Thank goodness for cool friends

I just got the following e-mail from a friend. It's a bit long... and if you can punish yourself long enough to get through the icky article, you'll be rewarded by said friend's most excellent (tho even looooooonger) reply:


Is it Islamic "extremism" -- or is it Islam itself?
posted 07/09/05 (edited Monday, Jul 11, 2005 11:15)

In the wake of the London bombings, we are forced again to confront this most uncomfortable question: Do the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists truly represent a marginal minority among Muslims worldwide? Or is the term "Islamic fundamentalist" really just a redundancy? I am by no means an expert on Islam. But since 9/11, and countless terrorist incidents since, I have been patiently awaiting evidence that the majority of Muslims worldwide repudiate the premises and tactics of Islamic terrorists.

Well, I'm still waiting. And there comes a time when one must finally draw conclusions, however painful, from the facts presented. If there really is some sort of ongoing war between "extremists" and "moderates" for the soul of Islam, it appears to be one of the quietest contests in the history of ideological warfare. Whatever the ancient history of Islam, in distant days when more enlightened thinkers and civilized rulers prevailed, I see precious little evidence that these sorts represent any significant part of contemporary Muslim thinking or leadership. If they do, they certainly haven't been very vocal, or active, about rooting out the terrorists in their midst and repudiating their views.

When a supposedly Christian fundamentalist nutcase, Eric Rudolph, bombed U. S. abortion clinics and gay nightclubs, he was forced to live a marginal, virtually reclusive life hiding in a remote rural area. Not so Muslim terrorists, who arise from even the upper classes of Muslim nations by the tens of thousands, and find vast social infrastructures of sympathizers -- including governments -- throughout the Islamic world, eager to shelter, support and protect them.

Where do we see remotely comparable numbers of religious terrorists quoting Confucius? Where are all the Buddhist terrorists? Or Christian, Jewish and Hindu car-bombers? Why, in nation after nation, bloody incident after bloody incident, do we find that those responsible for civilian massacres have been almost invariably nurtured on this so-called "religion of peace"?

Where, then, does the global Islamic community really stand on the issue of violence against civilians and non-believers? Inquiring minds want to know. No -- demand to know. Noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, certainly no right-winger, is only one of the latest to call upon Muslims to clean up their own stables.

Will they, though? How many years, and how many more bloodbaths, will it take? And how long do we in the West patiently tap our feet, waiting for such reforms in the absence of any visible signs that they are taking place? Don't we have a right at some point to pronounce judgment on the Islamic culture itself? And has that point now come? or even long since passed?

Among Western cultured classes, it is, of course, considered bad form to even ask such questions. Such words smack of (shudder!) intolerance -- intolerance being the only thing intolerable to moral relativists. Let Muslim fanatics shoot babies, bomb nightclubs and buses and subways, chop off the heads of Red Cross nurses, hijack civilian airliners and ram them into civilian office buildings...and their immediate (and only) response is to wail: "How did we drive them to these desperate acts?" Let the victims demand violent retribution, however, and their immediate (and indignant) response is: "Warmongers!"

This moral inversion is fueled by toxic philosophy. Thanks to a long gray line of ideological dope-pushers, Western intellectuals, politicians and cultural leaders are addicted to the self-destructive hallucinations of moral relativism, altruistic self-sacrifice, cultural self-loathing and political appeasement of sworn enemies. Self-blame, along with cowardly calls for more "understanding" and "restraint," are their only knee-jerk responses in the face of each new outrage.

I wrote about this moral bankruptcy right after 9/11, in an essay titled "Unilateral Moral Disarmament." Sadly, not a thing has changed since I penned those scalding words, which I cite in part for your consideration: No giants toppled the towers of our greatest city, nor drove a metal stake into the heart of our military's command center. No, these atrocities were performed by virtually unarmed, hate-driven midgets, motivated by a philosophy of destruction. Their only power was what we willingly granted them, in large measure because of our own mixed philosophical premises. Our feelings of impotence, confusion and vulnerability are testaments not to the terrorists' strength, but to the ideas that have undermined our own determination, power and will to resist them.

