The ever-egregious James Carroll outdoes himself with this outstanding display of historical distortion and obfuscation, "The war against Islam," from the Boston Globe (thanks to all who sent this in):
AMONG THE factors leading to the French and Dutch rejections of the European constitution last week, none looms more ominously than the nightmare of antagonism between ''the West" and Islam. Many Europeans fear a rising tide of green, both within the continent and from outside it. Where once communists threatened, now Muslims do. A new wall is being built.Muslims, meanwhile, see a flood of contempt in pressures on immigrant communities in European cities, in restrictions on Islamic expression, and in openly expressed reservations about Turkey's admission to the EU precisely because of its Islamic character. Given escalations of the war in Iraq together with widely reported instances of Koran-denigration by US interrogators, such trends in Europe make the global war on terror seem expressly a war against Islam. The ''clash of civilizations" seems closer at hand than ever.
Notice how 9/11 doesn't enter into this calculus. For Carroll it is as if the war in Iraq and "instances of Koran-denigration" were just acts of unprovoked aggression by the West.
To make sense of this dangerous condition, it can help to recall some of the forgotten or misremembered history that prepared for it, from the remote origins of the conflict to its manifestations in the not so distant past. As the story is usually told in Europe and America, the problem began when a jihad-driven army of ''infidel" Saracens, having brutalized Christians in the ''Holy Land," threatened ''Christendom" itself with conquests right into the heart of present-day France. Charles Martel is the hero of primal European romances because he defeated the Muslim army near Tours in 733. But for Martel, Edward Gibbon wrote, ''the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford."
"As the story is usually told in Europe and America..." Carroll is trying to get away with suggesting it didn't really happen this way, although he doesn't come out and say that. And why not? Because the historical record shows that it did happen that way.
Across subsequent centuries, in the European memory, Islam posed the great threat to the emerging Christian order. But was that so? Lombards, Normans, Vikings, forces from the Slavic east, and violent contests among Christians themselves all wreaked havoc in Europe, even in Martel's time.
Threats to the emerging Christian order? Really? Lombards, Normans, Vikings: all already Christian or soon Christianized. The jihad threat was perceived as greater because it was greater: it would have entailed the utter destruction of Christian society, or, as Carroll puts it with sneer quotes, "Christendom," and its replacement with Sharia. The Lombards, Normans, and Vikings never threatened to do anything remotely approaching that.
As I learned from the historian Tomaz Mastnak, the threat from the Saracens was one among many.
Militarily, yes. Culturally or religiously, no.
It was defined as transcendent only with the later Crusades, when Latin Christian armies set out to rescue that ''Holy Land" and roll back Islamic conquests. The crusading impulse presumed a demonizing of Saracens that was justified neither by the threat they actually posed nor by their treatment of Christians in Palestine.
"The crusading impulse presumed a demonizing of Saracens that was justified neither by the threat they actually posed..." So now we have it: Martel was fighting a phantom army. Gibbon was being hysterical. But what if Martel had lost at Tours? Where would the jihad armies have stopped? How much of Europe would they have had to occupy and subjugate for Carroll to acknowledge that the threat from them was genuine?
"...nor by their treatment of Christians in Palestine." As it happens, I have just completed a book entitled The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (coming August 8 from Regnery), and I did some research on this question.
What was life like for the Christians in Palestine in the years leading up to the Crusades? Let's see: In 1004, the sixth Fatimid Caliph, Abu ‘Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985-1021) turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother and uncles (two of whom were Patriarchs) and ordered the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim gave his most spectacular anti-Christian order: he commanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh century after the Persians burned an earlier version, marks the traditional site of Christ’s burial. The church had served as the model for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Caliph al-Hakim commanded that the tomb inside be cut down to the bedrock. He ordered Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks (and Jews heavy blocks of wood in the shape of a calf). He piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the order that they accept Islam or leave his dominions.
