Motives are one thing, facts are another
This FAIR thing is really terrible. Look at the ‘Dirty Dozen’ for instance. They’re an obnoxious crew, most of them, but FAIR just gives a quote from each without saying what is wrong with it, and it is simply not always self-evident that anything is wrong with it. (The motives of the people saying it may be deeply suspect, but that doesn’t mean that what they say is false, and I don’t think it always is false. It’s not clear what FAIR thinks.) For example David Horowitz (whom I do not admire at all, and who I think often argues unfairly to say the least) says there are 150 Muslim students’ associations which are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood. And…? Does FAIR know that that’s not true? I think at least some Muslim students’ associations in the US do have connections to the MB. Anyway if FAIR does know that it’s not true, it should say so – it shouldn’t just assume that it’s self-evidently not true. Why would it be?
And what Robert Spencer says is not self-evidently false either. Islam is a universalizing religion, it does hold that sharia should be universal, and it does at the very least disapprove of non-believers. The first sentence of the Daniel Pipes quotation has a whiff (or more) of racism, though in context it may be distanced (and I suspect that it is). But the second sentence, unfortunately, is at least arguably true.
FAIR seems to take it as simply axiomatic that Islam is 1) entirely benign and 2) off-limits to criticism, and thus to take it as also axiomatic that anyone who disagrees with 1 or 2 or both is acting from racist motives and also factually wrong. But it is entirely possible – in fact, easy – to think Islam is not entirely benign without having any racist motives at all, and thus to think that Islam is in urgent need of criticism, still without any racist motives. Racists and reactionaries and missionary Christians do confuse the issue, of course, but FAIR ought to be able to make the necessary distinctions.
Well, maybe… The Steyn quote about not bucking demography looks fairly innocuous, until you click through and find him saying things like “The Serbs figured that out–as other Continentals will in the years ahead: If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em.” Which is just deranged. [Or put another way, perfectly run-of-the-mill early C20 Social Darwinism; which is to say, deranged.]
BTW, OB, what’s with the old review of Human Smoke on the front page? I appreciated it when I read it, back in the spring – was there a reason to post it now?
Oh sure – I did say that racists and reactionaries and missionary Christians confuse the issue, and I definitely didn’t say (and don’t think) that all the quotes are innocuous.
Human Smoke review; just that it was good, and I hadn’t seen it. Should have put it in Flashback, really. Maybe I’ll do that.
Muslims aren’t a race. I suppose that you could call Arabs a race, although they aren’t, but not all Arabs are Muslims nor are all Muslims Arabs.
Dave:
Sadly, it is not just early 20th Century Social Darwinism. It is the story (or A story) of humanity.
I note that there is another Brian posting here now. So, from now on I will use BrianM :) (I was Brian above)
Of course Muslims aren’t a race. But people who talk about Islamophobia seem to think that ‘Islamophobia’ is a kind of racism – and that racist motives are behind dislike of Islam, etcetera. This is of course in serene disregard of the fact that Muslims are indeed not a race. (Not only are not all Muslims Arabs, the vast majority of Muslims are not Arabs.)
Dave in the piece you quote from Mark Styne is speaking about the mindset of the Bosnian Serbs at the time of the war,he is also expresing the fear that the masive demographic shifts that are taking place in Europe will lead to simlar conflict elsewhere. It is a very valid point that he raises that should not be dismised because you dont like right wingers.
No, it should be dismissed because it explicitly advocates approval of the sentiment that “If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em”. And if you can’t see what’s wrong with expressing approval for genocide, then thank you and goodnight.
I’m not sure what the full implications of Steyn’s troubling reference to Bosnian Serb ‘culling’ of Balkan Muslims really amount to. However, I’m not convinced that he was recommending that kind of action. If he was, then that could reasonably be interpreted as incitement to hatred, and the Human Rights Commissions in Canada didn’t think so.
I think what Steyn is trying to say is that if you combine Muslim demographics in Western countries with Saudi style Islamic imperialism, there’s going to be serious trouble in the future when people feel that their culture and freedoms are being threatened by an overbearing and confident Islam whose population is growing by leaps and bounds. In such a case it’s going to be hard to predict what the political outcomes will be.
Steyn is a right wing journalist. Perhaps he’s an extreme right wing journalist, but I don’t think he’s recommending any kind of extermination as a solution to the problem (and he does think of it as a problem). As I read him – and I don’t find it a pleasant or an easy read because his harsh prejudices stick out all over the place – he is issuing a warning. Keep going in the direction you’re going now, and there could be serious trouble down the road that will make Balkanisation look like a childhood game.
