Informed Comment

Newt Gingrich’s poll numbers and fund-raising have improved recently, as the GOP faithful continue their quest for an ABM (not anti-ballistic missile but “Anyone but Mitt”).

Gingrich in turn has begun trying out talking points again, which is good for pundits and stand-up comedians, but bad for everyone else.

In his most recent foray on Middle East policy, Gingrich tried to depict the Arab Spring as bad for Middle East Christians.

Weirdly, he began his attack on the 2011 protest movements in the Middle East by lamenting that the number of Christians in Iraq has fallen from 1.2 million to 500,000. He observed, “This is why the current strategy in the Middle East is such a total grotesque failure…. People say, ‘Oh, isn’t this great, we’re having an Arab spring.’ Well, I don’t know, I think we may in fact be having an anti-Christian spring. I think people should take this pretty soberly.”

As anyone with a brain will note, the Bush administration invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Gingrich helped plan out while on the Defense Advisory Board, is what caused Christians to have to leave Iraq. Christians weren’t the only ones. Millions of Iraqis at one time or another fled to Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, because Gingrich’s Republican Party kicked off a civil war in that country by creating a power vacuum. In addition, anti-American guerrillas unfairly conflated Iraqi Christians with American ones, and so attacked the former. I suspect there were about 800,000 Christians in Iraq before the invasion, and that half fled, mostly to Aleppo in Syria or to Beirut.

The foreign military conquest and occupation of Iraq took place in 2003 and has nothing to do with the Arab Spring. (No one among the activists ever even mentioned Iraq, except as a negative example. “Let’s not do that, it is what the Americans did in Iraq.”)

But if one took seriously Gingrich’s implicit suggestion that US foreign policy should be about Middle Eastern Christians, what policies would that produce?

First of all, the Christians of Syria are mostly declining to actively support the protest movement against the Baathist government of Bashar al-Assad.

Yuhanna Ibrahim, archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo told the Beirut-based The Daily Star this summer:
“To be honest, everybody’s worried . . . We don’t want what happened in Iraq to happen in Syria. We don’t want the country to be divided. And we don’t want Christians to leave Syria.”

Christians make up about 10% of Syria’s 22 million population. The big Christian neighborhoods of Aleppo and Damascus have seen no demonstrations against the regime. This attitude comes from the Baath Party’s embrace of secular Arab nationalism. The Baath ideology was invented by Christians. In an ideal Baathist society, the important thing is that you are Arab or think of yourself as Arab, and what religion you follow is irrelevant.

A lot of Iraqi Christians had felt the same way, and the lesson they take away from the Iraq debacle is that horrible things happen when Washington decides to get rid of a Baathist government.

Many Syrian Christians are afraid that if Bashar al-Assad falls, he will be succeeded by a Muslim fundamentalist regime that will reduce them to second-class citizens or even persecute them. (To be fair, the Syrian protesters have called on the Christians to join them, so they don’t seem anti-Christian, and they say they want rights for all).

So Newt’s Middle East policy is presumably to support the Baathist government of Syria against its foes, right? Isn’t that what a Gingrich would conclude would be good for Syria’s Christians?

Nope, Gingrich is a hawk on Syria, praising Rick Santorum’s stance on this subject. But Santorum wants President Obama to wave a magic wand and make al-Assad vanish.

So I guess the Arab Spring being bad for Middle East Christians doesn’t shape Gingrich’s Syria policy? Gingrich wants to deliver the Syrian Christians into the uncertain hands of the revolutionaries? Maybe even– gasp — the Muslim Brotherhood?

Then there are significant Christian Palestinian populations. Is Newt going to support these countrymen of Jesus of Nazareth against the Israeli settlers who are stealing their land and water?

Nope.

And what if it can be demonstrated that the attack on the Copts protesting in front of Cairo’s television station was orchestrated from behind the scenes by elements in the military government? Would Newt suddenly support the New Left organizations such as April 6 that are calling for the military to step down and go back to the barracks, and who have sponsored Christian-Muslim solidarity marches?

Nope.

Moreover, it seems likely that the Muslim Brotherhood will do well in the forthcoming parliamentary elections and will be in a ruling coalition. Since Gingrich considers the MB little short of Satan, how would a President Newt even be able to do Egypt policy? Is he just going to blow off the most populous and important country in the Middle East?