More recently, this past May, Bruce Thornton offered his own quite similar assessment of Muslim culpability -- and cowardly Western "tolerance" -- in a brilliant essay titled "Suicidal Tendencies in the West." He closes thus: Increasingly we Westerners resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, beautiful, gentle, highly civilized hedonists whose fate is to be devoured raw by the brutal Morlocks. We are the beneficiaries of a culture created by those before us who forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad: in Spain, in Sicily, in Eastern Europe, in Greece -- the plunder, rape, slaughter, massacres, sacks, kidnapping, and enslavement perpetrated by the armies of Allah were for centuries fought by those whose names now most Westerners have forgotten or would be embarrassed to claim as their own. Don John, Charles Martel, Leo the Isaurian, Prince Eugene, Montecuccoli, Andrea Doria, El Cid, Sobieski, Charlemagne, Suvorov, Boucicaut, Hunyadi, Fernando II of Castile, Alfonso I of Aragon, Guiscard, Harold Hardrada -- who among us knows anything about the men who fought and killed so that Europe, and Europe's offspring America, today looks like Europe and America instead of looking like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Syria?

Because of the brutal violence of those warriors against jihad, we in the West today enjoy the luxury of cynicism, cheap irony, effete tolerance, and hedonism. We moral dwarves stand on the shoulders of those giants and spit on their heads, thinking our ingratitude is really an intellectual sophistication superior to the primitive superstitions and naïve ideals that have made our lives of freedom and prosperity possible. Meanwhile jihad by other means -- demography, immigration, terrorism, the oil weapon -- continues apace, at least until the time when a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon falls into the hands of a modern jihadist and we are returned to the sort of slaughter our ancestors suffered for centuries. Maybe then we'll wake up.

Will it take that? Must an entire American city lie in flaming ruins, or its population lay dying in the streets from some plague, before we get serious? In the wake of the London atrocities, there is no time left to mince further words. Or actions. We must begin to place blame where it is due, and respond accordingly. It is time to hold the Muslim world to account for -- at the very least -- condoning the monsters in their midst. It is time for us to reiterate to them the words of moral clarity that President Bush uttered in the smoking aftermath of 9/11: "Either you are with us, or you are against us."

And to show them, in blunt action, that we really do mean business.

******************

I have some thoughts on the article you sent me. Starting on a lighter note, I wanted to respond to the rhetorical question posed at the end of the following passage:

"Increasingly we Westerners resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, beautiful, gentle, highly civilized hedonists whose fate is to be devoured raw by the brutal Morlocks. We are the beneficiaries of a culture created by those before us who forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad: in Spain, in Sicily, in Eastern Europe, in Greece -- the plunder, rape, slaughter, massacres, sacks, kidnapping, and enslavement perpetrated by the armies of Allah were for centuries fought by those whose names now most Westerners have forgotten or would be embarrassed to claim as their own. Don John, Charles Martel, Leo the Isaurian, Prince Eugene, Montecuccoli, Andrea Doria, El Cid, Sobieski, Charlemagne, Suvorov, Boucicaut, Hunyadi, Fernando II of Castile, Alfonso I of Aragon, Guiscard, Harold Hardrada -- who among us knows anything about the men who fought and killed so that Europe, and Europe's offspring America, today looks like Europe and America instead of looking like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Syria?"

Indeed, we should all learn more history, but not of the utterly fantastic variety that Mr. Bidinotto is peddling. For instance, in his list of "heroes" who "forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad", he left out one name most people have NOT forgotten: Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian prince more widely known as "Dracula" (which means "son of the dragon.") The following is from a historical web-site, but feel free to check your own sources:

"Dracula liked to set up a banquet table and dine while he watched people die. His favorite form of execution was impalement. It was slow; people could take days to die. He liked to impale many people at once, arranging the stakes in fancy designs. Nothing was too brutal for Dracula - he enjoyed having people skinned, boiled alive, etc. He prided himself on making the punishment (supposedly) fit the crime.

"By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, possibly more. He always thought up some excuse for these executions. He killed merchants who cheated their customers. He killed women who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman impaled because her husband's shirt was too short. He didn't mind impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It's said that there were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of course, the stories about Dracula's cruelty might have been exaggerated by his enemies.

"Despite all this, Dracula's subjects respected him for fighting the Turks and being a strong ruler. He's remembered today as a patriotic hero who stood up to Turkey and Hungary. He was the last Walachian prince to remain independent from the Ottoman Empire.....