For example, to take an example from later in the book. The quote about Bosnia occurs on page 5, so consider this that comes several pages in. First he tells us that pan-Islamism is a better example of globalisation than McDonalds. Then he says this:
“In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it’s put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of anti-trust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom n’ pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis’ Burqa King versions of global homogeneity.” (79)
This is a comment in a very different vein to the one used earlier in describing the genocide in Bosnia. It also gives you a sense of Steyn’s rather flip style (pretty cute too). So I disagree with Dave. I don’t think Steyn is advocating genocide at all. But he is giving us fair warning that, if we don’t do anything about growing Wahhabi domination of the Islamic agenda, there may be violent days ahead – at least if we don’t just choose to bow under, pay our respects to Allah, say our prayers five times a day, and stop offending our Muslim brothers and sisters.
Even mentioning the outbreeding/culling dichotomy in the context of what “other Continentals will” “figure out” indicates a belief that people are what they’re born, and that enmity between them is a fixture; while sliding towards implicit approval of the figuring-out of the need for, presumably, compulsory maternity or pogroms.
Underlying it further, presumably, is a view that “ex-muslims” such as those rightly lauded on B&W are some kind of front organisation for jihad, since they are what they were born, and “they” hate “us”…
What you say about Wahhabism is a perfectly reasonable point; what Steyn says, in the quote we began with, is an ugly piece of fundamentally racial [and racist] assumption – it is precisely the opposite of being able to claim that Islamophobia is not racism, because he is saying that the “enemy” is born, not made.
Dave. I’m not going to quibble with you over Steyn’s rather distasteful way of expressing his views and opinions. The way he speaks about Bosnia and culling or outbreeding is tasteless, I grant you. I bought the book initially because it – or at least excerpts from it – were under review as a piece of race hatred by several Human Rights Commissions in Canada. I haven’t been able to finish it. I find his approach flip, harsh and, as I say, tasteless.
However, having said all that, I think the remark in question (about ‘culling’ and ‘outbreeding’) needs to be taken in the context in which it is placed, of which my quotation about localised Islams being put out of business by someone in Saudi Arabia is a part. Steyn is brash and he grates. But he raises an issue that has been repeated over and over again here on B&W, and elsewhere, about how overpowering Islamism is, and how difficult it is to distinguish from Islam itself, and indeed whether this can be done. These issues raise very serious questions for those who live in liberal democratic societies, and they need to be answered. If we can’t answer them, and some people’s fears are realised, then there may be violence. We should be quite aware that this is on the table. Why should we hide from it?
I think it is a matter of great concern when large populations can be governed by ideologies. Catholicism, today, it seems to me, is a distinct threat to our freedoms, and it worries me. The same goes for Islam, or any other group that can be mobilised by the power of religious fervour and ideology. I don’t think we should underestimate it. Nor, of course, should we overestimate it. Steyn’s voice is very shrill. I don’t like it. But it expresses something that many people, like me, who find it shrill, are concerned about.
Steyn may express concerns which, once we have scraped them clean of his toxic language, reasonable people such as us may find reasonable. But he expresses them in that toxic language, which many other reasonable people will not want to go to the trouble of scraping off, and which many other unreasonable people will find a rallying-call to racial bigotry. That is his problem.
He will never be a serious voice in a policy debate, because he has already said far too much that will disqualify him from having such a voice. Like Melanie Phillips, or Ann Coulter. Their existence is both a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of free speech, and a problem for those who would like everyone’s speech to remain free – since they would like to shut up, or just plain kill, anyone who disagrees with them. [Or at least, they say they would. It is difficult to decide if any of their pronouncements are really intended to be taken seriously, or are just a schtick.]
BTW, large populations have always been governed by ideology. The USA is governed by an ideology of Americanism, as complex and exceptionalist an ideological formation as you’ll find in the world today. For 300 years from Elizabeth to Victoria, Britain was governed by an ideology that could be boiled down to two words: “No popery”. Under those two words was an equally complex set of ideas, equally exceptionalist in its self-conception of the “English” identity and mission. Now we have “Human Rights”, and if you don’t think that’s an ideology, I’d like to know what you do think it is?
