Feisal Abdul Rauf at this point perhaps wishes he had never come up with his slyly all-things-to-all-men triumphalist mosque, and no doubt wishes as well that he had never gotten himself involved with fellow slumlord, the far cruder and more obviously bullying Sharif El-Gamal. Feisal Abdul Rauf has a marvelous ability to personally ingratiate himself with the likes of Mayor Bloomberg, and others who, protected by their vast fortunes or power, are used to the ingratiating, and are unable to distinguish the oily sycophantic creature oozing deep sincerity from the honest underling willing to speak the truth even to such an imperious man, unused to being challenged by any of those under him, as Michael Bloomberg, with his sixteen billion dollars. Why, just imagine someone telling Bill Gates that his business practices left much to be desired, or that much of what the Gates Foundation was supporting wasn't worth supporting, but merely fed his ego.
And what must now pain Feisal Abdul Rauf is the thoroughness of those who have decided to examine his beliefs, by tracking the trail he has left, both orally and in writing, on his Islamic path, fi sabil Allah. What do we know, so far, about Feisal Abdul Rauf? Not who does he know, who has been involved in this project, such as the doubtful Mr. Qadhi, and a dozen others, but what he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, believes in. What does he believe in? To hear some tell it, he's a 100-percent American, flag-waving and deeply loyal to this country. But those people have failed to understand what Feisal Abdul Rauf believes in, and where his loyalties - his sole loyalties - lie. Feisal Abdul Rauf believes devoutly in Islam, and in the Holy Law of Islam, the Shari'a. He believes that Muslims in America are free to promote Islam without fear of the kind of repression that the police-states of Egypt (Feisal Abdul Rauf's native land) and Kuwait (where Feisal Abdul Rauf spent years) impose on those who are Muslims. And they impose it not only on those who are Muslim, but upon those whose political opposition to the rulers necessarily is expressed in terms that make sense to Muslims, the only terms that really make sense to Muslims: to accuse those rulers and those regimes of behaving not "unjustly" or "corruptly," but rather un-Islamically.
In America, with its easygoing tolerance, Muslims such as Feisal Abdul Rauf are free to work, to exploit our hard-won guarantees of individual freedoms - freedoms such as those of speech and conscience that could not for one minute have been developed in the Muslim-ruled lands, and that would not last, for one minute, in this country if Feisal Abdul Rauf were to attain his wish, and the Shari'a, that codification of Islamic law that he finds so thoroughly winning and convincing, were to be imposed.
And what would an "Arab state with a Jewish minority" look like, if Feisal Abdul Rauf has his wish? It would be a state, given that the Arabs who call themselves "Palestinians" are 98% Muslims, that of course would try to live under the Shari'a, as Feisal Abdul Rauf devoutly wishes the United States would do so. He tells his fellow Muslims in this country that while for now they should obey the secular laws of the United States, no one should prevent them from working to undo those laws, and replacing them with those that are Shari'a-compliant.
An Arab state with "a Jewish minority" under Shari'a would of course treat those Jews as non-Muslims have always been treated, over the past 1350 years, under Islam. If you want to find out exactly what happened to the Hindus (Jains, Buddhists) under Muslim rule in India, read the Indian historian K. S. Lal, or Francois Gautier, or Koenraad Elst. If you want to find out what happened to Eastern Christianity under Islam, one wonderful book -- possibly her masterpiece -- is Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam.
And if you want to find out what happened to Jews, even the Jews in supposedly wonderful (see Maria Rosa Menocal, and all who swallow her fantasy-history whole) Islamic Spain, see Evariste Levi-Provencal; for Jews elsewhere, see the multi-volume work, using in part the historical treasure-trove of the Cairo Geniza, of Eliyahu Ashtor on the Jews of Egypt and Syria Under the Mamluks; more generally, for a work on the Jews under Muslim rule, see Georges Vajda.
