|
|
Home | Notes
Contributors
Archives | Search
Links | About
..........
over 2 million served
..........
Julia Gorin
..........
..........
Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
.........
America Alone
by Mark Steyn
..........
..........
..........
|
|
Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
THE
RIGHT BOOKS: Equipping the Conservative
 Eurabia:
The Euro-Arab Axis
A review of Bat Ye'or's book on the jihad against Western
culture
[Bruce S. Thornton] 3/29/05
One of the first requirements in any conflict is to know the
enemy-- how he thinks, what he values, what his goals are. In
the current war against Islamism, we in the West have done and
are doing a poor job of understanding our enemy in his terms
instead of reducing his behavior to our own particular prejudices
and categories. Indeed, our enemy has been much better at knowing
where we come from and exploiting our cultural ideals and weaknesses
than we have been in understanding his.
We Westerners are a people increasingly secular, materialistic,
and ignorant of the past. We see all causes as material, all
behavior as the result of the physical environment or of psychological
forces that also have their origins in immediate material or
environmental conditions. Islamic terrorism thus is explained
as a response to ignorance and poverty, or to wounded nationalist
self-esteem, or to autocratic tyranny, or to post-colonial and
post-imperial fallout. The proposed solutions are likewise material:
increase development aid to reduce poverty and the despair it
breeds; compel Israel to weaken itself in order to remove the
constant irritant to Arab nationalist and ethnic esteem; promote
democratic institutions to subvert tyranny; and provide rhetorical
and fiscal reparations to compensate for colonial and imperial
guilt.
Such analyses of the roots of terrorism, of course, reduce the
Islamist to Western materialist categories. It either ignores
completely or discounts the historical, spiritual, and cultural
dimensions of his motives, reducing those to mere epiphenomena
of some deeper material cause. It also begs the question of why
other peoples, poorer and more oppressed than those in the Middle
East, do not resort to terrorism. As a way of getting at the
roots of Islamist terrorism, these material-based analyses obscure
more than they enlighten--particularly since for years the enemy
has become adept at manipulating these Western assumptions, which
they also see as weaknesses, the symptoms of spiritual bankruptcy
and cultural inferiority.
Bat Ye'or's Eurabia is an important exception to the above generalization, and
as such should be read carefully by everyone interested in
learning the motives of the Islamist in his own terms rather
than in the reductive categories of Westerners. Ye'or is a scholar
of the Islamic institution of "dhimmitude," her word
to describe the condition of those peoples conquered by Islam
who remain unconverted, the "subjugated, non-Muslim individuals
or peoples that accept the restrictive and humiliating subordination
to an ascendant Islamic power to avoid enslavement or death." Dhimmitude is "the direct outcome of jihad," the military conquest
of non-Islamic territory mandated by Allah as a spiritual obligation
for every individual Muslim and Muslim community. Historically,
Islam spread through violent conquest of non-Muslim lands; consequently, "Beginning
early in the eighth century, a formal set of rules to govern
relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims was elaborated,
based upon Islamic conquests, practices, theology, and jurisprudence." This "doctrine
of jihad established the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims
in terms of belligerency, temporary armistices, and submission."
Jihad can be pursued
through force or peaceful means such as propaganda, writing,
or subversion against the "enemy," which
comprises "those who oppose the establishment of Islamic
law or its spread, mission, or sovereignty over their lands." All
non-Islamic land is considered the dar al-harb, the "region
of war," until it submits to Islamic rule and enters the
dar al-Islam. The infidel enemy thus falls into three categories:
those who resist Islam with force, those living in a country
that has a temporary truce with Islam, and those who have surrendered
to Islam by exchanging land for peace--the dhimmi, who live in
a system that "protects them from jihad and guarantees limited
rights under a system of discriminations that they must accept,
or face forced conversion, slavery or death."
