morning. She was reporting from Basra. She interviewed a man, asking him as follows:
Amos: "Do you want foreign troops to leave?"
Iraqi: "Would you want your country to be occupied?" (Iraqis, she said, and soldiers know, tend to reply to questions cannily, warily, with questions of their own, and almost never give a straight answer to anything).When Amos then presses him if he wants the Americans to leave, he answers:
"Yes, I do. But not before they fix everything, and stop terrorism."
How nice. I hate you, and I want you to leave. But first you have to "stop terrorism" and, oh by the way, "fix everything."
That kind of attitude will not be understood by reading Karen Armstrong, who describes Muhammad as the man who "brought peace" to the Arabian Peninsula. It will not be understood by reading John Esposito, author of The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (we know which he chose), a man who in previous editions of his books does not give more than a single mention of the word "Jihad" and has never treated of the dhimmi.
How can American officers figure out why the Christians are being terrorized, if they know nothing about the 1350 year history of Jihad-conquest and of the imposition of dhimmitude? How?
How can American officers understand what is going on if the inculcated hostility toward them is not understood?
The greatest Intelligence Failure of the Iraq War was not about WMD. It was about Islam, its tenets, its nature, the attitudes and atmospherics it engenders. It was an intelligence failure that continues as long as we prate about how everyone wants freedom (nonsense), that "democracy" will lessen the threat in the Middle East (double-nonsense), that the best way to limit a threat based entirely on the classic ideology of Islam is to say nothing, to learn nothing, to hint at nothing, about Islam itself.
Supposedly, the "faculty at Yale" and people at the "Foreign Service Institute" were responsible for this list. Let's find out something more about precisely who was involved in the selection of the final group of eight books. What are their names? What are their own interests?
Note to Hollywood: it is time for movies and television stories, not about Muslim terrorists, but about those who are apologists for Islam, and who are determined to keep certain truths from getting out, in very high places indeed. One need not be of a conspiratorial frame of mind to see that with such a Reading List, something is very amiss -- and very high up.
This has to be thoroughly investigated.
We already know how the extremist's mindset is but do we know what keeps the moderate populace together?
They are not all terrorist's and the ones who wish to prosper and be free deserve a chance, that is after all what we are doing now.
Now if we can appeal to the real populace and encourage them to come out and fight their own battles would it not be better.
We are not going to eliminate the muslim faith so we must address it at every opportunity making it work.
Yes indeed, we know the mindset of the extremist however difficult that has been so now let us know what those who would have peace believe and instill in them the urgency needed to make firm this faith, then maybe they can get to start forming a nation and send the Americans and their Allies HOME.
Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
The one bright spot on this list is the V.S. Naipaul book. Because it is about relatively contemporary situations where Islamic governments are being planted was a good choice.
All of these are very good points.
how about a reading list?
Does everyone have short memories or are you easily fooled by the historic revisionists.
It was the U.N. that started this whole thing,endless resolutions that promised to keep the last promise to keep the previous promised to force disarming by an invasion of Iraq to confirm the weapons stockplies.
The U.N. waffled on any statement about Seddams agreement to distroy his WMD's,the U.N. would neither deny they found proof of weapons,nor confirm they found nothing.
Maybe you're willing to let the U.N. take the risk with your life,but don't force me to be killed along with you if the threat turns out to be real.
You have the right to hope for peace,but you may end up being dead-right and you won't be exercising any of your freedoms from a box 6 feet in the ground. John Kerry would like you to believe that if we took the guns away from the Police that the crime would stop,Kerry also suppressed information about war-crimes and atrocities against civilians in Vietnam,it wasn't until he could exploit those deaths that he came forward and became a peacenik to further his career.
Isn't this an identical reading list as assigned by a leader or two before .. or close enough that it has retained the dumb-downed-ness?
Geez, one can read Elizabeth Peters novels and learn more about the Arab mind set than reading anything on this list. Oy!
Mr. F., how's about you send Gen. Vines a comprehensive reading list? Even better, post one here (with correct addys) so the rest of us can send it to him and his staff and the president and the DOS and the DOD, etc. etc. ....
BTW, I hope Daniel Pipes sees this and sends a reading list of his. Or is that tooooooo much to ask?
Karen Armstrong is straight out of Kooksville. Her most recent book is not about religion nor another white wash of Mohammedanism. It's about her struggle to get out of the depression she was in for years. Some of her acolyte's book reviews are hilarious.
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
by Karen Armstrong (Author)
It is not just intelligence failure, it is a failure of Intelligence - ie failure of the intellect to grasp what is at issue, and the failure to realise that the issue is so important, that nothing but the truth will suffice.
The reason that islam may win this war us is that it knows that it is at war with us. This allows muslims to go on attacking us while we blithely sleep on as if nothing is happening. Meanwhile our goverenments, MSM, BBC and the rest, are beguiling us there is no war at all except against a group of ellusive terrorists. And these terrorists are supposedly guided by nothing other then the doctrine of terrorism. In this effort, muslims are doing their best to ensure that we continue believe just that.
