(np) What the Slaughter of Christians in Lahore Says About the Global Jihad

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Michael Walzer:

 > ... So the Islamic revival is a kind of testing moment for the left: 
can we recognize and resist “the possibility of tyranny?” Some of us are 
trying to meet the test; many of us are actively failing it. One reason 
for this failure is the terrible fear of being called “Islamophobic.” 
Anti-Americanism and a radical version of cultural relativism also play 
an important part, but these are older pathologies. Here is something 
new: many leftists are so irrationally afraid of an irrational fear of 
Islam that they haven’t been able to consider the very good reasons for 
fearing Islamist zealots—and so they have difficulty explaining what’s 
going on in the world.

My main evidentiary basis for this claim is the amazingly long list of 
links that comes up when you Google “Islamophobia.” Many of them are 
phobic; I focus on the anti-phobic links, and so I have entered the 
online world of the left. It is a large and exciting world, highly 
diverse, inhabited mostly by people new to me. It’s also a little 
disheartening, because many of the pathologies of the extra-internet 
left haven’t disappeared online. Obviously, there is no left collective, 
on or off the internet, but the people I am writing about constitute a 
significant leftist coterie, and none of them are worrying enough about 
the politics of contemporary religion or about radical Islamist politics.

For myself, I live with a generalized fear of every form of religious 
militancy. I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, of messianic 
Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I 
admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic 
world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially 
feverish and fervent. Indeed, the politically engaged Islamist zealots 
can best be understood as today’s crusaders.

Is this an anti-Muslim position, not a fear but a phobia—and a phobia 
that grows out of prejudice and hostility? Consider a rough analogy (all 
analogies are rough): if I say that Christianity in the eleventh century 
was a crusading religion and that it was dangerous to Jews and Muslims, 
who were rightly fearful (and some of them phobic)—would that make me 
anti-Christian? I know that crusading fervor isn’t essential to the 
Christian religion; it is historically contingent, and the crusading 
moment in Christian history came and, after two hundred years or so, 
went. Saladin helped bring it to an end, but it would have ended on its 
own. I know that many Christians opposed the Crusades; today we would 
call them Christian “moderates.” And, of course, most eleventh-century 
Christians weren’t interested in crusading warfare; they listened to 
sermons urging them to march to Jerusalem and they went home. Still, it 
is true without a doubt that in the eleventh century, much of the 
physical, material, and intellectual resources of Christendom were 
focused on the Crusades.

The Christian Crusades have sometimes been described as the first 
example of Islamophobia in the history of the West. The crusaders were 
driven by an irrational fear of Islam. I suppose that’s right; they were 
also driven by an even more irrational fear of Judaism. They were fierce 
and frightening religious “extremists,” and that assertion is not 
anti-Christian.

One can and should say similar things about Islamists today—even though 
jihadi violence is not required by Islamic theology, even though there 
are many Muslim “moderates” who oppose religious violence, and even 
though most Muslims are quite happy to leave infidels and heretics to 
their otherworldly fate. I know that there is a “jihad of the soul” in 
addition to the “jihad of the sword,” and that Mohammed famously 
declared the first of these to be the greater jihad. And I recognize 
that the Islamic world is not monolithic. Reading the daily newspaper, 
anyone can see that even Islamist zealotry is not all of a piece. Al 
Qaeda, the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 
Hezbollah, Hamas, and Boko Haram, to take just a few leading examples, 
are not the same; there may well be significant theological 
disagreements among them. I should note, also, that the many millions of 
Muslims in Indonesia and India seem relatively untouched by zealotry, 
though Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian Islamist network, has 
followers in Indonesia and has been accused of significant terrorist 
attacks there.

Despite all these qualifications, it is true without a doubt that the 
“jihad of the sword” is very strong today, and it is frightening to 
non-believers, heretics, secular liberals, social democrats, and 
liberated women in much of the Muslim world. And the fear is entirely 
rational.