The concept of jihad
is not a historical artifact no longer relevant in the modern
world; it continues to be studied, invoked,
and passionately believed in by millions of Muslims and numerous
Islamic religious scholars, for it expresses a potent spiritual
reality and belief which holds that all the world will one day
become Islamic to fulfill the will of Allah. Thus the natural
state of affairs between a Muslim and non-Muslim country is war.
If Islamic armies are unable to prevail militarily, then a period
of "truce" exists, a truce subject to several conditions,
including allowing Islam to be propagated: "The refusal
to allow the propagation of Islam in the lands of truce is tantamount
to a casus belli, and jihad can resume."
Western apologists
and Westernized Muslims discount the ideology of jihad or try
to rationalize as it as a sort of self-improvement,
but the evidence of history confirms that for a chauvinistic
Islamic civilization, war is a necessity occasioned by the infidel's
refusal to submit to Islam and recognize it as the highest spiritual
reality as willed by Allah for the whole human race. Thus Western
notions of nationalism, peaceful co-existence between states,
resolution of conflict through diplomatic dialogue and negotiation,
tolerant cosmopolitanism, human rights, separation of church
and state, and liberal democracy are all subordinated to the
spiritual demands of religion, manipulated during time of "truce," or
completely discarded if incompatible with those demands. No doubt,
many Muslims today reject this vision of Islam and sincerely
desire to adapt their religion to these modern Western goods,
but the scourge of Islamist terrorism, and the widespread support
it receives among millions of Muslims, suggests that such accommodationists
are a minority.
Ye'or's thesis in
Eurabia is that in the last thirty years jihad has reappeared
as "a powerful factor in European affairs," one
that has been virtually ignored in contemporary analyses. From
the high tide of Muslim ascendancy on September 11, 1683 before
the walls of Vienna, the subsequent centuries saw the contraction
of Muslim power and the growing interference of Europe in the
affairs of the Middle East, a retreat confirmed by the deep humiliation
of the Ottoman Empire's dismemberment after World War I. And
any hopes that Islam could regain its lost glory militarily were
dashed when a tiny Israel three times defeated Arab armies. These
further defeats confirmed that jihad could not be pursued with
military force and that other means would have to be pursued.
King Hassan II of Morocco said as much at the meeting of the
Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers in 1980: "The significance
of Jihad, in Islam," the summary of his remarks states, "did
not lie in religious wars or crusades. Rather, it was strategic
political and military action, and psychological warfare, which,
if employed by the Islamic Umma [the worldwide Islamic community],
would ensure victory over the enemy."
For thirty years,
these other means of waging jihad have been remarkably successful
in effecting "Europe's evolution from
a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment
secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that
is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers
that propagate it," with the result that Europe is turning
into Eurabia-- a "civilization of dhimmitude," content
to sacrifice Israel today, and its own cultural identity in the
future, for temporary peace of mind and economic benefits.
In Eurabia Ye'or documents
both the "jihad by other means" that
the Arab states have waged against its traditional enemy, and
the craven appeasement with which the European political elite
has faced a threat that their ancestors met and turned back at
Poitiers, Andalusia, Lepanto, and Vienna. In contrast, "Europe,
as reflected by the institutions of the EU, has abandoned resistance
for dhimmitude, and independence for integration with the Islamic
world of North Africa and the Middle East." Ye'or's analysis
shows us the various ways that this slow-motion Munich has taken
place, and the interests and pathologies that facilitated this
appeasement.
