A few years ago Bret Stephens cowrote an article in the Wall Street Journal to the effect that America did not have a "Muslim problem," because Muslims in America tended to be wealthy and well-educated. (I wrote about it at some length here.) His analysis suffered from two mistaken assumptions: first, that poverty causes terrorism and that therefore Muslims who were better off would not be interested in jihad. This has been disproven by many, many, many studies, and anecdotally by the doctors' jihad attacks last year in Britain, Intel executive Maher Hawash's jihad activity, etc. Stephens' (and his coauthor's) second false assumption was that an absence of discernable terrorist activity equals an absence of efforts to establish the hegemony of Islamic law -- and that false assumption also plays a role in Stephens' latest piece, "How to Manage Savagery," in the Wall Street Journal, September 5.
Stephens begins by discussing at length the thesis of Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations?," showing how it "seemed in many ways to have been borne out by subsequent events," and ultimately arguing that it has been disproven by more recent events:
Contrary to Huntington's forecast, much of world conflict is now overwhelmingly characterized by fighting and competition not between or among civilizations but within them. And nowhere is this truer than in the Muslim world.
However, to arrive at this conclusion, Stephens has to gloss over certain unpleasant realities:
Look again at the peripheries of the Islamic crescent where Huntington perceived a collision course between Islam and the West. In the Balkans, NATO intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo secured Muslim populations and ultimately ended the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic.
And planted an incipient jihadist regime in Kosovo.
In Africa, U.S. diplomatic mediation helped to bring an end to the 22-year second Sudanese civil war and to initiate de-facto autonomy—with the ultimate goal of independence—for that country's largely Christian south.
While jihad violence still rages in Darfur.
In Israel, the second intifada with its wave of suicide bombings was all but stopped cold by a combination of aggressive counterinsurgency operations and the building of a separation fence.
While Iran and Hizballah gear up to annihilate Israel once and for all.
In the Caucasus, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended with a ceasefire that has held to this day, while Chechnya was brought to heel by a brutal military campaign directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In Kashmir, there has been no direct fighting between India and Pakistan; the head of the main jihadist group lamented this past July that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had "murdered the Kashmir cause."
Just after tens of thousands of Muslims rioted over a land transfer to a Hindu shrine, and around the time that the Indian Army acknowledged that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were waging jihad in Kashmir.
Even as far afield as Mindanao in the Philippines, the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement has been crippled by a combination of Filipino and American arms.
Not crippled enough, apparently, to keep jihadists in Mindanao from trading mortar fire with government troops just weeks ago, displacing 130,000 Filipino Christians, and threatening full-scale jihad against the government.
Then Stephens concedes that "not all the wars of the Islamic periphery have ended," and details some of them, concluding:
Remarkably, however, the wars that chiefly roil the Islamic world today are no longer at its periphery. They are at the center, and they pit Muslims against other Muslims. The genocide in Darfur is being perpetrated by a regime that is every bit as Muslim—and black—as its victims.
Actually, no. The regime that is waging the genocide is Arab; the victims are black. The regime considers it a jihad. The regime is Wahhabi, and considers its Islam pure, and that of the blacks in Darfur to be syncretistic and heretical, thus making the Darfurians licit to slaughter.
Anyway, then follows more detail of conflicts, and then some background in Islamic history:
Taking the long view, one might note that intra-Islamic feuding is as old as the religion itself. Of Muhammad's immediate successors—the "righteous caliphs," according to Sunni tradition—the first, Abu Bakr, may have been poisoned; the next three are all known to have been assassinated, with the murder of the third caliph (Othman) resulting in the schism from which the Shiite branch of Islam emerged. The Abassid revolt destroyed the Umayyad caliphate in the 8th century; the early 9th century was marked by civil war between the sons of the fifth Abassid caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Al Qaeda itself has ancient Islamic antecedents: the 8th-century Kharajites, for instance, were notorious for their extreme puritanism, frequent recourse to violence, and the belief that they could declare their Muslim opponents to be infidels and treat them accordingly.