“Now we have” in the sense of “this object is before us”. Not “we have rights”, but “Human Rights” is an ideology – which, n.b., communalists and faithists use to bleat about their mistreatment by nasty secularists all the time, so go figure. If only they’d left the bit about religion [and “famerlee”] out of the 1948 declaration [and the bit about supposed “rights” to education, employment, and pretty much everything else except free breakfast in bed and guaranteed good weather on your birthday], then there might be a chance that “Human Rights” could one day be more than a cross between a vague aspiration and a field of combat. But we’ve had this discussion before.
Ah right, that sense; agreed then.
I also wouldn’t say the US is governed by an ideology of Americanism; I would say that ideology is one of several, even many, that govern the US, many of them in rivalry with each other. It’s a big one, but it’s not the only one and I don’t think it’s as universal as it may appear during the reign of Bush. (I’m not sure about that though.)
Hmm, maybe there are some Americans who stand outside the stream, but for example Barack Obama, much as I admire him, is as entrenched in an ideology of American exceptionalism as GWB is – it’s just a different facet of the same idea. “Last, best hope of mankind”, “indispensable nation”, “shining city on a hill”…
I absolutely dig and am groovy with the good things this set of ideas can bring forth, but they come from the same origins as the right-wing version that brought us Gulf War II: Get Saddam, courtesy of the Project for a New American Century…
Dave, I wasn’t particularly saying that some Americans stand outside the stream, much less saying Obama’s not an exceptionalist, I was saying there are other streams. There are other streams, I promise. ‘America is Topp’ simply isn’t the only ideology over here.
Dave wouldnt removing a brutal,genocidal tyrant be in keeping with those American values?
Eric brilliant job of explaining Mark Styne,s position,O.B recently refered to his style of writing as Coulteresque, I think that is a good description I also so think it is unfortunate because it alows Dave and others to dismis his work without having to think about what he actualy says. What he and many others say should not be ignored because we do so at our peril.
Trouble is there are no good answers to the problems Styne cites?
A stopped clock is right twice a day. Hitler was not wrong to claim that the Versailles Treaty was a humiliation. Mark Steyn has noticed that Islamists are not nice.
If you rely on a stopped clock for your schedule, you’re in trouble. Hitler’s problems you can work out for yourself. And Mark Steyn has, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly above, come yay close to advocating fascist solutions. That’s why he needs to be ignored, when there are many sensible voices raising the same concerns about Islamism without flirting with extermination as an answer.
OB: are there really many other streams? It’s my impression that even those who deeply criticise the US’s role in the world have a tendency to want to replace one kind of leadership with another – Al Gore? Maybe even dear old Chomsky?
Even American isolationism relies, it seems to me, on the premise that the USA can go it alone – that it is thus exceptional in being able to disregard “the opinions of mankind”. Are there really many people who in their hearts think that their America is just an ordinary country like any other?
Dave, see above, ‘I wasn’t particularly saying that some Americans stand outside the stream’ – I wasn’t saying it’s not an important or pervasive stream, I was just saying it’s not the only one. I was saying that there are other streams that run along with that one – not that they’re mutually exclusive.
Dave Hitler was in fact not right about the treaty of Versailes, bearing in mind the continent of Europe lay in ruins 2.5 Brits and three French men were lost to every German millions of people were diplaced the looser was always going to have tough conditions imposed on them ,the treaty was the best Germany could have expected.
Apart from that the Germans cheated on the treaty from day one.
Humiliation, Richard, was the word I used. Not ‘unjust’, nor ‘unfair’, nor ‘wrong’. I was making a point related to the stopped-clock analogy – anyone can be right about something without being right about everything.
Meanwhile, FYI, Germany lost 2 million soldiers dead, to France’s 1.3m and GB’s 900K. SO you are wrong in fact. But I won’t try to tell you how to unblock a sink, OK?
Eric – good assessment of Steyn.
Richard: Why is it any of our (the US’) business to “remove a tyrant”? Is it our duty to go gallumping around the world, righting all wrongs, correcting all problems? Is it our right to do so? Should Europe send troops to California when we pass Measure 8 denying the right to marriage to the gays.
Especially when said removal kills or displaces hundreds of thousands/millions of people, removes a secular bulwark against religious sectarian rule and increases the growth of power of Iran.
Are you, as a conservative, pledging to donate half your salary to the new cause, richard? Our you volunteering to serve in the new Freedom Expeditionary Army? Because this country is B-R-O-K-E, and we have a military recruitment shortfall. Get to it, soldier!
Brian as someone who grew up on a continent that was saved from the nazi jackboot and Soviet menace because of the ideals of the U.S I probably couldnt give an honest unbiased answer to your question. My answer would be yes the U.S does have the right and no to the second question.