The central factor in this process is Israel and the adjustment
the Arab world had to make after 1973, its last failed attempt
to destroy the Jewish state. One of Ye'or's most valuable services
is to show that the war against the Islamists and terrorism cannot
be separated from the fate of Israel, that indeed Israel has
been fighting for sixty years a war that the United States has
just recently been forced to enter by 9/11. Israel's existence
is the most painful and humiliating sign of the West's ascendancy
over Islam, even more so than were the short-lived Crusader kingdoms
or the European colonial presence. For Israel not only exists
in lands the Arabs consider rightfully conquered from a people
they can tolerate only as subservient dhimmi, but also flourishes
in ways that expose the cultural and political inadequacies of
the oil-rich Arab countries. The destruction of Israel, then,
would mark a major step in reasserting simultaneously the rightful
superiority of Arab Islamic civilization and the decadence of
a West that abandoned its cultural kin because of fear, moral
exhaustion, disbelief in its own cultural ideals, economic interests,
and its own peculiar evil of anti-Semitism. The defeat of Israel
would then become a model for the subsequent recovery of the
Islamic superiority lost over the last three centuries.
According to Ye'or,
the most obvious signs of this European appeasement of Islamic
aggression are "officially sponsored
anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism and 'Palestinianism.'" Anti-Americanism
is important for several reasons: the United States is the most
complete and most powerful embodiment of the modern West the
Islamists despise, a dislike that finds solidarity in the European
resentment of American military, cultural, and economic preeminence;
and, of course, the United States is Israel's staunchest ally.
Anti-Semitism likewise marries Arab disdain for the conquered
people who refused to accept the culminating revelation of Mohammed,
with the European fascist hatred of the Jew as embodying the
presumed evils of modernity such as capitalism, anti-traditionalism,
rootless cosmopolitanism, etc., a convergence obvious in the
writings of René Guénon, a French Nazi who converted
to Islam and "preached hatred of Western civilization and
modern Western secularism, and maintained that Europe could be
redeemed only through Islam."
Finally, "Palestinianism" becomes the vehicle for
pursuing the struggle with the West, one that exploits hatred
of Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism, thus giving cover to
a traditional anti-Semitism driven underground by the Holocaust.
Palestinianism also expresses various cultural pathologies of
Western societies, such as Western self-loathing, the idealization
of the non-Western "other," the glamour of guerilla
resistance, refugee pathos, and a sentimentalized post-colonial
guilt. The ultimate goal, however, is not the establishment of
a Palestinian state but the prosecution of jihad against the
West: "The Arab-Israeli conflict, deliberately blown out
of all proportion by the Euro-Arab associative diplomacy, is
just one arena of an incessant global jihad that targets the
entire West. PLO practices of airplane piracy since 1968, random
killings, hostage takings, and Islamikaze bombings have been
adopted worldwide as effective jihadist tactics against Western
and other civilians, including Muslims."
Other, more pragmatic
forces, however, have been at work as well in the dynamic of
European appeasement. With France taking
the lead, the unification of Europe to act as a counterweight
to American power could be facilitated by increased ties to the
Arab-Muslim world. For the French, who considered the Arab and
African Muslim world within their sphere of postcolonial influence, "France's
association with a Muslim federation extending over North Africa
and the Middle East would bring it an ascendancy that would impress
the Soviet Union and rival the United States." Such a move
appealed as well to anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and ex-Nazis, many
of whom found support and refuge in an Arab world that shared
their hatred of Jews and Israel: "Two elements thus cemented
the Franco-Arab alliance in the 1960s: French anti-Americanism
fed by frustrated power ambitions, and a convergence of French
Vichy anti-Semitism with the Arab desire to destroy Israel. From
then on, America and Israel were inextricably linked in this
policy." France stopped selling arms to Israel and instead
began arming Arab dictatorships such as Libya's Khadaffi and
Iraq's Hussein.
France's policy became
the European Economic Community's policy after the oil embargo
and the quadrupling of oil prices initiated
in 1973 by the oil-producing Arab states in response to yet another
defeat at the hands of the Israeli army. In November of that
year, the EEC issued a joint Resolution that enshrined the "legitimate
rights of the Palestinians" as the sine qua non of Middle
East peace. This innovative notion of a Palestinian nation was
invented as a means of exploiting Western cultural ideals that
had little relevance for Arab culture: "Arabs who had settled
in the Byzantine Holy Land after the early Arab conquest had
never manifested any political or cultural autonomy that differentiated
them from other Muslim Arab conquerors in the surrounding regions.
