Peter Bergen, consistently miscomprehending Islam -- go back and check the record of rich embarrassment -- is hardly alone. All sorts of writers on Bin Laden or on Al Qaeda purvey inside dopesterism and piquant details about Bin Laden's wives (including the one who ordered lingerie and ran around in a track suit, no doubt trying to hold onto her man who jettisoned her for a 15-year-old Yemeni girl -- a full six years older than little Aisha, the favorite wife of the man Bin Laden aims to emulate). They appear to think that these details about Bin Laden as son, Bin Laden as brother, Bin Laden as would-be leader of mujahedin in Afghanistan, Bin Laden as either the great leader and inspirer, or alternatively, as the great organizer of Al Qaeda, are illuminating of the “root causes” of the Jihad. So this is all breathlessly packaged and then appears, in tantalizing bits, in GQ or The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. But the reader learns nothing, absolutely nothing, about Islam, about the texts that have consumed Bin Laden, that animate him and his fellows. It is all Reader's Digest-level stuff, though the income from being a "consultant" or an "expert" to this or that news channel certainly kicks one's economic status up several rungs.
On NPR I listened to a voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone particularly naive. He was talking all about Bin Laden. I heard him, as I pulled out of the grocery store's parking lot, discussing how before Al Qaeda the various terror groups were all "nationalistic" in their desires. Yes, how true. Not the desire to eliminate the Infidel state of Israel, but rather the desire by so many Arabs and Muslims to show their solicitousness for the "legitimate rights" of the "Palestinian people" (whose actual lives are a matter of complete indifference to other Arabs and Muslims, as one can see by how they are not permitted to integrate into or become citizens of any Arab country but Jordan). And how very "nationalistic" are the declared aims of Lashkar-e-Taiba, or a hundred other groups.
Yet this group is hellbent on killing Hindus not only in Kashmir but all over India -- for the goal is not that of helping the "legitimate rights of the Kashmiri people" but of establishing, rather, rule by Islam over first Kashmir, and then over other parts of India as well. Over all of India. Nothing "nationalistic" about it. This is of course true of other conflicts also that are generally regarded as nationalistic: for example, the war of Muslim northerners against the Christian, predominately Ibo, people of what was to be the independent state of Biafra. The Muslims were conducting, as Col. Ojukwu said, a "Jihad" against the non-Muslims. The Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines has not stated any "nationalistic" aims; its aim is to end Christian rule over Muslims, and eventually, to extend the area over which the Muslims dominate. And the same is true with the Muslim attacks on Christians in Sulawesi, in the Moluccas, in East Timor, and on Hindu interests in Bali.
But Lawrence Wright was convinced that it was only when Bin Laden came along that a "nationalist" impulse, found here and there, was given a unifying framework, the framework of Islam. Had Wright been more than a mere reporter, a reporter of what so-and-so did or said, he might have spent a summer reading widely in the doctrine and the history of Islam. If he had done so, the things that he cannot quite grasp would have become clear. Instead, he passes on his confusion to his readers.
Then the speaker said something about how Bin Laden was "rejecting modernity." This "rejection of modernity" stuff is all over the place. It's nonsense. Muslims do not reject any of the gewgaws produced by the modern West. Airplanes, television, the Internet, satellite television, Western medicine, the whole shebang. If by "modernity" the author means, instead, the universal civilization of the West, that is now to be found everywhere. This is reflected not in those gewgaws but in the belief in the emphasis placed on the individual and on rights guaranteed to individuals. And if by "modernity" one means the very idea that a government's legitimacy is to be located in the expressed will of citizens, rather than in the revealed desires of Allah some 1350 years ago and his unalterable law of what is to be forbidden and what is to be commanded, then yes, you could call Bin Laden and all the other perfectly orthodox Muslims engaged in terrorism as "against modernity" -- but it would distract and confuse those who need to know that what Bin Laden is against, and what he is for, is not different from what a Muslim warrior was against and for in 1804 in West Africa, in 1600 in Hindustan, in 1453 in Constantinople. He is for exactly what any of a long line of those engaged in violent Jihad have wanted: the rule of Allah upon earth.
