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

[Robert Mahnke]

"But again, I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with
avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning Islamist
zealotry."

Conversely, it seems there are a lot of people who are more interested in
condemning Islamist zealotry than in figuring out what to do about it.
Their desire to be a part of "a civilizational struggle," as Maajid Nawaz
puts it, is just so very strong.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 4:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160329/430317e4/attachment.html>