Taking a cue from the master saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald asks, "Who's crazy?": people like Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi and Zacarias Moussaoui, or the dhimmi analysts who diagnose them?
“'I'm going to make this easy for you guys. I fought against the United States. I took up arms,’ he said in English, his hands clasped on the defense table in front of him. Later, he added: 'I'm going to tell you what I did ... I'm proud of what I did.'”These are the words of Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi, “an electrical engineering graduate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz.,” who “was captured in March 2002 in Pakistan with senior al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubayda and other figures.”
He is as honest about what he did and why as Zacarias Moussaoui has been. Yet his honesty will in all likelihood be dismissed, just as Moussaoui's was by his lawyer, and by many of those in the press. They simply cannot be bothered to learn what Islam teaches, and why Muslims might do what they do, think what they think, and harbor what dreams and resentments they do harbor. Instead, they describe such people time after time as "crazy" or "schizophrenic."They are not.
The only "crazy" behavior to be observed over the past few years is that of the Infidels like Richard Miniter who, faced with a threat, a menace, unlike any other they have faced on a world scale, cannot conceive of such a thing. They do not want to hear about it. They do not wish to engage in the kind of study that might offer an explanatory model that fits both past and present data (about Muslim behavior and attitudes) and that has predictive value.
This morning the BBC tells us that “anti-terrorist experts are floundering about trying to understand Islamic suicide bombers in the UK and the rest of Europe. The experts came together and argued together at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. The conference sought to assemble ‘the puzzle that will help us better understand what determines and motivates the actions of individual jihadists.’ The puzzle however remained frustratingly in pieces.”
Despite the volcanic mountains of evidence that rise higher as heaving hatreds sputter from deep below, the Infidels of this world content themselves with every conceivable explanation but the real one: "It's poverty." (Then the studies explode this). "It's American foreign policy." (Then the killings in Bangladesh and Pakistan of Hindus, of Christians in the Sudan and the Philippines and Indonesia, and another hundred examples, are adduced). "It's only the Wahhabis." (Then the speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini are pointed out, and the history of Jihad-conquest that preceded Al-Wahhab by a thousand years). "It's Iraq, it's ‘Palestine,’” it's whatever you want it to be to explain Malmo, and Rotterdam, and the unintegrated and unintegrable Muslim masses in Europe, and the Norwegian imam who explains that stealing from Infidels is religiously-sanctioned because it is merely a taking of the "Jizyah" that is owed to Muslims anyway, and the Sydney rapes and the Swedish rapes and the Norwegian rapes.
Similar non-explanations purport to clear up the causes of the mass hysteria over Danish cartoons in a Danish newspaper, leading to worldwide boycotts of Danish goods, recalls of ambassadors, and demands for changes in Danish and Western and global laws pertaining to free speech so that Islam, Islam, Islam will be exempt.
It's a "war on terror," and those "terrorists" are a "handful of extremists." No, they're slightly more than a "handful of extremists." Now they're ten percent, and now potentially 50 percent, or if we are to believe the ex-Muslims, the keen apostates, more like 80% or more of those who take Qur'an and Hadith seriously support acts of terror. And then, of course, we are not entitled, are we, to even discuss Da'wa and the demographic conquest of Western Europe -- even if such matters are discussed openly, with great anticipation and pleasure, at Muslim websites. That would not be possible.
Who's crazy? Who's schizophrenic? Is it Moussaoui? Is it Al-Sharbi? Or is it those Infidels who are still unwilling to look at the teachings of Islam -- the Infidels who are still too paralyzed with fear of what they might find out and who thus remain incapable of even beginning to study the texts of Islam, and to discover what caused the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest and subjugation and then codified oppression of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and indeed everyone under their control who was not a Muslim.
Who is crazy? Is it Al-Sharbi, or those who are discussing his case who will tell us that he's just "one more nut case, like Moussaoui"?
David Ignatious is crazy. He spends the entire column setting up his bona fides as an expert on the global jihad, making fun of policy analysts who just don't get it like he does. Then he hangs his entire argument on one word which he completely misunderstands in the worst way possible.