Middle Eastern Christians deserve a decent life and human rights like everyone else. But Gingrich is being silly if he advocates putting their interests first in US Middle East policy. There aren’t that many of them The largest group is the Egyptian Copts at 8 million or so. Less than a million left in Lebanon. About a million Palestinians. Some 2 million in Syria. Less than half a million in Iraq. Maybe 200,000 in Iran. And that is just about it– their numbers everywhere else are miniscule. They aren’t even big proportions of the countries where they reside. Less than 13 million in a region of about 420 million people (the Arab world plus Turkey and Iran).

Great Powers don’t behave the way that Gingrich is suggesting. They pursue their interests. Gingrich is only even bringing up Middle Eastern Christians as a ploy to get a hearing among evangelicals, who don’t mostly much care for his two divorces (not sure if they hold his recent embrace of Catholicism against him).

And Gingrich is wallowing in such bad faith that he doesn’t even take seriously his own policy, otherwise his attitudes toward Syria and Palestine would be completely different.

The irony is that most US evangelicals have never demonstrated the slightest interest in the welfare of Middle Eastern Christians, much preferring to support the Israelis. So Gingrich’s confused and hypocritical talking point probably wouldn’t even get him anywhere with them.

Posted in Iran, Iraq, Iraq War, Islam, Islamophobia, Israel/ Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, US Politics | 33 Comments

George W. Bush said of Iraq and Afghanistan,, “I’d like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people…”

The 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan [pdf], drafted and passed under the rule of George W. Bush in that country, makes Islam the religion of state and forbids any law that contravenes the sharia or Muslim religious law (the official translations on the Web misleadingly render ahkam or religious laws with the word “provisions,” which hides the real intent of the constitution, so I have translated those passages more literally):

“Article One Ch. 1. Art. 1: Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.

Article Two Ch. 1, Art. 2: The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam.

Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

Article Three
Ch. 1, Art. 3

In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and laws [ahkam] of the sacred religion of Islam.

A human rights report notes:

“The Afghan Constitution and Islamic Sharia law both support polygamy, allowing men to take up to four wives. Certain conditions apply to polygamous marriages, such as the equal treatment of all wives, but these are not always observed.”

The constitution of Iraq, adopted in 2005 under the rule of George W. Bush over Iraq, says:

Article 2:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and is the primary basis for legislation:

A. No legislation may be enacted that contradicts the established laws of Islam

B. No law may be enacted that contradicts the principles of democracy.

C. No law may be enacted that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this Constitution.

Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the
Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights to freedom of religious belief
and practice of all individuals such as Christians, Yazidis, and Mandean Sabeans.

Polygamy is legal in Iraq with a judge’s permission, and Iraqi legislators have been considering making it easier for men to take more than one wife in order to have the country’s vast number of war widows supported.

But the following recent statements by Libyan leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil provoked the CNN headline, “Libyan leader’s embrace of Sharia raises eyebrows:”

“As a Muslim country, we have adopted the Islamic Sharia as the main source of law. Accordingly, any law that contradicts Islamic principles with the Islamic Sharia is ineffective legally.” Jalil also urged an end to restrictions on taking more than one wife, and wanted to see Islamic banking principles instead of Western-style interest.

The Western press seems unaware that when Muammar Qaddafi came to power in 1969 he pledged to implement Islamic law or sharia and to abolish Italian and British colonial-era laws and regulations. He forbade alcohol, e.g. When in 1977 he declared Libya to be a “masses-ocracy” (Jamahiriya), he proclaimed that the holy Qur’an was the source of law or sharia for Libya.

So far, Jalil has said nothing that was not said repeatedly by his predecessor, Qaddafi. He has said nothing that is not in the constitutions and/or legal practice of Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq. But there is no hand-wringing about those two “liberated” countries and Islamic law or sharia. I guess if secular, communist Afghanistan was made fundamentalist by Reagan and Bush, or if the relatively secular Baath Party of Iraq was overthrown by W. in favor of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Call Party and the Bloc of Ayatollah Sadr II, that is unobjectionable and not even reported on. But if there’s a Democratic president in the White House, all of a sudden it is a scandal if Muslims practice Muslim law.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Islam, Islamophobia, Libya | 24 Comments

The unfortunate riots in Tottenham in London tell us a great deal about the problems of immigrant communities, and what they say to us most eloquently is that people want to be treated with justice. They want to be treated in accordance with a rule of law, and not singled out for extra policing on the basis of racial profiling. The demonstrations were set off by the police shooting of an African-Carribean man, and came in part in protest against the constant pat-downs to which African-Caribbeans are subjected by police.