Of course for those who have decided that history, and consequently the truth, do not matter, even the listing of such scholars is somehow an insult, an offense, an impolite reminder to the ignorant, such as Mayor Bloomberg, of their own ignorance and their obstinate refusal to recognize their responsibility, before they presume to speak about Islam or about such things as the New York Ground-Zero Mosque, to find out a lot more both about the doctrines (the immutable texts and tenets) of Islam, the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam, and the history of Muslim conquest of non-Muslims. They need to learn about the history, too, of how those many non-Muslim peoples were treated over many centuries of subjugation to Muslim rule.
Mayor Bloomberg could, with a flick of his finger, employ someone to translate Antoine Fattal's great work on the legal status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. Why doesn't Mayor Bloomberg do that? If he needs a good French translator, I can suggest three right off the bat who have native commands of both French and English, and who would be delighted to take on the task.
We have been finding out a lot about Feisal Abdul Rauf this last month or two. We know he refuses to condemn Hamas, claiming lamely that this would interfere with his attempt to "build bridges." Presumably those who are on the Muslim bank of the river or divide he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is attempting to bridge would have nothing to do with him if he were to forthrightly condemn a terrorist group that exists for the sole purpose of destroying the tiny Jewish state, and of pushing Jews back into the condition of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity that was their lot as dhimmis -- see Maimonides for his description of how Jews were treated in Islamic Spain -- under Muslim rule.
And that is exactly what Feisal Abdul Rauf wants for the Jews of Israel. He wants an end to the only Jewish state that exists, on one-fifth of one-one-thousandth of the territory that the Arabs now possess. He wants a "single state" that will become an Arab state "with a Jewish minority." And he has never mentioned, never opposed, the treatment of non-Muslims under the Holy Law of Islam, that is, the Shari'a. On the contrary, he has made clear that he reveres that same legal system that means unending and cruel inequality (that degradation, that humiliation, that physical insecurity that, over the centuries, led so many Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others to join the "party of the masters" -- that is Islam, in order to escape their otherwise at-many-times unendurable fate).
This is what the begetter of this mosque, Feisal Abdul Rauf, wants for the Jews of Israel. He wants them to be stripped, but by "peaceful means" rather than immediate and open warfare, which as a Slow Jihadist he knows will not work. He wants a state in which the Arabs, by demography, will take over. In this respect he is similar to Houari Boumediene, who in 1974 at the U.N. declared that the men of the South, and he meant by this the Muslims of North Africa, would conquer Europe through "the wombs of our women." Qaddafy has repeated this claim many times since, and so have Muslim clerics and journalists and diplomats and "intellectuals" all over the place -- you can catch some of them at www.Memri.org, and others you can find as far afield as the letters pages of the English-language "Dawn" in Pakistan.
Oh, Muslims are keenly aware of how demography is working in their favor, because the elites of Western Europe, with a carelessness, a nonchalance, an indifference that amounts to criminal negligence on a civilisation-wide scale, allowed into their own countries many millions of Muslims, without first finding out what Islam inculcated, and what the chances were, therefore, of a happy integration into the host countries. They didn't bother to find out if, instead, these Muslims -- with a few exceptions -- would constitute a permanently hostile force, working to undo, as best it can, the legal and political institutions and social understandings of the advanced Western democracies whose worship at the Altars of the Idols of the Age, Diversity and Tolerance, is unfortunately accompanied by the sacrifice of their own achievements, in political and legal institutions and in political and social and above all mental freedoms. All that can be undone, as everything else that over three thousand years has been achieved in the West can be undone, merely by numbers -- by Muslims simply coming to be such a large presence, one constantly replenished with funds for mosques and madrasas from the Saudis and other rich Arabs. The local Muslims have found the way to take advantage of every benefit offered and paid for by the Infidel taxpayers of these Western European nation-states -- free education, free medical care, free or heavily subsidized housing, and much more.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is not, pace Mayor Bloomberg, a genuine moderate, someone, that is, who though Muslim chooses to ignore much of it, has decided not to take it to heart. Rauf is not someone who, through his very laxity, his nonobservance of the tenets of, and dislike for the anti-Infidel attitudes that are inculcated by, Islam, may be considered a "cultural Muslim" or, still better, a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only." Such a Muslim may even be an apostate who chooses for obvious prudential considerations not to make his inward apostasy known to others. Feisal Abdul Rauf is someone who glories in Islam, who loves it, who wishes it to spread everywhere, and especially to see it spread in the United States where he believes, and has openly said he believes, that Muslims need only work to change the secular laws of this country so that they may be compatible with the Shari'a. And then Muslims, who enjoy our comforts and our freedoms right now, will be happy to continue to enjoy those comforts of a well-run Infidel nation-state (for whatever our many defects in the Western world, by comparison with Muslim countries we are models of political and civilisational deportment) with Islam being dominant and Shari'a, or a version of it, coming more and more to be the law of the land. Feisal Abdul Rauf is one more beneficiary of American generosity who does not understand what makes America tick, what makes it work, what makes it, by comparison even with the richest Gulf Arab statelet, so much more interesting and decent a place to live. It is such a place because Islam had no part in its founding or its subsequent development.