The erratic caliph ultimately relaxed his persecution and even returned much of the property he had seized from the Church. Thanks to al-Hakim’s change of policy, which continued after his death, in 1027 the Byzantines were allowed to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Nevertheless, Christians were in a precarious position and pilgrims remained under threat. In 1056, the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When the fierce and fanatical Seljuk Turks swept down from Central Asia, they enforced a new Islamic rigor, making life increasingly difficult for both native Christians and pilgrims (whose pilgrimages they blocked). After they crushed the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and took the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes prisoner, all of Asia Minor was open to them — and their advance was virtually unstoppable. In 1076, they conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. The Seljuk Emir Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once his men had entered the city, they murdered 3,000 people.
But I guess Carroll would say they all committed suicide.
Indeed, chronicles of the earlier period take little or no notice of the religion of Saracens. Religious co-existence, famous in Iberia, was a mark of other lands conquered by Arabs.
Yes, and it is mythical in Iberia, unless by "co-existence" Carroll means the co-existence of slave and master, beggar and king.
Europe's initiating ''holy war" with Islam, that is, was based on flawed intelligence, propaganda, and threat exaggeration.
Carroll earlier alluded to "Latin Christian armies" attempting to "roll back Islamic conquests." Did those Islamic conquests not constitute the initiation of "holy war" on the part of Muslims? Evidently not in the befogged mind of a dogmatic multiculturalist.
The poison flower of the Crusades, with their denigrations of distant cultures, was colonialism.
European colonies in the Middle East weren't founded until hundreds of years after the conclusion of the last Crusade, and had no historical continuity with the Crusades. Nor did those colonies do anything to threaten the hegemony of Islam in the colonized areas, except press for the abrogation of dhimmi laws.
The dark result of European imperial adventuring in the Muslim world was twofold: first, the usual exploitation of native peoples and resources, with attendant destruction of culture, and, second, the powerful reaction among Muslims and Arab populations against colonialism, a reaction that included an internal corrupting of Islamic traditions. The accidental wealth of oil in the Middle East made both external exploitation and internal corruption absolutely ruinous. The political fanaticism that has lately seized the Arab Islamic religious imagination (exemplified in Osama bin Laden) is rooted more in a defensive fending off of assault from ''the West" than in anything intrinsic to Islam. The American war on terror, striking the worst notes of the old imperial insult, only exacerbates this reactionary fanaticism (generating, for example, legions of suicide bombers).
"The political fanaticism that has lately seized the Arab Islamic religious imagination (exemplified in Osama bin Laden) is rooted more in a defensive fending off of assault from 'the West' than in anything intrinsic to Islam." Acceptance of this thesis depends on the reader's ignorance of the 450 years of jihadist aggression that preceded the Crusades and obliterated the Christian cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, and which today's jihadists consider to be the direct antecedent of their own efforts. Against what were the initial conquerors of Syria, Egypt, Constantinople, Spain and all the rest defending? What is the significance of the fact that today's jihad terrorists hold to the same ideological and religious imperatives? You won't find the answers by reading James Carroll.
Having forgotten the deeper history, nervous Europeans seem also to have forgotten how large numbers of Muslims settled in the continent's cities in the first place. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and North Africans were welcomed as ''guest workers," taking up menial labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. The rank injustice of a system depending on a permanent underclass was bound to issue in political resistance, and now it has, but with a religious edge.
There is no doubt that Europe encouraged Muslims to come. It's all in Bat Ye'or's Eurabia. Carroll doesn't mention, of course, that these immigrants were also encouraged not to assimilate, and to hold tightly to their Islam -- ignoring the fact that Islam is inherently political, a fact to which Europeans are just awakening today.
The point is that this conflict has its origins more in ''the West" than in the House of Islam. The image of Muslims as prone to violence by virtue of their religion was mainly constructed across centuries by Europeans seeking to bolster their own purposes, a habit of politicized paranoia that is masterfully continued by freaked-out leaders of post-9/11 America.
I doubt if Carroll has read a page of the Qur'an, or knows that Qur'anic verses such as 9:5 and 9:29 and many others are not just isolated, ignored religious texts, but have become the basis for an elaborate legal superstructure mandating warfare against unbelievers and endorsed by all the major schools of Sunni jurisprudence (as well as by the Shi'ites.)
They, too, like prelates, crusaders, conquistadors, and colonizers, have turned fear of Islam into a source of power. This history teaches that such self-serving projection can indeed result in the creation of an enemy ready and willing to make the nightmare real.