The idea of an Arab Palestinian people distinct from the larger
Arab-Islamic nation was not only utterly new, but contrary to
two fundamental historic concepts: that of the umma (the worldwide
Islamic community), and of the Arab nation--the ideology, dating
from the 1890s, that promoted a pan-Arab totalitarian nationalism
proclaiming the Arabs and superior people and combined with pan-Islamism." After
all, if the Arabs were so interested in creating a Palestinian
state, they could have done so any time before 1967, when they
controlled Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
The recognition of
the Palestinian people created the cover that allowed terrorism
to be legitimized as well, as evidenced
by the status conferred on the terrorist Palestinian Liberation
Organization and its boss, Yasser Arafat, who morphed into a
head of state treated with all the deference and privilege due
to legitimate leaders. Now the rhetoric of "nationalist
aspirations" could be manipulated and used to hide the true
motive of the PLO: the destruction of Israel, to be accomplished
through a "stages" process: "In the name of Palestinian
rights, new horrors would soon be unleashed upon Israel and the
world." For the Europeans, however, collusion in the myth
of the Palestinian nation bought them protection from terrorism.
For example, after Palestinian terrorists attacked the Vienna
OPEC meeting in 1973, Austria's socialist chancellor, Bruno Kreisky,
adopted a pro-Palestinian policy, even though the Socialist International
had always been pro-Israel. Kreisky became Arafat's tireless
P.R. man, the Socialist International's policy shifted to advocating
a Palestinian state despite the PLO's commitment to the destruction
of Israel, and Arafat was welcomed to Vienna with all the honors
given to a legitimate head of state.
The oil embargo was
followed by the creation of the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), which
in turn spun off numerous organs of European-Arab
rapprochement, such as the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab
Cooperation (PAEAC), all funded by European taxpayers mostly
ignorant of what these functionaries and bureaucrats have been
doing with their money. For the Arabs, recognition and support
of the PLO and its demands were the price for easing European
fears of terrorism and opening Arab markets to European businesses: "recognition
of the PLO . . . was an essential condition for the EEC to be
granted huge markets in the Arab world." Economic and political
policies would be linked: a Belgian member of the PAEAC wrote
in 1975 that support of the Arab states' campaign against Israel
would facilitate further, mutually beneficial economic ties: "The
Arab world could contribute manpower and raw material, the Europeans,
technology," particularly weapons and military technology.
We see here the beginnings of the European facilitation of Muslim
immigration, which would increasingly become a potent weapon
in the war against the West.
Thus EAD meetings
regularly included declarations from the Europeans that followed
to the letter the Arab line, most importantly the "national
rights of the Palestinians," the abandonment by Israel of
Jerusalem, and the designation of Gaza and Judea and Samaria
(i.e. the West Bank) as "occupied Arab territories," a
dishonest phrase the conceals the facts that these lands are
historically Jewish and that until a final settlement establishes
borders, are disputed territories whose final disposition has
to be negotiated. But politics, fear, and economics shaped European
Middle Eastern policy: "Henceforth, Europe would consider
the question of Israel's right to exist only in connection with
the European oil supply. In the decade to come, economic realities
and jihad terrorist threats would tip the scales in Europe markedly
against Israel."
Playing upon Western
ideals of tolerance, multicultural respect for the "other," cosmopolitanism, etc.--ideals no Arab
Islamic culture practices--the Arab representatives to these
various institutions were able to make the exchanges between
Islam and Europe pretty much a one-way street. Even as Europeans
gave in to demands that Arab immigrants be subsidized and allowed
to resist assimilation and maintain their loyalty to their countries
of origin, no Arab state thought of providing to even their own
citizens the same considerations: "While the Europeans did
all they could to please their Arab partners, none of the progressive
policies the EAD promoted for the Arab world were accepted or
applied. Indeed, the EAD trafficked in concepts that were largely
foreign to the Arab world. What did freedom of conscience and
religion, gender equality, and equality of dignity for all people
really mean in societies that practiced segregation of women
and infidels, death for apostasy, 'honor' killings, female genital
mutilation, and even the stoning of women, and which were riddled
with the religious fanaticism and hate nurtured by the jihad shari'a values that persisted at the core of Arab/Muslim civilization?"