Misreading the Enemy
What We Don't Grasp About Militant Islam
Really, this is his entire argument:
The Muslim demand for respect isn't something that can be negotiated, but that doesn't mean the West shouldn't take it seriously. For as the Muslim world gains a greater sense of dignity in its dealings with the West, the fundamental weapon of Iran, al-Qaeda and Hamas will lose much of its potency.
He briefly got it, and dismissed it.
Radical, or literate, well-read, Muslims who take the Qur'an, hadith, and Sunnah seriously base all their "dignity" on lording over non-Muslims. They want us "laid low" and to be "subdued." Their idea of "victimization" comes from not having complete dominion over non-Muslims. I only know this from reading what they've been saying for years. I make a point of reading everything I can by jihadis, here, at LGF, MEMRI, and from searching the Internet.
I'll bet Ignatious can't name and describe one sura from the Qur'an unless it's the one Bush likes to quote out of context, and arguably is abrogated.
If Ignatious thinks "dignity" for those who want to be our lord and masters, kill us and take our women and children, is doable without national, European, and cultural suicide, he's got a very unpleasant surprise coming.
Sorry, the quote function did me in again. The second paragraph under the blocked quote is also Ignatious. After that I add my commentary.
Free jazz and the ahadith... Now there's two great tastes that taste great together...
"David Ignatious is crazy..
-- from a posting above
David Ignatius is not so much crazy as deeply committed, and has been in his reporiting for decades on the Middle East, to anti-Israel, pro-Arab view of things that steers clear of any hint that something other than a "struggle for the legitimate rights of the 'Palestinian' people" might explain the relentless Arab siege, diplomatic, economic, and military, of Israel. In this respect he is a slightly less egregious version of the bow-tied H. D. S. Greenway, who used to appear at the Globe's offices at Morrissey Boulevard, where he would apparently be the Big Man on Campus (which of his many cars would David be arriving in today), and whether offering up his predictable and vicious (in the Mearsheimer-Walt sense) to the Middle East, offered (and every Friday, though officially retired, continues to offer) guides to nothing and to nowhere.
That's David Ignatius. That's H. D. S. Greenway. That's a whole bunch of people who are getting in the way of an understanding of Islam.
It seems that the legacy of Toynbee is still operative in the UK. His institution, the Royal Inst of Int'l Affairs, passes the legacy onto to new generations. I have no doubt that Toynbeeism is strong in the Foreign Office, the BBC, Intelligence, the Press, etc.
T-shirt idea:
"They're not crazy, they're Muslims."
Posted by Hugh: "Despite the volcanic mountains of evidence that rise higher as heaving hatreds sputter from deep below . . ."
That is truly the amazing part of the story. There is criticism of everyone and everything, but not the slightest effort toward skeptical inquiry on the belief system called Islam and its possible contribution to the chaos. Instead, our attitudes of tolerance, fair-play, and human dignity are being projected onto an Islamic culture that embraces no such concepts.
Well, Muslims are crazy -- just not in a legally or morally exculpatory way. It is a higher insanity, so to speak; what Voegelin used to call pneumopathology.
Hugh-
Intersting thoughts.
I wonder where you think this (the Islam-Infidel conflict) will conclude in the future. Perhaps you have written about this somewhere on JW and can direct me to such an article. You must have some thoughts-projections on the matter.
I have some thoughts-hunches. My projection is almost mystical (ironic-because I'm a very practical man).
I sometimes have a presentiment that Islam has a bad karma-that the the centuries of jihad, of blood flowing from India to Constantinople to the Twin Towers and beyond, requires from the Almighty an equal amount of blood and treasure from Islam to balance what has been taken from the Infidels in the name of the Almighty.
At the close of the American Civil War (600,000 killed)in 1865 Abe Lincoln thought the war was a punishment from God for slavery-that the Almighty required from the US payment in blood for the injustice of centuries of involuntary servitude by black Americans. Lincoln thought payment in blood for slavery was necessary before Providence would bring cooperation and mutual respect among racial groups in America-until we would finally become one people and "the last great hope of mankind."
In like manner, I have the chill sense that the terrible bloodshead that spread Islam must be paid back by Moslems in a terrible holocaust of repayment by them.
