At NRO/The Corner, reliable anti-Islamist Andy McCarthy calls for opposition to Cordoba House today, recalling the protests that he believes helped stop plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan.
That dissent was enough to forestall the trial, but it will have to be even more energetic to stop the mosque — whose construction would be a classic instance of supremacist Islamists building their icons over those of the non-Muslims they mean to vanquish. As I explain in the book, this is not a case of me drawing an inference from the facts we can observe, although those facts are obvious enough. Leading Islamists — not just terrorists but Muslims who adhere to very mainstream Brotherhood ideology — insist that they will “conquer America” and turn it slowly into a shariah society.
I find the above statement comically myopic (or would the right phrases be “willfully blind“?). In terms of victor’s “icons,” just ask yourself, for example, how an Islamist views the zillion dollar U.S. monster-embassy in Baghdad. But let’s set that aside, and take McCarthy’s description at face value: If I believed that Shariah Law, or perhaps some Americanized version of it, would be better for the United States, is there anything in our constitutional tradition that would prevent me from organizing, speaking, or constructing buildings to advance that purpose? What if I were a communist or a Nazi or… a far right conservative?
For every political ideology or religion, there is someone in a pluralistic society convinced that its triumph would be their destruction, moral or physical or both. We live and even flourish amidst the contradictions – though over time it becomes more and more difficult for believer in religion 1 to claim with a perfectly straight face that belief in religion 2 is sending his good friend across the table to eternal damnation, or that mere belief in ideology 3 is a threat to everyone’s survival. And it also becomes more and more difficult for belief in religion 2 and ideology 3 to remain unaltered. Today’s hardcore “Papist” or “Commie” is not yesterday’s. He can’t be. You don’t step in the same river twice, and human beings are mostly water – wearing endlessly away at the remnant rock.
The process often feels to serious believers like the onset of decadence. I don’t think that can be helped. I think it’s likely that, over time, the U.S. will absorb Islamic influences in predictable and unpredictable ways. In a world one-sixth Muslim, a free country will tend to become something around one-sixth Islamic – it might overshoot, it might fall short. In the meantime, in resisting the outward forms of Islamism – support for Shariah Law, maybe a building project in Manhattan – people like McCarthy visibly take on the inward character – the ideological rigidity, paranoid xenophobia, willful blindness – of that which they despise. That’s pretty much inevitable, too.
As for me, I think I’d rather have America, and call it the Caliphate, than have the Caliphate, and call it America.
@ Sully:
It wasn’t the defenders of equal rights and freedom of worship in the United States who brought up the Pearl Harbor example. It was people like Rod Dreher grasping for a way to affix some fig leaf of rationality and decency to their arguments.
Speaking of which:
@ J-Bone:
HI, J-Bone – hearty if inalienably necrotic greetings to a once-living Contender.
Before the frog linked that Japanese Culture Center (a few minutes down the Fwy from Pearl), I was going to ask if you and others were absolutely sure there isn’t a “Japanese cultural center” near Pearl Harbor. Rod Dreher specified a “Shinto shrine” – though one might ask whether every Lexus and Sony TV isn’t a Japanese cultural center in the 2010 context. I also wonder if there are American centers of any type near the Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials. There is a Hiroshima baseball team – in business since 1949. For decades virtually all of Japan and West Germany were massive American cultural centers, so obviously no one on “our” side is interested in some kind of parity in mutual respect to survivor sensitivities.
You can’t put anything past this country’s political culture. If some Japanese group announced their intention of building a cultural center somewhere near Pearl Harbor, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tried to make a living from opposing it on behalf of those who died, their families, national honor, etc.
All the same, there are so many differences between Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks that analogies like Dreher’s are, as I put it in the GR piece, profoundly incommensurate. But these differences are actually somewhat instructive.
The forces that attacked Pearl Harbor represented a nation-state, and the war that followed, though it eventually involved unconventional weapons and methods, had a conventional end, eventually leading to occupation and alliance – including an acceptable and legitimate disavowal of central tenets and expectations of Shinto militarism (“Emperor Worship” being the best-known case), but not the complete disavowal of Shintoism (something that would equate with the total eradication of Japanese traditional culture).