But again, I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with 
avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning 
Islamist zealotry. This is an odd position with relation to the Muslim 
world today, but it makes some sense in Western Europe and possibly also 
in America, where Muslims are recent immigrants, the objects of 
discrimination, police surveillance, sometimes police brutality, and 
popular hostility. I have heard Muslims called the “new Jews.” That’s 
not a helpful analogy, since Muslims in today’s Western Europe have 
never been attacked by Christian crusaders, expelled from one country 
after another, forced to wear distinctive dress, barred from many 
professions, and slaughtered by Nazis. In fact, right now, some Muslim 
militants are among the chief purveyors of anti-Semitism in Europe (they 
get a lot of help from neo-fascists in France and Germany and other 
countries, too). In America, the “new Jews” label clearly doesn’t work. 
According to FBI statistics, between 2002 and 2011, there were 1,388 
hate crimes committed against American Muslims and 9,198 against 
American Jews—and 25,130 against black Americans. We should defend all 
victims of hatred, but it isn’t wrong to recognize where the greatest 
dangers lie.

It’s true that Europe’s Muslims (and America’s too, to a lesser extent) 
are a harassed minority; they rightly receive sympathy and support from 
the left, which also hopes, rightly again, to win their votes as they 
become citizens. There are many right-wing groups that campaign against 
Islam—not only far-right splinter groups like the English Defense League 
in the UK or Die Freiheit or Pro-Deutschland in Germany, but populist 
parties that command considerable electoral support, like the National 
Front in France or the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Since the 
political leaders of all these groups claim to fear the “rise” of Islam 
in Europe, Islamophobia has become for everyone on the left politically 
incorrect; more important, it is morally incorrect.

Islamophobia is a form of religious intolerance, even religious hatred, 
and it would be wrong for any leftists to support bigots in Europe and 
the United States who deliberately misunderstand and misrepresent 
contemporary Muslims. They make no distinction between the historic 
religion and the zealots of this moment; they regard every Muslim 
immigrant in a Western country as a potential terrorist; and they fail 
to acknowledge the towering achievements of Muslim philosophers, poets, 
and artists over many centuries. Consider, for example, the Dutch 
nationalist Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, who 
describes the Koran as a “fascist book” and calls for it to be outlawed 
(as /Mein Kampf/ is) in the 
Netherlands.^<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left#ftn3> 
Or Hans-Jurgen Irmer, deputy floor leader of the Christian Democratic 
Union in Hesse, Germany, who claims that “Islam is set on global 
domination.”^<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left#ftn4> 
There are indeed Islamists with global ambitions (even in 
Germany—remember Mohammed Atta), but it is wrong to hold all Muslims 
responsible for Islamist zealotry, which the greater number by far of 
German Turks, for example, certainly reject. People like Wilders and 
Irmer, and there are many others, go a long way in explaining the left’s 
aversion to Islamophobia.

But we have to be careful here. There are perfectly legitimate 
criticisms that can be made not only of Islamist zealots but also of 
Islam itself—as of any other religion. Pascal Bruckner argues that the 
term “Islamophobia” was “a clever invention because it amounts to making 
Islam a subject that one cannot touch without being accused of racism.” 
The term was first used, he claims, to condemn Kate Millett for calling 
upon Iranian women to take off their chadors. I don’t know who 
“invented” Islamophobia, but it is worth repeating Bruckner’s key point: 
there has to be room for feminists like Millett and for all the militant 
atheists and philosophical skeptics to say their piece about Islam—and 
also about Christianity and Judaism—and to find an audience if they can. 
Call them to account for bad arguments, but their critical work should 
be welcome in a free society.

Critiques of Islam are inhibited not only by the fear of being called 
Islamophobic but also by the fear of 
“Orientalism.”^<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left#ftn6> 
Edward Said’s book by that name provides many examples of both scholarly 
and popular arguments about Islam that contemporary writers will rightly 
want to avoid. But his own argument about the future of Islam and the 
Arab world (he was writing in the late 1970s), missed the mark by a 
considerable distance. Said thought that, with only a few honorable 
exceptions, Orientalism had triumphed in the West; he also believed that 
it had been internalized in the East, so that Arab and other Muslim 
writers were now producing Orientalist—that is prejudiced and 
stereotyped—accounts of their own history. “The Arab world today,” Said 
wrote, “is an intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of the 
United States.” Islamic revivalism is nowhere anticipated in Said’s 
book. Indeed, he takes Bernard Lewis’ insistence on the “importance of 
religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world” to be an example of 
Orientalism. And a year later, in /The Question of Palestine/, Said 
calls “the return to ‘Islam’” a “chimera.” It would be difficult for 
anyone to say that now, but it is still rare for writers on the left to 
address the “chimera” head on.