Should Islam ever come to play such a part, as Feisal Abdul Rauf so ardently wishes, the very things that make America pleasant for him would come undone. But he does not, and cannot, understand this. In similar fashion, Muslims want the goodies that the Western world provide, but they fail to understand the civilisational conditions that made for the production of such goods and the services that often accompany them. They want the stuff, but without even thinking that they might ask themselves why it is that the advanced West is the advanced West, and why it is that despite the more than fourteen trillion dollars that Muslim oil states have received since 1973 alone, none of them has a real economy that impresses. Instead, they all remain dependent on Western (and Eastern, and Third-World) engineers, doctors, teachers, contractors, builders, domestic workers, day laborers. Were those non-Muslim wage-slaves to be pulled, even the richest kingdoms or sheikdoms would collapse.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is like those cargo-cultists. He wants the good things he sees in America, but he does not connect those good things with the political and legal institutions that he is working to undo, by making America safe for those who like him will work full-time to change our secular laws, work to bring about a legal system more and more consonant with Shari'a. He has written that Muslims must remain free to work to make the secular laws of this country consonant with Shari'a, not to work to make Shari'a consonant with the laws of this country. He sees nothing about the Shari'a that is worthy of being criticised. As a loyal Muslim, as a "slave of Allah" who accepts the idea that the object of true worship in Islam is Islam itself, he could not possibly question the Shari'a. If he did, he might become emotionally or mentally unhinged. He is stuck with his rigid orthodoxy, hidden behind a thin veil of affability and deep sincerity, the kind of thing that the naive and unwary -- Mayor Bloomberg being among them -- fall for, and the rest of us, thank heaven, no longer do, or never did.
Mayor Bloomberg, some may think, is influenced by economic considerations -- apparently his company is hoping to expand into the Gulf statelets. But I disagree. I do not think that he is, with his sixteen billion dollar fortune, influenced by economic interests. He is at the stage of his life where, having acquired sixteen billion dollars, he wants - in that phonily self-sacrificing do-good way of a certain self-aggrandizing subset of the very rich -- to now "give something back." And what better way for these people to "give something back" than to win political office, and thus some kind of glory, for themselves? Bloomberg does not give the impression of having acquired the habit of reflecting on, or studying deeply, history, that record of men and events. And as a very rich man, too, he is at a great disadvantage, as many very rich people are, of always being surrounded by people whose economic wellbeing is tied to his, and who are unlikely, therefore, to disagree with him on anything of real substance, though jokily round-the-office disagreements over choice of a tie, or somesuch triviality, is not only plausible but likely, because it provides the façade of "daring to not be a yesman" while of course doing exactly as a practiced yesman would do.
