Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the need in some quarters to situate the present global conflicts solely or primarily in the mind of the West itself:
It has become a peculiar sort of conventional wisdom among those of a particular intellectual and ideological bent -– the idea that each generation of Americans seems to identify a particular enemy, contrived to fit ideologies or economic necessities. Americans must always find "The Other" whom they can then hate and fear."The Other" was, of course, Edward Said's favorite topic. He kept talking about the need of the West to create the Islamic "Other," but said nothing about the fact that the Original, the Ur, the Other of All Others, was the one that was created by Islam to sustain Believers. The most perduring “Other” is the Infidel, who must be hated no matter what good he "appears" to do, what kindness he "appears" to offer -– such as those hapless American soldiers in Iraq who wonder why everyone wishes to kill them as they build schools, hospitals, electricity grids, and roads.
But no one is concerned about that. Everyone know that the real “Other”-constructor, the real villain of the “Other” piece here, is not the Islamic world but the West -- the need for white, European, racist, colonialist Europe/America to "construct" that "Other" that it can then despise. For without that "Other" to hate, that miserable, racist, dysfunctional, poverty-stricken, ruinous, chaotic, violent, worthless bunch of countries and peoples who ridiculously call themselves the West, or, even more absurdly, "Western civilization," and who have given the world absolutely nothing of value, would scarcely be able to justify its own chaotic and confused existence. After all, just compare its ridiculous accomplishments with the scientific achievements and immortal works of art produced over 1350 years everywhere that Islam has planted itself.
It was not enough for the West to have constructed "the Other" of Hitler and the Nazis, and to have caused World War II thereby, with all the enormous suffering that could have been avoided. It was not enough for that West to have constructed "the Other" of Lenin and Stalin and the Politburo, and to have deliberately inveigled the Red Army into Eastern Europe to seize control for local Communists so that, all over the West, people would be filled with quite unnecessary alarm and dread.No, now they are at it again, having somehow tricked a few misguided people, a handful of extremists who were putty in the hands of the C.I.A. and the Mossad, to here and there plan their pathetic little attacks (with, admittedly, one or two actually succeeding -- to the great delight, you can be sure, of the master puppeteers in Langley and Tel Aviv). And what about all these so-called "plots" that they discover, with all that fanfare, all over Europe, or all these people picked up and charged with "terrorism" all over the United States? What is that if not a sustained effort at scaring people, all cooked up to make them think there is a problem with Islam?
Yes, I know what you are going to argue. You will say -- but they never actually mention Islam. All they talk about is the "war on terror." Exactly. Exactly the point I was trying to make. It is precisely the refusal of Western governments to blame the teachings of Islam in any way, to even go out of their way even to mention Islam, that is the most diabolical part of it.
It's the old "don't put beans up your nose" strategy. By failing so noticeably and so obviously to mention Islam, the government is actually doing everything it can to make people focus on precisely that -- Islam. For people are not fools. Or rather, you can only fool those people in some ways, and not in others. By now everyone in the West knows that their own governments are not to be trusted, that they are run often by the very foolish people who foolishly try to fool them. But they can't do it. The fools who rule are even bigger fools than the fools they rule over, who cannot be so easily fooled as the ruling fools think.
And that is why, you see, when the ruling fools engaged, for the third time in less than a century (the Nazis, the Communists, and now the helpless, innocent so-called "Muslims"), in constructing "the Other" (oh, don't believe me -- read Gil Anidjar, professor at Columbia University, on the "construction of the Other" -- i.e., Jews and Arabs, peas in a pod, identical victims of European hatred, and for exactly the same reasons), with that "Other" today being "Muslims," they realized that the very best way to construct that Other was -- not to construct it! By not naming Islam or Muslims, everyone who had grown to distrust the leaders would focus manically on the subject of Islam and Muslims.
Have I made it clear?
Good. I thought I would.
Can we all agree to just drop "the Other" from our lexicon? It's too problematic a word and it is only applied to the West and never to any other cultures. This construct makes the West vulnerable to accepting the greivances of its mortal enemies and it justifies the enemy's hatred toward the West because the West "labelled" it "the Other" first. It willfully disregards the significance of history. European Christendom regarded the Turks as the enemy, so what? They were the enemy and they still are. They conquered formerly inoffensive Christian and Jewish lands and replaced their culture with Islam and they wanted to do the same with Europe because an infidel superpower could not be tolerated. Here are the destroyers of civilizations, the Turks, and we are the evil imperialist racists because we dared to call them the enemy and denigrate their lack of civilization and refinement? The truth hurts that bad, huh?
