Andrew Sullivan comments on the recent suppression of an EU report on anti-Semitism in Europe. Eugene Volokh elaborates, and also wants to find a copy of the report to publish on his blog.
Serendipitously, the New Republic Online just published an interview with Kenneth Timmerman about his new book on rising anti-Semitism: Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America
Here's a key graf from the interview:
Timmerman: Antisemitism is a non-Jewish disease that kills Jews. It is the sewer from which the likes of Osama bin Laden have emerged. It has swept across the Arab and Muslim world, and it is reemerging with deadly force in Europe, 60 years after the Holocaust. For the first time since the Holocaust, Jews in Europe are afraid.I expect that most American Jews understand the dangers of antisemitism, but many non-Jewish Americans are probably unaware of just how extensive the hate teaching has gone. I offer this book as a wake-up call. When whole generations of Muslim children are being brought up to believe that Jews are the "sons of monkeys and pigs," and that they have a religious duty to murder Jews "and the Americans that are like them," then no amount of wishful thinking is going to make them go away. This is not a social problem. It is not even a political problem. It has become an existential problem: How do we come to terms with large groups of people who want to see us dead?
The Nazis sewed the seeds of anti-Semitism back in the 1940s as part of their war against the allied powers and the virus took. It took because it fell on fertile ground, but was relatively invisible to us. We really have no choice about whether to be in Iraq right now, unless we want the entire Middle East to go the direction of Germany in the 1930s and 40s. This virus doesn't go away on its own, and it has also invaded much of the Marxisant Left, just as it was adopted by the French socialists who followed Paul Faure. The seeds in the Arab world were nurtured by pan-Arab nationalism, by a "status gap" just as raw and open as Germany after WWI, and by 1400 years of a tradition that cultivated contempt as a sort of literary condiment. The seeds in the Left are nurtured by wishful thinking.
Islam is aching for a Reformation, and what it lacks so far is a Martin Luther. At least when such a one appears he may have some place of sanctuary in Iraq, or in a reformed Iran. We are at the tipping point. And as Armed Liberal makes clear, if we are unable to cure the patient, the virus will not kill us. It will harm us, perhaps in ways we won't recover from for an age, but the Arab world will never recover.
Posted by Demosophist at November 23, 2003 01:44 AM | TrackBackI fear that Islam has had its Martin Luther, and his name was Mohammad Ibn Wahab. Luther's dream was not a future of tolerant and diverse Christianity. It was the one true faith, purged of superstition and corruption. His immediate legacy was a hundred years of rapine and slaughter. His half-failure was the fertile disaster from which our current successes grew.
No, I'm looking for an Islamic Locke, or Spinoza. I wouldn't turn away an Islamic Jefferson, though the chance of such a creature emerging unslaughtered from the intellectual abattoirs of the Middle East strikes me as somewhere between slim and none. I think the best we can hope for is an Islamic Cromwell.
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Mohammad, think it possible you may be mistaken."
Posted by: Mitch H. at November 24, 2003 02:28 PMMitch:
I fear that Islam has had its Martin Luther, and his name was Mohammad Ibn Wahab. Luther's dream was not a future of tolerant and diverse Christianity. It was the one true faith, purged of superstition and corruption. His immediate legacy was a hundred years of rapine and slaughter. His half-failure was the fertile disaster from which our current successes grew.
Wish I could argue with you. The best I can do is offer the hope that Ayatollah Komeini may have been their last Cromwell. I contemplated writing a piece about the similarities and differences between Christian and Muslim puritanism but I found the books on Cromwell, particularly Antonia Fraser's, almost unreadable. It's a style of historical authorship that's very unfortunate in that you can't actually read it in a waking state.
Ernest Gellner thought that their process differed from the West's in part because their Reformation has been perpetual and never completed. Before he died, though, he offered the suggestion that the Iranian Revolution may have represented the final victory of urban "high Islam." That, he figured, would mean an end to the perpetual Reformation because it would lead to "rationalization." Looking at post-revolutionary Iran suggests there may have been some wisdom in that.
Gellner also figured that Ibn Kaldun was their Adam Ferguson. That's not quite John Locke, but it's a beginning.
Posted by: Scott (to Mitch) at November 24, 2003 03:29 PMWell, that's obscure. I've never heard of Ferguson... interesting. I guess I have some reading to do.
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