Instead of winning contracts in Dubai, his motives are likely connected to his own private demons, that is, to his childhood worries about antisemitism, which have been recognized and cleverly exploited by Feisal Abdul Rauf and his ilk. They have no doubt played on the fashionable, for Muslims and their apologists, theme of "Muslims-are-the-New-Jews." This is an appeal that such people as Feisal Abdul Rauf pull out for Jewish interlocutors, when we all know that the "new Jews" are the same as the "old Jews." Their persecutors in the world today are not antisemites who come out of the Western world, but rather Muslim antisemites who are the main carriers of Islamic antisemitism, with its own history and traditions.
Bloomberg has spent his life making money and not on cultivating his understanding of men and events except in the narrowest possible, money-making way. He is ignorant of Islam. And the oily and ingratiating Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy have made it a point to exercise all their wiles to win over Mayor Bloomberg, a self-righteous, stubborn, and not very intelligent man (save for his ability to make money, which some not very intelligent people can do quite well at, for reasons that deserve to be pondered). Rauf is a "moderate-sounding" Muslim for Mayor Bloomberg. But Mayor Bloomberg cannot keep dismissing and dismissing every new bit of evidence that shows just how unpleasant (as, for example, a slumlord) Feisal Abdul Rauf is, or how strange his refusal to discuss funding. Mayor Bloomberg claims he "doesn't care" where the funds come from, and no one should even inquire. How can he possibly say that, when in every area of politics we need to find out where the money comes from, and this 100-million dollar mosque is all about politics, and nothing to do with an inoffensive "house of worship"?
For god's sake, Mayor Bloomberg, you are not dealing here with the Amish. A little world-historical reality has got to enter your head. You don't have to remain ignorant of Islam. You don't have to keep your misplaced faith in Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy. You are entitled to read, to study, to listen to others who know a bit more, and are willing to lucidly present the broad outlines, and some of the details too, of Islam. You could take a short text -- I'm going to unblushingly recommend my three-part "Islam For Infidels" -- and start there, and then continue with books, including the testimonies of ex-Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish, Anwar Shaikh, Magdi Allam, Ali Sina, and a dozen others. You have a duty to rectify your ignorance, not to obstinately and imperiously remain almost defiantly unwilling to make yourself less ignorant.
You owe it to the three-quarters of the New York City population that is dead-set against this mosque, with a large part of the remaining percentage consisting of those who think that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause must surely be absolute (how wrong such people are, constitutionally, intellectually, and morally), and who are not in favor of the mosque but as a matter of "constitutional right" do not oppose it.
Yes, you owe this to them, to those whom you presume to preach to and to protect. And you owe it to yourself to, to show to Posterity that you are capable, when necessary, not to behave like a stubborn billionaire unused to not getting your way, no matter how ill-considered that way may be, and that there is more to you than, at the moment, there appears to be. You must think of that Posterity, which does not forgive those who made mistakes in the past about other, similar threats. Those who have misread the Communists, or the Nazis, who were deeply impressed with the New Order that was being built in Germany, because Fritz Hanfstaengl told them not to worry, that the "right people" would still come out on top, or who were deeply impressed with the kindly, crinkly, face of Uncle Joe Stalin, knocking the dottle from his pipe (humble pipe, humble Joseph Stalin), are now, whatever else they did, remembered only for their grotesque miscalculation.
And unless Mayor Bloomberg decides, coute que coute, to learn a lot more about Islam, and learns to question everything, including that ingratiating act of his New Best Friend Feisal Abdul Rauf, Posterity will not be kind.
He could still change things, change his mind, or at least give some sign that he is willing to learn, willing to find out more.
If not now, when?
All Roads Lead to Ground Zero Mosque – Part 2
Diana West: http://bigpeace.com/dwest/2010/09/01/all-roads-lead-to-gz-mosque-part-2/
The enablers, the useful idiots and what connects them:
After 9/11, Rauf co-founded the Cordoba Initiative with former Aspen, Colo., Mayor John S. Bennett, which explains why Cordoba’s tax filings list an Aspen address.
During his four terms as mayor, Bennett was introduced to Alwaleed bin Talal (see Part 1) and other Saudi royals, who own chalets and other properties in Aspen (Bennett’s own home is valued at more than $2 million). Bin Talal met his second wife in Aspen.
