Not too long ago Bret Stephens published an article in the Wall Street Journal to which I replied here. It was soon thereafter reprinted in Commentary, and someone from Commentary contacted me and asked if I would make that blog post into a letter to the editor replying to his article. I did so, and it was published recently. I'm told that Stephens replied contemptuously and did not address the substantive points -- but I have not seen his reply. In any case, I hope his response to this letter from David Yerushalmi of SANE is more positive.
"The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens has an epiphany?," from SANE, January 13:
Dear Mr. Stephens:I was literally at the edge of my seat when I read the title to your opinion piece this am: “The No-State Solution: Hamas cares more about Shariah than 'Palestine.”
My immediate reaction was to ask if one of the main spokesmen for the WSJ’s editorial view had finally come to penetrate the barbwire PC that many, including the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations in the US, had laid down around a serious analysis of Shariah. The idea that Hamas, which was elected presumably on its concern for Palestinians qua Palestinians as evidenced by its focus on social welfare, was in fact far more dedicated to the broader telos and methods of Shariah, was for me a breakthrough of enormous proportions, especially coming from the WSJ which mindlessly promotes Shariah through Shariah-compliant finance.
Shariah, as the common enemy threat doctrine, unites the mujahideen from around the world—those committed jihad warriors and financiers who share no national or cultural ties, political or racial affiliations, or even common language other than the fundamentals of a theo-political-military jurisprudence—and remains the single most authoritative institution in Islam despite its lack of full state authority in most Muslim regimes. It was Hamas’ commitment to Shariah which I sought to introduce in the Boim v Holy Land Foundation appeal before the full 7th Circuit in a brief authored for the Center for Security Policy. Hamas states quite clearly, as do all MB groups, that nationalism as expressed through political engagement is only a stage in the ultimate reunification of the Umma worldwide ordered politically via Shariah.
But then, with the greatest of disappointment, I read the piece, and while good enough, missed the Shariah connection almost entirely. I say almost because given the title the reader with some background might envision it with some effort between the lines. Unfortunately, you fell into the trap of most pundits and even experts who look upon the Muslim Brotherhood and the resurgence of Shariah through “Islamist” groups as a kind of revolutionary ideological movement or “ism” like the communist/Soviet one in the mid-20th Century. Indeed, most of these commentators point to the genesis of the MB in Egypt (Qutb) and Pakistan (Maududi) in the 1930s-1950s as evidence of this modern revolutionary bent.
The problem with this historical hypothesis, however, is the presence of facts. While the MB has taken on some of the language of the social revolutionary movements of the hard Left, it specifically renounces such secular causes and examines all of its own behavior through the studied and authoritative Shariah rulings of men such as Mufti Taqi Usmani, the long-time head of the Dow Jones Islamic Index Shariah advisory board. (If you don’t know of this sordid affair and the Dow Jones cover-up, ask your colleagues at the editorial desk.)
In fact, if you look deeper into the Hamas Charter and the writings of the leading polemicists and Shariah scholars of the MB groups, you will find a very strict correlation between Shariah and deeds. While many of the “experts” like to say the MB is a wholly different beast than al Qaeda, for example, they are wrong. Both groups are absolutely committed to Shariah; indeed, both groups adhere to Shariah’s goal of a one-world hegemony and the methods of dawa, dhimma, and jihad to achieve that end. They differ, however, in tactics. The former believes in a staged conquering where the political mujahideen must work within certain Kufr political regimes; the latter accepts no such intermediate goals.
Finally, let me say this. You are also terribly mistaken if you believe the majority of the Gazans and those in the Gush area (Hebron) are not fully committed to Shariah as their common cause. While Palestinians under Arafat were notoriously loose in the commitment to Shariah, this is almost entirely due to Arafat’s popularity but also due to the fact that he gave Shariah its due in political rhetoric. In fact, the West, and especially the US and even Israel, could not understand why it was that the PA and Fatah would not clamp down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the Peace Process days to finally break through the political-security stalemate that had developed over the years. Aside from Arafat’s own perverse calculations, which hardly anyone could fathom (which of course is how he stayed alive as long as he did), was the fact that he could not reject the Shariah these groups represented. They held the deepest recesses of the hearts and minds of the largest number of Palestinians because like most Muslims, even the non-observant, Shariah maintains its monopoly as the one single “true” force within the Muslim cultural, societal, and political worlds.
This last notion is of course not mine. “Scholars” like Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard (formerly of NYU) also speak to this institutional legitimacy. Unfortunately, men like Feldman opine mindlessly that Shariah can be used as a political and constitutional force for the “rule of law” while at the same time they dream that western democratic forces (the WSJ’s version of this is “free markets”) can tame Shariah. The problem with this dream-state is that many Muslim leaders and even Islamic religious figures have tried to tame Shariah over its 1200+ year reign, and they have utterly failed.