African-Caribbeans are the least organized ethnic community in the United Kingdom, as Paul Gilroy has also noted, and are the least represented in politics and in the media. They suffer from high unemployment, and are particularly youthful (most of the some 200 demonstrators who have been arrested are teenagers).

Muslim-haters, exemplified by Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, have long attempted to conflate immigration issues with Islam and culture. In essence, they have a “clash of civilizations” theory of why immigrants are, as they insist, unassimilable into white, Christian, European societies. Muslims, they charge, are committed to un-Christian values and their own code of law, the sharia (which they will, the haters argue, attempt to impose on white Christians). In fact, large numbers of European Muslims are de facto secular, and even among the religious there is no appetite for having non-Muslims live by Muslim law (many would find that idea sort of blasphemous, since Islam makes a place for religious pluralism). And, besides, 2-5% of the population, many of them without citizenship or unused to voting if they have it, cannot impose anything on anyone. The sharia hysteria is a deliberate ploy to stir up hatred by well-funded bigots.

When riots broke out in Paris in 2005, the Muslim-haters, such as Fox Cable News, blamed Islam. But there too, the issue was not religion, as almost all French recognized immediately. The issue was youth unemployment.

Likewise, the Tottenham riot was not about culture. African-Carribeans are Christians and are not pushing for a Talmud or a sharia. (Some Muslim communities may get caught up in the wave of rioting, but as I will argue, it will be because of issues other than their religion).

It is not completely clear what is driving the looting that has come in the wake of the rioting. It could just be opportunism (a wave of looting once swept New York City just because the lights went out because of a problem in the electrical grid). Some of the arson seems mindless, but then the US saw similar things in the late 1960s. When people hate their lives, they sometimes lash out, even at the few nice buildings in their neighborhood. The looting may also be organized crime (and some of the arson and sabotage may be intended to cover for looting and burglary by these gangs). The looting is not the main issue, in any case; it is rather the demonstrations and riots that have created the conditions of which looters have taken advantage.

Muslim immigrant communities are not distinctive in their problems (nor in their successes) from other immigrant communities. It isn’t about a clash of cultures or civilizations. It is about access to the mainstream economy, employment, and, as I said, a feeling of being treated fairly by the government and the society–a feeling that the law applies equally to everyone and is applied in a transparent and even-handed way.

Britain is capable of achieving the rule of law for all its citizens equally (the rule of law is something the British have been especially good at through history, and they have bequeathed the world many good institutions and much good thinking on this subject). African-Caribbeans maintain that they haven’t been equal before the law with other Britons. Of course, they also need jobs, and job training. But the problem of equal treatment under the law is the one that needs to be addressed most urgently.

Posted in Islamophobia | 29 Comments

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi writes in a guest column for Informed Comment

The Norway Attacks and the Paranoid Mindset

It has emerged that Anders Breivik- who is suspected of killing at least 76 people in two attacks in Norway on Friday a week ago– was an avid user of online so-called “counter-jihad” forums. At one such site called document.no he claimed in 2009 that he was now working “full time to develop/promote further the Vienna school of thought that Fjordman, Bat Ye’or…and many others have already contributed so much to.” (For more on this issue see this post.) This connection raises the question of whether some conspiracy theories pose a threat to the public, that is, whether they constitute a clear and present danger of promoting violence, because of the way they are formulated.

The “Vienna school of thought” refers to the outlook promoted by the blog “Gates of Vienna” (GoV), which is the most avid advocate of the “Eurabia” thesis first formulated by Bat Ye’or and promoted in detail by an anonymous Norwegian blogger known as “Fjordman.” (Eurabia is the daft idea that Europe is going swiftly to become a continent dominated by radical Muslim regimes). On multiple occasions, Breivik has advertised Fjordman’s work, most notably in describing his article “Defeating Eurabia” as “the perfect Christmas gift for family and friends.”

