Terry Jones and the Harper's Ferry Redux

[Ehud]

The media and political elites are looking for legal precedent to compare or possibly avert the burning of Qu'rans by Terry Jones. They should rather be looking for historical comparisons no matter how nauseating they might be.

David, has mentioned before that the Middle East looks like Europe in 1940, but the political atmosphere in the US looks far more like 1859.

Pastor Terry Jones seems to be of a singular spirit with John Brown. Both are religious fanatics with a small, but loyal following. John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry and his desire to start a slave revolt distilled the essence of the zeitgeist of his day, while Pastor Jones seems to have done the same with his ultimatum to Imam Rauf.

Islam is too brittle to ever stand down from the building from a Mosque after having been threatened with humiliation and the American psyche can not stand the idea of a victory mosque commemorating Islam's greatest military raid since the siege of Constantinople.

No one could have predicted six months ago that the world would be on the edge of conflagration because of a pseudo-Pentacostalist pastor with a shady past decided to take a stand on the Ground Zero Mosque. The men of responsibility in civilian and military life abhor this man and think of him to be a nutcase, just as Lincoln thought the same of John Brown. Jacob Bronowski once said, "the Ascent of Man is not driven by likeable men." Neither it seems of man's descent into conflict.

Mark Noll in his book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis depicts the epic struggle as essentially a religious argument whose ultimate settlement was meted out by "the Right Reverends Grant and Sherman'.

The standoff over the Ground Zero Mosque between Imam Rauf and Pastor Jones finally allows a large segment of America to arrive to is really the essence of the Global War on Terror. Islam must expand or die. It must show the world its supremacy through conflict or otherwise lose its war with modernity. The United States, being the world's engine of modernity through the rationalization of human endeavor, must defend itself from the deprivations of an Islam that is at once aggressive and irrational.

It begs the question that if both religions require man to believe in irrational events in human history how can there be any real difference in the rationality of either culture? The answer lies in the object of worship of each religion. That is the battleground. One god demands submission and the other wants a personal relationship. One can contradict himself the other establishes covenants.

Thank you Pastor Jones. With all of your snake-handling vulgarity you have brought this world conflict into perspective for the great mass of humanity.

[Simple Minded]

Ehud,

Well put. I like your summary of the two religious views. I find it disturbing anytime an individual turns away from the concept of being a responsible individual, and opts to run with a herd. People never seem to function well as demographic groups/crowds.

I was struck by your reference to 1859. Several years ago, Robert Prechter stated that the then current wave structure of social mood was very similar to 1839.

It seems reasonable, at least to my very small brain, that religion should reflect social mood as well as anything.

I think we are entering a period of increasing exclusionism and polarization.

Buckle up.

[Michael]

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of “security” to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely fasten onto places, behaviours, and even people themselves, an ideal order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world but everything about the Western concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this empire of universal verification. Since all human behaviour, from the most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly formulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a dose of truth that the Western concept knows nothing about enters into every life. We talk in the West about “real people,” but only in order to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been thought of as liars and hypocrites by the people they’ve colonized. This is why they’re envied for what they have, for their technological development, but never for what they are, for which they are rightly held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in advance. Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light-such is the long labour of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end. – L’insurrection qui vient

[Dismal Scientist]

Regarding expansion (necessary or otherwise), I don't suppose that it has occurred to you that it is the Muslim nations that have been militarily occupied by the US and its allies? And I am afraid that I have great difficulty in believing that these occupations were primarily motivated by the need to defend ourselves from a dangerously expansive Islam.

I'm no particular friend of Islam - but I feel one ought at least to be clear about who is attacking whom, and why.

[Simple Minded]

Michael & Dismal Scientist,

Good posts. Obviously, there are an almost infinite number of opinions on the clash of cultures containing large numbers of people.

My best friend, an early 60s, devote Muslim born and raised in Egypt, educated in Egypt & the US (pHD), and US citizen since 1972 has the following opinion.

70-80% of the Muslim/Arab anger at the West is due to the creation and existance of Israel. 15-20% of the anger is due to the invasion of the Middle East by the base(?) aspects of Western culture: Hollywood, MTV, clothing fashions, Liberalism (stange bedfellows here), internet, etc. He thinks at most 5% of the anger towards the West is due to military occupation or oil industry machinations. Anger due to these last causes is primarily focused upon Middle Eastern political leaders.

Stands to reason that information age technology will also create cultural friction. Virtual borders are nebulous and hard to defend.

[charleston]

Ehud;

Very astute insight

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt.

excellent quote..do you have a link to the total?

[Dismal Scientist]

70-80% of the Muslim/Arab anger at the West is due to the creation and existance of Israel. 15-20% of the anger is due to the invasion of the Middle East by the base(?) aspects of Western culture: Hollywood, MTV, clothing fashions, Liberalism (stange bedfellows here), internet, etc. He thinks at most 5% of the anger towards the West is due to military occupation or oil industry machinations. Anger due to these last causes is primarily focused upon Middle Eastern political leaders.

What the Muslim-Arabs think or believe is immaterial, as they are not the masters of their own destiny. They can only react with impotent fury to their perpetual humiliation.