"In 1462 Dracula attacked the Turks to drive them out of the Danube River valley. Sultan Mehmed II retaliated by invading Walachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's. Dracula was forced to retreat to his capital, Tirgoviste. He burned his own villages and poisoned wells on the way so that the Turkish army wouldn't have any food or water.

"When the sultan reached Tirgoviste, he saw a terrifying scene, remembered in history as 'the Forest of the Impaled.' There, outside the city, were 20,000 Turkish prisoners, all impaled. The sultan's officers were too scared to go on - Dracula had won again."

If you do any reading of the history of the crusades and the middle ages in general (certainly of the Holy Roman Empire) you will find that this incredible barbarism was quite in keeping with the way Christian Europe conducted itself, both with the masses of people of their own countries, and with foreign enemies. Mr. Bidinotto's comparison of Western Civilization to "the Gentle Eloi" of H.G. Wells would be hilarious if it were not routinely promulgated as a justification for further horrific crimes -- which is exactly the the way Mr. Bidinotto is utilizing it.
But let's not confine ourselves to the glorious history of the west -- let's fast-forward through the enslavement of millions of Africans and the murder of millions more, let's rush through the virtual extermination of the native population of the U.S. (in the name of "Christianity"), let's skip over Hitler's murder of 6 million Jews and the conscious U.S. policy of sending Jewish refugees back to Europe the U.S. and British policy of refusing to bomb the train lines to the death camp or to offer significant assistance to the rebelling Jews in Warsaw, let's ignore the savage colonial wars waged by the U.S. and Britain in India, Ireland, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and countless other places, which involved the slaughter of millions of people... Let's just look at the last 40 years:

-- Vietnam: the U.S. killed 3 million people (these are the accepted figure of Western historians), overwhelmingly civilians. One prominent form was the widespread use of Napalm to "defoliate" the jungle and to destroy crops that could be used to feed the NLF insurgents. Since the Vietnamese peasants lived in the jungle and raised (and ATE) these crops, they were often the victims. (Many argue that the U.S. intentionally targeted civilians with Napalm, but I will leave that aside.) Remember the picture of the fleeing girl, burned and naked? Napalm is jellied gasoline; it adheres to your skin as it burns and will continue to burn even if you put water on it.

Atrocities in Vietnam were routine and were not limited to what was dropped from the sky. A popular form of interrogation was to take NLF prisoners up in helicopters, and if they failed to answer questions, throw them out. Rape of Vietnamese women was extremely common, as was the mutilation of their bodies (many G.I.s had belts with vaginas hanging from them.) Some made sport of inserting explosives in women and setting them off. There is My Lai of course -- 500 murdered in an afternoon, and no one ever saw the inside of a jail cell for it. More recently there was exposure in the Toledo Blade about a unit that ravaged the countryside for months, massacring civilians wherever they went, totals probably in the 1,000s.

If you have any doubts about this, look it up. A good place to start is to "google" Winter Soldier Hearings". These were hearings conducted by anti-war Vietnam vets in the early 70's, with hundreds of hours of testimony from former combat soldiers about what they had seen. That search will also bring up John Kerry's speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (probably the last honorable thing Kerry did.) I have copies of the Toledo Blade stories, which I can give you next time I see you.

-- Iraq and Iran -- the U.S. put the Shah of Iran in power through a CIA coup in the 1950's -- the Shah was a notorious torturer who once gunned down 10,000 demonstrators on a single day, and of whom the Chicago Tribune said: "He may be a despot, but he's our despot." When the Shah was overthrown in 1978, Khomeini came to power, the hostage crisis went down and relations with the U.S. soured. The U.S. feared the influence of Iran and encouraged Sadaam Hussein (whom the U.S. had ALSO put in power some years earlier) to invade Iran. The infamous use of poison gas by Sadaam occurred during that war; the gas came from manufacturers in New Jersey, it is documented that U.S. aerial spotters assisted the Iraqi army in targeting poison gas shells, and the U.S. press at the time virtually ignored the whole incident. (trotting it out as an atrocity only years later when Sadaam was no longer working well with the U.S.) When Iraq started to get the upper hand in the war, the U.S. began secretly selling arms to Iran because it had a policy that NEITHER side should win (because it didn't want either a strong Iraq or a strong Iran) -- it was better to keep the war going. It lasted 10 years, at least 1 million people died.

