Over at PJ Media, I explore how voices on both “Left” and “Right” want you to stick your head in the sand and ignore centuries of imperialism and brutality.
The Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious to make sure that you have a positive view of Islam. Thus we see a steady stream of articles in the mainstream media assuring you that the Qur’an is benign, the U.S. Constitution is Sharia-compliant, and the Islamic State is not Islamic. These articles come in a steady stream, and they have to, because they are asking non-Muslims to disregard what they see every day — Muslims committing violence against non-Muslims and justifying it by referring to Islamic texts — and instead embrace a fictional construct: Islam the religion of peace and tolerance.
This takes a relentless barrage of propaganda, because with every new jihad atrocity, reality threatens to break through. It wasn’t accidental that Hitler’s Reich had an entire Ministry of Propaganda: lying to the public is a full-time job, as the cleverest of propaganda constructs is always threatened by the simple facts. This propaganda not just from the Left (the Huffington Post, Salon, etc.), but also from the Right, or at least the Right-leaning media (Forbes); it seems as if whatever divides Americans politically, they’re all united on one point: Islam is just great, and only bigoted, racist “Islamophobes” think otherwise.
Yet the pains that must be taken to establish this betray the futility of the enterprise. A sampling: establishment academic Juan Cole, a Board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been established in court as a front group lobbying for the Islamic regime in Iran, pointed out last Tuesday in The Nation that Rudy Giuliani and Paul Wolfowitz had taken issue with Barack Obama over whether Islamic terrorism was really Islamic, and asserted that this question was “actually about what philosophers call ‘essentialism,’ and, as Giuliani’s and Wolfowitz’s own interventions make clear, it is about absolving the United States for its own role in producing the violent so-called ‘Caliphate’ of Ibrahim al-Baghdadi.”
Oh, really? Yet I readily agree with Cole that Bush’s removal of Saddam Hussein and naive trust that a stable Western-style republic would take its place was ill-considered, as I argued back in March 2003. And the Islamic State filled the vacuum thus created. But this is an entirely separate question from that of whether the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam or not. Whatever Paul Wolfowitz or Rudy Giuliani said or did is simply irrelevant to the question Cole claims to be investigating: if Giuliani and Wolfowitz are right that Islamic jihadis have something to do with Islam, that does nothing whatsoever to absolve the U.S. “for its own role in producing the violent so-called ‘Caliphate’ of Ibrahim al-Baghdadi.”
As for “essentialism,” Cole added:
“Essentialism when applied to human groups is always an error and always a form of bigotry. Zionists bombed the King David Hotel in British Mandate Palestine in 1948, killing dozens of civilians and some British intelligence officials. If a British official had responded then by arguing that ‘everyone knows that Judaism has something to do with what we’re fighting,’ it would be fairly clear what that official thought about Jews in general.”
“Essentialism when applied to human groups” may be “always an error and always a form of bigotry,” but when applied to belief systems it is not. Cole is, perhaps deliberately, conflating Islam and Muslims, and claiming that to speak of what Islam is and is not, which is established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings, is to make a bigoted judgment against all Muslims. Islam in all its forms teaches certain things. Its teachings are knowable. To speak about Muslims acting upon them, when they themselves explain and justify their actions by referring to those actions, is not bigotry, despite the endless charges to the contrary from leftists and Islamic supremacists. It is simply to notice reality.
Cole then embarks upon a labored argument to establish that the Salafi jihadis are a “sect” and a “destructive cult,” charging anyone who disagrees with him with the cardinal sin of “Orientalism,” claiming that “it is now typically forgotten that in the early twentieth century the Ku Klux Klan was a Protestant religious organization or that it came to power in the state of Indiana in the 1920s and comprised 30 percent of native-born white men there. It was a large social movement, with elements of the destructive cult, in the heart of North America. More recent groups such as Jim Jones’s People’s Temple and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians may have begun as high-tension sects, but at a certain point they became destructive cults. The refusal to see ISIL in these terms is just a form of Orientalism, a way of othering the Middle East and marking its culture as inherently threatening.”