The simple fact is that they have the dubious good fortune to be sitting on top of the most stupendously important resource on the planet. Consequently, their society, their religion and their political elites will be coerced, manipulated and instrumentalized ruthlessly by those who wish to exploit this resource.

Anybody who imagines that the endless conflict in the Middle-East is about religion, political freedom, terror or (God forbid) Israel - or that Islam is remotely in a position to threaten industrial civilization - is simply an idiot.

[charleston]

If You Can Blackmail Yale, Why Not Blackmail New York City?

By Joel J. Sprayregen
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf unashamedly told CNN that relocating the Ground Zero Mosque will proximately cause havoc: "The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. But if you don't do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world." He predicted that "the reaction could be more furious than the eruption of violence following the 2005 publication of Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad... Our national security now hinges on how we negotiate this.[emphasis supplied]."

The Imam chooses his words carefully. Let's look at the "reaction" he recalled to publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad. In summary, more than 200 people were killed and many more injured as embassies and churches (yes, churches) were burned. As late as 2008, eight people were killed in a bombing outside Denmark's embassy in Pakistan. Where energized Muslims could not find embassies or churches to attack, they found other targets, i.e., a U.S. airbase in Afghanistan, the Italian embassy in Libya, an anti-government dissident in Yemen, fast-food restaurants elsewhere. This is the carnage which the Imam promised (I didn't say "threatened"--draw your own conclusions).

Silencing Yale With Threats of Violence

Four years later, the violence intimidated Yale University, one of my almae matres (the other is Northwestern, which retains a Holocaust denier on faculty in deference to academic freedom). Last December, I unforgettably attended a meeting at Parliament in London, sponsored by the Henry Jackson society (named for our sorely missed late Senator from Washington). The speaker, Danish-born Brandeis Professor Jytte Klausen, discussed her book about the cartoon controversy, titled The Cartoons that Shook the World. She lamented that, despite her insistence, Yale University Press, her publisher, deleted the cartoons from the book. Yale publishing chief John Donatich said he had consulted "a range of experts," each of them anonymous, who "all confirmed that republication of the cartoons by the Yale Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence (Italics supplied by me)." Note carefully the publisher's chosen verb: Instigate! Christopher Hitchens acerbically observed in Slate:

"Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as our concept of moral responsibility...What shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself."

Granting a Veto to the Mob

In my callow youth, I was an ACLU lawyer, in the halcyon days before the mission of the organization became preventing the United States from eliminating terrorists who murder our citizens. Defending the First Amendment, we successfully assailed "the heckler's veto (a phrase invented by my one-time colleague, brilliant University of Chicago Professor Harry Kalven)," i.e., the notion that speech can be suppressed for fear of violent reaction. Could any force in the world -- other than Islam -- have successfully blackmailed Yale? Can you imagine Yale's censoring portrayals of Shylock or Iago if Jews or Blacks threatened violence? The Imam now "suggests" that refusing to relocate the mosque will produce "reaction....more furious" than that which took 200 lives. There are plausible arguments on both sides of the Mosque controversy. But what does it tell us about the Imam's brand of Islam that he explicitly invokes the heckler's veto to coerce the decision?

I inveterately rely on Justice Holmes' teaching that, in seeking to understand a complicated problem, "a page of history is worth a volume of logic." In trying to understand the Imam, I recalled Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa mandating death for Novelist Salman Rushdie for his portrayal of Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. The British authorities commendably guarded Rushdie. But the toll elsewhere was gruesome. Rushdie's Japanese interpreter was stabbed to death, his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed, his Norwegian translator was shot, 37 people died in a hotel fire in Turkey which targeted his Turkish translator, and The Riverdale Press, a Bronx weekly, was fire-bombed for editorially defending the right to read the novel. But in this instance the hecklers -- some would call them murderers -- did not succeed in their demands that the book be expurgated.

Will American Public Policy be Decided by Threats of Muslim Violence?

Will the threats of violence which intimidated Yale likewise resolve the locating of the Mosque, as the Imam seems to urge? If threatened violence decides this issue, when will the next occasion arise when threats of Muslim violence will be unleashed to influence our public debates? The Imam could have rested his case on the reality that he has the support of influential cheerleaders in the White House and Gracie Mansion, as well as at the New York Times and CNN.

I understand that the prestigious blocking backs for the Ground Zero project call it an "Islamic cultural center," rather than a mosque. But in the Muslim world, it is always called a mosque, and one is entitled to speculate whether Muslim mobs will kill for a "cultural center." I publish this in full awareness that opposition to the Mosque is routinely derided -- by people who should know better -- as bigotry. I suspect that the articulate Imam will find a way to refine his "predictions." Are those Americans who insist that the Mosque should not be relocated comfortable with threats of violence? Are President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg dismayed -- as I am -- by the stark failure of the Imam to say that it is totally impermissible to commit mass murder in support of his project?

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/09/ ... e_why.html at September 11, 2010 - 01:17:24 PM CDT

[lzzrdgrrl]

".....You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble......."