Carroll has worked hard to create his enemy -- Western defenders against the jihadist threat -- and make his nightmare real. If there weren't so many people in government who believe as he does, he would be beneath notice.
Make this man a mullah and ship him to Tehran!
(He can have one of my copies of the Koran to read on the flight over. But no turning back once he reaches sura 9:5... sorry Jim...)
His mental functioning is about at the level of the average ayatollah. (Or Ward "America Must Die!" Churchill.)
Does he really want to be a serf in the Imperial Islamic World State? ("Restored Caliphate" ring a bell, Jim?)
Looks like it.
He's got the dhimmi down pat.
I issue a fatwa against him:
May he slip on a banana peel soon and end up in traction in a hospital room next to an apostate Muslim woman who has both memorized the Koran and undergone female genital mutilation.
(With amateur 'Islamic historians' like him, it's no wonder most people couldn't tell you who Aisha was, or who raped her at age 9, -or what Mohammad ordered done to poet Asma Marwan, initiating the 'peaceful' expansion of Islam.)
On wonders what his real point is.
Except to get us to surrender.
You first, Jim.
Maybe Nick Berg will put in a good word for you.
What a complete dolt!
Where'd he get his degree? Sears?
But then, perhaps his precedents were not 'apes and pigs'. Say, maybe THAT was a western fault too?
So Mr Carroll, all those pictures I see of AK47 toting Moslems celebrating the death of 3000 American infidels in the streets of their mythical Palestine were really faked by the Europeans?
"Charles Martel is the hero of primal European romances because he defeated the Muslim army near Tours in 733"
Not all Europeans were pleased with Martel's victory. Behold:
"Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -Already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity!- Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so." (August 28, 1942)
"Hitler's Table Talk; 1941-1944" translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)
Off the subject. I just posted a new article at Sixth Column. It is called "Crackpot Hubris" (You might have to scroll below a much earlier article called "Paving the way..."). Yes I know that this book was already reviewed by others, but my observations are original. Check it out:
http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/rublev_p1.htm#crackpot%20hubris
Selective Bibliography on James Carroll
http://library.brandeis.edu/about/nsf/carroll.html
This has got to be the classic text book example of the dhimmi mentality and ahistorical nonsense.
Truly unbelievable in its idiotic scope.
I guess Jimbo thinks jihad is just a tricky internal struggle.
"The dark result of European imperial adventuring in the Muslim world was twofold: first, the usual exploitation of native peoples and resources, with attendant destruction of culture"
Doesn't he know that there was no Muslim world, in fact, it was largely the Christian world, until invading armies brought Islam?
To make it more correct (by dropping the timeline back some 400 years):
"The dark result of Muslim imperial adventuring in the Roman/Greek/Christian world was twofold: first, the usual exploitation of native peoples and resources, with attendant destruction of culture ..."
Give this man an award. Speaking as a historian, I am familiar with the deliberate abuse of historical data in the service of ideology or self, but I must say that nobody since the collapse of the Soviet Empire has ever managed it so thoroughly, elaborately, laboriously, hitting so many hot buttons and emotional words (the insulting use of "prelates" implying "power-thirsty", for instance), with such sophisticated malevolence.
What I wonder about is, who is going to reward him for this. It is a spectacular performance, but it is in the service of people who do not have much to give - unlike the old Communist Russia - and, again unlike the Communists, have little respect for intellectual leaders and award no Lenin Prizes or Peace Prizes. That is why I say, give the man an award. The Dhimmi Peace Prize, anyone?
James Carroll - idiot extraordinaire. I think he should convert to Islam. He has all the conclusions that would make him welcome in Dar al Islam.
Answer to Paolo:
Carroll's reward comes in the form of fans in his me-club. He belongs to the self-congratulatory sophistic Postmodernists whose intellectual arrogance places them under the strange delusion that they are far smarter than the mere mortals that inhabit such forums as Jihad Watch. To those disengaged from the real world, the ethereal vanity of such a state of mind is reward enough.
Don't you people get it. Everything bad in the world is fault of the US? Don't you see that we are so evil and have caused all the misery in the world, all the violence? It is as clear as mud.