Alas, I have gone long-winded when I intended this am to pen a short email of pleasant surprise and ultimate disappointment. I hope you will forgive my over-indulgence in the brute facts few are willing to face. As a litigator, it is an occupational hazard.
David Yerushalmi
Yerushalmi's the man. I admire him more and more as time goes on.
Why do people think that people are more important to the "Palestinians"/Hamas than Sharia? The liberal-controlled news, that's how. People don't know about the genocide of the Christians community or the institution of crucifixion on Christmas. People don't know about the mass executions of Fatah members. I don't think people even know about the phenomenon of infanticide-as-industry.
I also don't think that Al Qaeda and the Ikhwan are all that different. The Ikhwan has Hamas and PIJ, its terror wings, but it also has its stealth jihad wings. They have more tactics, but not necessarily different ones.
All those who, at the Wall Street Journal or at The New Duranty Times or on CNN, or in Congress, or at the State Department, or in the White HOuse who presume to discuss the Middle East, or "the Arab-Israeli conflict," must perform due diligence. And that means to read, and to grasp, the significance, of what is in the texts of Islam: Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. They should consult the great Western scholars of Islam who wrote in the period before the Great Inhibition set in aroud 1970, and avoid the venal and the stupid -- that is, the espositos and the armstrongs who are not to be confused with the real scholars, Joseph Schacht and Snouck Hurgronje and Henri Lammens and a hundred others of every nationality. And just as the West learned so much about the Soviet system, and Soviet intentions, not from Peace Congresses in Helsinki, but from a succession of defectors from the Soviet Union, from Viktor Kravchenko on right up to the 1970s, so we now have, in the West, articulate and intelligent defectors from Islam, such defectors as Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from every background, and all of whom come with tales remarkably (or rathger, unremarkably) similar about what Islam teaches, what the inculcated attitudes of Muslims really are, what the meaning of Islam, and the menace of Islam, are for Infidels everywhere.
Editorial board members, columnists, television interviewers, national security advisors and secretaries of state, all alike have been far too easy on themelves, far too negligent in still, as of 2009, not learned about Islam but insteasd relied on the pieties of "soft power" or "addressing the issues that concern Muslims" or this or that, without considering that Islam is an ideology, not merely a "religion" as many understand that word but also, even primarily, a politics and a geopolitics. No one in the Western world before the Second World War had any misunderstandings about Islam. Read them all -- read John Wesley, or Tocqueville, or John Quincy Adams, or Winston Churchill, or a thousand other historians, statemen, political thinkers, even just travellers to the East (even lady travellers, presumably more innocent then the men, such as the well-bred Mary Bird, with her "Travels in Persia and Kurdistan") all describe the fanaticism of Muslims and their hatred and contempt for Christians and Jews, and had the Indian testimony, that of such historians as K. S. Lal, been added, the same story of Muslim hatred and cruelty toward Hindus could have been added.
It is only in recent decades, in roughly the last half-century, that for various reasons -- including the belief, in the United States, that Islam was 1) a "religion" and religions are Good Things and 2) Islam was a "bulwark against Communism" (see the Dulles brothers, see the whole line of American policy-makers who were fooled, fooled by CENTO, fooled by Pakistani generals into thinking Pakistan was a true-blue staunch ally, fooled by ARAMCO propagandists into thinking that Saudi Arabia was a staunch ally, fooled and fooled and fooled again, as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and no doubt will be tomorrow, thinking they can "win hearts and minds" of Muslims, when such is not possible, and in the attempt great sums of money will be vainly spent, transferred from non-Muslims to Muslims, and the delay in failing to properly identify and exploit, sometimes by merely getting out of the way, the fissures (ethnic, sectarian, and economic) in the Camp of Islam, will lead to great and quite unnecessary anguish and trouble and loss of life and civilizational peril for the entire West, or rather for the entire non-Muslim world.
It would be good, at the very least, to start with, that the relevance, but the centrality, of Islam in the war against Israel should be recognized. This is a war without end, a war without a "solution," but also a war that can be contained, made manageable, if Israel does not in a fit of confusion give up still more territory, but insists on the absolute rock-bottom minimum of strategic depth it now possesses, and grimly understands that the "peace" it now has is the only peace it is going to get, because according to the Islamic view, the very existence of an Infidel nation-state on land once controlled by Muslims, land that happens in this case to be right in the middle of what the Arab Muslims consider should be one uninterrupted swath of Dar al-Islam, is simply intolerable. Of course there are differences between the Slow Jihadists of Fatah and the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, but these are differences only on matters of tactics and timing, not on the essential goals that do not differ, and that will last as long as Islam itself lasts.