Finally the interviewer (Terry Gross? Someone else? I can't remember) gave the title of the speaker's book -- "The Looming Tower" -- and his name, Lawrence Wright. I had heard the name, and I wondered what made Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker, think he could write a book about Bin Laden without immersing himself in the texts that Bin Laden refers to constantly, that Bin Laden has taken as the source for his entire being, and to which he makes constant appeal in everything he says or does.
In today's New Duranty Times, there is a story about Grisha Perelman and a possible proof of Poincare's Conjecture. What, I wondered to myself, would one think of the author of that piece had he confused the mathematician Poincare with that other Poincare, the political figure. Not much. But every day "terrorism experts" and "Bin Laden experts" and "Al Qaeda experts" flogging their wares, or delivering themselves of some well-recompensed banality on some nightly news program ("Well, Al Qaeda could be behind this. It bears all the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation. Then again, it could be some entirely different group. Hard to tell") make a similarly glaring error. No one cares.
But these Bergens and Wrights, in getting the most obvious and most important things wrong, are akin to that writer about Perelman and Hamilton and the Poincare Conjecture, had he, that reporter, described for his audience "the very versatile Frenchman Poincare, not only a mathematician of the first rank but also the President of France just before and during the First World War, who later served as the Prime Minister as well. Amazing what politicians used to be like." Or so I could so easily imagine -- for what's in a name, Henri or Raymond, they both end in Poincare, how much attention exaggerated to detail do you require, and what does it matter?
And what does it matter if Peter Bergen tells an interviewer that if he could ask Osama Bin Laden one, just one question, that question would be "Where in the Quran can you find justification for killing innocent civilians?" -- with all the colossal ignorance that that question betrays? And what does it matter if Lawrence Wright, staff writer for The New Yorker, where once upon a time William Maxwell and Katherine White and E. B. White, and James Thurber, and Brendan Gill, and Philip Hamburger, and many others -- grown-ups all, and supported by a cast of contributing grown-ups (Niccolo Tucci, I. B. Singer, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, John Updike, S. N. Behrman, Joseph Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, and many others, hundreds of others), proceeds to tell us, to tell the NPR audience and his readers, that Bin Laden was at war not with Infidels, but with "modernity," and that before Bin Laden all Muslim terrorists were merely "nationalists"? What does Wright think the nation-state means in Islam? What can he conceivably think it means?
Henri, Raymond, what's the difference. Bin Laden is bad, so what's the difference if we don't quite pinpoint what it is that makes him bad, and that makes him and so many uncountable others bad? What does it matter if we don’t care to discover what makes their ranks endlessly replenishable as long as people continue to believe, and to find their entire mental universe both created and limited by the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sira? After all, now we know about his wife jogging in her track suit, and how he treated his kids, and how that stuff -- "modernity" -- managed to get his goat.
Oh God, I cried. Is there to truth no duty?
A George-Herbert moment.
Was I overreacting? Was I wrong? Should I simply acquiesce in having to be faced every day with evidence of shallowness, ignorance, and stupidity by those who presume to instruct us on matters that affect our physical and civilizational survival?
Or do I, just possibly, have a point?
What do you think?
Right on, Hugh.
Hugh, why are you surprised by such ignorance? You, of all people, must know what sort of a society we live in - a society where enormous numbers of people believe in such things as astrology and crystal healing. A society where most people have never even heard of people like Edmund Husserl or Clyde Tombaugh, Gottlob Frege or Amedeo Avogadro, Jose Ortega Y Gasset or Charles Townes, Martin Heidegger or Gustav Kirchhoff, far less do they know what these people, and many, many others, have reasoned their way to or discovered or invented.