And Hugh is right, those who like to use "the Other" think the West is worthless. According to them, it has caused too much pain in the world for its achievements to have any merit. Yet they fail to take into consideration how different the world would look if there was no ancient Greece, no Christianity, no Scientific Revolution, no Enlightenment. They take it for granted that every culture would have eventually stumbled upon science, equal rights, and the abolishment of slavery if only the nasty, nasty West had not interfered. They willfully disregard the importance of ideology and how relying soley on one ideology will run your culture into a dead end eventually. The West was so successful in comparison to other cultures because it had so many ideologies that were constantly reviving themselves and evolving. Not every culture is capable of this due to either geography, war, or demographics.
Did the West have racist and triumphalist tendecies? Yes, of course. Name one dominant culture that never had any of that in their history. The difference is that the triumphalism did not define the West the same way it defined Islam because the West was able to criticize itself whereas any criticism is forbidden in Islam. The West defined "the good" in objective terminology whereas Islam defined "the good" as Islam. No matter how morally corrupt a society became, just as long as the ruler was Muslim and sharia was fully implimented, it was "good" in the eyes of Islam. There was no notion of "West is best!" in Western culture, but "Islam is best!" is so pervasive in Islamic culture that this sentiment can be found in the most learned imam to the most irrational and illiterate peasant. Triumphalism defines Islam and it is a surprise that those who study "the construction of the Other" and history would fail to realize this.
Every culture is xenophobic to a certain degree, but saying that the West "constructed the Other" is absurd because it implies that the West needs a perpetual enemy in order to justify its existence. Completely not true. For most of its history, the West has been at war with itself. There is no unified West like there is a unified Islam. Islam needs an eternal enemy, the infidel. There is this intrinsic need in Muslim society to expand the borders of Islam to the ends of the earth and Muslims tend not to be able to co-exist with infidels in peace in lands where they are dominant. And if these post-colonialist studies students are interested in racism, then they need not look any further than Muslim society because under the banner of Islam there is tribalism (even in the most "moderate" countries). They only need to ask the average Arab on the "street" what he thinks of black people or South Asians or look into the treatment of Asian guest workers. I'm sure they'll be shocked at what they discover.
I'm no fan of the concept of "constructing the Other" but if there is any culture that does this, it's Islam and only Islam. This is still problematic because there is an implication that Islam could stop doing this and stop viewing infidels as inferiors, but it cannot done because Islam cannot be reformed. It is a totalitarian system and like all totalitarian systems it must be demoralized and eventually dismantled. Islam is sacralized form of Nazism with a fuehrer as its prophet.
"The fools who rule are even bigger fools than the fools they rule over, who cannot be so easily fooled as the ruling fools think." - HF
Mutt: "You think Muslims really believe all that crap in the Koran?"
Jeff: "What was your first clue?"
Once again Robert, excellent points. In W. C. Smith’s book Islam in Modern History pages 163-164,
“The reaffirmation of Islam endeavors to counter the failure of modern life but may not succeed in transcending it. Unfortunately, for some members of the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) and even more for many of their sympathizers and fellow-travellers the reaffirmation is not a constructive program based on cogent plans and known objectives, or even felt ideas; but is rather an outlet for emotion. It is the expression of the hatred, frustration, vanity, and destructive frenzy of a people who for long have been the prey of poverty, impotence, and fear. All the discontent of men who find the modern world too much for them can in movements such as the Ikhwan find action and satisfaction. It is the Muslim Arab’s aggressive reaction to the attack on his world which we have already found to be almost overwhelming – the reaction of those who, tired of being overwhelmed, have leapt to sadistic joy to burn and kill. The burning of Cairo (26th January 1952), the assassination of Prime Ministers, the intimidating of Christians, the vehemence and hatred in their literature – all this is to be understood in term of a people who have lost their way, whose heritage has proven unequal to modernity, whose leaders have been dishonest, whose ideals have failed. In this aspect, the new Islamic upsurge is not a force to solve problems but to intoxicate those who cannot longer abide the failure to solve them.”
As Bat Ye’or states in her article A Christian Minority, The Copts in Egypt
“The kharaj, the tax on non-Muslim land reduced the Copts to destitution: they abandoned their fields and mass conversions (to Islam) occurred, but they were forcibly brought back by the army and obliged to pay the taxes. To prevent Copts from abandoning their villages the Arab army conducted a census and branded them on hand and brow. In 724, twenty-four thousand Copts converted to Islam to escape ruinous taxes. The conversion impoverished the state; to discourage them the jizya was also imposed on new converts.”