Cole here ignores, of course, the fact that the KKK, the People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians represented obvious deviations from Protestant Christianity, and were condemned as such. The Islamic State and jihadists have likewise been condemned by Muslim authorities, but these condemnations have all too often rung hollow: Tahir ul-Qadri’s vaunted 300-page fatwa against terrorism doesn’t even mention the passages of the Qur’an that exhort believers to violence against unbelievers; and the recent “Letter to Baghdadi” from Muslim scholars to the self-styled caliph of the Islamic State endorsed central concepts of jihad doctrine that Western analysts usually think are limited only to “extremists.” Cole likewise ignores the fact that all the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence (madhahib) teach that the umma has the responsibility to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. It is not “othering the Middle East” to point this out — it is simply noting the severe limitations of Cole’s analogy.
Ultimately Cole’s argument rests on “essentialism” — that is, the idea that anything really is anything, as opposed to anything else. That this is nonsense, and that Cole knows it’s nonsense, is shown by this very article: Cole assumes that he and his readers both know what the KKK is and the People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians are, but Islam? — a mystery, and you’re a bigoted Orientalist Islamophobe if you think otherwise. In any case, even if one grants that Islam has no essence, nonetheless the Islamic State jihadis claim to be acting in accord with Islam, and make their case based upon an interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunnah that is well established in Islamic history and theology. The fact that other Muslims have a different understanding of Islam doesn’t negate this.
Even worse, Cole claims that the Islamic State “is put under the sign of religion, but it is in fact a form of nationalism appealing to medieval religious symbols.”
To claim that the Islamic State is a form of nationalism leads inevitably to the question: which nation? And that’s where Cole’s analysis is most absurd: the Islamic State is not nationalistic in any sense. It is neither Iraqi nor Syrian, for it has erased the border between the two. It is, in fact, the most internationalist of movements, with over 20,000 Muslims from all over the world traveling to Iraq and Syria to join it. The only nation that the Islamic State could conceivably be said to be fighting for is the international Muslim nation, the worldwide umma — but Cole can’t acknowledge that, as it would be granting the point he is trying clumsily to rule out.
Even clumsier, however, was Cole’s counterpart on the (relative) Right, Loren Thompson of Forbes. Thompson began his case that the Islamic State is not Islamic by noting that “when you do the math, it appears that the ‘addressable market’ for ISIS ideas is 5% of the global Muslim community, and as of today most of that market isn’t buying.” Yes, and the Bolsheviks were never a majority in Russia, and the National Socialists never won an absolute majority in a German election. But where is the Muslim pushback against this organized, energized vanguard? We have recently seen hundreds of thousands of Muslims demonstrate against cartoons of Muhammad; there have not been any Muslim demonstrations, however, against the Islamic State — much less efforts to teach against its understanding of Islam in Muslim communities.
Thompson’s case went downhill from there. His second point against the Islamic character of the Islamic State was that “non-Muslims have committed similar atrocities.” But of course, the fact that there is “nothing uniquely Islamic” about what the Islamic State does in no way establishes that its behavior isn’t sanctioned and justified by Islamic texts and teachings….
Read the rest here.
Champ says
OT …
“Report: Iran’s Supreme Leader Hospitalized in Critical Condition”
Arab media reports Ayatollah Khamenei brought for urgent care in Tehran after several of his body systems fail.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/192169#.VPieTHzF_Al
mariam rove says
Yes. I know you are religious and you know I am an atheist so thank god! M
abad says
His hatred is eating him alive.
pumbar says
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I bet Allan (SWeaT) sharpening his fork and turning up the propane even as we speak.
Mirren10 says
He must be bricking himself he didn’t become a ‘mujahid’ in time; the ‘torments of the grave’, and all that.
pumbar says
Perhaps he secretly loved Pepsi Cola more than death? He’ll find out when he’s “livin’ next door to Allan”. 🙂
Mirren10 says
🙂
jihad3tracker says
As Robert says, and it has been said before — but not often enough : the main sleight-of-words that a predominance of apologists for Islam use is SHIFTING THEIR DISCUSSION TO THE BEHAVIOR OF “BILLIONS OF PEACEFUL MUSLIMS”.
No actually mention of the life and conduct of Muhammad, and how abrogation permits any Muslim to be violent, and the abundant reliable Hadiths used as justification for subjugation / rape / murder. “Academics” like Juan Cole are quite skilled in such diversions but make a big mistake when they lay out arguments in print — which can then be shredded..
Angemon says
Americans in general need to learn about European History. Ignorance of it makes the work of people like Juan Cole much more easy than it has to right to be.
Don McKellar says
Follow the money.