I have maintained for over 3 years, that not naming the enemy, was the single greatest blunder by Pres GWB. If it was not politically possible to name islam, then at least he should have named Islamism or jihad as the enemy. The continue rhetoric of islam as the RoP, and the koran as one of the defining texts of the US, is a serious misjudgement in this war.
DP111 is right. The whole universe of the busy-busy-busy in Washington, with their one-page executive summaries, or perhaps a country set down in two, or even three, pages, is a recipe for silliness. The reliance on people who have titles -- you know, like Peter Bechtold, the head of the Middle Eastern training section of the Foreign Policy Institute (now please, google "Peter Bechtold" to get a purchase on what he is all about -- an apologist of the Esposito school, who went out to attend the last meeting of Mesa Nostra and assured one and all that only a "handful of neo-cons, about 30" were the problem, so you Mesans, don't worry, you apologists who want no mucking about with the Arabs and Islam will triumph in the end (he didn't say that part, but it was clear).
The government needs to train -- not with the Espositos of this world but possibly at the Jihadwatch Training Institute just set up, in my imagination, for this very purpose -- to learn about Islam. To wit: how it started, of what elements is it composed, what is the history of Jihad-conquest (same, or different, in time and space), what is the history of the treatment of non-Muslims whose lands have been subjugated by Islam (same, or different, in time and space), what is the current attitude toward non-Muslims taught in Qur'an, Hadith, and sira, what are the doctrines of taqiyya and kitman? How, beginning in the late 19th century, did some would-be reformers of Islam emerge, and why did they all fail so completely? What is the role of "defectors" or ex-Muslims, and how can they help the Infidel West in understanding Islam, and in constructing strategies to weaken it from within?
Oh, there is much more. Il y a si peu d'esprits et tant de sots.
Really, for just a teeny-tiny bit of the Pentagon's budget (not much more than few armored Humvees), so many hundreds of billions could be saved, so many American lives saved from being ended, or damaged forever. Isn't it worth it?
For best results, Pentagon, Media, Big Wall Street Firms who want to "know about Islam," kindly contact us at the usual Jihadwatch address.
Then we shall create a cadre of a few hundred officers, and civilians, who have not gone through the Esposito-Bechtold-MESA Nostra school, but rather something quite different, which will have a distinct advantage over all the others: It Will Tell the Truth. And on the faculty will be, among others, the most distinguished and articulate ex-Muslims in the world.
On-site visits can be arranged for those Wall Street Firms, of course.
So how about it? Ball's in your court.
I have maintained for over 3 years, that not naming the enemy, was the single greatest blunder by Pres GWB. If it was not politically possible to name islam, then at least he should have named Islamism or jihad as the enemy. The continue rhetoric of islam as the RoP, and the koran as one of the defining texts of the US, is a serious misjudgement in this war.
Posted by: DP111 at January 23, 2005 02:43 PM
Yup.
The problem for GWB is that he can't bring himself to label a religion as something evil. It's flat unneighborly!
If Islam were stripped of it's self-proclaimed association with a deity, Bush would immediately understand the problem.
If there were some gang somewhere that announced the same goals as Islam does, had the same policy as Islam does, and behaved the way Islam does, yet unlike Islam, did not claim that its goals, policies, and behaviors were sanctioned by a deity, Bush's whole response to said gang would be quite different.
Bush is afraid; he feels a sense of "family" with Islam precisely because it calls itself a religion. The fusion between the belief in a deity and earthly political ambitions of Islam is so complete that he feels that an out-and-out attack on the earthly political ambitions would be an attack on a legitimate system of worship.
The wolf (the political system) has assumed the sheep's clothing (the system of worship). Since the two are conjoined twins, one will eventually have to suffer the consequences of what happens to the other.
Never before has there been such taqiyya as Islam calling itself a religion.
Hugh - I look forward to all your writings :)
as each essay provides an education in history, linguistics, philosophy, etc. . . .you pack an incredible amount of information into each effort. THANK YOU!
I have a question . . .I cannot find reference to a term you have used on more than one occassion. What is "Mesa Nostra"?
All I could find is:
MESA = table
NOSTRA = acronym for:Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity
. . .and that cannot be what you mean. HELP!
"Mesa" or "MESA" is the acronym of the Middle East Studies Association, the professional group of those who at American universities and colleges are charged with the responsibilty of teaching the American young, those trusting, innocent, infinitely malleable young, with learning about the Middle East -- which is to say, about Islam.
As an organization, MESA has over the past two decades slowly but surely been taken over by apologists for Islam. Many of these are Muslims, and many are non-Muslims. The latter includes quite a few people who are married to Muslims, or who, to get along with their colleagues (and remember, the most political place in the entire universe is a university faculty, and that institution which, alas, Randall Jarrell failed to immortalize (if memory serves), the Departmental Meeting. Junior faculty owe everything to, and therefore must curry favor with, senior faculty. If that means signing an anti-divestment petition that has the mighty empire of Israel, fons et origo of everything that has ever gone wrong with the Muslim and Arab states and peoples, then so be it. Funny thing about being a trimmer, however, is that the mere act of signing something you really don't believe helps to convince you that you really do believe it, otherwise you would have to come to terms with your own cravenness, your own pusillanimity. And no one wants to do that.