Is that consecutive wife or concurrent?
Before taking over Cordoba as executive director, Bennett (above) headed the Aspen Institute, which included among its board members former Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as well as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice has appeared with Rauf at events in Washington and overseas.
Aspen Institute recently launched the Middle East Leadership Initiative with “generous support” from Saudi Arabia. Abu Sulayman, bin Talal’s aide, is an Aspen Institute Middle East fellow.
Cordoba’s tax filings show that Julia A. Jitkoff of Kingsville, Texas, was a director before resigning in 2007. Sources say the Texas socialite was sponsored by “longtime friend” Jim Baker, who sits on the board of her family’s King Ranch holding company.
FEC records show Jitkoff and her family gave over $30,000 to the Bush-Cheney campaigns. Cordoba’s 2008 IRS statement shows its books are kept by Kay Zimm of Kingsville.
According to bin Talal’s biography, he and Baker met regularly in Houston to discuss business in the 1990s, when bin Talal was a Carlyle Group client of Baker. Joining them for business lunches at the Bayou Club was former President George H.W. Bush, a senior Carlyle adviser at the time.
Baker’s Houston law firm, Baker & Botts, which defended Saudi officials against the 9/11 lawsuit, is one of the top international firms specializing in Shariah-compliant finance – another hobbyhorse of bin Talal.
Bin Talal in 2007 donated $250,000 to the James Baker III Institute at Rice University.
Bennett is also close to the Bush family. He graduated from both Yale University and Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. In 2002, bin Talal donated $500,000 to help fund the George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship at Phillips Academy.
The Cordoba Initiative is promoting the Ground Zero mosque. According to its tax filing, its mission statement, among other things, is to “address the root causes of international terrorism.”
Cordoba was the center of the Islamic caliphate in Spain, and the Cordoba mosque was built over the cathedral there.
Rauf has also worked on a documentary film – “Out of Cordoba” – by New York director Jacob Bender, a peace activist and Islamic apologist. The 2008 film, for which Rauf is listed as an adviser, purports to document how Islam led Europe out of the Dark Ages.
“Cordoba was the most advanced city on the European continent,” Bender says.
He also claims it was the most tolerant, allowing Christianity and Judaism to “coexist” with Islam….
He may claim it, but Andrew Bostom debunks it – here.
Listed first among “major funders” backing the film: Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation.
Another backer is the Islamic Society of North America, which bin Talal also finances. The uncle of Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, serves on ISNA’s board. The U.S. government recently named ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history…
It’s a small umma.
"He could still change things, change his mind, or at least give some sign that he is willing to learn, willing to find out more.
If not now, when?"
Never.
Once again, Hugh knocks it on the head.
I would like the Mayor (and the rest of the willing dhimmis in this country) to read the Qur'an. Bear in mind that many in pre-World War II Germany (and, for that matter, the elites around the world) dismissed Hitler's "Mein Kampf" as the ravings of a madman and that his plans "can't happen here". History has proven them wrong. And history, once again, will have the last word for Mayor Bloomberg and the rest of the fools and poltroons who defend Islam.
Islam is not a religion, it is a rigid ideology that demands total submission from it's believers and death from its opponents. Only dhimmis think otherwise.
Antidote for dhimmitude. Learn a little history. Must be taken when early symptoms appear.
Hugh Fitzgerald is absolutely awesome !
"... is one more beneficiary of American generosity who does not understand what makes America tick, what makes it work, what makes it, by comparison even with the richest Gulf Arab statelet, so much more interesting and decent a place to live. It is such a place because Islam had no part in its founding or its subsequent development."
This is extremely important.
In fact despite possession of riches & oil reserves quality of life is good in Dubai , Kuwait only because of America. And Indians ought not to forget this. Today we see Iraq getting panic stricken as American Troops are leaving.