The Kharajites were by no means alone in this. All Muslim groups have done this -- and Stephens' gingerly "treat them accordingly" is a figleaf for "kill them," as that is the penalty given to apostates and heretics in Islamic law. Al-Qaeda does this more than other Muslim groups, but they did not originate it, and the Kharajites are by no means their only Islamic antecedents.
Then comes, with no discussion at all of the violent and supremacist imperatives in the Qur'an, Muhammad's words, and Islamic law, some fashionable moral equivalence:
To be sure, endless feuding is hardly unique to Islamic civilization: the history of the West is also one of intense competition, bitter conflict, and outbursts of religious fanaticism. On the whole, though, these conflicts have dissipated and evanesced as the West has almost universally adopted democratic forms of governance. By contrast, Islam's foundational patterns not only persist into the present day but in many ways have intensified....
And why is that? That question is not considered.
Several explanations have been offered for this history of violence. There is the absence of democracy, which forecloses opportunities for non-violent political change and pushes most forms of dissent into the mosque. There is the oil curse, which allows states like Saddam Hussein's Iraq to finance expensive wars, buy political support, sustain huge sclerotic bureaucracies, and prevent the diversification and modernization of their economies. There is the endemic tribalism of Muslim, and particularly Arab, societies, and the values that go with it: the claims of kinship, the premium on familial honor, the submission to established hierarchies, suspicion of those outside the clan. There is the moral abdication of the Muslim intellectual class, which, with some notable exceptions, fell prey to nearly every bad idea that came its way, from fascism to socialism to third-worldism. And there is the history of Islam itself, which has made a virtue of military conquest, dealt sharply with heretics, and, until the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, typically combined political with religious authority.
But nothing, you'll note, about Islamic theology and law, which teaches unanimously and has always taught that heretics should be killed, and that political and religious authority. It is manifestly and demonstrably true that all the orthodox schools of Islamic thought contain such doctrines, but to acknowledge that would be to grasp the third rail of contemporary public discourse, and Bret Stephens is by no means alone among conservatives in being unwilling to grasp it.
It's also our fault, of course:
There is also the fact that European colonial regimes overstayed their welcome in their Middle Eastern possessions, with the effect that more or less liberal movements like the Egyptian Wafd came to be seen as stooges of the West, incapable of achieving national goals through nonviolent means. Partly as a result of this failure, the Muslim world soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it, and traditional liberal parties and policies were discredited in favor of more radical alternatives: the Muslim Brotherhood, the violent Arab nationalisms of the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the "Free Officers" in Egypt, Algeria's National Liberation Front, and so on. Despite the manifest failings of these movements, and the triumph of liberal politics from Mexico City to Warsaw to Seoul, liberalism has never really recaptured its good name in the Muslim world beyond a handful of courageous individuals. [...]
Stephens goes on to detail the decline of Al-Qaeda, culminating in a positive appraisal of the rejection of violent jihad by one of the leading modern jihad theorists:
Even now, after his "conversion," Dr. Fadl is no one's idea of a modern secular thinker. Rather, his manifesto rejects the inherent radicalism of jihadism in favor of more orthodox conservative values, a return to a kind of Islamic mean. More than that, it is a frank recognition of reality—namely, that the jihadist fervor of men like Zawahiri can only lead Muslims down one dead-end street after another.
True, about 9/11 Fadl asks, “what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?...That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11.” In other words, it was tactically stupid. Not morally wrong. Has he rejected jihad? No, he has just rejected certain tactics. He still says that “jihad in Afghanistan will lead to the creation of an Islamic state with the triumph of the Taliban, God willing,” and that “if it were not for the jihad in Palestine, the Jews would have crept toward the neighboring countries a long time ago.”
But like Lawrence Wright, Stephens confuses a change of tactics with a change of ultimate goals. However, the goal remains the same. Now it is being pursued through stealthy means. That is not on Stephens' radar screen: he mentions neither the cultural and demographic crisis in Europe nor the "grand jihad" in the United States aimed at "destroying Western civilization."