Meanwhile, as organizations
such as the EAD were legitimizing the PLO and its explicit
call for the destruction of Israel in
its 1964 Charter, terrorist attacks "flourished on an international
scale during the 1970s and 1980s with the 1972 massacres of the
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, the blowing-up
of airplanes, the attacks and murder of civilians by the Black
September group, and the bloody war against the Christians in
Lebanon." Yet at the same time, the PLO became a member
of various UN bodies, including the Commission on Human Rights
(from which Israel is excluded), and Arafat was received as a
legitimate statesman and political leader, a process that culminated
in the UN's notorious Resolution 3379, which labeled Zionism
a form of racism, thus giving even more legitimizing cover for
anti-Semitism and the murder of Jews.
The bulk of Bat Ye'or's
invaluable study comprises a careful analysis of the transcripts
and communiqués from various
conferences, seminars, and other functions in which the European
appeasement of terror and the demonization of Israel are set
out in plain speech. Over and over we can see in these dry records
the steady erosion of the European will to resist a culture radically
antithetical to its own and contemptuous of its most cherished
ideals. As a result, a tiny Israel, under vicious assault for
its whole existence, has been turned into an international pariah
that must shoulder the blame for its own victimization, as evidenced
by French President Jacques Chirac's statement in 1996 that blamed
terrorism on "the slowness of the peace process and the
Palestinian people's frustration." Centuries of Islamic
aggression against the infidel justified by "countless Qur'an
verses, hadiths, and Muslim religious jurisprudence" are
completely ignored in this reductive, self-serving analysis.
Indeed, the reduction
of terrorism to a response to the "Palestinian
question" has become a cliché in European foreign
policy, thus completely obscuring the long history of jihad: "Hostage
taking, ritual throat slitting, the killing of infidels and Muslim
apostates are lawful, carefully described, and highly praised
jihad tactics recorded, over the centuries, in countless legal
treaties [sic] on jihad. Yet [British Foreign Secretary Jack]
Straw and [French ex-Foreign Secretary Dominique] de Villepin
declared to the press that the Arab and Islamic world were angered
by the injustice felt by the Palestinians, and that this was
the most important issue in the world and in Euro-Arab relations." Meanwhile
the slaughter of black Christians by Arab Muslims in Sudan has
continued apace, the Lebanese are occupied by the Syrians, and
the Kurds are denied a homeland despite over 2500 years of continuous
existence in lands now possessed by Turkey, Iran, Syria, and
Iraq. On all these issues the European elite whose hearts bleed
for the Palestinians has been silent.
Bat Ye'or's analysis
makes a powerful case for understanding European policy in
regards to the Middle East as an expression
of classic dhimmi psychology: "The dhimmi policies of submission,
humiliation, and services, blended with antisemitism and anti-Americanism,
have given Eurabian dhimmitude its complex fabric. It follows
a historical jihadist pattern by fomenting animosity between
dhimmi groups and division between infidel nations." We
have here a compelling explanation for the strange self-debasement
of European intellectual, cultural, religious, and political
elites, their eagerness to denigrate their own culture and values
as inferior to Islamic civilization and to the culture of immigrants
who have fled societies whose dysfunctions are in large part
an expression of that supposedly superior culture. The dhimmi mentality explains as well the willingness of European governments
over the years to pay billions in cash to thug regimes and terrorist
groups like the PLO, and to confer legitimacy on murderers and
to attend conferences in the capital cities of tyrants who torture
and slaughter their own citizens. And this mind-set clarifies
the behavior of those European governments that in the last three
years have hampered and subverted America's attempts to end the
bad habits of appeasement, whose grisly fruit is that gaping
hole in lower Manhattan, not to mention the hundreds of Israelis
blown to bits by murderers who have been given psychological
and material comfort by the European elite.