Ignorance is all around us and it is as deep and as profound as it ever was so why should ignorance about islam be any different from ignorance about anything else. So no, don't "simply acquiesce...[when]...faced... [with the] ...every day ... evidence of shallowness, ignorance, and stupidity."
Remember, people like me, who are at least clever enough to know that we are ignorant, depend on you (and Robert) for information and viewpoint - even if we don't always totally agree with you.
Dominic.
Hugh,
Of course you have a point and I "share your pain." It's frustrating to see and hear the Jihadis plainly and consistently voicing their true intentions and the root of their actions in Islam while so called pundits continue to spew non-sense and ignore the facts. The desire to slap them silly while yelling "It's the Islam, stupid" is hard to resist. With so many examples of Islamic intolerance and barbarity around the world, you would think anyone with half a brain would start connecting the dots.
You shouldn't aquiesce to ignorance. None of us should, there's too much at stake. That's what JW/DW and other websites talking about what needs to be talked about are for, to dispell the clouds of ignorance that dominate the public discourse of the war Islam has declared on Infidels. We know there's rampant ignorance out there, that's why we need Robert and people like yourself to take every opportunity to appear on TV or any media and keep saying what you're saying. And why those of us who come here need to keep on spreading the word.
Like a certain disgraced news anchor used to say: Courage.
"Ignorance is all around us and it is as deep and as profound as it ever was so why should ignorance about islam be any different from ignorance about anything else."
Ignorance is not our problem, nor is lack of knowledge or lack of information.
Our number one problem is the dominance of an interpretative framework, the prejudicial PC multiculturalist template, by which data gets fit into interpretations.
The prevailing mindset among jihadwatchers seems to be that if sufficient data is shown to these "elites", if these "elites" take it upon themselves to "immerse themselves" in the data, they will wake up and change their minds.
This mindset ignores the fact that no matter how much data -- even the mountain of data we have documenting the perniciousness of Islam -- comes to the attention of someone, that someone will then come to the interpretation, then to the judgement (following the irreversible mental operations analyzed by Bernard Lonergan), that accord with his interpretative template.
It is the interpretative template that is the problem. Interpretative templates, particularly stubbornly irrational ones like the PC multiculturalist one based upon pathology, do not alter when new data comes their way: they absorb and digest new data, and transform the data you and I, we Jihadwatchers, think obviously supports our interpretation, into fuel that perpetuates their template.
And it is not merely a problem of "elites". This template dominates our society.
Good God, if only 25% of non-Muslim Brits -- a year after the London tube bombing -- think that Muslims are to blame for terrorism, and slightly more (27%) think the West is to blame for terrorism, this is obviously a much broader and deeper problem than one of mere "elites". A healthy Western society would show percentages more like 75% blame Muslims, 5% blame the West.
Of course, "elites" have a higher responsibility to be awake and diligent, but their myopia is not due to some kind of elitist subculture: it is due to a pathology prevailing generally in Western culture.
(figures above according to a June 2006 Pew poll as reported in http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23889 )
Television/
I agree with your thesis that there exists a pathology, probably widespread, in Western societies. However, when you write that "ignorance is not our problem, nor is lack of knowledge or lack of information" I have to disagree to certain extent, and my disagreement is based on the very pathology you identify.
This pathological politically correct multiculturalism has permeated the mediums that ordinary people rely upon to gather knowledge about the everyday world to such an extent, in my opinion (videlicet - but not exclusively - the BBC), that people are ignorant because they have no conception of what it is that they are ignorant about. It isn't only the truth that is being kept hidden from them, it is the fact that there is a truth there in the first place. If one doesn't know that there is an alternative viewpoint, or that an alternative viewpoint could conceivably have been formulated or is needed, then one doesn't know that one should go looking for such an animal.
I remain, however, confident, that we will get our point of view across before it is too late; and people like Hugh and Robert must me encouraged and supported as much as we can in order to facilitate this. So my message to Hugh is still the same - you do have a valid point of view and you must not give up.
Dominic.