Stephens' ultimate conclusion is this:
To speak of an Islamic civilization is to speak in error. Rather, there is a Muslim world. It is fractured, and fractious. At times, Muslim causes or conflicts spill over into the non-Islamic world, as they did in the 1990's. Today, thanks in no small part to our actions, they remain internal—expression not, or not merely, of a clash of civilizations, but of the convulsion of one. In this internal disunity lie our strength and our opportunity—and ultimately, perhaps, the reform of the Muslim world itself.
To speak of an Islamic civilization is certainly not to speak in error. There is a civilization informed by and shaped by Islam, but really this is beside the point. He is absolutely right that we should exploit the internal disunity of the Islamic world to blunt the force of the global jihad -- Hugh Fitzgerald has been advocating that here for years. But his assertion that the conflicts in the Islamic world are largely internal today is wildly exaggerated and misleading, and fails to consider in any way the many non-violent ways in which the Islamic supremacist agenda is advancing in the West today.
As always, I'd be happy to discuss this with Bret Stephens. I'd be happy to open up any kind of dialogue or debate he would be interested in, but I won't be holding my breath -- I have invited enough people to dialogue and discussion lately and been rebuffed to know how few people, even vaunted political writers and bloggers, are willing to defend the positions they take. We have in our public square today a dialogue of the deaf, or more precisely a series of monologues by graceless people who refuse to engage one another's point of view, and boorish ratings hounds who find the jihad low on the public's scale of interest and so don't talk about it, as if the jihadists will go away if people are uninterested in them. I am not referring in any of this to Bret Stephens, whom I do not know. But I'd be happy to hear from him.
I sent Bret Stephens an email last year, and he replied quickly and directly. Perhaps you should try the same.
NEWSFLASH!! Robert Spencer is on Savage RIGHT NOW!!
NEWSFLASH!! Robert Spencer is on Savage RIGHT NOW!!
Excellent writing, Robert. You da man.
Re: Robert on Michael Savage's Show
Robert, I so appreciated your strong statements about the threat(s) that the Islamic ideology represents in the US and the world. To be specific, scholarly but not pedantic, and reality based is lacking in nearly all public discourse on Islam. Even you seem to be frustrated at the continued deafness of so many "leaders." I sense also the greater blogosphere’s frustration and impatience with elected officials and courts. We may be reaching a critical mass, where avoiding the serious issues brings as much a flood of angry e-mails and commentary as does asking the difficult questions and forcing a public examination of Islam.
And yes, Robert, you are Da Man!
I will re-post my comme nt at HotAir today on this very same subject:
"In this internal disunity lie our strength and our opportunity—and ultimately, perhaps, the reform of the Muslim world itself.
There is no possible reforming of the Muslim world without the reformation of Islam itself, specifically, its canonical texts, especially the Qur’an, the supposed uncorrupted direct immutable word of God."
My response:
Not at all likely to happen.
Discussion and interpretation of the Islamic texts, known as ijtihad, ended almost 1000 years ago.
Islam therefore, will eternally be the adversary of all things non-Islamic.
awake on September 5, 2008 at 3:16 PM
Robert has responded and linked on the very same thread as well.
HotAir has a specific problem. They do not appreciate any open, honest, direct criticism, regarding what Islam really is. Not Lawrence Auster type of "bizzaro world" exchanges, but rather policy from MM and AP and Ed. Malkin's decision to discontinue Robert's blogging the Qur'an stinks on so many levels in my estimation.
That being said, the HA commenters who have moved over to JW for the Qur'an blog posting is quite heartening.
Ed doesn't like attributing the word Jihad to self-proclaimed Jihadists. AP thinks Tyson's union has every right to forgo Labor Day, a 100 year old plus national holiday, in the name of Eid, regardless of the back story.
So be it.
The contradictions abound, but never let it be said that Robert is an obstacle to free and open debate. He has openly and respectfully addressed Ed and AP at HitAir directly, to which neither has responded to, to date.
