BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes." (I'm still waiting for my check!)
The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was "common sense" in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always "common" -- the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.
If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or "natural" understanding of social and political realities.
The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word "man" was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.
Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno's time the word "man" was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one's social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, "man" is the ideology of dehumanization.
Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."
The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."
Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.
One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.
Judith Butler is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
It probably started with Theodor W. Adorno, this confusion of 'common sense' with 'common ideology'. And although the confusion does not diminish the validity of common sense philosophy, also called 'Scottish common sense realism', it does give the impression at least that the child (common sense) can be thrown away with the bathwater (common ideology). So I would maintain that a critical theory dismantling a common ideology can be expressed in ordinary, common sense language. It's just more difficult than expressing it in a newfangled intellectual language that may appear nonsensical. With nonsense being the opposite of common sense, there is a real danger that critical theory expressed in apparently nonsensical language is not well understood and becomes a nonsensical ideology no less harmful or wrong than any other common ideology. The idea that "power haunts the common-sense world" and that abolishing common sense therefore opens a "way to a more socially just world" seems to me a clear expression of a nonsensical ideology that has the power to destroy critical theory as an emancipatory endeavor.
"Gendered language can be harmful when it does not match the gender of the person it is applied to."
The whole idea of combating supposedly harmful gendered language by regulating and changing the common sense language is a prime example of what such a nonsensical ideology can lead to. Because the ideology ignores that there is only one speech rule that is acceptable, and it is not even a rule but a simple fact. The fact that I am responsible for what I say, while you are responsible for what you hear or understand. From which it follows that your misunderstanding of what I say can never give you the right to tell me what I should say or how I should say it.
An 'ought' does not follow from an 'is'? "If it were not for the fact that we ought to be reasonable, it would not be unreasonable to deny that something ought to be believed because it is a fact." - Frank van Dun
Speech rules for pronouns? Let me start by pointing out that your gender is just one of your properties out of many and therefore not the same as your identity. Which means that by using a pronoun that does not match your chosen gender I'm only doing injustice to one of your properties but not to you as a person. You may not like it, and you are indeed free to ask me to use the pronoun you deem appropriate. But I am also free to not grant you that wish for reasons that are my own, such as my instinctive refusal to use language that does not feel natural to me. You may in turn conclude that I am not being nice to you, and you may even be right, but that still doesn't give you the right to order me what language to use. You are certainly free then to decide that you don't want to have anything further to do with me, and there is nothing I can do about that. Except maybe to cave in and start using your preferred pronoun, which I may very well do if my relationship with you matters enough to me. It's called 'to each his own' or the natural order of human conviviality. I'm free to exercise my right in whatever way I wish as long as I respect your and other people's right to do the same.
J.K. Rowling defending women's and girl's rights
Women's and girl's rights are of course no different from everybody else's rights and are to be protected against all those who want to violate them irrespective of their motives - you don't need a scientific study on anyone's patterns of criminality to justify upholding the law!
Trans-women are men who identify as trans-women; they can ask you to accept and love them as trans-women, but you are equally free not to grant them their wish. When they ask you to consider and treat them as biological women, their demand is obviously nonsensical, as they cannot prove the fact they ask you to treat as fact.
Restroom business: Isn't the obvious solution to that nonexistent problem to create a third category of restrooms 'for all those who want to enter'? Or if the men have no objection, to change men's restrooms into that third category?
Same for sports competitions: a third category 'for all those who want to compete'. Or if the men have no objection, to open the men's competition to all those who want to compete with the men?
Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler's public lecture at University of Cambridge 2023
"As we know, we live in times in which we see the Earth destroyed by powers that seek to maximize profits and to expand state control. We also see attacks on women, gay, lesbian people, trans people, migrants, attacks which are focused on sexuality, gender and race, all operating in various parts of the world to support authoritarian structures, if not neo-fascist passions and politics ..."
Claim 1: "Fascist passions are intensified and accelerated by attacks on women, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, black and brown people, and the poor."
Claim 2: "These attacks appeal to the fear of destruction with which many people now live, not only workers who fear the loss of their jobs and the stability of their lives, but people forced into migration by the ongoing climate catastrophe."