The method of apologetics is simple: concentrate on Israel, or the more tendentious reification of an alternative state, "Israel/Palestine," keep clear of such topics as land ownership under the Ottoman Empire, the actual demographics of the Ottoman vilayets and sanjak that made up what became Mandatory Palestine, don't even whisper that more than half of the Jews in Israel had never left the Middle East but lived as dhimmis in the Yemen (virtual chattel slaves), in Iraq, in North Africa, in Syria and Egypt -- because officially, all Israeli Jews are "European colonialists"; finally, do not under any conditions mention that a goodly number of the ancient "Palestinian people" (invented post-1967) are the descendants of Arabs and Berbers who were veterans of Abd el-Kader's campaign, Egyptians who came with Mehmet Ali, Muslims from the Balkans and Bulgaria and other Ottoman territories in Europe who were transferred, en masse, by the Turkish government as the high tide of Islam receded -- for that area (a/k/a in the West as "Palestine") was by far the most desolate and under-populated in the Ottoman Empire, always excepting the Empty Quarter of Arabia).
The apologetics consists in hardly ever discussing Jihad, dhimmitude, or indeed even introducing the students to Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Sometimes an expurgated version -- the Michael Sells horror -- is assigned to students. The Hadith and Sira are never mentioned. Books on the level of Armstrong and Esposito are assigned, and feelgood nonsense like Maria Rosa Menocal's "The Ornament of the World."
But not everyone who is a member of MESA is completely awful. There are a few reasonable people, some of the Ottomanists and suchlike. MESA is a little like the Soviet Union of Writers, which had thousands of members and hardly a real writer. When one considers Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Bernard Lewis, and a feew others, on one scale, and the assorted khalidis and dabashis and massads and bahranis in the other, you can guess which side kicks the beam. No member of MESA has done as much to make available to a wide public important new work on Muhammad, on the origins of the Qur'an, and on the history of early Islam, as that lone wolf, Ibn Warraq. No one has done such work on the institution of the dhimmi as that lone louve, Bat Ye'or. It is an astounding situation, where much of the most important work is not being done in universities, because many university centers have been seized by a kind of Islamintern International. Willy Munzenberg could have learned a lot from Edward Said, who was only begetter, with his "Orientalism" for a good deal of this "post-colonial hegemonic discourse" stuff that permanently stunts the mental growth.
Now, recent presidents of MESA have included Lisa Anderson, the well-versed and compleat academic (and beyond, what with the Councils on this and the Committees on that, all very impressive if you are impressed with that sort of thing) operator, Dean of the School of International Blah, and then Laurie Brand, about whom you may google, and Rashid Khalidi, and -- has Juan Cole served his term, or is that coming up? Well, you get the dreary picture.
In any case, even MESA has its constraints. For example a few years ago it had to award, it could not avoid awarding, a prize for the best book of the year to Michael Cook for his 720-page "Commanding Right and Prohibiting Wrong in Islam," even though Cook is suspiciously learned and has written a book, perhaps too warily not permitted to be reprinted, with Patricia Crone (who herself is very good, but also, at times, as in her treatment of Christoph Luxenberg, not quite as brave as she should be).
Why do I refer to MESA as "Mesa Nostra"? Because it is a kind of "Our Thing" conspiracy, but not nearly as appealing, as folkloric, as the Mafia, or the 'ndrangtheta, or the camorra, for in Italy the malavita has three main components. Everyone knows everyone else; the maneuvering, the politicking, the fear that the hot breat of Campus Watch, and perhaps even Congress, will take away all that government money that the khalidis and the dabashis et al. wanted to use to spread their anti-Israel anti-American and "why-do-they-hate-us?" and "it is only a handful-of-extremists" message, and how can that mean old U.S. government not want to fund that,huh?
"Mesa Nostra" is my little invention. It communicates the doubtflness, and more, of the enterprise. It has nothing to do with real scholarship. Ask yourself this: could Joseph Schacht, the great authority on Mohammedan law, or Arthur Jeffery, an authority on Islam, on Muhammad, even on aspects of the lexicon of the early Qur'an, both of them once starts in Columbia's middle-eastern firmament, have been hired today -- at Columbia, or indeed, anywhere that the plotters of Mesa Nostra rule the roost?
The Arabs have poured money into various Georgetown Centers for this and that (because that's where the power is, that's where the foreign service officers are trained, that's where Peter Bechtold, who gave a cheerleading address to the last meeting of Mesa, heads the "Foreign Policy Institute" and was so instrumental in drawing up that farcical list for General Vines). They have also bought up chairs: the nice "Guardian of the Two Holy Places" professorship of law that Frank Vogel holds, and a King Abdul Aziz thisorthat, and so on. Oh, they get their money's worth. They do, indeed they do.
So that's why I call it "Mesa Nostra." Everybody should.
Hugh -
UNDERSTOOD . . .THANKS again . . .:)