I report. You decide. Malkin is free to reply officially or unofficially.
There will be an awakening in the US/West as the many recognize the threat and the dissent of the few (the apologists) will be set aside.
A conflagration of sorts, whether legislated or physical, will occur.
A wall of separation, whether virtual or physical, will be erected.
The Infidel (that'd be us) will be freed to continue our path.
The Believers will be amongst themselves to hammer out a pure Islamic civilization or, for whomever among them is brave enough, to begin the reformation, transformation or denouncement of Islam.
Science fiction or reality...
Posted by: Civilus Defendus at September 6, 2008 12:15 AM
Reality, we almost all here hope.
I am writing to concur with Robert on just about every aspect of his retort to Bret Stephens' opinion.
I have followed Bret's thoughts on Islam and Muslims for sometime. I am afraid that he has not really thought through this well.
Islam as an ideology of conquest is far more agreeable with data than Islam as a religion (which Bret and the Wall Street editorial board apparently cling on to in vain).
My thoughts on this: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=85447CC0-5BC0-4B50-BD31-7718A136D661
Robert has more than published few opinions here and there. His series of books on Islam is an evidence of a long and extensive thought process.
Seriously, if bret thinks that he knows his stuff, he should get into a debate with Robert.
By the way, I had brought to Bret's attention my Frontpage article about six months ago.
No reply!
Awake: "HotAir has a specific problem. They do not appreciate any open, honest, direct criticism, regarding what Islam really is. Not Lawrence Auster type of "bizzaro world" exchanges, but rather policy from MM and AP and Ed. Malkin's decision to discontinue Robert's blogging the Qur'an stinks on so many levels in my estimation.
That being said, the HA commenters who have moved over to JW for the Qur'an blog posting is quite heartening.
Ed doesn't like attributing the word Jihad to self-proclaimed Jihadists. AP thinks Tyson's union has every right to forgo Labor Day, a 100 year old plus national holiday, in the name of Eid, regardless of the back story."
I am extremely familiar with HA a I comment over there a whole lot under a different handle.
I think the fact that at HA they are so gung-ho for the "Islamic Nation Building" in Iraq blinds them to Islam's nature.
Dear Americans,
Wanna defeat Jihad?
Yes?
First step: do not vote for the pro-infanticide candidate
Second step: when you speak about the pro-infanticide guy with your fellow citizens, do not say "Obama" or "Barack Obama", call him "the pro-infanticide guy", "the infant-killer", etc.
It is not a lie, it is the reality of his vote record. If you call him so, your friends will ask you why and you shall have the opportunity to explain them how obnoxious he is (if you do not know the details, inform yourself). So, your friends will be disgusted of the pro-infanticide guy.
Third step: encourage your friends to vote for reasonable people like John Mc Cain and Sarah Palin.
Fourth step: vote for Mc Cain.
Result: there is a chance for difficulties for jihadists and other Saudis.
OK, there is no real link with the topic of this article, but there is a real link with fighting jihad.
I've spent a month living in London and I arrived here thinking that the assertions made about Britain's dhimmification may have been partially exaggerated.
They are not. I have already been involved in several instances where I was uncomfortably aware and made to feel physically threatened about my infidel status. I can't believe this is a so-called "free country".
The Muslim world IS disunited and fractious... but this cannot (unfortunately) be attributed to the actions of non-Muslims...
Indeed, Muslim organizations like Hizb Ut Tahrir, (www.hizb.org.uk) intend to unite Muslims and re-ignite their fervour to create an Islamic caliphate and impose dhimmi status on non-Muslims.
Stephen's ignores the very cause of Islamic extremism, Islamization and Islamic supremicism - it is found in the Qur'an and the Sunnah...
And this is why, in Europe and the West, Islam needs to be banned. Islam should only be allowed in private homes - and any Islamic influences, such as halal, should be wholly removed from the public arena.
I would argue that this is actually a war between an uncivilized mass ideology and the Balkanized fragments of a once-great civilization.
