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Fitzgerald: Question authority

Sep 19, 2006 8:31 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

John Esposito, the lean, mean, jogger, the recipient of Arab money for his Center (he boasts about that Arab money) of “Muslim-Christian Understanding,” which is merely a facade for a group of apologists, with Esposito leading all the rest (Haddad, Voll, and others), attacks the Pope. He deliberately avoids the main point — is there compulsion in Islam or isn’t there? He dodges the issue of whether or not Islam has a long record of using violence, the violence of Jihad, the military conquest of vast territories in which large numbers of culturally much more advanced, wealthier, settled populations — of Jews and Christians, of Zoroastrians and, later, Hindus and Buddhists — were subject to at least forced dhimmitude, a condition of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity, that naturally would lead some of those enduring this status, in order to escape it, to convert to Islam.

Is that not “compulsion in religion”? And of course there are all the mass murders of conquered non-Muslims, including the 60-70 million Hindus killed, and those who were terrified into, forced into, converting to Islam. Isn’t that “compulsion in religion”?
Esposito so far has been permitted to keep his monstrous enterprise, treasonous to the West, and certainly to Catholicism, at Georgetown, one of the most important Catholic universities. How can this continue? How can he be allowed to retain, and to flaunt, a Georgetown connection? What alumni, what faculty, what students are offended by the presence of John Esposito, and his attempt to mask his propagandistic enterprise that, objectively, furthers the Jihad in just the way that CAIR does — and who thought nothing of attacking the Pope by deliberately missing the point? Many, I should think. Many should withhold donations to the university, many should investigate what goes on, what has been going on, at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding — one more phony aspect of the whole “dialogue” racket with which we are all, by now, familiar.

Let his center go. It will exist. It will still have the money from the rich Lebanese contractor who started it, and the later infusions, most recently from the Saudis, whose solicitude for Christians and Christianity is well known — which is what makes it so understandable that Esposito would solicit them. Or perhaps he had no need to — they know a good thing for Islam, even Wahhabi Islam, when they see it. And for them, and for Sheik Al-Azhar, and for Esposito’s hysterical Hamas friend Azzam Tamimi, his “ustadh,” and for so many other deeply unsavory characters who have marked Esposito’s entire professional life, if you can call it that, John Esposito is really quite a find.

We understand why the government of Saudi Arabia, and the Al-Saud family, would like to keep Esposito well-endowed. But why is his continued flaunted connection to Georgetown permitted, and not treated as the embarrassment — no, the disgrace — for Georgetown that it so obviously is?

Does jogging John Esposito think he can indefinitely keep the text of the Qur’an, and the main recensions of the hadith, and the sira (the biography of Muhammad) away from Infidels, or presented only in the sanitized versions of the Michael Sells of this world, forever? No. And despite all the money that has gone into buying up academic departments, though it has given jobs to a good many Calibans in place of the Prosperos who ought, by right, to be holding those tenured positions, something inspiring has occurred.

And that something is what might be called guerrilla education. People are not relying on the likes of John Esposito, for they can easily smell a rat. They are going back, not only to the primary sources, but to the extensive literature by important, and some cases great, scholars of Islam whose work has been deliberately suppressed or ignored by the likes of Edward Said. Not a Muslim himself, nor at all familiar with the literature of scholarship on Islam, Said was a great academic entrepreneur (distributing blurbs and references and weaving a network of backscratching alliances) for a while was successful not only in providing jobs for those who parroted his “post-colonial” line of literary or “cultural” studies — my, how many people are deeply grateful that Said made their otherwise impossible academic careers possible indeed. But he’s gone, and the work of Keith Windshuttle and the well-merited scorn expressed for Said by Kanan Makiya and Fouad Ajami, and the feline unanswerable reply of Bernard Lewis to Said on the “question of Orientalism,” have helped limit the cult’s appeal; the forthcoming book centered on Said by Ibn Warraq (“The Defense of the West”) will blow up what remains.

That leaves Esposito and his allies and protégés. But they, and their collaborators in MESA Nostra (which see or google) cannot prevent students of the Middle East from even noticing the 800-pound gorilla in the room — that is, Islam itself, its tenets, its views of Infidels, its 1350-year wars to seize the lands of, and then to subjugate, the Infidels, reducing them to a state, at best, of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.

Everyone has seen that obnoxious self-congratulatory bumpersticker — Question Authority. Well, here we all are, questioning the authority of the transparent propagandists and apologists, at St. Antony’s, at the University of Exeter, at the two Georgetown Centers (the “Center for Contemporary Arab Studies” and that other one, the “Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding” or whatever it is called — between Michael Hudson and John Esposito, and all the other hangers-on, there is not much difference in the message, really). Yes, by all means, in this case we must question the bought-and-paid-for authority of people who simply have not even bothered to study the unbought-and-unpaid-for (in money, in jobs, in the support of tenure-voting Muslim colleagues) and whose stock-in-trade is all picturebook local color (Esposito loves those blue mosques, those Iznik tiles, that Kufic calligraphy — and so do innocent students). They may, some of them, be professors. But they don’t know much, can’t make sense of things because they will not make sense of Islam, and that is becoming clearer every day. And they are certainly no guide to policy. They are, instead, merely academic extensions, with native command of English, of the Arab League’s propaganda department. Spare us, please.

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