What a sad situation: our universities are full of professors such as Carroll and others trained to manipulate bright young minds to see the world through Muslim eyes U.S. as the bad guy.
A similar situation began decades ago in Europe through the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD). Read about it in Bat Ye'or's Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.
I wonder if a secret agreement along the same lines has been made by our leaders...
Ted:
As a former priest, perhaps Carroll is Karen Armstrong's alter ego.
Does anyone have this idiot's email address or someplace to write him? All of the posts on here are great, but they're not doing a thing to enlighten the poor, misguided Mr. Carroll...
illustr8rg8r:
You could probably get Carroll's e-mail address by going to the website of the university where he teaches and accessing the staff directory. Ted posted a link above that should help you determine the appropriate institution of higher learning.
As for rousing the man from his intellectual stupor, that's another matter. If he can only see the Crusades as an act of aggression and not the Muslim invasions of various sovereign European nations, than he's a cretin.
Those wishing to meet Mr. Carroll need only visit his well-appointed townhouse, where he lives in complacent comfort along with his quasi-literary wife, leading a quasi-literary life. And where the flotsam and jetsam of "literary" Boston, such as it is (and it isn't much) may come to share received opinions and cliches not only about the misperception of poor, misunderstood Islam, and the brutal Americans with their goddam need for the Other, but about so much else. Think of the worst conceivable Martha's Vineyard cocktail party you have ever been to, with the stupidest people. That must be what a party at James Carroll's is like.
Carroll wrote "Constantine's Sword," which is a highly-unsatisfactory treatment of Christian antisemitism -- Gavin Langmuir and Leon Poliakov and Frank Manuel have written much more acutely, and much better, and so has Malcolm Hay, whose "Europe and the Jews" has been re-issued and can be obtained on-line. Malcolm Hay, a Roman Catholic Scot, and veteran of World War I, wrote a much more impassioned account than Carroll, one far more interested in Jews as victims than in settling private scores with the Catholic Church.
Carroll makes much of his own holier-than-thou personal trajet. We all learn about his father, the admiral. And we learn about his own lapsed catholicism, of his moral superiority, and so on and so bloody forth. Few can stomach him, though that book had a great success, I suppose, on the lectures-to-synagogues circuit. Too bad. The wrong person was being lionized, for the wrong resons.
But at The Boston Globe, one of the most stalinoid of papers, it is de rigueur to assume that Islam is entirely unobjectionable. This is slightly harder to do than it might be, because The Globe editors, especially those who run with an iron fist the Op/Ed page (keeping out all of George Will's best columns but allowing him his ruminations on baseball; making sure to publish such shallow anti-American columnnists, based in Europe, as the American William Pfaff, who lives in Paris but makes howler after howler in French, and Jonathan Powers, an Englishman of the Guardian or at least Independent persuasion. Neither one, needless to say, has had a word about the growing and perfectly justified fears of islamization all over Western Europe -- possibly the most undercovered, or poorly-covered story, of the last decade.
Just like Karen Armstrong, who was once a nun and found it not to her liking, and has been taking it out on Christiianity (her lack of sympathy for Jews was something she already possessed) and making up for it by defending the faith of Islam, Carroll studied for the priesthood (he's big on autobiography) and possibly is doing the same.
Such apologists for Islam lead to a de profundis plea:
Libera nos a malo. Puh-leeze.
Hugh,
Thank you for all your contributions to this hedonistic website.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/006547.php
Pass me another margarita, will you?
Best
RS
You can almost hear the commissioning editor, on the Boston Globe, and a myriad of 'progressive' newspapers and news outlets around the world:
"...anything. ANYTHING at all. You've got a free rein. Apart from one thing. If you wouldn't mind, don't write anything that might be construed as defending Western civilisation. OK? Little bit controversial these days, that's all. Great - now, our terms..."
This man is dangerous. he should not be allowed to rewrite history.
He should join the "Historians for Holywood" cult.
Good God, I had not made the connection. Is he one of the Carrolls of Carrollton, MD, who kept Catholicism alive in persecuting Colonial times, and who at the time of the Revolution provided a signer of the Declaration of Independence whose brother was the first Catholic Bishop in the U.S.A.? A traitor to his family and descent, if he is, as well as to his religion, culture, and country.