To what extent, if at all, should these various anti-Muslim blogs (they characterize themselves as “anti-jihadist”) — particularly the writings of Fjordman– that have so influenced Breivik be regarded as having a share of responsibility for the carnage? Of course, many will reply that attempting to draw such connections is merely “smear-by-association.” After all, the Gates of Vienna itself has condemned Breivik’s murderous rampage and has affirmed that “at no time has any part of the Counter-jihad advocated violence, and its raison d’être is to eschew violence, to preserve law and order, and to uphold the rights of the individual.”

But the British government has at some points seriously considered banning the radical Hizb-ut-Tahrir Muslim fundamentalist group, even though it uses the same diction as Gates of Vienna– that it condemns violence to achieve political ends. Nevertheless, Hizb-ut-Tahrir propagates a narrative that the West and non-Muslim world in general are actively waging war against Islam. At the same time, its literature constantly insists on the right and need for Muslims to assert their rights and “resist” the Western “occupiers.”

Once this framing of things is accepted, it is not hard to see how a Muslim reader of such pamphlets might reach the conclusion that the only way to combat the war against him is to resort to violence. Do we exculpate the likes of Hizb-ut-Tahrir for doing the kind of propaganda that may have led to actions such as the July 7, 2005 bombings in London by radicalized young Muslim Britons?

And so it is with the “Eurabia” thesis. This theory goes well beyond simply asserting that many on the liberal-left and in government have been naïve about the behavior and intentions of non-violent Islamists in Europe. Rather, their Eurabia hypothesis posits that the entire political left and European elites are actively conspiring with Islamists or the Muslim world to turn Europe into an Islamized continent, forming a joint Euro-Arab axis against Israel and the United States. Not all anti-Islam blogs adhere to the Eurabia theory: for example, “The Hesperado” prefers to see liberals and political elites as only naïve, well-intentioned, and therefore amenable to reasoned argument.

Fjordman has taken the Eurabia conspiracy further, seeing Western governments’ policies on immigration and multiculturalism as part of an attempt to foster “White Masochism” in the European natives. Hence, Fjordman urges whites to assert their rights to have “a place of our own where we can prosper…without being stripped of our heritage in order to placate people who moved to our countries of their own free will. We…are under no obligation to commit collective suicide and serve as a dumping ground for other countries.”

He goes so far as to accuse Western governments of practicing “reverse Nazism” since their policies are “based on the assumption that whites should have fewer rights than others and can be colonized or culturally eradicated with impunity. I don’t see why I should either be a “Nazi” or embrace and celebrate my extinction.”

It is clear how acceptance of Fjordman’s theories- warning of “reverse Nazism,” “collective suicide,” “cultural eradication” and “colonization” by (Muslim) immigrants- can inculcate a dangerously paranoid mindset, with numerous parallels to Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s outlook (namely in the idea that the supposed victims must stand up for themselves in the face of an imminent and existential threat). Reading Fjordman and the Gates of Vienna, one gets the impression that the halls of power are dominated by sinister leftists and cultural Marxists, that co-existence with the Left is impossible, and that we must be at war with the establishment to prevent the dire threat of decline, creating a sense of what The Hesperado terms “Gnostic alienation” from the West.

Far from being a shooting spree of someone mentally ill, Breivik’s attacks were evidently well calculated. Attacking the government in Oslo and the youths of the Labor Party he felt would be future leaders of his country, Breivik sincerely hoped he would free Norway from the grip of what he saw as a giant social experiment in multiculturalism, mass immigration and Islamization. Fjordman and the Gates of Vienna are either using hyperbole and vast exaggeration, or they sincerely believe that there is an imminent and existential threat to life and property. If the former, they should not be taken seriously. if the latter, their readers could be excused for concluding that violent action might be necessary to avert the threat.

In the end, responsibility lies with Breivik and his conscious decision to commit these atrocities. However, Fjordman, the Gates of Vienna and other promoters of the Eurabia conspiracy theory ought to re-consider their claims, and how they might be interpreted. Above all, demonization and personal vilification of one’s political opponents needs to be abandoned.

————————

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi is a student at Oxford University.

Posted in Islamophobia | 21 Comments

As usual, Friday was a big day for the popular Arab reform movements that are challenging dictatorial governments.