But all the years they were present were Iraqis honestly effusive enough in thanking America by exerting themselves sincerly to offer complete trustworthy cooperation in nation building ? Islam is the culprit.
Serves them right. The mess created by these jihadists let the jihadists alone bear the burden of its consequences.
Whether Bloomberg learns now or later Americans should NOT cave in. A triumphant America alone can ensure good for all of us in the world.
Hugh writes " (... ability to make money, which some not very intelligent people can do quite well at, for reasons that deserve to be pondered).
I wish Hugh writes a separate article on this interesting point when he gets time.
Great essay, Hugh. Simply first rate.
“Cordoba was the most advanced city on the European continent,” Bender says.
So what makes Cordoba different from "modern" Islamic cities such as Cairo, Islamabad, Mecca, Riyadh, Kabul, Bagdad, Tehran, Algiers, Tripoli, Amman, and Dacca?
http://emergingcorruption.com/?p=726
I think if you read this you will understand why he doesn't want the funders investigated, because sure as hell he will be one of the contributors. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours. He is building termianls in Dubai and other countries. What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!
"for Jews elsewhere, see the multi-volume work, using in part the historical treasure-trove of the Cairo Geniza, of Eliyahu Ashtor on the Jews of Egypt and Syria Under the Mamluks; more generally, for a work on the Jews under Muslim rule, see Georges Vajda."
I seem to remember some fellow who put out some little book about this... oh, what was his name again...? Arthur Brostram... no, wait, was it Arnold Buston... no, wait... I think it was Andrew Bostom, by jove!
I was suggesting one or two primary sources that simply came at once to mind. Had I been listing a dozen titles, I might well have included the anthology "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism."
"... is one more beneficiary of American generosity who does not understand what makes America tick, what makes it work, what makes it, by comparison even with the richest Gulf Arab statelet, so much more interesting and decent a place to live. It is such a place because Islam had no part in its founding or its subsequent development."
This also reminds me of why Fetullah Gülen doesn't want to leave the US and go back to his native Anatolian Arabia. I saw as something along those lines the following excerpt of Hugh's essay Ayatollah Khomeini and Fetullah Gülen:
... and he (Gülen) could if he wished move back to Turkey. Why doesn't he?
Because here he is comfortable. Here he is entirely safe. Here the rule of law protects him. Here he can also plan and plot his moves, moves that will affect the future of Turkey, the future of Germany, and - by now you understand this - the future of the United States.
He has been extended every courtesy, provided with everything that a well-run non-Islamic polity can give - a well-run and safe and secure polity because it is non-Islamic, though Fethullah Gulen would be reluctant ever to recognize that. And all that courtesy, that generosity, that tolerance, has had no effect on him, and on his implacable desire to further the Cause of Islam. He can do no other.
And the US is certainly a "much more interesting and decent a place to live" in comparison with Gülen's native Anatolian Arabia too. "It is such a place because Islam had no part in its founding or its subsequent development", unlike the haphazard-to-the-extreme insh'allah paradise which he's from.
But Gülen, just as Rauf the Rat, would never acknowledge that.
Yes. It is the case that many of these regimes are held up with Western support. We have here a weapon that is not being used. ie withdraw our support. Let them really experience the catastrophe of Islam and then ask the West for help. The West could then say: "Yes we will help you, if you do the following: (We could then list our terms eg Democracy. Freedom of religion ie no killing of apostates. Separation of church and state - absolutely necessary vis-a-vis Shariah. And so on.)
My point is that the West has immense international political strengths which it is not using. The current problem is not the lack of a solution, but the lack of any will to do what is right.
" My point is that the West has immense international political strengths which it is not using. The current problem is not the lack of a solution, but the lack of any will to do what is right."
Undoubtedly gerard.
However don't be so dangerously naive as to lay down conditions you have cited above. Of course they will nod vigorously , might even rock back & forth taking the very name of ALLAH , grovel at American's feet offering dates & almonds grown in America , nay shoving them down your throat.