Another Saudi glove-puppet. Still, at least he'll never have any financial problems.
Not being from Boston, the name James Carroll meant nothing to me.
Having looked up his work, it means even less.
One more crusader for the overthrow of the bastion of freedom because it is not perfectly good.
Unaware that of the haunting truism "the best is the enemy of the good".
He seems to think that Islam will treat everyone so much better if America would just commit suicide.
He has a published book of his Boston newspaper columns called "Crusade:", a predictable batch of blather that carries on the same level of hysterics and hyperbole and a-historicity as this example.
We are bad. Our motives are suspect. Everyone we fight is better than we are.
ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.....
The same pap was churned out by Soviet apologists in the West during the 1930's, -until the shock of the Hitler-Stalin 'non-agression pact' surprised some of the still mentally-functioning writers back to reality.
Carroll builds an inverse "Potempkin Village" world -where all American acts are scurrilous, shameful and genocidal. Placing a facade of corruption in front of the real, struggling, evolving, self-refining reality of the American Experiment.
And tries to blame it all on Bush and the cabal of conservatives around him.
Sorry, Jim, I never liked Bush, but if WMD's had even a 1% chance of still existing under Saddam (the Kurds knew they were they at one point, since they died to demonstrate it to the indifferent West), and Saddam consistently ignored the U.N. demands to show his weapons- or be attacked- then anyone holding the office of President of the U.S. would have been derelect in his duty and a fool NOT to have gone in to Iraq to force Saddam's hand -and find out the truth.
Finding NO WMD's is not a bad thing.
It is a relief.
We finally verified what Saddam foolishly prevented the U.N. from doing. His bluff lost him his throne and his sons. A true maniac.
What would Carroll be saying if we had not gone in, and Boston were hit -with a loose Iraq WMD in the hands of jihadists -at 11 p.m. tonight?
Probably:
"That criminally-negligent idiot Bush failed to defend us! Why wasn't he smart enough to ignore the U.N. and do the job the American people hired him for! To protect us!" .... blah ,blah & blah...
I know his schtick.
"Mr. Damned if you do/damned if you don't".
Why doesn't he just emigrate to a poor, mistreated Muslim land and do a public mea culpa.
The Syrians could use a new P.R. flack.
Or how about 'Iranian information officer'?
He knows the buzzwords, the soft-soap, the p.c. pabulum, and could easily explain all of the convincing "America is the devil!" reasons why the ayatollahs really do need nuclear power.
(Let's hope he accidentally insults Islam and gets on some fulminating Muslim clerics sh*tlist, just to give him a taste of the "holy' Koran's true nature.)
Hi All,
This is going to be my last post on JW/DW. I will not be visiting this site anymore.
I would firstly like to apologise for any hurt I may have caused, if I have hurt or offended anyone here I would like to humbly ask for your forgiveness.
I don’t wish to leave here with out speaking about the hurt or pain I may have brought about in your hearts. If I have hurt you I apologise, please forgive me.
I have to say that although we clashed many times, I know that the people here a decent people. Please realise that you have more Muslims on your side, Muslims are on your side. We will not tolerate those that commit terrorist attacks and those that wish to harm innocents. I for one would fight those that wish to harm you people. I oppose all Islamic extremism, I will continue to battle Islamic Extremism and promote Moderate Islam for the rest of my life.
I appreciate everyone putting up with me, I appreciate those that spoke kindly to me, I appreciate all those that wished well for me. I thank you all.
We will face chaotic and turbulent times in the future, I see a much larger threat than Islamic Extremism around the corner. I also believe that Jesus will return during our lives, I hope we will all be together on that day.
I wish you people all the best, I wish you all happy and prosperous lives, look after yourselves and your loved ones.
Your friend in the UK.
Take Care.
Ia786
"If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; if not,why then this parting was well made"
Jul Caesar, Act v, Sc.1
ia666-
"Hello my hateful brothers and sisters..." was a more honest example of you taqqiya flatulence.
Have fun at the Al-Qaeda summer camp in the Hindukush.