1. Syrian security forces are alleged to have killed about 20 protesters on Friday, as the demonstrations and rallies continue to be vigorous in places like Hama and Deir al-Zor. The one-party state, ruled by the Baath Party, had attempted to mollify Syrians this week by issuing a law allowing many parties to contest elections. Most are not mollified.

2. Tens of thousands of Yemenis protested again on Friday, demanding an end to the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is recuperating in Saudi Arabia from burns in a bomb attack. A general who defected to the protesters provided them with protection in Sanaa via an unusually large convoy of military vehicles. Half of Yemen’s 23 million citizens own a gun, and fears of a bloody internal struggle have risen. Protests were held not only in the capital of Sanaa but also in Taez (the second-largest city), Maarib, and elsewhere.

3. Thousands of mostly Shiite protesters marched on the Budaiya highway outside Manama on Friday, denouncing the fixed “dialogue” process and tepid reforms offered by King Hamad Al Khalifa. The dialogue council had been heavily stacked with Sunnis and regime supporters. The Wifaq Party was marginalized. It represents the majority of Bahrain Shiites, who are roughly 60% of the population (down from 65% because of a crash program of giving citizenship to foreign Sunnis in recent years on the part of the regime). Shiite Bahrainis are disproportionately rural and poor and face employment, social and political discrimination. Wifaq seeks a constitutional monarchy, though the minority view that a republic would be even better may be gaining adherents as the monarchy uses hard line tactics to repress the majority demands. Manama is the site of the HQ of the US Fifth Fleet, and while the Obama administration has urged King Hamad to negotiate and compromise with his citizens, it has done no more than that, in the face of severe repression and violations of basic human rights. There is no evidence for the regime charge that Bahrain Shiites are cat’s paw of nearby Shiite Iran. Most Bahrain Shiites belong to a different legal school than Iranians, and, being Arabs, are skittish about the idea of Persian domination. (A minority of Bahrain Shiites, mostly in Manama, has Iranian ancestry). The demonstrations on Friday were a remarkable resurgence of the democracy movement, given how severe the crackdown against it was.

4. The Egyptian Left has been on a roll since July 8, starting back up the Tahrir protests and forcing the government to move more aggressively in trying former regime figures and out-of-control police, and in switching out about half the cabinet, replacing Establishment figures with persons more sympathetic too or even deriving from the ranks of the protesters. The Muslim fundamentalists were upset by this growing leftist influence, backed by labor activists and youth groups sympathetic to them, and so threatened to stage a big rally on July 29 in favor of implementing Islamic law. They were afraid in part that the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, the real power behind the civilian cabinet of PM Essam Sharaf, will issue “guiding principles” for the drafting of the constitution, scheduled to begin this winter after elections. These “guiding principles” could forestall any Islamization of the constitution. The Wasat Party mediated a deal to avoid a clash at Tahrir Square, and it was decided that some 30 parties and organizations would hold a joint demonstration for mutually agreed-upon goals. The Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood, which represents itself as the modern face of Muslim politics, largely abided by the agreement. But Salafis, who are a recognizable subculture in Egypt, did not. Salafi men tend to wear white, Saudi-style robes, checkered kaffiyas or head scarves, and large beards, often with no moustaches. The Salafis want an Islamic state and a hard line interpretation of shariah, and on Friday they said so loudly. The Salafis are a tiny group in Egypt, and they are widely seen to have behaved badly, even by other Muslim parties like the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the Salafis put a scare into women, middle class people, Coptic Christians, and youth on Friday that almost certainly hurt the chances of the Muslim Brotherhood in the upcoming elections, at least in urban areas. That is, the true significance of Friday’s events is the opposite of that you see in a lot of today’s headlines in the Western press, about Muslim politics coming to the fore. More like Muslim politics behaves like a boor.

5. Some 3,000 Muslim fundamentalists protested in downtown Amman, Jordan, demanding “genuine reform.” On July 15, pro-regime crowds (or paid hands, who knows?) attacked protesters and journalists there. The fundamentalists took a joint oath to remain peaceful. Polling does not show that Muslim fundamentalism is very popular in Jordan, and as long as the protests are spearheaded by that part of the political spectrum, they are unlikely to amount to much.

