Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

This is a short article I published in the ISIM Newsletter in 2002. Ironically, it was posted online by “CampusWatch,” a site created by Daniel Pipes, whose views I criticize in it. Presumably someone at CampusWatch posted the article because, although I am critical of the neoconservative view of the Middle East, I am also critical of some of my fellow Middle East experts who seem determined to ignore the more odious aspects of militant Islamic movements.

It should be obvious that it is unethical to object to the antisemitism lite of a Pat Robertson or an Ann Coulter while ignoring the more obvious antisemitism that pervades many Islamist texts. One can be, and should be, outraged by both the simplistic neoconservative cant about “Islamofascism” and much of what is said and done by Islamists. One can be, and should be, outraged by what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza. But this does not entail portraying Hamas as the innocent victim of “Islamophobia.” One can be, and should be, outraged by the neoconservative effort to induce the government of the United States to attack Iran. But this not entail ignoring the vile Holocaust denial of Ahmedinejad.

By failing to condemn that which deserves condemnation, many prominent Middle East experts unintentionally help the neoconservatives portray all critics of Israel as antisemites. Analyzing the nationalistic and anti-imperialist dimensions of Islamic militancy is legitimate. Ignoring the reactionary and xenophobic dimensions of Islamic militancy is not.

There is a middle path between demonization and idealization. And that is the path that should be taken by serious analysts of Islamic militancy.

Henry Munson, Between Pipes and Esposito, ISIM Newsletter, July 2002

Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published a short book (137 pages) by Martin Kramer entitled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Kramer is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, a journal founded by Daniel Pipes and others who feel that the discipline of Middle Eastern Studies, as practised in the United States, has become too pro-Arab and too ‘dovish’. Kramer, a former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, shares Pipes’s views, though he has generally been less strident in expressing them. Ivory Towers on Sand is primarily a critique of scholars dealing with issues related to American foreign policy in the Middle East. Kramer is not especially troubled by current trends in the study of Sufi poetry.

Both Kramer and Pipes, like their intellectual mentor Bernard Lewis, view the Muslim world as inherently irrational, violent, and above all, anti-Semitic. The Arabs in particular only understand force. They will behave only if they are beaten mercilessly. The American government should not waste time trying to address their alleged grievances, or those of Muslims in general, because these all boil down to primitive hatred of the infidel and resentment that the infidel now dominates the believer instead of the other way around (Lewis 1990).This view of the Islamic world underlies the policies of the Sharon government in Israel and the policies favoured by at least some members of the American administration. So the issues at stake are by no means strictly academic.

Munson: All those rightly outraged by American and Israeli policies in the Middle East should condemn this antisemitic rhetoric just as emphatically as the neoconservatives do. The fact that neoconservatives and right-wing Israeli extremists exploit this kind of language does not mean it can be ignored.

MEMRI, October 31, 2007

TV Channel Affiliated with Lebanese Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Beri in Show on Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Jews Use Drug Trafficking to Control World, Subjugate Other Nations

The following are excerpts from a Lebanese TV report on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The report aired on NBN TV on October 22, 2007.

Maria Maalouf: “On land and in the heavens – the use that American and Israeli Zionism makes of the weapon of drugs in order to thwart intifadas and revolutions cannot be justified by the American claims about the intensification of the struggle on land, as long as the Jews purport to have their own private god in the heavens, who commanded them to annihilate the nations and peoples of the world, using drugs and causing anxiety, and numbing the mental, psychological, and physical capabilities of non-Jews, as written in the Talmud or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”Isn’t it true that these Jewish plots to corrupt the peoples were described by American ‘plot-disrupters,’ such as Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford, and even by some Jews, like Alfred Lilienthal, and even Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, exposed in his book On the Jewish Question that there was an instinct within the Jewish individual that drives him to take control of the world, by means of illegal money – which is known today as ‘money laundering?’” […]

 Hussein Ibish rightly criticizes those who defend Hamas even though they would never defend Christian or Jewish movements with similar views. Israel and the United States both bear much of the responsibility for Hamas’s electoral successes because of their failure to improve Palestinian living conditions. Fatah has also been crippled by corruption and, in some cases, a willingness to cooperate with counterproductive Israeli efforts to destroy Hamas.  Israel’s punishment of the people of Gaza for the Hamas takeover is outrageous.  And refusing to negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas as a result of its electoral successes is both wrong and counterproductive. But none of these facts entails ignoring the reactionary aspects of Hamas. None of these facts entails ignoring the antisemitic rhetoric of the Hamas charter that is routinely echoed in sermons and statements by Hamas supporters. Those of us who routinely condemn the simplistic Manichean language of the neoconservatives should make sure we avoid simplistic Manichean language of our own. The bigotry of the oppressed is no more excusable than the bigotry of their oppressors.

Hussein Ibish, American Taskforce on Palestine - ATFP Issue Paper (Sept 7, 2007)

…let us recall that the Hamas government’s foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahar, told an astonished Wolf Blitzer of CNN in his first post-election interview that an “Islamic” society in Palestine was needed because a “secular system allows homosexuality, allows corruption, allows the spread of the loss of natural immunity, like AIDS. We are here living under Islamic control.” In 2005, the same gentleman condemned dancing between men and women, and castigated “homosexuals and lesbians, a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick.” Meanwhile, Hamas’ education minister banned a book of folkloric tales because of its “immoral” references to romance….

… [those] of us who seek first to end the occupation and then support the development of a democratic and pluralistic Palestinian state have to hold firm to those commitments. This means at the very least not defending those whose stated policies and concrete actions run strictly counter to those aims. It is not necessary to support any particular entity to promote these principles, and it is hardly our role as Americans to carry water for any leadership outside of our own country. But support for those principles must translate into sober judgments about what and who is most likely to promote them, and words and deeds should follow these considerations. Dismissing those who hold firm to these important values and goals as “diplomatic fronts” or “Washington lobbies” for narrow Palestinian political factions, or, most preposterously, as “neoconservatives,” is beneath contempt. 