Send us a fatwa.
On this site and others we have read the about the horrors of Islamic conquest.
We have read about the complete lack of compassion from Muslims towards the infidel throughout its history.
we have read about the modern outrages of Islamists and the never ending aim to destroy our civilisations.
We all realize that Islam is an ideology which is far more dangerous than Nazism or Communism ever were.
yet the basic questions
remains unanswered.
A question that has preoccupied my thoughts over the last few years of accumulating knowledge on this threat to humanity.
It is this
Why do so many of us refuse to face up to the truth in the light of overwhelming evidence?
What malaise hides in the modern western mind that insists on never facing the reality?
Why do we seek to excuse all the excesses of Islam and condemn even the smallest violations on our side with reams of column inches in the western media?
Chevalier, that is easy. Islam is a religion, not a cult. At least our politicians have deemed it such. And you can't say we say here about a religion. Could you imagine our governemnt saying we are going to discriminate against Muslims in our immigration quota system? Not in a million years.
I believe a time will shortly come when desperate westerners in America and Europe begin to avenge themselves against Muslims. Once this begins, imagine how the rudderless obfuscators on the left and the fascist Islamists will use this propaganda. It will be difficult not to acknowledge current Muslim slanders against us. The war on terror will be required to aim its guns in two directions simultaneously, at the West AND at the fascist Muslims. This is a recipe for disaster. Nevermind the obvious inequalities between comparing violent rogue actors in the West, versus the institutionalized violence which Islam extolls....It will be like spitting in the wind... They already tar and feather the West by promulgating all manner of vicious lies which are eagerly lapped up by toadies such as Carroll or the NYT. Look at the mileage they've gained through pretexts such as the Koran flushing incident, or through relentlessly referring to the Oklahoma bombing as a sign that we have terrorists too -- that it's all morally relative -- that our bad actors are the same as theirs -- Imagine the moral confusion in the West once Imams really do get capped by frustrated citizens, or Mosques are bombed by hopeless westerners who take matters into their own hands. The current pablum our governments feed us about Islam will drive some over the edge... Look at the recent success of extremist right wing forces in Europe. We must begin to fashion a clear set of terms and arguments to refute the inevitable sewage that will begin to spew once Muslims begin to feel the REAL oppression of violence and mayhem rather than their prevaricated lies. They are already geared up for this propaganda war -- I believe some are yearning for violent anti-Muslim pretexts to further their successful erosion of our systems and our resolve -- sadly it looks to me like they're winnning. Hence forward it may be better to always refer to "Islamic fascism" rather than "terrorism." Linking "ISLAM" with "FASCISM" at all opportunities will at least keep them on the defensive.
ia
I wish you well for your exams. To paraphrase Cat Stevens (now your knowledge of modern popular music is poor but you must have heard of him) "You are young, that's not your fault, there's so much you have to learn."
I just hope you do not have to learn the hard way.
"In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and North Africans were welcomed as ''guest workers," taking up menial labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. "
This is exactly what is happening in Saudi Arabia today. S.A. population is somewhere around 22 - 24 million (accurate figures are not available). There is an additional 7 or 8 million foreign workers. Most of them are doing all the hard, menial work - such as sanitation workers, laborers of all sorts, and maids - that the Saudis do not want to do. The small percentage of Westerners here are mostly doing the technical work that the Saudis cannot do.
Recently, Saudi Arabia has decided to allow foreigners to seek Saudi citizenship. You could almost hear the cheering in the streets. Then they published the requirements: speak Arabic, worked in the Kingdom 10 years, have family ties, and Ph.D. or M.S. degrees in engineering fields. Being Muslim is not mentioned, but assumed. Basically, you have to meet these requirements before they will give you the forms to apply. Abdullah, with an MS in mechanical engineering from Pakistan, has a good chance. Mohammed, the ditch digger from Bangladesh, can forget about it.
"In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and North Africans were welcomed as ''guest workers," taking up menial labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. "
This is exactly what is happening in Saudi Arabia today. S.A. population is somewhere around 22 - 24 million (accurate figures are not available). There is an additional 7 or 8 million foreign workers. Most of them are doing all the hard, menial work - such as sanitation workers, laborers of all sorts, and maids - that the Saudis do not want to do. The small percentage of Westerners here are mostly doing the technical work that the Saudis cannot do.