Posted in Bahrain, Egypt, Islam, Islamophobia, Syria, Uncategorized, Yemen | 8 Comments

Television commentator Bill O’Reilly lambasted the press for referring to Anders Breivik as a Christian terrorist, on the grounds that he is not a practicing Christian and on the grounds that no true Christian can be a terrorist and on the grounds that Christian fundamentalists are essentially different from Muslim fundamentalists (“those crazy jihadis”).

O’Reilly, who has engaged in hate speech toward Muslims of the sort that inspired Breivik’s violence, is in part trying to change the discussion so that his guilt in fostering an atmosphere of rancor is not brought up. The in-your-face pundit has insisted that “Muslims killed us on 9/11,” the kind of ‘shouting fire in a theater” discourse that could easily get people killed.

In fact, O’Reilly is a specialist in bullying, violent rhetoric. He wished that the Katrina hurricane hit the United Nations building and he “wouldn’t have rescued them,” a tasteless and callous way to refer to the deaths of over 4,000 persons in New Orleans and a transposition of that tragedy to New York city. Ironically, the UN building was one of five New York landmarks that al-Qaeda wanted to blow up. I’m not sure it is really a Christian sentiment that O’Reilly gives us here.

As for O’Reilly’s comments on the Norway massacre, Breivik is a “cultural Christian,” believing in a monocultural Christian Europe, and said he wants Protestants to return to the fold of Catholicism so as to present a united front. He also had a cult of the Knights Templar. I mean, it is not as if he is a Buddhist.

Ironically, Breivik’s form of Christianity is precisely like the “Islam” of many Muslim fundamentalists, who are only nominal Muslims but see the religion as a bulwark against Western dominance. Many of the al-Qaeda figures were not particularly pious. Thus, September 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah was from a secular Sunni family (an uncle was a Baathist) and he had a live-in Turkish girlfriend, and danced at a wedding not long before his horrible mass murder spree.

Since O’Reilly insists that Jarrah was a Muslim, we’d have on the same grounds to insist that Breivik is a Christian.

It is darkly humorous to see O’Reilly annoyed at Christianity being tarred with the brush of Breivik; now he knows what it was like for Muslims who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda (i.e. almost all of them) to suddenly fall under a cloud because of the actions of a small number of militants.

What of the argument that whereas a true Christian could never murder because the New Testament forbids it, the Qur’an commands holy war against infidels?

It is not actually clear that the New Testament is a pacifist document. Jesus says he brings a “sword.” Peter cut off the ear of the servant of the High Priest who came to arrest his master; you can’t cut off someone’s ear with a broadsword unless you were trying to kill him. [Update: Christian pacifists see Jesus' statement as metaphorical and point to his rebuke of Peter. But we cannot know that the statement was metaphorical, and the rebuke may have been tactical rather than about principle; Peter certainly hadn't imbibed pacifist principles as of that point. In the context of the [pdf] Jewish messianic movements of late antiquity, pacifism is a little unlikely. Ideas of ethical non-retaliation by individuals also existed in rabbinical Judaism, but did not rule out war by states.) And it was certainly Christian authorities who called for, e.g., the Crusades.

But it is equally important to stress that the Qur’an forbids murder. The command to fight in the Qur’an is against militant polytheists of Mecca who were trying to wipe out the Muslims– i.e. it is about self-defense. Islamic law forbids terrorizing people or depriving people of life and property when they have done nothing wrong. Christians and Jews in traditional Muslim society were under the law guaranteed the right to life and property, though of course in the real world sometimes there were pogroms (just as Christians conducted pogroms against Muslims and Jews despite the fine words in the New Testament). Classical Muslim law forbids individual laypersons just to declare jihad one morning; it has to be declared by duly constituted Muslim authorities. Today’s Muslim terrorists are not authorized by any major Muslim religious authority, and have been condemned by all the ones that count. O’Reilly’s insinuation that a “state” backs Muslim terrorism reminds us of his confident predictions that it would be revealed that Iraqi resources flowed into the 9/11 operation (they did not).

So the “jihadis” are no more exemplars of believing Islam than Breivik is of believing Christianity. O’Reilly delivered himself of a self-loving and bigotted diatribe typical of the main themes of Muslim-hating in America, a discourse that is attended with inherent dangers of violence.

