"Moments ago CNN interviewed Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College. He promotes Hamas."-- from a recent comment at Jihad Watch
The oily Fawaz Gerges managed to pull the wool over a number of faculty eyes when he slithered up the tenure pole at Sarah Lawrence, a school where Adda Bozeman once taught, and where her papers (the curator being Prof. Adams) can now be found. A Russian émigré, Bozeman was among the very first to describe the immutable problem of Islam, the violence and aggression of Islam, and the fact that Islam is not like any other belief-system that we call a "religion." Indeed, Samuel Huntington borrowed, it is clear, much from her.
Yet here is the oily Gerges, teaching young girls (and now boys) at Sarah Lawrence. This is a school that during the war, and for at least a decade after, profited from the refugees from the Nazis, and then the Communists, on its staff. It was also a place where some of the ills of the modern American university first could were detected -- the smiling vacuous university president, the general atmosphere of wallowing in "tolerance" (to be replaced later on by "diversity"), all acidulously etched by Randall Jarrell in "Pictures From An Institution." Were Jarrell alive today, he would have fun taking apart the likes of Fawaz Gerges.
Gerges is one of the many sly ones who has managed to convince some network -- ABC? -- to put him on a retainer as an "expert" on "terrorism" or "Islam" or something. Most of them are merely silly repeaters of the obvious, but Gerges is more than that. He's a sly and determined apologist for Islam and the Islamic worldview. Therefore, he is of no value whatsoever to an audience of Infidels, who desperately need a little instruction. He's a guide to nothing and nowhere. It is at this point insulting to all of us that he is still retained, on his fat retainer, to present his misleading lessons in understanding.
Anyone who writes, who talks, who pontificates, who appears as an "expert" on television -- from Fareed Zakaria to Juan Cole to Anthony Cordesman to Fawaz Gerges -- who continues to ignore, or to fail to understand, the centrality of Islam, will continue to be misleading, either willfully or ignorantly so.
The only people who are qualified to talk about the Middle East are those who understand fully the tenets of Islam as they relate to the world of the Infidels. For the real intelligence failure in Iraq is not about weapons, but about attitudes -- the attitudes of hostility toward Infidels, that will not end no matter how much aid is lavished on that ungrateful populace. It is Islam that explains the impossibility of any final settlement between Israel and those waging what must be, by the tenets of Islam, an endless Jihad against it. And only "darura" or necessity can be invoked to justify non-participation in a war against Israel.
It's too late for the likes of Fawaz Gerges to any longer prettify Islam. Too many people can now read the Qur'an and hadith, for they are online. Too many people are finally fed up with the likes of Esposito and Armstrong or the endless propagandists, including that triumvirate of transparent propagandists, Gerges, Rashid Khalidi at Columbia, and Rami Khoury at the Daily Star in Beirut. Khoury is, like Gerges, an “islamochristian” who parrots the Muslim agenda and view of things, but Gerges does it with a broader grimace. People are getting fed up with those who want us to keep focusing on the putative sins of Israel and the “centrality” of that matter, when a glance around the world from Beslan to Amsterdam to Madrid to Kashmir to southern Sudan to northern Nigeria to the Balkans to New York, to Washington, to southern Thailand causes us to realize that the war against Israel is only a local expression of a worldwide totalitarian belief-system whose adherents firmly believe in the right, as Muhammad says, of “Islam to dominate and not to be dominated.” Naturally the Arabs would prefer that Infidels learn nothing about the tenets of Islam, and still less about the treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule over 1350 years from Spain to Indonesia, and to keep the high-beams on that little affair of little Israel.
But Infidels are not having it any longer. “J’en ai marre” -- I’m fed up. That is what they are saying even in France. They have come to realize that neither their governments, nor many of the apologists for Islam now teaching in Western universities, will offer any guidance or real instruction. So they are studying that belief-system on their own. It is not, after all, impossible to learn what hundreds of millions of others have learned. And it is nonsense for defenders of Islam to suggest that "only" native speakers of Arabic can read the texts, when 70-80% of the world's Muslims cannot read Arabic. And further, for insight into the mindset of many Muslims, to understand the quality of its logic, the nature of its reasoning power, the worldview that Islam encourages, Infidels can now go to Muslim websites and be amused, or horrified, or both.
All this means that Fawaz Gerges will not be able to pull the wool over our eyes any longer.