How does the Non-Muslim world bring Islam into the 21st century? Is it really Non-Muslims to obligation to do so? Apparently there is no mechanism within Islam that permits it. Hugh advocates separation and containment letting the various factions “have at each other”. But what would come of it? If one looks at the past 1,000 years it is plain to see Islam thrives on religious imperialism and hegemony. The economics of Islam depend on conquest and subjugation of new converts. The ultimate pyramid scheme. How do we find the common resolve to counter the spread of Islam when the West is infiltrated with so many Islamic apologists? With those same apologists having a direct, tangible stake; financially, politically, economically, religiously and egotistically in keeping the conflict alive and Islam on the march. Tough times ahead.
"... (Islam) is rather an outlet for emotion. It is the expression of the hatred, frustration, vanity, and destructive frenzy..."
-- from Islam in Modern History by W. C. Smith
Which reinforces my theory that Islam is a permanent stage of adolescence. Moslems smack of immaturity and irresponsibility at every turn.
DISLOYAL HARVARD DISLOYAL GEORGETOWN DISLOYAL USC DISLOYAL COLUMBIA
What *will* Moslems evolve into? What with all the external exposures to which they're now subjected, surely some development will take place, even despite the Mohammed's best reactionary design elements.
My guess is that they will devolve back into a loosely coupled global lattice of the original gang, where they rode out and robbed, or collected protection money, and then returned to the tent to concentrate on sex with the newly seized women.
I envision hundreds of thousands of such core Old School Islam gangs lording over metro areas throughout the world.
You bring up some interesting points ARAKIS. I can't speak for Hugh, but I assumed that his separation and containment idea was not really a "solution" to the problem of Islam but more of a "strategy". A strategy that will allow us to spend less money on Muslim nations, to restrict Western education and technology to Muslim nations, and basically to make sure that we get no more immigrants from Muslim nations (non-Muslim immigrants from those nations are okay though). It's really hard to think of an actual solution to the challenge of Islam because there are so many variables involved but Hugh's proposal seems like a logical first step. Islam needs to be isolate first, demoralized second, and then depending on the circumstances we can take it from there (possibly a propaganda campaign or send some missionaries?). But to occupy all Muslim lands (even with a multinational force) seems far too costly and wasteful, so we can't go the Bush route and knock down every Muslim dictator and hope for a "democracy".
"that the Original, the Ur, the Other of All Others, was the one that was created by Islam to sustain Believers."
You mean the Mother of all Others.
""The Other" was, of course, Edward Said's favorite topic."
Worse still, it was Western anthropologists and other "social scientists" and illiberal artists who, in a collective act of self-flagellating self-criticism, created the idea of the Other as an exclusively Western idea. I'd bet that Said simply picked this up in the course of his PC Western education, then exploited it.
Igor, while yer heart's in the right place, I can't drop "other" from my lexicon. I live with other people. In other words, I'm a social animal. Other cultures also have other concepts of "other". It's now the Christmas season, and we're told to love one another; and some other religions have other observences.
Since it was Freud himself who famously said that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", hopefully I'm in good company when I suggest that 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you'!
"It's the old 'don't put beans up your nose' strategy."
Never heard of this in my life, but I'm very intrigued!
I think it ultimately does a disservice to our youth to feed them the popular line that everyone's basically the same, and there is no "other." It trivializes cultural differences by only acknowledging food and clothing, and reinforces the depressing notion that we in the West (particularly in the US) don't really have a culture. Then, to the extent that we do have a culture, it's all bad and we have to learn from other cultures to "save" ourselves from the ways of our barbaric founding fathers.
That's the tone with which international studies were presented when I was in high school in the '90s; it's taken me until very recently to get that out of my system. The kicker was when I dated a foreign-born man (still blind to the notion of real cultural incompatibilities) for a few months and realized 1.) I'm truly, and irreversibly an American, and that makes a difference in who I am 2.) I will not give up the cultural liberties and mindset that makes me an American 3.) Those ideals helped me make a much better life for myself than his backward, condescending attitude. This guy wasn't Middle Eastern, but nonetheless 3rd-world enough to make the point.
I wonder how many other women, due to the cultural indoctrination in our educational system, have found themselves in horrible marriages by the time they reached the same conclusion.