As for whether believing Christians can be terrorists, of course they can. The Crusades often involved terrorism (the use of violence against innocent civilians by non-state actors for political purposes). They don’t call it the Wars of Religion in France for nothing (they are why France is not today a largely Protestant country). There were some believing priests in the IRA (again, they may have had legitimate grievances, but killing innocents is not OK). More recently we have the example of the murders of physicians who perform surgery to terminate pregnancies. ( O’Reilly’s campaign of vilification against one such physician, it is alleged, may not have been irrelevant to his murder). Or post-colonial movements like the Lord’s Resistance Army.

O’Reilly is just engaged in special pleading. He is embarrassed at how much like his own diatribes parts of Anders Breivik’s Manifesto sound. Ironically, he uses exactly the same arguments about the transcendental virtue of Christianity that Muslim fundamentalists use about Islam.

O’Reilly, that self-proclaimed exemplar of Christianity, has ambushed guests and whipped up bigotry and sexually harassed co-workers (remember the loofah? Or was it a felafel?). That he is a major voice on American television tells you how weird the media environment is in the US. Imagine what it was like for Norwegians to hear that Glenn Beck had compared the innocent children shot down by Breivik to Hitler Youth. And now they will hear from O’Reilly that Breivik was a) not a Christian and b) that Breivik’s views on Islam and Muslims were correct. American “news” is being Breivikized before our eyes.

Posted in Islamophobia | 13 Comments

Norwegian right wing Christian terrorist Anders Breivik spoke of being a member of the “Knights Templar,” and if anything is further terrorizing about Friday’s attacks beyond their own horror, it is the possibility that an organization was behind them or that there are other members of it as looney and violent as Breivik himself. Update: : Breivik warned Monday that 2 more cells of “our organization” were organized for further attacks. Is this his “Templars”? The name, of course, refers to the medieval order coming out of the Crusades.

Breivik visited Malta, where the remnants of the real Knights Templar, having turned their resources over to the Knights of St. John the Hospitaller, had run a pirate mini-state for a few hundred years in the early modern period. Breivik, from a Protestant background, advocated a return to Catholicism, but not to the really-existing current church, rather to a pan-Christian revival of a Crusade theocracy.

The Crusade, he insisted, was necessary because in ten years Muslims would be a majority in most of Europe and they were raping Christian girls. The fear of brown men raping Norwegian women is of course the ultimate in iconic racism, redolent of Jim Crow in the Old South.

The myth about rape in Oslo is debunked here. The argument has the form of bad statistics. It is alleged that Muslims are only 4% of the population in Norway but are responsible for almost all the rapes. First of all, the allegation is untrue. But consider this: most rapes happen in big cities, where anonymity affords more opportunity for subsequent escape. Immigrants are mostly in cities and are a bigger proportion of the urban population than they are of the general population. Then, rapists tend to be young, and recent immigrants groups are disproportionately young. Then, rape is more common in low-income areas, and, you guessed it, immigrants are poorer. So if you studied rape among poor urban youth, it may well be that Muslims commit fewer rapes than would be statistically expected, in that demographic group (the relevant one). Moreover, a lot of the victims of rape would also be poor, urban, young immigrant women.

This wicked fantasy that most European rapists are Muslim immigrants is a staple of the far right, and it has contributed to hatred and violence toward European Muslims. This theme, like many Muslim-hating canards, appears to have been started by McCarthyite Daniel Pipes, a far right Zionist who “watches” American academics that do not toe Breivik’s sort of line at an invasion-of-privacy enterprise ominously called ‘Campus Watch’; and given the turn to violence among people of Breivik’s stripe, it is only a matter of time until Pipes’s organization whips some kindred looney into a homocidal frenzy against those liberal, multi-cultural, Muslim-coddling professors– so like the people at the Labor Party meet on Utoya. And why would Pipes be writing about rape in Scandinavia anyway? It is because people who want to steal more Palestinian land think that they can run cover for the often fanatical and violent West Bank settlers by scaring white people into thinking Muslims in general are a threat and should be discounted, and that if they get kicked out of their homes they’re just getting what they deserve.