So the critique of Islamism from the left is constrained these days; 
Islamophobia, however, seems to be growing, and not only on the populist 
or nationalist right. Why is this happening? The new /Islamophobia 
Studies Journal/ (a bi-annual publication sponsored by Berkeley’s Center 
for Race and Gender), in an editorial in its second issue, identifies 
the source of the trouble:

    For some, rising anti-Muslim sentiments are immediately explained
    away as a “natural” outcome of the many violent events in the Muslim
    world and “terrorism” in general. However, we maintain that the
    rising negative sentiments may have to do with the presence of a
    well-organized and well-funded Islamophobic industry that has
    managed to invade and capture civil society and public discourses
    without serious contestation. Up to this point, anti-racist and
    progressive voices have not been effective in challenging this
    industry, nor have they been able to provide the needed resources to
    mount regional and national responses.

This is nicely self-serving: more resources for the /Journal/ would 
certainly be a big help in combating the Islamophobic industry. But 
notice the reluctance to engage with “the many violent events in the 
Muslim world.”

One can find a similar reluctance in a series of otherwise excellent 
articles published in a special issue of the /Nation/ in July 2012. Jack 
Shaheen’s “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth” is an example 
of an argument very much like that of the editors of the /Islamophobia 
Studies Journal/. The novelist Laila Lalami in “Islamophobia and its 
Discontents” recognizes that “retrograde blasphemy laws” and “unfair 
divorce laws” may have something to do with hostility to Islam but 
rightly refuses to treat these as excuses for the harassment she has 
lived with here in the United States. Nor would “violent events in the 
Muslim world” provide any such excuse. Islamist zealotry should never be 
used to justify or “explain” European and American prejudice. But the 
entirely legitimate desire to avoid prejudice isn’t a reason to avoid 
those “violent events.” I don’t mean to single out the /Nation/ here, 
whose editors organized that useful special issue; so far as I can tell, 
no leftist magazine or website has attempted a serious engagement with 
Islamist zealotry.

Most leftists, whatever problems they have understanding religion, have 
no difficulty fearing and opposing Hindu nationalists, zealous Buddhist 
monks, and the messianic Zionists of the settler movement (the phrase 
“no difficulty” is a gross understatement in this last case). And, of 
course, no one on the left makes common cause with Islamist militants 
who kidnap schoolgirls, or murder heretics, or tear down the ancient 
monuments of rival civilizations. Acts like these, insofar as they are 
noticed, are routinely condemned. Well, not quite routinely: Nikolas 
Kozloff, in an excellent article, “A Tale of Boko Haram, Political 
Correctness, Feminism, and the Left,” has documented the strange 
unwillingness of a number of leftist writers to blame Muslim zealots for 
the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls. Less outrageous, but bad 
enough, is the unwillingness of many more leftists who do recognize such 
crimes to attempt a generalizing analysis and an encompassing critique 
of Islamist zealotry. What stands in the way of analysis and critique?

Deepa Kumar’s book, /Islamophobia and the Politics of 
Empire/,^<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left#ftn9> 
suggests one possible answer to this question: what stands in the way is 
the fact that Islamists today are opponents of “the West,” that is, of 
Western, really American, “imperialism”—bases in Saudi Arabia, the two 
Iraq wars, the Libyan intervention, support for Israel, drone strikes in 
Somalia, and so on. I would argue that this list requires a selective 
response: opposition in some cases, certainly, but also agreement in 
others. I dare say that the overthrow by Islamist zealots of the regimes 
the United States has supported in the Middle East, bad as some of them 
are, would not be terribly helpful to the people of the region. But 
leftist opponents of imperialism don’t usually make selective judgments, 
and neither do the Islamists. So “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” 
We watched this maxim being acted out in last August’s demonstration in 
London, sponsored by the UK Stop the War Coalition, which was attended 
by vocal supporters of Hamas including secular leftists and religious 
Muslims (some of them fundamentalist, some not). The secular leftists 
were fierce opponents of Islamophobia, though they were not entirely 
free of other phobias.