I watch, almost daily, Arab, Iranian and Israel news on Mosaic
Available it seems only on Satellite TV services (Dishnetwork or Direct TV). Worth the watch, although snippets of news from 15 mid east countries, and government and private news stations, as I can ascertain the translations are (in as much as possible) fairly accurate.
I can describe the broadcasts in the two most overworked words of the reporters.. and subjects "humiliated" and "suffering", they love to suffer for Allah, they don't care, in the words of more than one chadored woman, about health, jobs or food (except when they are used as an excuse to rant against the Jews and crusaders, to rile the emotions of their fellow muslims and to manipulate the westerner by our achilles heel.. guilt. Guilt is alien to the muslim mentality, as it has to be since all is the will of Allah, hence how can they be or feel guilty about anything.
Islam is the Arab culture sacralized, and the personifacation of the Arab culture is "muruwwa" or manhood, and their notion of manhood lies behind honor, hence honor killings, face and blood debts and feuds.. It is intolerable for an Arab to be "humiliated" and anything but dominance is humiliation, hence the emphasis on dignity, which translated means supremacy, domination, control which of consequence means the subordination and submission of the other.
Western dignity differs from Islamic Dignity. In the west one can be dignified and have dignity without suborning others, not so in Islam. For a Muslim to have dignity, he must suborn others, and if he can't suborn others then he is humiliated.
Islam is, by their lights, the perfect ideology for the world, refusal to accept "that fact" is considered to be an act of aggression and the muslim is humiliated. The only way to assuage the humilation and recover muruwwa (face and dignity) is by violence, beating the unrespectful kaffir, who insists on being hard headed, into submission, even if it means ones death.
Hitler and his minions also had grievances about "dignity".
Yet his honesty will in all likelihood be dismissed, just as Moussaoui's was by his lawyer, and by many of those in the press. They simply cannot be bothered to learn what Islam teaches, and why Muslims might do what they do, think what they think...
Cognitive dissonance is exacerbated in cases of the tone deaf. Don't expect so much as one sliver of intellectual curiosity or intitiative, nor one whit of moral certitute.
The truth doesn't exist. Reality doesn't either. But Fictive Reality does. Just ask Tim Russert, he'll be happy to tell what he doesn't know and what that won't do.
MO HIJABS MO BACK-STABS MO HEROIN LABS MO HLAL FLABS MO LAND GRABS MO
As our reiticent Moslems, tax mooches all, overtake America, riding Tim Russert and Bill O'Reilly like donkeys, let's at least acknowledge them for the relative honesty Moslems show when talking world takeover, and their continued progress towards that goal.
Nariz,
How true. This " saving face " is going to, I do predict, be the Muslim world's downfall. More and more the rest of the world has about had it.
I'm glad that Hugh wrote something about this syndrome of placing the faculties of any jihadi under the microscope and trying to find them to be insane and not products of their culture and their devotion to Islam. (My own similar thoughts had been pressing on my own mind several days ago.)
And Westerners are hardly alone in this "call it crazy" approach -- don't forget that the Afghanis wanted to call an apostate crazy for defying and leaving Islam. Basically, if you're PRO-Islam, you're sane, if you're ANTI-Islam or neutral to it, you're crazy.
However, if we just continue to stand firm in the face of detractors and liars, then we will eventually change the way the entire world views this war. And we have historical evidence to support that theory -- just look at Churchill's stubborn research and speech-making prior to the outbreak of WW II.
That one man changed the fate of the world.
War frightens most people to the point that they would call the sky orange if they thought it would save their hides. So, don't expect too many instances of truth-seeking amongst the intelligencia and mass media. They are mostly concerned with self-preservation, and again, this is history replaying itself:
"But what would happen if all these neutral nations I have mentioned-and some others I have not mentioned-were with one spontaneous impulse to do their duty in accordance with the Covenant of the League, and were to stand together with the British and French Empires against aggression and wrong? At present their plight is lamentable; and it will become much worse. They bow humbly and in fear to German threats of violence, comforting themselves meanwhile with the thought that the Allies will win, that Britain and France will strictly observe all the laws and conventions, and that breaches of these laws are only to be expected from the German side. Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear-I fear greatly-the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely. It will spread to the South; it will spread to the North. There is no chance of a speedy end except through united action; and if at any time Britain and France, wearying of the struggle, were to make a shameful peace, nothing would remain for the smaller States of Europe, with their shipping and their possessions, but to be divided between the opposite, though similar, barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism."