Elementary. Who does not want to cling to life? It is Christians & JEWS they want annihilated. Hence spawning forth in multitudes as human bombs. And consistently KILLING Jews , Whites & Christians.
I don't EVER fall for this ruse that those cherubic human bombs are victims of mullahs. NOT AT ALL. If they are such alleged victims of cherubic innocence , what prevents them from hurling their explosives strapped bodies at the mullahs themselves ? At those mothers who teach them fiendish recipes like adding freeze dried faeces to food meant for Infidels & JEWS ???
Why talk of pardon & aid ? Whatever happened to RIGHTEOUS PUNISHMENT ???
This lack of retribution makes their obese invincibility even more grossly OBESE. Stultifying us the compassionate , the VIOLENT PACIFISTS.
A jihadist plunges a sword into the eyes of an American.Disabling him. And we hire lawyers to discuss:-(( REVOLTING. Whatever happened to clause of LOSS of PROFITS ????
" We cannot expect our third-grade politicians to study Aristotle. Aristotle may have had Indian & various political scoundrels in view when he said: 'Democratic education ought to mean, not the education (or more precisely non-education!) which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy'. Until we have realised that these two things do not necessarily go together we cannot think clearly about education.
All political parties in India & the world at large today are pitted against any system founded on merit or excellence or intellectual superiority. The demand for equality arises from two sources. One of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of merit and superiority. The kind of democratic education which is being advocated by all political parties is bad because it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy.
A truly democratic education, one which will preserve democracy, must be in its own field, RUTHLESSLY ARISTOCRATIC and SHAMELESSLY ' HIGHBROW '.
As politicians and political parties have been less and less able to commend themselves on the basis of their performance, they have deployed a standard technique: look for a grievance, for some measure by which it can be shown that the target group has been left behind; when you cannot find the grievance, invent it; stoke the sense of being discriminated against; frighten the group into believing that others are out to take away even more of what is its right ;and present yourself as the only savior.
Inevitably, in each succeeding round, two things have happened. On the one side, the grievances that have been stoked have been more and more far-fetched. On the other, the group at which the rhetoric has been directed has been narrower and narrower. In the end, politicians pass laws.
They appoint Judges , lawyers as much as Vice- Chancellors and even Police etc . Hence, the ultimate responsibility lies with them. But they have received much help from others - the 'Progressives' who have dominated public discourse, for instance, a handful of 'progressive' judges for another. These 'progressives' are Aiders and Abettors. No , the right word ought to be Instigators.
M W M Yeatts , the Superintendent of Census Operations in the Madras Presidency in 1931 and who later became the Census Commissioner of India wrote as follows: 'Several of them 'induviduals and groups' manufacture 'cacophonous combinations'.
As early as in 1921, the English Census Commissioner for Baroda State had warned with a clairvoyant vision that in the face of change all round, 'Caste may soon adapt itself and be content to remain as if it were the Election Agent of the new Democracy in India'.
There is in all men a tendency to resist the existence of what is stronger, subtler or better than themselves.
In uncorrected and brutal small men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence..... it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy.
Two reasons can be advanced against this mad approach or movement.
In the first place, you will not succeed. Envy is insatiable. The more you concede to it the more it will demand. No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex. In the second place, you are trying to introduce equality where equality is fatal.
Equality can exist precisely only in the field of mathematics. Outside the field of mathematics, equality is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind.
As C S Levis beautifully puts it: `Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless.
Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours`.
Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual or aesthetic democracy is death.
In drawing up its curriculum for instance , it should always have chiefly in view the interests of the student who wants to know and who CAN know.
The stupid student, nearly always, is the student who does not want to know. It must, in a certain sense, subordinate the School to the University. Only thus can it be a nursery of those first class intellects without which neither a democracy nor any other State can thrive or survive - either against external enemies or internal foes.
Many faux democracy demands that little men should not take big ones seriously ; it will die when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
These small, short and wicked men sitting tall collectively sing the following Ode to Madame `Merit`:
Oh! You damned Madame Merit
How much we hate thee and
How do we hate thee? Let us count the ways.