But there is another reason for the reluctance to condemn Islamist 
crimes, and that is the great eagerness to condemn the crimes of the 
West. The root cause of religious zealotry is not religion, many leftist 
writers insist, but Western imperialism and the oppression and poverty 
it has bred. So, for example, David Swanson, first on the /War Is A 
Crime/ website and then on the /Tikkun/ website (with a nervous but only 
partial disclaimer from the editor), asks “What to do about ISIS?” and 
answers: “Start by recognizing where ISIS came from. The U.S. and its 
junior partners destroyed Iraq . . 
.”^<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left#ftn10> 
That’s right; there would be no ISIS in Iraq without the U.S. invasion 
of 2003, although if Saddam had been overthrown from within, the same 
religious wars might well have started. For ISIS doesn’t “come from” the 
U.S. invasion; it is a product of the worldwide religious revival, and 
there are many other examples of revivalist militancy. Swanson might 
offer a similar explanation for all of them, but the explanation loses 
plausibility as the instances multiply.

The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion. 
Aren’t all religions the ideological tools of the ruling class? And 
aren’t all millenialist and messianic uprisings the ideologically 
distorted response of subaltern groups to material oppression? Religious 
zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by 
reference to the economic base. These ancient convictions are 
particularly obfuscating today. Parvez Ahmed, a Florida professor who is 
fully cognizant of the “scourge” of Boko Haram, provides a typical 
example in a recent blog. He argues that “much of the violence 
[committed] in the name of Islam is less motivated by faith and more so 
by poverty and desperation.” Similarly, Kathleen Cavanaugh from the 
National University of Ireland, writing on the /Dissent/ website, 
insists that “the violent and oppressive actions [of ISIS] have little 
to do with religion per se,” but rather are “underpinned” by material 
interests.^<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left#ftn12> 
But is this right? Why don’t poverty, desperation, and material 
interests produce a leftist rather than an Islamist mobilization? In 
fact, the religious revival, not only among Muslims but around the 
world, among Jews and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, has enlisted 
supporters from all social classes, and the driving motive of revivalist 
activity seems, incredibly, to be religious faith (Fawaz Gerges’s 
/Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy/ provides ample 
evidence of religion’s power).

There are also people on the left who believe that Islamist zealotry is 
not only produced by Western imperialism but is a form of resistance to 
it. Whatever groups it actually attracts, it is fundamentally an 
ideology of the oppressed—a version, though a little strange, of left 
politics. Think of the leftist writers who described the Sunni and 
Shi’ite militias fighting against the U.S. occupation of Iraq as “the 
resistance”—deliberately invoking the French Resistance to the Nazis in 
the Second World War. But nothing about the Islamist militias was 
leftist except for the fact that they were fighting against Americans. 
This example was featured by Fred Halliday in a 2007 article in 
/Dissent/ called “The Jihadism of Fools.”^That’s a good tag, but it 
didn’t stick, as we can see from Slavoj Žižek’s claim the following year 
that Islamic radicalism is “the rage of the victims of capitalist 
globalization.” I have to acknowledge that Žižek is not afraid to be 
called Islamophobic; he advocates a “respectful, but for that reason no 
less ruthless” critique of Islam and of all other religions. But he 
won’t get the critique right so long as he thinks that the object of 
Islamist rage is the same as the object of his own rage.