So back to the “Knights Templar.” They grew out of the Crusades, which was a murderous and unprovoked attack of European, Latin Christians on Byzantine Greek Orthodox, on Jews, and on Muslims in the Levant, involving sordid episodes like the ‘Children’s crusade’ and the slitting of the throats of all Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem when it first fell. (The Muslim riposte under Saladin was considerably more ambiguous, involving Christian alliances and internecine Sunni Muslim fighting).

The Knights ironically fell victim to the very Christian fanaticism that provoked the Crusades in the first place, being accused of heresy by the Inquisition, tried, and largely disbanded. Some off their considerable assets (deriving in part from plunder) were given to a kindred organization, the Knights of St. John the Hospitaller, who eventually were kicked out of Rhodes by the Ottoman Empire and continued their activities, including piracy, on the island of Malta, which they took over.

I told the story in Napoleon’s Egypt of how the Knights of St. John on Malta met their demise at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte, who took the island on his way to conquering Egypt.

Bonaparte made Malta into a French-style Republic, declared the Rights of Man, dispossessed the Church, including the Knights, most of whom were repatriated to Europe and some of whom joined the Republican army. He freed some 2,000 Muslim slaves held on the island, who had been kidnapped on the high seas by the Knights, and he wrote to the Bey of Tunis boasting of this favor he had done for Islam.

Bonaparte was the rhetorical originator of Breivik’s nightmare, a proposed alliance of Enlightenment, Reason with an alleged pure, democratic, Deist-style monotheism of Islam. The general even hinted around that he had converted or would convert to Islam, along with his troops, in an attempt to win the clerics of the al-Azhar seminary over. (The clerics were not that gullible).

Two things were going on here. It would be wrong to dismiss the universalism of the French Republic. The French memoirs of Egypt seldom doubt that Egyptians are perfectly capable of becoming modern Republicans, and there were even plans for Egyptian units in the Republican army. It was assumed that they would delight in the Rights of Man once they were liberated from the tyranny of sultans and slave-soldiers. Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and liberty, which included a liberty to practice Islam under French Republican rule, were part of the reason for which the sullen sectarianism of the Knights had to be abolished.

A less idealistic second cause was at work. Liberal European imperialism, which aimed at dominating the Muslim world, had to have at least correct relations with Islam and Muslim authorities. That is another reason that the medieval Crusading knights admired by Breivik had to go. It isn’t practical to continue to flail about with Crusades when there is money to be made by cooperating with people in Cairo and Jakarta. There is a less pathological, post-colonial version of this motivation for tolerance, which is simply global commerce that (properly regulated) can benefit everyone on the planet, and global cooperation on common challenges such as climate change.

Most European colonial authorities in subsequent decades were hostile to Christian missionaries and wanted to persuade the locals that they were not in fact being ruled by Christian white people, though the locals appear never quite to have been convinced. Christian Europeans went on to conquer and rule over almost all the world’s Muslims– the Dutch in Indonesia, the British in Malaya, what is now Bangladesh (1757-1947) and Pakistan and India (now 12 percent Muslim), the French in most of Muslim North and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

This history of hundreds of years of European conquest and rule of, and emigration to, the Muslim world is what makes it so ironic that people like Breivik now are driven to homocidal rage by 170,000 Muslims being in Norway, and fear that they may influence European law and custom. Yet most law, administration and other aspects of life in most Muslim countries have been decisively shaped by Europeans very much of Breivik’s background, in some instances for centuries. In fact, the Europeans actually did do to the Palestinians in British Mandate Palestine exactly what Breivik bizarrely fears Muslims will do to Norwegians in Norway, and most Palestinians haven’t even replied with violence.

Breivik’s medieval romanticism, his artificial European nativism, his pan-Christian vision, his hierarchical, racist view of society, all belong to bits and pieces of past dark episodes in European history. It is as though he has picked through the trash heap of history and attempted to resurrect broken icons, toys and ruined weapons. The Knights, both Templar and Hospitaller, came to an end because fanaticism eats its own children, and because a new world was imagined by American and French revolutionaries and later on by people like Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in which sharp divisions between Self and Other of the medieval variety were replaced by a global, modern Self. As Walt Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Breivik and his Knights are small, and hateful and isolated. The rest of us are building a global civilization.

Posted in Democracy, Islamophobia, US Politics | 26 Comments