Who is paying these people? Who is funding them? What do they have to gain by telling lies? When you have people lying and telling falsehoods of such absurdity, and repeating them over and over despite a mountain of evidence, you have to follow the money.
john spielman says
the Saudis are paying for these academic whores like Juan Cole, John Esposito, and others to turn their academic tricks and dance to their music. Like all whores Juan does it for money!
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
… claiming that to speak of what Islam is and is not, which is established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings, is to make a bigoted judgment against all Muslims.
Ahh, he’s got us in the logical trap that, yes, the Islam scriptures may be bad, and so may be the mass murderers and imams invoking their texts, but the vast majority of Moslems are not to be held lower because of what other Moslems do and what scriptures well over a thousand years old command. They are but normal people suffering from phobia and bigoted hatred.
Moderate Moslems not are to held responsible the command of the scriptures, that’s bigotry, which is by definition irrational, and this is so even though the Unicor… er, Moderate Moslems, openly revere Allah. Bad scriptures, good people, but unfortunately stuck with a large group of bad apples.
Spot On says
Any child with a conscience can see they are wrong. Unfortunately, the media and many universities hold these people to be examples for all follow. This is a scam. Actually they cannot make their sophomoric case except with students under their control. Anyone else who questions their intelligence is a called bigot or racist and the media backs these creeps all the way. This really means that they and the media are nothing but bullies. They would be more suitable to be part of a dictatorship such as the Nazis. They cannot and will not answer the hard questions. They refuse to see the facts. They are not intelligent.
thomas pellow says
As a corrective to much of the Western intelligentsia’s misunderstanding of Islam’s tenets and history,
such people would have to study key books and articles which currently are self-censored.*
*( The books and pamphlets listed at the very top of this ‘Jihadwatch’ page would make an excellent start.)
Spot On says
“Intelligencia” should be changed to “Ignorancia”. Could it be that the “intelligencia” is self censoring itself i.e. like voluntarily wearing blinders, maybe. Such people are ignorant, not intelligent.
Joseph says
Basic fact;;;;If you march in step with the invading army(support them) then you are just as bad as the invader. You become fair game for elimination.
This being the case, ALL Muslims and non-Muslims who do not stand up and publicly denounce Islam are just as bad as the most insane terrorist out there. ALL of them are “fair game” for termination.
CHOOSING NOT TO DECIDE IS STILL MAKING A CHOICE.
Champ says
Spot on, Joseph!!
mortimer says
What is remarkable about both Cole and Thompson is their utmost determination to minimize and excuse the violence of jihad.
Could this be their common hatred of Christianity?
Lee says
In a word, yes, but it is not just Christianity that they hate but also Judaism. And is this not exactly what the Quran teaches and which in repeated daily in the prayers of ALL muslims? Exactly.
wildjew says
Mr. Spencer wrote:
As for “essentialism,” Cole added:
“Essentialism when applied to human groups is always an error and always a form of bigotry. Zionists bombed the King David Hotel in British Mandate Palestine in 1948, killing dozens of civilians and some British intelligence officials. If a British official had responded then by arguing that ‘everyone knows that Judaism has something to do with what we’re fighting,’ it would be fairly clear what that official thought about Jews in general….”
Is anyone here interested in engaging in a thought experiment? The British “conspired” (yes they conspired) with Nazi Germany in the Final Solution because the British cut off (choked) all Jewish immigration from Nazi occupied Europe from reaching “Palestine.” British turned ships full of desperate Jewish refugees back to the tender mercies of the Nazis. British sunk ships full of desperate Jewish refugees. The British seized boatloads of desperate Jewish refugees and put the in squalid camps on Cyprus and Mauritius; even after the war. If a British official had responded by arguing that ‘everyone knows that Judaism has something to do with what we’re fighting’, then what?
Sheikh Yabooty says
You are exactly right, Wildjew. Even the fiercest critics of the Etzel and the Lehi – Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive – would never have said anything as ridiculous as, “The Irgun has nothing to do with Judaism or the Jewish People.” That simply would not have made any sense, to anyone on any side of the conflict. Alas, we live in a time when our leaders can make patently absurd statements (like “there is nothing Islamic about ISIS”), and a large gaggle of talking heads will unite, and dig in their heels, to defend that absurdity.