-- Sir Winston Churchill
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=390
Frank said
I don't know or care if there is terrible bloodshed coming for Islam. All I want is for the spread of Islam, and the influence of Islam, to end. In this case, education is as effective a weapon as daisycutters.
Special guest-
I agree re education, but I think Lincoln was right that the Almighty requires a balance with regard to life and property taken in the name of God and without justice-without regard to what a person deserves-including freedom of conscience in belief or disbelief in matters of religion.
I think the terrible destruction of the South by General Sherman's Federal-Union army in 1864 was on Lincoln's mind in the second inaugural address. Lincoln at the end of his life believed it was our destiny to become a place of equality of opportunity for all persons, but he definately saw that God required a balance to be repaid when life and treasure was taken from others in the name of God.
http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?p=lincoln%27s+second+inaugural+address&sp=1&ei=UTF-8&fr=slv1-mdp&SpellState=n-1363337735_q-CojxiAFsV%2FrZ57IrXZ5wkwABAA%40%40&u=www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html&w=lincoln%27s+second+inaugural+address&d=Pxp6L0aqMsZH&icp=1&.intl=us
Frank,
Your reading of a "balance" into Lincoln's Address ignores a crucial "if":
"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Lincoln is not positing some abstractly absolute principle of "balance"; he is reflecting on the mystery of God's will at the expected close of a horrendous civil war that has taken a terrible toll on both sides, and framing the caveat of its possible protraction in terms of that mystery which must, to the believer, be just, somehow, and must make sense (transcendent sense, not immanent sense) of the deaths of the good men as well as the bad. That sense, should the war continue even further its horrible catastrophe (though Lincoln at the outset of his Address makes clear his tentative expectation that the worst has passed), must be some sort of a "balance". Lincoln's balance then, is, as with the greatest statesmen of history going back to Thucidydes, mythic and transparent for transcendence beyond history; not as you apparently have it, literal, prosaic, immanently clear and defined.
Lincoln is taking gravely the toll the war has taken on the righteous cause, and he specifically and unequivocally casts the blame for the war on the South; and as a great statesman he rises above absolute moral certitude about the boundary dividing good and evil in the war: but the main reason he does this, other than his great capacity for humility, is because of the horrific magnitude of the war itself: "Each [side] looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding" -- a result of a war whose goals at the outset were expected to be manageable (though of course no less dreadful as any war must be)
To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it
-- careered out of control on such a horribly colossal scale of magnitude, the believer in Providence (as Lincoln sure was) and furthermore steward of a nation had to have recourse to a solemn reflection on the higher, transcendent meanings of history from on high. For Lincoln to go further and erect this reflection into an apodictic, abstract principle which you seem to be doing, would have been for him to arrogate himself as a gnostic ideologue who knows the meaning of history: for such knowing ideologues can (and, all too often, do) wreak terrible evils when they set about becoming God's agent in establishing "balance" in this or that historical crisis.
Frank -
I am not disagreeing with you; maybe you're right and there is an Almighty and He will demand bloody retribution of the Muslims, and their blood will run like rivers through the streets. I have to admit though, that this starts to sound like a different god than the Christian God, and starts to sound more like Allah.
I fit the description of the Quranic quotes:
Qur'an 4:91 "You will find others who, while wishing to live in peace and being safe from you to gain the confidence of their people; thrown back to mischief headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw from you, and offer you peace besides restraining their hands, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have given you a clear sanction and authority".
Qur'an 7:97 "Did the people of the towns feel secure against the coming of Our wrath by night while they were asleep? Or else did they feel secure against its coming in broad daylight while they played about (carefree)? Did they then feel secure against the Plan of Allah? But no one can feel secure from the Plan of Allah, except those (doomed) to ruin!"
I just want to live in peace and be safe, and feel secure while I am sleeping and while I play about carefree. That's it. If God creates a bloodbath for the Muslims for the murders they have committed in His name, then so be it. That is for Him to decide, it's none of my business.