Judith Butler makes a similar mistake when she insists that 
“understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are 
progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is 
extremely important.” She said that in 2006 and then repeated it with 
interesting amendments in 2012: Hamas and Hezbollah belong to the global 
left because they are “anti-imperialist,” but she doesn’t support every 
organization on the global left, and she specifically doesn’t endorse 
the use of violence by those two. I am grateful for that last amendment, 
but the left identification was as wrong in 2012 as it was in 
2006—usefully wrong, perhaps, since it helps explain why so many 
leftists support or won’t actively oppose groups like Hamas and 
Hezbollah. The only thing that makes these organizations “leftist” is 
that they are fighting against Israel, which stands in here for imperial 
America ... <

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left


On 29.03.2016 12:27, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>
> Maajid Nawaz:
>
> > ... A jihadist guerrilla war is being waged against world order, and 
> the international community is woefully unprepared to address the problem.
>
> Many still deny this insurgency exists, and it is true that these 
> countries have locally specific factors that contribute to their 
> respective insurgent conditions. Yes, the groups behind these attacks 
> are not under one central leadership, rather they are either 
> affiliates or offshoots of competing jihadist groups.
>
> But they all share one cause.
>
> They are all—including ISIS—derived from, or affiliated to just two 
> jihadist groupings: al Qaeda and the Taliban. In turn, jihadists all 
> drink from the same doctrinal well of widespread, rigid Wahhabism. And 
> they share the ideological aims of popular non-terrorist Islamists. 
> They are all unified behind a theocratic desire to enforce a version 
> of Sharia as law over society. Considering that non-violent Wahhabi 
> and Islamist Muslims exist in their millions globally, this 
> drastically increases the potential recruitment pool for jihadists. 
> The insurgency could not succeed were this not so. There is no use in 
> denying it.
>
> For many years, liberals—and I speak as one—have refused to 
> acknowledge the ideology of Islamism. All talk of “ideas” was seen to 
> be nothing but a “neocon” line taken directly from the worst excesses 
> of the George W. Bush years.
>
> Ironically, due to this very fear of political incorrectness we wound 
> up repeating many of the mistakes of the neocon era. While we feared 
> to engage in a debate on values with Muslim communities, we tried to 
> restrict the problem to the realm of mere criminality, as something to 
> be dealt with by law enforcement or, failing a solution there, by the 
> military—and ultimately by war, even if that word went unspoken. Under 
> this doctrine, President Barack Obama developed a secret kill-list, 
> preferring simply to assassinate his enemies, even if they were 
> American citizens, and he has dispatching more drone strikes abroad 
> than Bush ever did.
>
> /Anything/ to avoid discussing ideas.
>
> And so, as this global jihadist insurgency became impossible to 
> ignore, we liberals reluctantly, euphemistically began naming the 
> problem “violent extremism.” We used nauseating, limp State 
> Department-coined phrases such as “al-Qaeda-inspired extremism” to 
> refer to what was clearly an ideology. But as the assassination of 
> Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani hideout proved, we cannot arrest nor 
> shoot our way out of this problem. “Defeating” al Qaeda was only ever 
> going to give rise to a group like ISIS, because it was not al Qaeda 
> that had “inspired extremism”; it was extremism that had inspired al 
> Qaeda.
>
> Our failure to recognize this as a civilizational struggle—one 
> centered around /values/—has allowed the fundamentalist problem of 
> Wahhabism, and the political problem of Islamism, to fester and 
> metastasize. This struggle is an ideological one before it is a 
> military or legal one. Vague platitudes that this has nothing to do 
> with Islam—my own religion—are as unhelpful as saying that this is the 
> essence of Islam. Extremism certainly has something to do with Islam. 
> Not nothing, not everything, but something.
>
> The Lahore bombing underscores the very religious character of the 
> jihadists’ fanaticism. This was not about alienation in a European 
> ghetto, or revenge for American and European airstrikes in the Middle 
> East— the secular-sounding explanations offered as the motivations of 
> people like those who carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks. 
> Lahore was about pure, vicious religious intolerance, killing 
> Christians—including Christian children—on Easter Sunday because they 
> were Christians and not the kind of Muslims the murderers claim to be 
> ... <
>
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/28/what-the-slaughter-of-christians-in-lahore-says-about-the-global-jihad.html?via=twitter_page
>
>

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