As I have posted before, I am amazed that these media geniuses think that they are making a valid point for their cause by comparing ISIS to the KKK. If anything, it is the counter-jihad movement that should be comparing ISIS and the KKK:
* Western, Judeo-Christian society has consistently fought its extremists; today the KKK and their ilk are a fringe phenomenon (our teen-agers are certainly *not* running off to compounds Idaho, or someplace similar, to link up with the Klansmen).
* Western society continuously reminds itself of the horrors of its past. Movies and novels are released every year; describing the bad old days of slavery and Jim Crow. Civil society is filled with civil rights and “anti-racism” groups devoted to countering the ideologies of the Klan. Do *any* groups exist in the Muslim world to fight racism, misogyny, and hatred of others?
* Nobody I am aware of tries to “contextualize” the beliefs of white supremacists, or advocates trying to reduce racism by creating a jobs program for disaffected young white extremists. Contrast that with the fact that the ISIS fanatics, even when ruthlessly victimizing others, are almost always portrayed as victims acting out on their grievances.
I am now beginning to think that the reason so many Muslims (and their loyal cheerleaders in the West) use the KKK – ISIS analogy because they feel that, by pointing out the intrinsic link between Islamic ideology and groups like ISIS, we westerners are trying to assert the superiority of our faiths over Islam. While most counter-jihadis would assert that Christianity or Judaism (or Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Baha’i, atheism, or almost any other human belief system) is superior to Islam, that’s not really what we are getting. We need to understand *why* jihadi terror is encircling the world today; getting at the truth is an imperative to winning the struggle.
At its core, then, the struggle against Islamic jihad is not just about the triumph of peace over wanton violence, or love over hatred – at its essence it is a struggle for a culture based on truth, instead of a culture based on power and image.
duh_swami says
Here’s my analysis…The Quran is a dark and evil fairy tale whispered into the ear of a psychotic Arab by an incoherent angel named Gabriel’,,,Everything went down hill from there and is still going down hill…When if finally hits bottom it will crash and burn…
cesar bento says
Great article by Robert Spenser, that is the truth: while there are people following Quran, the satanic verses, no peace in the world….
BC says
It is important to note that we did not have ‘organised’ AKA monotheistic religion until writing was invented. Before that we had various gods and shamans etc. The whole thing is still a complete mythology meant to give certain people control over the rest of us. In Irak and Iran we see what the results of that control will be
Mirren10 says
”It is important to note that we did not have ‘organised’ AKA monotheistic religion until writing was invented. Before that we had various gods and shamans etc”
In the absence of written records, BC, what you say can only be conjectural.
We have no means of knowing how organised, or monotheistic, religion was before writing was invented.
Artefacts, cave paintings, figurines, burials etc, whilst fascinating, tell us little about what the majority of people may have believed, or how organised the belief was.
For all we know, the exaggeratedly feminine figurines found in various parts of Neolithic Europe, for example, may be the remnants of an organised and monotheistic religion surrounding the concept of a great earth mother, and the possibly sacrificed bog people may have suffered the punishment for heresy !
Edward says
Their might be bad/mean Muslim’s (the terrorist prone types), indifferent (don’t care)Muslim’s and/or most righteous / ultra moral Muslim’s, but sadly all abide to the same code of submission that is being enforced according to the dictation, that is highly lighted on their Koran. All because of an innate fear of each other or plainly just because of their strong tribal allegiance (its in their genes)!
Arnold David says
I hope this piece signals a long overdue departure by RS from the myopic view that refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of civil and human rights inherent in Islam is a problem affecting only the “left” (however defined). I’ve always thought that view was not only wrong, but unnecessarily antagonistic towards many progressive, liberal, left, independent, non-right (however defined) people many of whom, in deed, abhor this barbaric, warmongering ideology, It didn’t help matters to so aggressively ostracize a large % of the population.
Likewise the struggle to “out” Islam is not about one religion vs another, much less about one (Judeo-Christian) being truer than another (ironically, that smacks of Islamic supremacy). It is about educating those victims of the propaganda mill suffering from cognitive dissonance – a failure to acknowledging the obvious simple facts that Islamic ideology is inherently anti-human, homophobic, misogynistic, barbaric, supremacist, and bellicose.
Michael Warden says
What bothers me personally is that with 27% of muslims thinking it is acceptable to behead someone for insulting their prophet, it means that there are 500,000 muslims in the UK who are happy to have my head on a plate. Meanwhile back at the House of Clowns – sorry, Houses of Parliament, that bloody fool Cameron still allows potential murderers in while keeping out law abiding citizens,