Of course, to the militarists, their Shintoism was authentic Shintoism, just as it was for anti-Shinto propagandists – as similarly for Islamists and anti-Islamists today. 65 years ago, we were grown-up enough to dispense with such fearful symmetries when they ran counter to our interests and values. Because we didn’t believe in collective guilt, we were able more or less immediately to establish ourselves as benign occupiers, guardians of Japanese (as German) welfare, respectful of indigenous culture. When we tried war criminals – and this is crucial, I believe – they were tried as individuals, responsible for their own conduct.
Collective guilt would have operated within their defenses – “we were only following orders” is an attempt to hide within the collective rather than personal responsibility. None of which is to make an absurd claim to the effect that our administration of victor’s justice was totally unself-interested or perfectly fair, or without its own serious contradictions. Yet it had an identifiable ethos, one consistent with the best American traditions and with with American policy ever since.
The “forces” that attacked the WTC represented at most the idea of a transnational state that may not ever come into existence, or that, if it does ever come into existence, may have little or no direct connection to the terrorists. Indeed, who and what the terrorists represented and are still struggling to be recognized as representing is one of the crucial political questions in the battle with them. To be seen as representative of Islam is one of their highest aspirations, and establishing themselves as the effective leaders and banner-carriers of political Islam was one of the central motivations and objectives of the attacks. There is no place within the American tradition or within the American interests to treat the terrorists as true and legitimate representatives of some pseudo-entity called “Islam” or maybe “The Caliphate To Be.”
Ironically, more or less in keeping with the terrorists’ intentions, the radical Islamists’ self-proclaimed most ardent foes are often their chief facilitators. Many of the same people who in one breath declare the 9/11 and other terror attacks “pointless” may in the next breath reinforce the actual “point.” They accept the terrorists themselves as self-legitimating representatives of authentic Islam and a Caliphate-to-Be, and they are busier than the terrorists’ own publicists, and with much better access to Western media, in driving home that argument. By now, the Islamists have countless volunteer ideologues who can be found all across the internet, especially on the right side, distributing their propaganda for them.
Assuming there isn’t a Japanese cultural center or Shinto shrine near Pearl Harbor, then denying some new initiative for one would indicate that the peace between the U.S. and Japan was incomplete – despite a 65-year-old alliance and all the tearful and respectful meetings between former adversaries on anniversary days. It would give life to a conflict that for most Americans and Japanese is a thing of the remote past. Denying permission to Cordoba House to put up a relatively small building (for Manhattan, and for the site as planned) would be a tribute to the terrorists – even if everything the the Neo-McCarthyites say about it is fair and true. It would also be a dreadful admission of weakness and hypocrisy on our part.
Thank you for the very thoughtful response.
@ J-Bone:
Thank you for the question!
The problem is CK, that we’re not speaking of collective punishment, but a project underwritten by a member of the Perdana movement, which help support the MV Marmara and the Rachel Corrie this week,
among other enterprises, Just like we turned down Prince Talal’s offering of danegold after September 11th, unless you think Guiliani was wrong and Cynthia McKinney was right.
SAdly the Turks and the Egyptian are not living up to the standards of their Ottoman era counterparts, when Selim 11 and Mohammed
Ali, the original, helped bottle the Sauds back in the Nejd in 1818
narciso wrote:
Woah – way too much guilt by association there. Yet, even if took it totally as offered, if you had the smoking gun proving that Rauf et al personally sent Rachel Corrie packing on her tractor martyrdom operation, it wouldn’t be a justification for opposing Cordoba House in the way that it has been opposed. As I have now had to remind people repeatedly at multiple venues, my critique of the conservative reaction is concerned only secondarily with Cordoba House itself, mainly in relation to the proportionality of that reaction.
If you can oppose the CI in a way that doesn’t sooner or later depend on “religion that kills” and other anti-Islamic utterances and characterizations or on lame attempts at character assassination and forced inference, and doesn’t lead to “let’s put up a bacon stand” gestures of willful bigotry, have at it.