During the first Gulf War, the U.S. systematically destroyed civilian infrastructure such as water treatment plants, medicine factories, etc. After the war ended (through the UN) the U.S. imposed strict sanctions which prevented Iraq from repairing this infrastructure. As a result, clean drinking water became unavailable and diarrhea diseases became very common, while the medicine to treat them could not be produced. According to the UN and various int'l human rights groups, 5,000 children a month died as a result -- something like 600,000 total. (Dennis Halliday, the UN official assigned to oversee the sanctions resigned, describing them as genocidal). Asked about the deaths in the late 90's, Madeline Albright acknowledged them, but said that "we felt the cost was worth it." (Don't believe it? Look it up. A good place to start is "Oil, Power and Empire" by Larry Everest, which as I recall is well-footnoted.)

-- The current "War on Terror": The U.S. started the war by hitting Baghdad, a city of over 1 million, with 400 cruise missiles. Close to 100,000 Iraqis have died in this latest war, whose so-called justifications have been revealed to be complete lies, again and again. Think about it.

The U.S. is the first modern nation that I am aware of to issue presidential memos authorizing and justifying torture. It has established a network of torture centers, most of which are unknown, around the world, and disappeared thousands of people into them, in addition to "rendering" hundreds more into the torture chambers of Syria, Egypt and other known practioners of torture for interrogation. Abu Ghraib? This was not an aberration, but part of a systemic approach to terrorizing the Iraqi people.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. installed a regime that rests mainly on Islamic Fundamentalist warlords who oppress women just the way the Taliban did. House of Saud, same deal -- the U.S. has backed them for decades because they collaborated in the theft of Saudi oil, in return for generous payoffs military support.

I'm not going to get into Israel here because I know we disagree and it would have to be the topic for another letter. But I'll just say that from the perspective of not only Arab and Moslem people, but the great majority of people everywhere in the world, the U.S. backed Israel in massacring and driving out the native people of Palestine, reducing those who remained to oppressed second class citizens, launching numerous wars to expand their territory, and carrying out savage repression of anyone who resisted, including unarmed youth (remember the policy of breaking the arms of stone throwers?)

So please, GIVE ME A BREAK. The West has dominated the world as a whole, including the Moslem world, for 100 years, installing and deposing dictators, invading, plundering, dictating... And it is a bloody mess in which the overwhelming majority of people suffer horrendously, while the U.S. flaunts its wealth and power and prattles on about the glories of the west, Christianity and democracy.

And yes, Eric Rudolph, Christian Fundamentalist nut case, did have to go live in the woods, but George W. Bush, Christian Fundamentalist nut case, is in the White House, commander of the most powerful military the world has ever known, including a vast nuclear arsenal -- and he believes in the the "End Times" and "The Rapture". Gerry Boykin is a top commander who "knew" the U.S. would prevail in Somalia because "my god is a real god"! (The fact that the U.S. DIDN'T prevail there doesn't seem to have given him much pause.) Tom Delay and Bill Frist, both fundamentalist nut cases who believe the current conservative Supreme Court to be wild-eyed leftists. Please show me something scarier than this in the Moslem world.

Another point Bidinotto raises is that the majority of people in the Islamic world have not repudiated terrorism against civilians. First of all, I have to ask, how the fuck does he know what the majority of people think in the Islamic world? Does he read Arabic or any of the other languages spoken by Moslems? Does he have some serious scholastic works to cite that have investigated this question? His argument is "I haven't heard about it, so..." SOOO WHAT!

But let me ask another question: Have the majority of people in the U.S. repudiated the crimes the U.S. has committed? Have the majority of Christians repudiated the crusades or the genocides against native peoples, or the policy of preventing condom use in Africa, thus clearing the path for the AIDS epidemic that has killed 17 million? Have the majority of white people repudiated slavery? If so, "I haven't heard about it". I personally think that to the extent that most people know about and understand these things they don't like them, but a) most people don't know much about them, and b) even most of those who do don't make that much noise about it. (In some case (Vietnam and Iraq) there have been very important mass movements against these crimes, but the slaughter if the Indians for example never evoked significant protest, nor did the conquest of the Philippines, the coup that brought the Shah to power, 3,000 lynchings of Black people in the late 19th/early 20th century, etc.)