The Bush administration’s efforts to blame its problems in Iraq are ludicrous. But the Islamic Republic of Iran does deserve harsh criticism for its bigotry and human rights abuses. Middle East experts who condemn the demonization of Muslims in the West should also condemn the demonization of Westerners by Muslims.

For Iran’s Shiites, a Celebration of Faith and Waiting - New York Times
And there was the booth set up to warn people about “Satan worshipers.” There was a Jewish star at the entrance, posted atop a replica of what was supposed to be the Washington Monument which also was described as a satanic symbol because it is shaped as an obelisk.

There was also a movie concerning “perverted cults,” which focused on the Bahai faith.

Khouri, How do Salafist-Jihadists happen? Daily Star, 8/29/2007

Many in the West allow themselves to see militant Salafist-Jihadists like Fatah al-Islam only through US President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” without sufficiently grasping the local and global root causes of radicalism - including American, British and other Western powers’ policies - that are easily traceable in the modern history of the Middle East. On the other hand, those in the Middle East who delight at any sign of indigenous resistance to American-European-Israeli-Arab regime dominance are prone to put up with Salafist-Jihadist criminality as an inevitable reaction to the many malaises of the modern Arab-Iranian-Muslim world.

Neither approach is very useful and only condemns us all to more confrontation, destruction and death. We must understand correctly the root causes that drive the continuing proliferation of groups like Fatah al-Islam, if we hope to nip such criminality in the bud. This particular group will soon be defeated or killed in Nahr al-Bared, but what happens after that?

MEMRI is a right-wing Israeli organization that seeks to attribute Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel to anti-Semitism and thereby divert attention from the agony of the Palestinians. This perspective is both absurd and morally repugnant. That said, Islamist antisemitism is also absurd and morally repugnant. Middle East experts who are rightly critical of attempts to demonize all Islamists should not go to the opposite extreme of idealizing them all. The fact that Islamist antisemitism is often used to divert attention from Palestinian suffering does not mean it can be ignored. The following statements by the former Turkish prime minister Prof. Necmettin Erbakan, who is the founder and leader of the Islamist movement Milli Gorus are clearly outrageous. And those of us outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should condemn such rhetoric just as vehemently as we condemn the bigotry of Christian and Jewish religious reactionaries. If we do not, we simply invert the moral myopia of the neoconservatives.

MEMRI:
Erbakan: “When we look at the map of the world, we see about 200 countries painted in colors, and we think that there are many races, religions, and nations. The fact is that for 300 years, all these [200 nations] have been controlled from one center only. This center is the racist, imperialist Zionism. Unless you make this correct diagnosis for the illness, you cannot find the cure to it. You will ask, ‘What is this belief, this racist imperialism that destroys happiness in this world?’

“This belief began 5,765 years ago, when the children of Israel were living in Egypt, with a book of magic that was written by someone called Kabbala. The author or authors of this book later claimed that they belonged to the tribe of Moses, but this is not true. They distorted the Tevrat [bible] of Moses and put in it the Kabbala. If you want to see proof of this, you can look at their Tevrat and then look at the Kabbala.

“What do these people believe in? Their belief has four principles [while ours has six] that say: […] 1) You are the real people of God; all others are created to be your slaves; you were created as men and others [were created] as monkeys that later turned into men. This is what they believe and what they teach. They believe that they are the superior class. 2) This superiority will be not only in thought, but will be materialized, actually realized. They will be the masters and the others will be their slaves. 3) For all this to come true, they must perform three duties: The first duty will be to gather all the exiled sons of Israel into Quds [Jerusalem]; the second duty is to build the ‘Greater Israel’ between the Nile and the Euphrates, within these determined borders, and to provide for the safety of this Greater Israel.

“Do you know what the safety of Israel means? It means that they will rule the 28 countries from Morocco to Indonesia. Since all the Crusades were organized by the Zionists, and since it was our forefathers the Seljuks who stopped them, according to the Kabbala there should be no sovereign state in Anatolia. This is these people’s [i.e. the Jews’] religion, their faith. You can’t argue or negotiate with them. This is their religion, and it comes from the Kabbala.

Devenu chrétien, un Égyptien vit un calvaire, Le Figaro, August 17, 2007

[Le] quotidien gouvernemental Al-Messa…affirme que selon un «sondage» réalisé par ses soins, tous les oulémas sont unanimes sur la «nécessité de tuer l’apostat» : un verdict lapidaire clairement destiné à contredire le grand mufti d’Égypte, qui a récemment affirmé que les hommes n’ont pas à se substituer à Dieu pour faire justice…

Munson Intolerable Tolerance, Contention 5/3, 1996

The laudable desire to eliminate popular misconceptions about Islam in Western culture has sometimes induced Western scholars to embrace notions as fanciful as those they seek to refute. One thinks, for example, of the argument that Islamic fundamentalists, or “Islamists,” are benign revivalists who have been unfairly maligned by biased Western journalists, government officials, and scholars. There is a kernel of truth to this argument, but those who make it tend to minimize the significance of those aspects of Islamic militancy that are rightly condemned not just by non-Muslims, but by many Muslims as well. The notion that every Muslim is an infidel-hating terrorist is of course ludicrous — and dangerous. But trying to eradicate this stereotype does not entail glossing over the intolerance, violence, and fanaticism associated with many of the movements that advocate strictly Islamic states.

Selon les juges, les sévices subis par cette jeune fille ont été commis “non pas pour des motifs vexatoires ou par mépris”, mais “pour son bien”, Le Monde, 16 août 2007