Recently, Saudi Arabia has decided to allow foreigners to seek Saudi citizenship. You could almost hear the cheering in the streets. Then they published the requirements: speak Arabic, worked in the Kingdom 10 years, have family ties, and Ph.D. or M.S. degrees in engineering fields. Being Muslim is not mentioned, but assumed. Basically, you have to meet these requirements before they will give you the forms to apply. Abdullah, with an MS in mechanical engineering from Pakistan, has a good chance. Mohammed, the ditch digger from Bangladesh, can forget about it.
Ia~ if you come back by this thread, good luck with things. And as per Granny Weatherwax: you are young, and there is still a great deal to learn.
I've long since learned that a person doesn't really get going on some levels until they are in the late 20's. Which might explain why they used to figure a person wasn't entirely mature until 30.
I'm getting sick of these leftist who were civil-rights activists in the 60's who keep defending a culture that is anti-thetical to civil-rights.
If people want to learn more about the history of Jihad, a good web site is http://www.historyofjihad.com.
If anybody else finds any more web sites about the history of Jihad, please let me know.
Two good letters have been published in response to Carroll's idiotic article. Yesterday, there was one from L.E. Joiner in Framingham, Massachusetts; today, one from Leopold Rosenfeld in Beverly Hills. I suspect that a great many readers were heartened to see expressed that which they know to be true, but keep wondering -- am I the only one? have I failed to understand something? Is Islam really all sweetness and light, and is it the "West" as James Carroll says, that is at fault?
The one thing that neither letter had space to discuss was Carroll's extraordinarily limited view: Islam and the West. What about Islam and the Rest? How has Islam, how have Muslims behaved, in sub-Saharan Africa? In Asia? Does the fate of the Zoroastrians in Sassanid Persia and later mean anything? Read the historian Mary Boyce? Does the fate of the Hindus mean anything? Read the historian K. S. Lal, or a dozen others. Does the "hideous trade" in black African slaves, by the tens of millions taken, and castrated on site, so that the mortality rate was 90%, matter? Do the attacks by Muslims on non-Western non-Muslims in Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, and here and there all over both West and East Africa, matter? What about the massacres of 60-70 million Hindus by Muslim invaders and conquerors? And what of Muslim attacks in Indonesia (especially the Moluccas, as before in East Timor) on both Christians and Confucians (has Carroll forgotten the massacres of 600,000 Chinese in Indonesia in the 1960s, or does he really believe they were all agents of Communist China, as the Muslims claimed?) What about the Bumiputra system, the disguised Jizya, in Malaysia?
What about the desturction of Buddhism in India by the Muslim invaders? The destruction of the Greco-Buddhist civilization of Afghanistan, of the prayer books, and the sculpture, and the temples, as always destroyed by Muslims who had only contempt for everything pre-Islamic and non-Islamic? Does James Carroll know anything of this? What of the attacks on Buddhists today, in southern Thailand?
None of this has to do with "Christendom" or "the West" or "the Bush Adminstration." None of it. It all has to do with the clear and unambiuous teachings contained in the Qur'an, and supplemented by the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded in the Hadith, and by the example of Muhammad, uswa hasana, the model of mankind, in his own life, as recorded in the Sira, or sacralized biography.
But of this Carroll cannot utter a word. Perhaps he thinks it doesn't matter.
He is Eurocentric, and egocentric. He is a menace, full of cruel indifference to the truth, disinclined to study or inquire, sure of himself, insistent on his version of history, which accords with his version -- his military-family-sees-light, would-be-priest-sees-light potted biography.
Readers deserve better. It is entirely possible, though the james carrolls of this world do not realize it, to be completely unreligious, not a Republican, not a supporter of the Bush he loves to hate, and still regard Islam as a belief-system that is the enemy of free thought, of artistic expression, of free and skeptical inquiry. He should find out just a bit about Oriana Fallaci, and Ibn Warraq, and Pim Fortuyn, before he begins to make his bland assumpations about who is, and who is not, concerned about the menace of Islam. It might shake up his assumptions, his little Beacon-Hill world.