Hugh,
Mathematical Physics was not for me. Nevertheless, you have many, very sharp, points, above. Thank you for the essay.
I, for one, am encouraged by President Bush's change in language from "religion of peace" to "Islamic fascists." The dictionary definition of fascism -- a system of government marked by a totalitarian dictator, socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition, and usually a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism -- is a good match with the Salafi Caliphate envisioned by the jihidis. The outcry over this expression from apologists for the Muslim political agenda is telling, and it is coming from such high places as the Saudi Arabian government.
Furthermore, large numbers of observers are coming to the conclusion that the problem is, indeed, Islam. Yes, it is hard to let go of the idea that all cultures and religions are fundamentally good, but the interpretive template is changing, albeit slowly. Now, the hope is that thinking Muslims will also change their own inerpretative template -- recognize the evil elements of their religion and of their society and root them out.
Well politically correct multiculturalism did very well for my Ashkenazim ancestors, and in fact for practically all Americans who had to fight against prejudice and exclusion.. if the function was enabled I could post 19th Century cartoons of bloated red nosed Irish Americans, swarthy Italians or hook nosed side locked crafty Jews.
And if I recall correctly politically correct multiculturalism was actually born in the likes of Jewish, Irish American, Italian, and Afro American ghettos.
So youse guys want to trow da baby out wid da bathwateh huh?
The numbers of loyal assimilated, tax paying Americans who would, if they could, join you number in the millions, yet youse guys manage to alienate them with your radical extremist (and no you aren't conservative) politics and rants.
Feminists, gays, liberals et al are natural allies in this struggle of all struggles.. however there is no room at all in the camp of the radical "right", because youse guys get your rocks off ranting, demonizing, marginalizing and excluding natural allies because of the Oreilly Robertson Buchanan culture war.
Here we are locked in the death throes of a real culture war with Islam, and what garbage spills out of the mouths and pens of those icons of radical mindlessness (Oreilly and shemale with an Adams apple Coulter) but more culture war garbage, and you morons eat it up like it was ice cream, and spew it out like it was vomit and in the process alienate half or more of your fellow citizens.. brilliant I say, absolutely friggin brilliant.
I heard John Dean this week declare that he (as I am) is a Goldwater Conservative, but the Republican party and politics has shifted so far right, that he (and I) are no considered leftists, which means you so called conservatives are in reality authoritarian (gasp) fascists, just like the Islamofascist you rant against.
Nariz/
I happen to be gay and fairly left-wing, but I have no problems with this site. I have only ever experienced courtesy and help here - oh, and the occassional bit of humour and sarcasm, but that's alright. What's your problem?
Dominic.
"Well politically correct multiculturalism did very well for my Ashkenazim ancestors"
It did lots of good, but it has also laid the ground for a current ideology that pathologicaly inhibits criticism (let alone condemnation) of Islam. Now what?
I think there is a problem not only with journalists but with the academic world, as Hugh and others have pointed out time and again. After all, just as a PhD needs no more than 6 feet of earth, like anybody else, so too a PhD or MA or MEd likes mezuma, just like most other folks. So they too can be bought. If not with naked bribes, then there are grants, and institutes and centers, and junkets, and speaking engagements, etc.
What to me is startling --because the corruption and ignorance of the journalists, often indoctrinated before they ever arrive in the Middle East, are not startling-- is the loss of knowledge, the loss of understanding of Islam and Muslim culture. Was it John Adams 200 years ago who deplored the Islamic propensity to demand tribute from non-Muslims? Then Mark Twain [circa 1869] pointed to Islam as the reason for Jerusalem's wretched state in the mid-19th century. Cesar Famin, a French historian and diplomat, explained the depredations of the Barbary pirates as an expression of religiously mandated aggression, not as a mere drive for booty [in his book in 1853].
So how did this understanding vanish? How did George Horton's understanding of the Blight of Asia in the 1920s metamorphose into State Dept and CIA Islamophilia and jihadophilia? [Horton was US consul in Smyrna in 1922].