We hate thee to the depth and breadth and height
Our souls can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of bestial being and democratic disgrace.
We hate thee freely, as men strive for democratic non-rights;
Demonically, secularly, stupidly, sadistically, uproariously,
And above all blasting forward for backward meritoriously."
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
There are many memorable statements in the posting above -- particularly those by C. S. Lewis -- that one would like permanently posted in the minds of those in charge of our educational system, or rather, of all those who have anything to do with the enterprises of science, art, teaching, that is, culture sensu lato.
The apotheosis of this Ekwilism, the Permanent Party Of Equality, a diseased Equality applied to areas of endeavour -- the only areas in the end by which a civilisation is judged -- where the idea of Equality, or ideals of Ekwilism, can do great harm, can be seen in, for example, the No Child Left Behind or Making-A-Silk-Purse-Out-Of-A-Sow's-Ear educational policy, one in which all eyes are to be permanently averted from real, as opposed to factitious, causes of what is primly described as "differences in outcome."
Merit often goes unrewarded. But in an earlier age, before the age of mass-man and mass democracy, the complaints were limited. From Juvenal's Satires, all the way to Shakespeare's Sonnet 66, which I put up just above, the complaint was against those lickspittles and spaniels who jostled for, and found, preferment, while merit went unrecognized or unrewarded.
Ever since Mass Democracy, and still worse, the Age of Mass Man that need not have, but did, come into being, the problem has become much more acute. What was meant to be limited to legal equality has become, in too many places, a the all-shall-have-prizes outcome. And we are all supposed to avert our eyes from such things as I.Q., or to deny its relevance or importance, or go along with the fashionable and transparent attempt to dilute the significance of I.Q. by describing, howard-gardner-fashion, these "multiple intelligences."
And while we have a kind of debased equality exactly where it has no place -- in cultural matters, in education -- we simultaneously have great and growing economic inequality with a class of billionaires who, like Mayor Bloomberg, are regarded as sages precisely because of their money. If these people were all models of taste, reserve, cultivation, refinement, and in the Medici fashion, supported the right kinds of endeavors, the right kinds of artists and writers, one might forgive or overlook. But they are themselves very often badly educated, and share in the general ignorance. Possibly the best thing that can now be done to help the good artists, as opposed to the tracey-emins of this world, is to provide good educations in art history to the children of the rich. See, for confirmation of what money in the wrong hands can do to the art market, the Saatchi brothers, or Eli Broad. And no doubt in other countries, there are analogous examples.
Ekwilism is now the Party of All, and the race is so often to the self-promoters and schemers, the noisier and more vulgar the better for them. Meanwhile, as a sign and symbol of the general levelling, the word "elitist" is flung about as a pejorative. This makes no sense.
Ortega y Gasset, Jacques Barzun, Jacques Ellul, and the insufficiently-studied Wladimir Weidle ("Les abeilles d'Aristee," an expanded version of his "Umiranie Iskusstva" or "The Dying of Art") have all had their say.
Such books should be the required reading for college students. Some of them -- the best ones -- will even be able to take it in. But then, so many of the teachers and administrators would have their authority undermined, wouldn't they?
May The Almighty Really Bless you Hugh Fitzgerald with LONG LIFE & GOOD HEALTH !!
I have never read this sonnet.
And brilliant scintillating intellects (like you & many Americans, Jews, Australians etc etc, for instance a lot of people commenting here) ALONE can inspire & guide the rest to optimum development.
I would never tire of repeating this. It is Americans' politically incorrect bluntly honest approach to various issues that has helped me immensely in my life. Freedom of thought & freedom of speech are so important.
Ashley Brilliant ("Pot-shots")had a memorable one long ago that IMO addresses the blindness of GZ0 supporters (I can't speak for his opinion on this issue):
YOU can change the world.
But unless you really know what you're doing, please don't!
I think more important than changing the world is trying to prevent, or at least minimizing the damage of, those who are seeking to change the world.