In 1973 French travel writer Jean Raspail published The
Camp of the Saints, a disturbing allegory of Europe's cultural suicide
in the face of a mass invasion of the Third World poor. Yet as
correct as Raspail's depiction of European moral, cultural, and
spiritual exhaustion has proven to be, the European world will
not end with such a bang but with the long, slow whimper of appeasement,
as Ye'or documents in her powerful analysis. But what about America?
In her conclusion,
Ye'or acknowledges the importance of the Bush administration's
actions after 9/11 in beginning the reversal
of decades of appeasement: "Integrated in Bush's declared
war against terrorism, the Iraqi conflict has debunked Europe's
complacency and collusion. Furthermore, President George W. Bush
has unveiled the lethal danger of Islamist terrorism and placed
it on the international world stage, dethroning the 'Palestinian
cause,' and thus revolting many Europeans by weakening the Euro-Arab
struggle against Israel." True, yet there are considerations
that should temper our optimism that the United States can ultimately
prevail.
First, the recent
election shows that a substantial number of Americans still
don't understand the true nature of the struggle
with Islamism. Too many still believe that poverty, or Israeli
intransigence, or post-colonial fallout, or Bush's unilateral
gun-slinging, or Western cultural "arrogance" and disdain
of the dark-skinned "other" explain Islamist terrorism.
Year of therapeutic multiculturalism and leftist-inspired slanders
against the West, promulgated in schools and popular culture,
have taken their toll. Consequently, many Americans indulge a
sentimental cultural relativism and self-loathing that make it
easy to avoid moral judgments and assign responsibility for terrorist
murder. And of course, sheer ignorance of historical facts leaves
many of us vulnerable to the falsifications of history that undergird
such relativism.
Next, the President's policy of facilitating democratic regimes
and political freedom in the Middle East short-changes the power
of cultural and religious ideals in determining behavior. Democracy
is obviously important if the requisite cultural transformations
can take place: respect for human rights irrespective of sex,
sect, or race; the rule of law; subordination of religion to
government; civilian control of the military; an independent
and transparent judiciary-- all these are necessary for democracy
to create political freedom rather than simply ratifying a new
tyranny, as the Algerian democratic elections did in 1993. We
need to acknowledge the power of spiritual ideals, such as jihad,
in driving the Islamists, and not just explain these as the consequences
of the lack of elections.
Finally, I'm not sure
the President has "dethroned" the
Palestinian cause. Since the death of Arafat, the Holocaust-denier
and apologist for terror Mahmoud Abbas has been elevated into
a statesman and promised millions in aid; the smokescreen of
Palestinian statehood continues to obscure the long-term Arab
strategic goal of destroying Israel in "stages"; the
terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad committed
to this goal have not been disarmed and destroyed; and most important,
the myth that all disorder and violence in the Middle East result
from the lack of a Palestinian state is perpetuated. More and
more the current calm resembles those heady days after Oslo,
when unrequited Israeli concessions were greeted with Israeli
blood and flesh in the streets.
As Ye'or documents, the key to Islamist terrorism is Israel,
but not in the way most people think. For the jihadist mentality,
Israel must be destroyed, if not by bombs and tanks, then by
piece-meal concessions and sheer demography. It make take fifty
years, it may take a hundred, but like the medieval Crusader
kingdoms, this manifestation of the dynamic power of Western
cultural ideals cannot be allowed to survive as a constant reminder
of Islamic civilization's failure. Israel's war is our war, and
until we forcefully assert that linkage in our public pronouncements
and more important in our actions, everything else we do just
buys some time, in which the forces of appeasement and the murderous
energy of the jihadists will do their work. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
§
|
|
|