BTW, I actually share your belief that there will be a horribly violent outcome of the current conflict. Not because God wills it, but because there are two groups, non-Muslims and Muslims, who have opposing goals: non-Muslims want to live in peace, and Muslims are required by Allah to subjegate them. I don't see how either side can back down, and the goals are mutually incompatible. A tragedy is coming, it's time to prepare to defend ourselves.
"For Lincoln to go further and erect this reflection into an apodictic, abstract principle which you seem to be doing, would have been for him to arrogate himself as a gnostic ideologue who knows the meaning of history: for such knowing ideologues can (and, all too often, do) wreak terrible evils when they set about becoming God's agent in establishing "balance" in this or that historical crisis.----Television
Your interesting comments noted.
I think in Lincoln's remarks there is implied wonder about a Providential balance that had to be met before the US could move on. Lincoln (in public/private) believed the war was a punishment required for slavery, the involuntary servitude of Americans from Africa that was too often justified by citing scripture, especially in Old South.
Personally, I have no absolute-dogmatic view on this (organic justice, balance, karma, etc.), but I do believe-feel there is balance and that we should be particularly careful in citing the Almighty as endorsing our actions when we kill or take the treasure of others. (Lincoln made a sly dig at the Old South re that-LOL.) I wonder what he would think of OBL, etc.
Personally, I don't dare speak for God-but I do think it's ok to wonder out-loud about Him. I have no absolutes on the matter, I have beliefs, but they are not facts.
Frank, at any rate, if there is a "balance" exerted by God in history (which is dangerously close to immanentizing the Last Judgment, by the way), Islam has yet to pay for the gargantuan sins and evils it has committed -- those against black Africans outweighing what America and Europe did combined by innumerable factors.
A classic statement of the "only crazy people, not real Muslims, engage in terrorism," can be found in Eric Ormsby's review of Minou Reeves's "Muhammad in Europe," inthe Wall Street Journal for December 12, 2001. Here is what Eric Ormsby (who teaches at the Islamic Institute of McGill, and who possibly wishes now that he had not, decades ago, decided to make Islam his specialty).
Here is part of Ormsby's review:
"The charge of fanaticism has stuck, and the horror of recent events [the review was published on 12/12/2001]--which, it must be stressed, have almost nothing to do with Islam as such, and everything to do with a nearly psychotic distortion of it -- may render the charge ineradicable."
One wonders if, in presenting such a misleading view, that "recent events" have "almost nothing to do with Islam as such" but "everything to do with a nearly pschotic distortion of it," Ormsby knew what he was doing, or didn't know. Either way is unacceptable. Did he not, even by December 2001, not take in the glee, the celebrations in Cairo and Saudi Arabia and the West Bank and elsewhere, with which those attacks were greeted in the Muslim world to change his mind? Anything about the sermons and textbooks in much of the Muslim, especially Arab, world? Has he learned anything from the hundred-odd terrorist groups whose names, at least, he now knows? Anything new about his specialty, Al-Ghazzali, that he has learned from the pages about Jihad by Al-Ghazzali in Bostom's "The Legacy of Jihad"? Any turning to the studies of Snouck Hurgronje, Antoine Fattal (Ormsby knows French; he should have no trouble), Fagnan, Abel, St. Clair Tisdall, Ivo Andric, Angelov, and a few dozen others, representated in that useful anthology, that make the Defenders of the Faith (Ormsby and Irwin come swimmingly to mind) rethink their defense, just a tiny bit?
It must be just a bit uncomfortable for Ormsby at the New Criterion, with his reviews of Goitein (now that he knows what Goitein finally concluded about the onerousness of the Jizyah, and also that Goitein at the end of his life was on the verge of giving Bat Ye'or's first study of the dhimmi a very favorable review -- does Ormsby have a new view, not of Goitein, but of the conditions of non-Muslims under Islam) and of French poetry and other poete-a-ses-heures subjects -- for the New Criterion's editors and many of its contributors have been properly alarmed by the islamization of Europe. One wonders: is Ormsby?
Fitzgerald-
I am jealous of your knowledge on this issue. It annoys me.