How terrible that those wicked Islamophobes blocked the access of these lovely people to U.S. port operations. "Emirates Aided Kin of Palestinian Militants," from the New York Times, with thanks to Seymour Paine:
In the last four years the United Arab Emirates has provided substantial financial support, through its Red Crescent Society, to families of Palestinians, militants as well as civilians, who have been wounded or killed by Israeli forces, according to Red Crescent documents....In 2002 and 2003, the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent Society, a quasi-governmental organization, made donations to Palestinian charities that included social groups associated with Hamas, the radical Islamic organization that won Palestinian parliamentary elections and has long been designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
A glimpse inside the Emirates aid programs comes from documents provided to The New York Times by Gary M. Osen, an American lawyer litigating cases in the United States federal courts on behalf of American victims of Palestinian terror attacks. The documents include unclassified materials seized by Israeli forces from Palestinian organizations in the West Bank.
"that those wicked Islamophobes blocked the access of these lovely people to U.S. port operations..."
-- from Robert's comment above
"Wicked" because hysterically anti-Arab, in the descriptions offered of the opponents of the deal by David Brooks and his editorial employers at The New Duranty Times. And in The New York Sun, we now have Mark Steyn who, in the same article in which he demonstrates that, having been given last fall Andrew Bostom's "The Legacy of Jihad," he has at least gotten through the preface, and has learned the terms "jizyah" and "dhimmi." He does not draw attention, or give credit, to this book for helping him to understand. In an article in the Chicago Sun-Times recently he referred to, and quoted, the Sufi theologian Al-Ghazali: "Whether intentionally or not, they [those who parrot Muslim demands about Infidels drawing cartoons of, or discussing, Muhammad] seem to be channeling the great Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali, who died a millennium ago but whose first rule on the condcut of dhimmis -- non-Muslims in Mulsim society -- seem to have been taken on board by the Western media: The dhimmi is obliged not to mentnion Allah or His Apostle..." Since al-Ghazali appeared for the first time in English in Bostom's book, that is the only place Steyn could have read it, yet he didn't feel the need to write "as Andrew Bostom points out in his "The Legacy of Jihad." And in The New York Sun article, Steyn writes this: "That's why almost all Muslim societies tend toward the economically moribund You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills." This comes from page 66 of "The Legacy of Jihad," where Bostom in his 120-page introductory essay, offers excepts from Ivo Andric's "The Devleopment of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Turks." Again, no attribution to Bostom, or for that matter to Ivo Andric. On the basis of these excerpts made by Bostom from Andric, writes that "you can see it literally in the landsape in rural parts of the Balkans." This way of phrasing things makes a reader assume that he, Steyn, has been in the Balkans himself, has looked at that landscape in those rural parts that he has managed to intrepidly tramp through, and has himself witnessed, and comprehended, the signs of the Christians who fled to the hills in order to escape the onerous imposition of the Jizyah.
And having just begun to use the words "Jihad" and "Dhimmi," he promptly misuses the first. When he describes the payment by oil-consuming Infidels to Muslim oil-producers as a "Jizyah" he is wrong, and casual use of the term diminishes the force of the observation, made by others here, that the attitudes of both Infidel donors, and Muslim recipients, of what is traditionally called "foreign aid" shows that it is much more akin to the classic definition of "Jizyah." If Steyn is going to carelessly apply the word to any payment from Infidels to Muslims, then that pointed and accurate use of the term, designed not only to note the simlarity but to provoke Infidel outrage, will be undercut. He should watch this, for he can make it more difficult to extend the application of the term "Jizyah" to situations where it truly fits.
By reading JW, which one suspects he already does or soon will (he's no fool), Steyn will learn that Egypt,Pakistan, the "Palestinians," all pocket that proferred foreign aid from Europe and America, but do not exhibit any real or lasting gratitude. What they do exhibit is fury, unfeigned and permanent, at the slightest hint that such aid could ever be cut by those same Infidel donors. For in the view of Muslims, that would not be right, that would be unjust. be cut, or even done away with altogether. The Hamas rulers of the "Palestinians" simply cannot believe that the Western world would do something so unjust, so unfair, as to cut aid to them, even though their declared aim is to destroy Israel, and to impose the Shari'a everywhere that they will rule, which is to say, all over what Christians regard as the Holy Land. Egypt, similarly, seems to think that no matter how vicious the media campaigns against both Israel and the United States, Egypt's rulers still deserve and must by right be given, that nearly $2 billion a year from the American government. It does not matter that Egyptian weaopns scientists were found to be engaged in undisclosed work with the weapons scientists of Saddam Hussein. It does not matter that Egypt failed to fulfil any of its solemn commitments under the Camp David Treaty. It does not matter that Egypt staged "elections" that would make Tammany Hall blush, and that the regime continues to persecute, for daring to run, the only real secularist and democrat in political life, Ayman Nour. It does not matter that Mubarak has been grooming in the royal stables his equine son to fill his father's horse-shoes. None of this matters. The American government, or that part of it that distributes the aid, is simply afraid to deny Egypt that billion a year. The same is true for Pakistan and, as one can see by all the contortions intended to make it possible to continue the Jizyah to the will find that the word "Jizyah" can most accurately, and devastatingly, and usefully, be applied as it has been here -- to refer to the foreign aid that has been given, and that seemingly cannot be stopped lest the receipients take it badly, and the donors cease to be treated as "protected peoples" (to the extent they are), safe from even greater Muslim ire, and vindictiveness, by Infidel governments to such Muslim polities and peoples as Egypt, Pakistan, and "the Palestinians." Such foreign aid bears all the outward and visible signs of being "Jizyah"; it is money given from Infidels to Muslims, money that is received not with any expressions of gratitude, but pocketed as if by right, and as if by right more is demanded, and outrage expressed, at the very notion that the Infidels might dare to limit that payment.