In many ways, it's the absence of the coherence of a civilization's defining characteristics on either side that's made the matter as drawn-out and horrifyingly bloody as it is. Were Islam simply one element of a true civilization, we either would have warred against it as an implacable enemy on the scale of a large nation state, or we would have surrendered to it already. Were the Euro-American Christian-Enlightenment civilization of old still in functioning shape, Islam could never have made its inroads into our cultural guts; we would heve treated it as unsparingly as we did Nazism and Communism.
The strengths of the Christian-Enlightenment survive mainly in the United States. They've been abandoned, even expunged, in Britain and Europe. That's why Europe is falling to the Islamic madness...and why the U.S. is chiefest among the Islamists' targets to come.
...the reform of the Muslim world itself. (From the article)
There is no evidence of any reform of the Muslim world in 1400 years. In light of this reality only an arrogant out of touch person could come to this conclusion. But on the other hand, "arrogant and out of touch" is a common affliction among our elites these days.
“Islam is not a monolith” and “we can’t tar one billion people with the same brush..”
http://sheikyermami.com/2008/09/06/islam-is-not-a-monolith-and-we-cant-tar-one-billion-people-with-the-same-brush/
...The strengths of the Christian-Enlightenment survive mainly in the United States. They've been abandoned, even expunged, in Britain and Europe. That's why Europe is falling to the Islamic madness...and why the U.S. is chiefest among the Islamists' targets to come.
Francis W. Porretto
Extraordinarily well said.
While the pundits and experts of dar al-harb try and explain away what they don't know about, the jihad continues.
No matter what is said about it, or what it is called, the jihad continues.
Islam is not going to reform from the inside. There may be an occasional group of apostates who try, like Musims Against Sharia, but they wont get anywhere with it. The only real reform would come from dis-interest, but I don't see that happening large scale. Without reform, which is not coming, the jihad will continue.
There has never been a time since Allah and Mohammad invented it, that jihad has not been aimed at non believers.
The only way to make Islam back up is some kind of force, multilevel, and not necessarily violent.
This is necessary because the supreme are very reluctant to give up their supremacy, can't be talked out of it, and are always looking for more things to be supreme about.
Supreme is not always bad, like a benevolent king, but there is nothing benevolent about Islamic rule. If you seek benevolence, don't go to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, or any muslim dominated country. You won't find benevolence in these places, but you may find jihad, leveled at you. It's nothing personal, just business, Allah's business...After all, you are a filthy kufr...
Jihad is the tool used by the supreme to retain their supremacy, there is nothing benevolent about it. It's not going away soon..Allah has willed it...
It's nothing personal, just business, Allah's business...After all, you are a filthy kufr...
Jihad is the tool used by the supreme to retain their supremacy, there is nothing benevolent about it. It's not going away soon..Allah has willed it...
duh_swami
It should also not be considered personal when we blow these Jihadists away for good (with maybe quite a few apprentice Jihadists included).
Isn't it obvious that Bret Stephens never read the Qur'an?
How could he possibly understand the facts?
His false assumptions about Islam are just that - false! They are based on hearsay or lies whispered into his ear by someone else who has never read the Qur'an, or by a deceptive Muslim.
I'm in favor of debates and dialogue, but what good can come from a college graduate debating with a second grader?
We Americans wake up slowly, but when we wake up, we are ferocious PIT BULLS!
America doesn't have a "Muslim problem"???
Bret must have been writing far more than he reads to hold such a clueless view of events. Apparently, it has been going on for years.
It really does not take long to come to a firm conclusion that the only thing that has ever united Islam and Muslims is the chance to do Infidels harm. When they cannot do that, they occupy themselves with making unbelievers out of each other.
There is enough incriminating information about Muslims out there that it should soon be legal to descriminate against them in the job market and in real estate - if someone does not want to hire a Muslim there is plenty of information that could support the reasons for not hiring a Muslim. If someone does not want to sell or rent real estate to Muslims, there are plenty of information that will support why one should not rent or sell to Muslims.