As for the “danegeld” incident, I could accept Giuliani’s action as expressing a refusal of the terrorists’ self-justification at a time when action was on the table and complexities were unwelcome, but that can’t equate with full acceptance of his rationale, which has in subsequent years become definitional for a certain brand of rightwing political correctness that I’ve commented on before. At a certain point, a refusal to view the full context of the 9/11 attacks becomes a familiar ideological straitjacket, an excuse not to think.
@ CK MacLeod:
you wrote – “Because we didn’t believe in collective guilt, we were able more or less immediately to establish ourselves as benign occupiers, guardians of Japanese (as German) welfare, respectful of indigenous culture.”
An excellent analogy for use as a model for after we address the problem in a decisive fashion, although I suspect it will take a number of additional attacks on us, the catalyzing one likely with nuclear weapons, before our children or grandchildren implement it. I won’t belabor the parallel to de-nazification and de-militantshintoization because it isn’t necessary.
Sully wrote:
Suspect or prophesy whatever you like, but there is no Islamic equivalent of Germany or Japan for us to make war with and then to de-Islamify. “Addressing the problem in a decisive fashion” does however echo certain other historical traditions other than the ones that we stood up for during and after World War 2. In fact, it sounds a lot like one of the main ones we stood against.
Shall we put you down in favor of a “final solution to the Islamic problem”?
@ CK MacLeod:
You misread me. I have no problem with the people, although I don’t think we should import them, or even let them visit, if they carry the ideology. In the longer term, it’s the ideology that needs to be abolished, as militant Shinto and Nazism were.
As I’ve pointed out before, I think our half measures and weak responses to provocation will probably lead to a very destructive global spasm which I would prefer were avoided.
@ Sully:
But Imperial Way Shintoism and Nazi-as-you-wanna-be were not abolished here. You could tomorrow start up a new Nazi-Shintoist anti-Islamist party, group-sing paeans to the Emperor and Adolf Hitler, publish double-sided paperbacks like those old ACE sci-fi editions holding an injudiciously abridged MEIN KAMPF with suitable Frazetta-ish illustration on one side, turn it over and around and get Yukio Mishima’s missing head calling for a Bushido revival from the other, and hold rallies and try to get funding for a cultural center two blocks from Pearl Harbor and another two blocks from the Washington Monument.
Even in Germany, though distribution of MEIN KAMPF is restricted, it is still available in annotated student editions and to scholars, and I don’t believe there’s a penalty for possessing it. The symbols of the Nazi Party are barred, but you’re allowed to be a moronic thug who probably keeps a home made version in his closet and logs on to probably American-based Neo-Nazi web-sites. In Japan, we relaxed significantly when the Emperor himself declared himself not to be divine. It didn’t hurt in either case that the people came to see us as liberators, providers, and winners – and that we, overall, in our deeds, proved ourselves different from what the losers claimed about us. (In Germany, most of the people already knew we were preferable both to the Nazis and to the Reds – they didn’t blame us as passionately for bombing their cities to the Rubble Age because by the end of the war the belief was already widespread that Germany was experiencing just retribution for the Nazi crimes.)
As for ideological examination of immigrants and visitors, that’s a practical question. I don’t think anything in our tradition bars us from doing that, though we’d (almost) all object to, say, an explicitly racist immigration policy, or to a policy that aimed to exclude everyone who wouldn’t automatically vote McCain-Palin. We’ve already discussed the oath of allegiance required of new citizens. The extent to which we close our borders to certain types of visitors would be a different issue, but, even if we could come up with an acceptable standard and practical method of examination for screening would-be visitors, beyond what we have already, there will be costs and trade-offs. An overly and overtly hostile policy might, for instance, greatly complicate diplomatic, political, military, and economic objectives of other types.
We need to update the have you ever been a Nazi from 1933-1945, and refine the Communist part of the form. Now the problem is CAIR,
who’s political director came from Hamas, and is part of the ICASP project, ISNA, (a member of which was lecturing on extremism, around the time of the Ft, Hood shooting,) MPAC, are problematic entitities are their very best. and they are always warning of the backlash that hasn’t happened yet.
Now Imam Gullen, don’t know how to do the Turkish dieresis, is smart
enough to know that the IHIH really mucked it up, with the Marmara.