In case anybody wants to send me information, my email address is alexb@netacc.net.
Hugh wrote:
"It is entirely possible, though the james carrolls of this world do not realize it, to be completely unreligious, not a Republican, not a supporter of the Bush he loves to hate, and still regard Islam as a belief-system that is the enemy of free thought, of artistic expression, of free and skeptical inquiry."
It's possible but extremely unlikely, because liberalism over the past 50 years has mutated into a Leftism which sees the West as the main source of evil in the world.
Even most relatively intelligent centrists and quite a few "right-wingers" buy into the revisionist history that condemns the history of Western Imperialism as mainly an evil enterprise against an innocent Noble Savage Third World -- when it was mainly a good enterprise that helped Third World peoples --, and blames most ills of the Third World on the legacy of that Western Imperialism. Such is the power and dominance of PC thought.
James Carroll seems deeply entrenched in that way of thought, and the only way out of it would be nothing short of a road to Damascus epiphany for him: to realize that the West is, and has been throughout most of its history, the agent for most good and noble progress in the world.
As Hugh states, Mary Boyce is one of the only authorities on Zoroastrianism, ne, Iran in general, available to the English reader. Most others are in German and are more than 100, possibly 150, years old. Anyway, my point here is that there is a new book in the last month, called "Curse of Ham" and it's about biblical, Jewish, Christian and Muslim attitudes to blacks, and specifically how this led to a hideous racism. I plan to go get it at my univ. library in just a few mins, but there's some sample pages on Amazon that you can try out. Well worth it, if only for the contents.
The other book, by Bernard Lewis, "Race and Slavery in the Middle East" is easily accesible, very cheap and very short. There's some pictures and documents in the book, as well as some studies. But the better book on this is "Arabs and Others in Early Islam" by Suliman Bashear, and costs an arm and 2 legs at Amazon. He details how the early Muslims or Arabs viewed the world in a mostly-biblical framework, supplemented later with Greek science, particularly Galen (surprise surprise). The theological dogma/end result is that Shem is the father of the smartest and most beautiful ppl, Japeth is the father of the Turks and Europeans, and Ham is the father of all blacks. The jist is that Noah prayed to God to make Ham the servant of the other two and that they should always be punished with stupidity and curly hair. It is also of note that Galen said that ppl in the medial to warm climates have short, coarse, curly, black hair and it doesn't grow very long. Ppl more southern (Ethiopia) have long and silky black hair. Hmm.
My source for the Noah tale is Tabari. I got the info from a post here or at FFI. Go read Tabari now. You'll be the only one to have read it in centuries. The only other ppl who read it are scholars like Wansbrough, Crone, Bashear, Conrad, me, etc. It makes sense that by the time Tabari was around (d. 920s) Galen's major works had been translated and well commentated on (see Farabi, a Turk) by both Muslims and Christians.
"Most others [books on Zoroastrian history] are in German and are more than 100, possibly 150, years old."
Ah, excellent: they would pre-date the irrational revisionist history of 20th century politically correct multi-culturalist historiography!
When someone white, liberal, and arrogant makes this kind of comment, look wistful and tell him, "Gee, isn't it great that there were once times and places where minorities knew their places."--the comment referring bak to racist attitudes common in the America of my childhood--then watch the lofty luck come unstuck.
Metaxy, I suppose you're right. I am going to learn German, so maybe this is not sucha bad thing after all. I could gather a team and translate them.
The liberal political elites of Europe are way out of touch with normal people on these issues. The No vote was a smack in the face for them and a wake up call that we're not going to stand by and have all our values trampled on by people who have no invested interest in our countries, other than economic gain and carte blanche to walk all over us.
Abdrei Rublev - I read your link. The only way to get rid of this stuff is to take all religious symbols and teaching out of schools like the French have done ( if you want religion go private.) That way, there is no room for maneuver for the multiculturalists. I have a friend who teaches in an infant school in London and she says there is an excessive amount of time spent on this subject and all the accompanying nonsense that your link talks about. Plus, some groups can decide to get "offended" about another group so that's more time taken up that should be spent on learning to read and write.