I firmly believe that people SHOULD repudiate these things, but the fact that they haven't doesn't make them responsible. The concept of "collective responsibility" is actually one routinely used by Hitler: someone resists, the people of the town didn't stop them or turn them in, so kill them all. It is a horrific principle. People can be punished for what they do, or what they order to be done. Period. People who try to go about their lives peacefully even as crimes crimes are being committed by others should be urged to oppose them and stop them (and this applies nowhere more powerfully than in the US), but no sane or moral system would justify SLAUGHTERING them for their inaction. Once you start thinking and acting along these lines, you have really opened the gates of Hell.

In fact, I think that the same illogic that Bilotto wields ("I haven't heard about them renouncing these crimes so they are responsible) is actually BIN LADEN'S LOGIC, which does have some influence among sections of Moslem people: "The U.S. government carries out these terrible crimes in the name of the American people, and the American people seem to go along with it, so they must support it, so they must be to blame, so they must be monsters, so whatever happens to them is nothing to shed tears about." You know this is nonesense because you know that most people, even if they are supporting, going along with or not actively opposing terrible things the government does are not terrible people, and are not actually making these terrible decisions and policies. But people who are hurting and powerless are very vulnerable to this kind of demagogy.

Still, the general sense I get from "man in the street" interviews I've seen is that people in much of the world are, yes, extremely frustrated; overwhelming power is brought to bear against them, millions are murdered, economies are ruined, people are unable to live normal decent lives, and the world and the west seem (to them) to "approve". Nevertheless, most people do NOT seem to support terrorist actions that target civilians. Often people in these interviews will say that they "understand" why this happens, but will quickly add that they cannot support it, and that it goes against Islam. If Bidotto hasn't noticed this, it is because this doesn't fit the picture he wants to paint and thus screens it out.

Look, I have to be blunt: what you sent me is NOT an honest attempt to seriously wrangle with grievous problems in the world. It is jingoist propaganda written with the objective of PREVENTING people from thinking about what is really going on. It is lie on top of lie on top of lie, and I have really only scratched the surface in this letter. It appeals to people partly on the basis of ignorance, and partly on the basis of an unconscious racism that somehow considers several thousand dead Westerners a horror, but several hundred thousand dead Iraqis no big deal. (Note the uproar about London; when the U.S. bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan last year, killing dozens, it was a non-story in the West. Why is that?)

You have to think about this -- this is the kind of stuff that lined Germans up behind Hitler, lined Americans up to exterminate the Indians, lined Serbians up to slaughter Croats and Bosnians. This guy is telling you DON'T THINK about what the actual relationship is, the history of the Middle East, why people are upset. He is turning them into demons, "the other", people who you really don't need to concern yourself with because they are less than human. This is no joke, and it's not academic, it's an argument for mass slaughter, and I truly hope that you will dig into some of the issues I am raising and understand that what this guy stands for goes against every decent sentiment that you have.

Look at this passage, which refers back to the earlier stuff about the warriors of the middle ages (such as Vlad the Impaler):

"Because of the brutal violence of those warriors against jihad, we in the West today enjoy the luxury of cynicism, cheap irony, effete tolerance, and hedonism. We moral dwarves stand on the shoulders of those giants and spit on their heads, thinking our ingratitude is really an intellectual sophistication superior to the primitive superstitions and naïve ideals that have made our lives of freedom and prosperity possible. Meanwhile jihad by other means -- demography, immigration, terrorism, the oil weapon -- continues apace, at least until the time when a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon falls into the hands of a modern jihadist and we are returned to the sort of slaughter our ancestors suffered for centuries. Maybe then we'll wake up."

Note what he is saying -- if we don't ascend to THOSE LEVELS of savage barbarism, then we are "moral dwarves". And this is not confined to "the terrorists" -- in this passage he lumps in "immigration" and "demography" to the same list. This is actually the point of his whole post -- it's NOT just the Al Queda types who are "The Enemy". His argument is that Moslem people IN GENERAL are the enemy and they need to be slaughtered. He's a Nazi. Where do YOU stand on this?