You can add the Holy Land Foundation, which was tipped off by the Times’s Lictblau and Miller(yes, that Miller) the General Welfare (sic)
and a whole host of other enterprises. Also Al Jazeera, at least in the early part of this campaign was acting like an enemy mouthpiece
@ CK MacLeod:
Right now we’re acting as though literal belief in the Quran is not the problem even though the book clearly calls for world domination by force. The book is actually far more dangerous than Mein Kampf, precisely because it is not racist.
There is a middle ground between the utter insanity of pretending the Quran is benign and an attempt to forbid publication of the Quran and burn all the copies in existence. We are well on the danger side of that middle ground.
@CK
“As I have now had to remind people repeatedly at multiple venues, my critique of the conservative reaction is concerned only secondarily with Cordoba House itself, mainly in relation to the proportionality of that reaction.
If you can oppose the CI in a way that doesn’t sooner or later depend on “religion that kills” and other anti-Islamic utterances and characterizations or on lame attempts at character assassination and forced inference, and doesn’t lead to “let’s put up a bacon stand” gestures of willful bigotry, have at it.”
I Wonder …
If enough Jews and Christians had been around the region (and armed) when the Muslim horde murdered everyone in their path in order to build a mosque on ground Holy to THEM in Jerusalem – Would they have allowed it?
Methinks not.
~(Ä)~
@ Rocketman:
I’ll refrain from quibbling on the description of how Islam spread, and just point out that even under your description the “Islamic hordes” hardly qualify as standouts in the the long and wondrous history of humanity. As for comparisons to the Christians of the time, at least the Muslims didn’t believe bathing was sinful.
@ Sully:
The “book” calls for a lot of things, often contradictory things, and is as subject to a range of interpretations as the other frequently warlike, xenophobic, and even genocidalist scriptures at the roots of all great and most small and forgotten religions and cultures. If Muslims hadn’t found ways to re-interpret the Koran and Koranic injunctions for changing circumstances and deepening understandings, the religion would have died out 1000 years ago.
Sully wrote:
You speak as if you don’t know that Hawai’i had many Japanese living there when Pearl Harbor was bombed. ———————————-
The difference is Islam was aggressive from the start, as the examples of Khaybar and Yathrib attest, Christianity as it was forced to assume
the role of unifying force in particularly Byzantine politics, became more
beligerent, and Judaism has been holding off the Egyptian, the Babylonians, et al all the live long day
@ narciso:
Ask the Benjaminites about who “started out” with aggressive ideas about in-group and out-group. Since, in point of fact, we weren’t around and have precious little to guide us regarding the misty origins of humankind, we have no idea. The fact that Islam is a successor faith, not a “brand new idea” also presents certain problems.
Most of the West is already Islamic theologically and juridically, but just doesn’t recognize it yet – not really believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ but accepting him as a prophet, endlessly debating the fine points of logic and law, aware that surrender to fate brings peace, advocating the universal state in which all share the same fundamental moral precepts. Of course, that’s because Islamic civilization is already really Western – a culture of the logos, word and reason. All those comical Imams with their rulings on breast exposure and sex with goats are epiphenomena of that culture, not the culture itself. Islam is so obsessed with word and reason that its bad philosophizing – its sophistries and absurdities – get translated almost immediately into bad and inhuman acts. But the same thing makes it accessible, someday, if we ever get past our fear and hatred, or far enough, to the West. Neither side can “win,” because they’re already the same side, each “sub-side” overly fascinated with its own half-truths.
@ CK MacLeod:
OK, MacLeod, that last comment tears it!!
If you go around talking like a grown-up none of the Kids are gonna want to play with you. We need more of that old-time “optimisticism” , the kind of Kid-speak that relies on defining our goodness with our feet on the broken backs of the face-down fallen foe.
@ forecastle casady:
I guess that really was unforgivable of me.
@ CK MacLeod:
I will neither forgive that comment, nor forget it.
I might even try fobbing it off as my own
@ forecastle casady:
Someone else just having read Strauss-Kojeve has probably already said the same thing.
@ forecastle casady:
I knew you would eventually work your way around to reason.
Sully wrote:
I point the right way about twice daily.