Blowing With The Prevailing Wind

The biggest problem I had with Congressman Tancredo's ill-advised remarks last week was that they were a whack in the face of the Moslems in this world that are working - explicitly or implicitly - to rebuke the terrorists among them.

Let me be clear about two things; it is abhorrent that so many Moslems, even among those who abjure terror, will not stand up for Israel's right to exist. It is also human nature; conflict with the Jews is deeply entwined with Arab and Moslem culture; it is going to take a few generations to unwind this deeply-programmed cultural antipathy. It's nothing new; race relations in America have undergone a civil war, a political upheaval, and a century of fitful improvements. In that context, the west needs to applaud the fact that moslem nations like Egypt are finally taking honest looks at how they've fostered extremism; how Indonesia and Pakistan, both nations who've contributed many a terrorist to the jihad, have cooperated; how Mali and Senegal have built democracies.

And so I say encouragement, not threats, are in order.

Which is not to say there isn't opportunism involved. Going with the dominant flow is an integral part of Middle Eastern culture; trained by centuries of weakness and impotence, it's part of the culture, too.

Victor Davis Hanson notes, there are some currents in Arab culture that could be of some help in waging the war.

Hanson expands the example of the father of Mohammed Atta; in the days after 9/11, he was subdued, and denied his son's involvement; as it became clear he wasn't going to wake up with the severed, ticking head a cruise missile in his bed, his support for violent jihad became more open:

for all their braggadocio, the Islamists are cowardly, fickle, and attuned to the current political pulse.

When the West is angry and liable to expel Middle Eastern zealots from its shores, strike dictators and terrorists abroad, and seems unfathomable in its intentions, the Islamists retreat. Thus a shaky al-Amir once assured us after 9/11 that his son was not capable of such mass murder.

But when we seem complacent, they brag of more killing to come. Imagine an American father giving interviews from his apartment in New York, after his son had just blown up a shrine in Mecca, with impunity promising to subsidize further such terrorist attacks. If our government allowed him to rant and rave like that in such advocacy of mass murder, then we would be no better than he.

The other lesson is that the war the Arab autocracies thought was waged against the West by their own zealots has now turned on them. The old calculus of deflecting their failures onto us by entering in an unspoken unholy agreement with the Islamists is coming to an end. George Bush’s “You are either with us or against us” is belatedly arriving to the Middle East’s illegitimate regimes.

It's a long-standing current:

In the 1940s the raging -ism in the Middle East was anti-Semitic secular fascism, copycatting Hitler and Mussolini — who seemed by 1942 ascendant and victorious.

Between the 1950s and 1970s Soviet-style atheistic Baathism and tribal Pan-Arabism were deemed the waves of the future and unstoppable.

By the 1980s Islamism was the new antidote for the old bacillus of failure and inadequacy.

Each time an -ism was defeated, it was only to be followed by another — as it always is in the absence of free markets and constitutional

And the presciption, per Hanson?:

Quite simply, Islam is not in need of a reformation, but of a civil war in the Middle East, since the jihadists cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. Only with their humiliation, will come a climate of tolerance and reform, when berated and beaten-down moderates can come out of the shadows.

The challenge for the Middle East is analogous to our own prior war with Hitler who sought to redefine Western culture along some racial notion of a pure Volk long ago unspoiled by Romanizing civilization. Proving the West was not about race or some notion of an ubermenschen ruling class did not require an “internal dialogue,” much less another religious reformation, but the complete annihilation of Nazism.

So it must be with the latest fad of radical Islamicism. Contrary to popular opinion, there has not been a single standard doctrine of hatred in the Middle East. Radical Islam is just the most recent brand of many successive pathologies, not necessarily any more embraced by a billion people than Hitler’s Nazism was characteristic of the entire West.

Very much worth a read.

Posted by Mitch at July 29, 2005 12:10 PM | TrackBack