But that was not my main point about Steyn's latest article. That point was his mocking of the opponents of the Dubai deal, mainly by showing how incompetent American officials have been. And so they have. And so what? Are we to conclude that the ansswer is to turn over port security to Dubai, that is to one of the constituent sheikdoms of the U.A.E., that loose collection of louche statelets, because things are so bad it couldn't get worse? Steyn thinks that giving the Arabs a way to recycle petrodollars that does not involve Jihad-making activities (or at least does not appear to) is a good thing. He's focussed on soaking up those petro-dollars. He should be focussed on how, not to allow the Arabs and Muslims to buy things so as to "recycle those petrodollars, but how to diminish those petrodollars altogether.
And his bland belief that this is all somehow a big joke, something to observe but not to be alarmed about, and that the expression of such alarm by opponents of the deal was silly, or even hysterical, is intolerable. Such opposition was, in fact, a popular expression of mental health, of the right kind of suspicion of the right suspects, both the U.A,E., and those in the American government who for decades have depicted that country, and Saudi Arabia, and the other Muslim states, as our "allies" or "staunch allies." Anything that leads people to believe, as thewy should, that these countries are not, and never can be, our allies, and that is because of the tentes of Islam that even the most decadent of Arabian-sheikdom plutocrats must pay some kind of tribute to (often the tribute is of the traditional kind: soothing one's Muslim conscious, for that very decadence, by contributing extra funds toward the building and upkeep and spread of Muslim institutions in the Lands of the Infidels, not to mention the private support for assorted Al-Qaeda-like organizations, of which there are so many, from Pakistan to Pennsylvania).
The opposition to the Dubai Ports Deal was correct. It was correct, and useful, as a way of indicating public fury, even if that fury is still confused, and in places inchoate because of that confusion. We smell a rat. The rat is the deal. The rat is the attitude behind the deal. The rat is the belief that there are only these "Wahhabis" or "Salafis" or "extremists" and then there are all the others, according to those who might be described as "the-boys-we-can-do-business-with" boys. They are all over. They are plausible sounding. Steyn is apparently one of them. They are wrong. Perhaps he will come round, perhaps not. If not, Steyn will, like some others, be left high and dry, as high and dry as the wood placed by some of his adorers on their Temple of Fame built in his honor in Woodsville, to alight under whatever has been selected to be the latest burnt offering.
Humor is welcome, but not when the larger points are missed in making the smaller point that the World Is Just One Big Joke. Discussing Islam is not quite the same thing as reviewing a Broadway play or West End play, not even Cowardy Custard. Jokes are one thing, obsessive jokiness another. Even from someone who has so often provided, especially in comparison with almost everyone else, comic relief.
The inappropriate comic relief here led Steyn to overlook the symbolic signifiance of that fierce opposition to the deal. That opposition was a good thing, far beyond whatever heightened threat might, or might not, exist (I think it does), from such a transfer of ownership and possible control. If course some of the political figures who expressed outrage were time-servers and hypocrites (Senator Clinton is married to Mr. Clinton, who apparently has been offering lobbying adviceon the deal). So what? Better that time-servers and hypocrites are forced to say the right, rather than the wrong, things. All kinds of people in England in September 1939, who had a few weeks or months or years before, been thinking of ways to appease, or not to oppose, Mr. Hitler, suddenly found they had quit different views. Fine. As long as they had those views, and felt they had to act on them.
I want an atmosphere where such things as the Dubai Deal are turned down, for perfectly rational reasons that go far beyond the economic justifications offerred for the deal, and including that pleasing notion, prmoted in that old Chamber-of-Commerce motto in Atlanta had it, "Atlanta-the City That is Too Busy to Hate" that Dubai businessmen would be so eager to protect their businesses that they wouldn't use any of their wealth to promote the Jihad. The notion that if only everyone can be kept busy making business deals, they will be no threat is, aside from being a most unappealing justification, but is also a false one. And the security concerns over the deal, concerns that Mark Steyn treats with such insouciance, and because he can adduce evidence of extraordinary past incompetence by the FBI and other security agencies, thinks are therefore phony or illegitimate, evidences a logic that not only escapes me, but apparently has escaped a good many others as well, because last I heard it had flown down to Rio and was living undetected under a false identity.
No, the mixture as before will not do. Not even when stirred by the swizzle-stick of someone who has in the past, il passato increasingly remoto, earned our gratitude for being, on occasion, very funny.
I understand that bloggers across the UAE are very indignant about the demise of this deal. If so, it's just a tad ironic seeing as they perceive of non-Muslims as unwanted intruders unless they are there as guestworker slaves and and do not particularly welcome kuffir-owned enterprizes setting up shop on Holy Islamic soil.
Et tu, Robert? I would think you would have a more sensitive ear for taqiya than to uncritically accept that the Dubai ports deal has been "blocked." The #1 article on realclearpolitics.com explains that the "blockage" is far from a done deal:
Dubai Port Pullout a Fraud
It seems that the wealthy ruling elites in the UAE in general and Dubai in particular subsidize terrorism and provide it with political/diplomatic support at the UN. They also practice racism in their treatment of foreign workers, their treatment of Israel, Jews, etc. Yet they are also capitalists, although probably not especially democratic. How do we explain this combination of facts?
Eliyahu:
It's spelled g-r-e-e-d.