You see this development; holding a firm and unshakeable opinion of any sort is now considered edgy, transgressive and daring. The quality of the thought and analysis behind that opinion is not so important, just that it's defiantly and often abrasively posed against a pliable and unprepossessing backdrop. The results tend towards the doctrinaire, unreasoning and intolerant mess that the 'enlightened' multicultural programme was supposed to eliminate in the first place.....

[Dismal Scientist]

Charleston: While I don't deny that militant Muslims are a pretty insufferable bunch, the actual threat that they pose to our civilization is vastly overstated. Indeed, their exaggerated sensitivity to any perceived sleights to their religious beliefs is ultimately a symptom of their real powerlessness. They cannot react meaningfully to their humiliation, they can only bluster threateningly.

Even the high-water mark of their campaign of 'terror' against their tormentors is insignificant with respect to the real balance of power. Spectacular and brutal as the attack on the WTC may have been, the murder of 3000 office clerks is hardly going to bring industrial civilization to its knees any time soon.

The fact is that our boot is on their throat, and we really don't have to worry about this situation changing as a consequence of any actions that they might take. The only real risk is that of an absurd overreaction to an inconsequential threat on our part.

[Michael]

Ehud;

Very astute insight

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt.

excellent quote..do you have a link to the total?

http://zinelibrary.info/files/pdf_Insurrection.pdf

[Michael]

Charleston: While I don't deny that militant Muslims are a pretty insufferable bunch, the actual threat that they pose to our civilization is vastly overstated. Indeed, their exaggerated sensitivity to any perceived sleights to their religious beliefs is ultimately a symptom of their real powerlessness. They cannot react meaningfully to their humiliation, they can only bluster threateningly.

Even the high-water mark of their campaign of 'terror' against their tormentors is insignificant with respect to the real balance of power. Spectacular and brutal as the attack on the WTC may have been, the murder of 3000 office clerks is hardly going to bring industrial civilization to its knees any time soon.

The fact is that our boot is on their throat, and we really don't have to worry about this situation changing as a consequence of any actions that they might take. The only real risk is that of an absurd overreaction to an inconsequential threat on our part.

It is actually a distration from the much wider threat, of which it is merely a part.

This, I believe, is the most realistic assessment of the banlieue riots of 2005, so often described as the work of militant Islamists:

The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has stopped burning. Many different profiles can be found among the arrested, with little that unites them besides a hatred for existing society – not class, race, or even neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “banlieue revolt,” since that was already going on in the 80s, but the break with its established forms. These assailants no longer listen to anybody, neither to their Big Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community organizations charged with overseeing the return to normal. No “SOS Racism” could sink its cancerous roots into this event, whose apparent conclusion can be credited only to fatigue, falsification and the media omertà. This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute negation of politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of the Bloody Week [la Semaine sanglante[/i]- and knows it...

The conflagration of November 2005 was not a result of extreme dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possession of a territory. People can burn cars because they are pissed off [parce qu’on s’emmerde,], but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing where they were least expected. Rumors can’t be wiretapped.

Meanwhile, the walls of the Sorbonne are daubed with the slogan « Le futur n’a plus d’avenir » - “The future has no future.”

The South Bronx is, perhaps, the American equivalent.

A society that has lost any sense of meaning or solidarity can only invoke “security” to ensure that nothing happens, for it has lost the capacity to accommodate change. That is the real threat.

[Simple Minded]

A society that has lost any sense of meaning or solidarity can only invoke “security” to ensure that nothing happens, for it has lost the capacity to accommodate change. That is the real threat.

Excellent post. The dispossessed or in the US :"the disenfranchised" or those who perceive themselves as either staking a claim to what they are "entitled" seems to be a common theme in the West.

[Simple Minded]

[quote="Ehud"]

David, has mentioned before that the Middle East looks like Europe in 1940, but the political atmosphere in the US looks far more like 1859.

{quote]

The other thing that struck me of your mention of 1859, was that Strauss and Howe deemed the Civil the Second Turning, and think we have now entered the Fourth Turning.

[Dismal Scientist]

Hello Michael,

Although I'm quite an admirer of French critical social theory, I'm afraid that I remain unconvinced by the argument presented in your quoted text - viz. that precisely because the inhabitants of the banlieus are socially and economically marginalized, they have escaped the social and economic mobilization that has atomized French society in general, and consequently have preserved the capability for violent collective resistance - and that this is a foretaste of some future general insurrection, as the ranks of the marginalized multiply.

It's a clever argument, but - firstly - I'm afraid that it spectacularly underestimates the relentless logic of our economic and social system, and the tremendous resources that it is able to mobilize if genuinely threatened or obstructed.

Secondly, I'm afraid that it vastly overestimates the quality of the human materiel out of which such an insurrection would have to construct itself. Have you never come into contact with a salaried member of what is laughably called the 'middle-class', especially - but not only - in the US? Don't let the bluster about 'liberty' and flourishing of firearms fool you - these people are so craven and terrified of losing what tenuous prosperity that they still possess that they are barely capable of wringing their own shit! It will take at least a generation before we have a plebeian class in the US, or Western Europe, that is hardened and desperate enough to instigate an insurrection worthy of the name. Not that they're likely to gain anything by it, mind!