Since I have no plans to attend Sarah Lawrence, Columbia or Georgetown Universities, the effects of Gerges, Esposito Cole or Khalidi will have zero influence on me. Yet, I too am fed up with the opportunities given to those who intentionally mislead and/or are willfully ignorant have influence.
Gerges is big on the "ferment" and "reform" that is supposedly all over the "world of Islam. The propagandist for Middle Eastern states and regimes.
For example, one Antony T. Sullivan, founder and director of a "consulting firm" nonwn as "Near Eastern Support Services" (think James Akins, think Eugene Bird,think Raymond Close, and you'll know exactly what is going on here) managed to hornswoggle the editors of "Modern Age," a publication ordinarily respectable, and put out by the Intercollegiate Studies Association (which should put us in mind of Richard Weaver, Friedrich von Hayek, and Josef Pieper, not give us the Muslim apologetics of someone who no doubt at this very minute is using his appearance in "Modern Age" to hike his fees to members of the Al-Saud or Al-Maktoum or Al-Thani or Al-Sabah families -- but really, I'm being unfair, for we all have to eat, don't we?). In this article Sullivan tries to convince us that the world of Islam is in a ferment, a veritable orgy of self-questioning and "reform" and he quotes, to this phony effect, Fawaz Gerges: "We are in the throes of a ...new wave [of democratization]." About this one can say that
1) it is flatly untrue. Those naive hopes about "the opening up of the Mubarak regime" were smashed with the same club that the Egyptain police use to smash political opponents, and the truest Egyptian democrat now sits in an Egyptian jail. in an article in the latest "Modern Age"
Ditto with the supposed "opening up" of Saudi Arabia -- purely trivial and cosmetic steps.
2) It ignores the fact that the principles of modern advanced democracy are flatly contradicted by Islam. The will expressed by the people, mere mortals who should be submissive to Allah, does not count; what counts is the will expressed by Allah in the Qur'an, and glossed by the Sunnah.
This is something that Bush, Rice, and many others simply don't understand -- they don't understand that Islam is a total belief-system, a Total System, doubly totaliarian, claiming to regulate every area of a Believer's life, and laying claim as well to the entire globe.
3) "Democracy" when it is temporarily practiced always leads to more, not less, Islam. This is because the discontent of Muslimns, over bad government, will always take on an Islamic cast, always lead to more Islam, not less. And that is true whether or not the discontent is justified, as it is, certainly, with the corruptions of Abbas and Fatah, or Mubarak and his Family-and-Friends plan, or the Al-Saud, the Al-Maktoum, the Al-Thani, the Al-Sabah, and all the other despots and potentates and beglerbegs and pashas of this world that some insist, absurdly, as seeing as somehow akin to our own world, when it is nothing like it.
I don't know if Gerges has gotten on the gravy train of government and foundation grants to study, or promote, the "reform of Islam" that he and others, eager for the same grant money, keep talking about. Perhaps his television retainer, and other fees, are enough. But in Fawaz Gerges' case, I doubt it. No, I'm sure some "reforming Islam' grant money (Vartan Gregorian's Carnegie Foundation? Or some other innocent, shelling out the dough?) has gone, is going, or will go his, oleaginous Fawaz Gerges', way.
Wouldn't you agree?
Thanks, Hugh, for mentioning Fawaz Gerges. I occasionally have seen him on television and am astounded at how his transparent Islamic line is taken for expert analysis by the media, who seem to have zero understanding of what's really happening in the world. Are they really this clueless?
JustAMomOf4,
Please realize that while: "Since I have no plans to attend Sarah Lawrence, Columbia or Georgetown Universities, the effects of Gerges, Esposito Cole or Khalidi will have zero influence on me."
is true in a direct sense, in an indirect way the influence will be felt by prolonging true awareness of Islam, and thus put all of us in danger. I know you know this by your next sentance, "Yet, I too am fed up with the opportunities given to those who intentionally mislead and/or are willfully ignorant have influence." but I thought it important to bring this to your attention anyway. All who are in positions which can influence others on this subject must be called to account for their errors if we are to win the day!
How can ya talk as if ya know what muslim or islamist are, or thinking or what? They always change! Except kill kill kill! The most brutal way.
I wonder if Gerges latest pay master isn't Hamas...He acts like a paid shill.