Claim 3: "These attacks, whether they take the form of physical attacks, murder, or legal disenfranchisement, also redirect the fear of destruction. If gender or migration are identified by the right as the cause of the destruction of society, then they themselves become eligible targets of destruction. If a nation can get rid of them or hold them in states of indefinite subordination or detention, then apparently the fear of destruction can come to an end. Or at least that is one of the false promises of fascism, or perhaps not a promise at all, but rather a fantasy collective in nature and lethal in its effects."
"My argument today is that the anti-gender ideology movement should be considered a neo-fascist phenomenon. (...) Anti-gender is one of the vectors through which fascist passions are stoked and circulated, and those are passions that support increasingly authoritarian regimes that justify their wars and their acts of destruction by appearing as if they are putting an end to what threatens society with destruction."
I find it very difficult to argue with that kind of 'suggestive thinking', i.e. thinking that suggests more than it spells out, while only mentioning as an aside very contestable ideas as if they were indisputable axioms or self evident truths, and that in general tends to make a great mess of things, as when it puts on the same plane gender and migration. Aren't we allowed to question anymore that the Earth is being destroyed by powers that seek to maximize profits and to expand state control? Or that people are forced into migration by an ongoing climate catastrophe? I mean, where do you start to untangle this mess? If that is what critical theory has become, then how is it to be distinguished from a nonsensical and inimical ideology that is effectively undermining our capacity to argue rationally about the human condition and the state of society?
Then there is the inescapable logic of polarization: You start by scaring yourself with a depiction as black as you can imagine of your opponent's malevolence, only to see your worst fears validated by your opponent's reaction to what was in effect your own deliberate but unintended provocation!
It was a debate (to score points with the audience) not a discussion (to learn from the other side's arguments), and as a debate it was as boring and confusing as it was long.
A discussion with Palestinian advocates is intrinsically impossible anyway, because of what they are: inherently bad faith actors, who know that their position is indefensible, and who use all their deceptive skills to run circles around their opponents, who in turn look naive and foolish simply by trying to argue in good faith with a bad faith counterpart. With the main deceptive skill of the Palestinian side being the lie of omission, the Israeli side finds itself additionally burdened by the impossible workload of pointing out those omissions in lengthy explanations, a predicament also known as Brandolini's Law or the 'bullshit asymmetry principle'. In order to approach a minimum of fairness in such a debate, allotted speaking times would have to be very unequal.
The outcome of any debate, as opposed to a discussion, depends as much on the audience as on the debating partners. And here too the distinction between open minded (good faith) and prejudiced (bad faith) listeners is what counts. Prejudiced listeners will go with their side no matter how the debate went. Open minded listeners in all likelihood (1) will detect the bad faith on display in the debating style of the Palestinian advocates, and (2) will share the frustration felt by the Israeli advocates in their hopeless task, augmented by their own frustration from not learning anything definitive from the debate.
The noisy anti-Israel crowds marching in US/EU streets, who have intoxicated themselves to the point that they believe they're speaking for the 'World' and on the way to 'Victory', cannot be taken as evidence against the presumption that the large majority of US/EU electorates remain open minded and non-partisan. The real problem are the US/EU governments, who act as if they were no less impressionable than the anti-Israel crowd when exposed to the inflated civilian casualty figures and false accusations of 'genocide' spread around by Hamas's propaganda operation. To cure them of their islamophobia (i.e. fear of confronting Islamist immigrants as well as the Iranian government and its IRGC affiliates), debating bad faith Palestinian advocates is a useless distraction, and Israeli advocates must instead argue their case as straightforwardly as they can. And this not only to the US/EU governments, but also to the Palestinian people and the Palestinian political opposition, which is brutally suppressed by their self-righteous and nefarious leaders. For a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be found without the Palestinians. And for it to be the foundation of a just and lasting peace, it cannot be found without an entirely new political representation of the Palestinian people that is willing to admit defeat in this 100-year unjust war for Muslim supremacy in Palestine, and is also prepared to accept the consequences of that defeat, before entering into good faith negotiations on a peace agreement.
For any Palestinian opposition party to have a chance of success, the Palestinian Nakba victimhood narrative must be completely demolished. As long as the 'Nakba belief' of being the victims of a Zionist and Western injustice survives in the population, the thugs with guns will always bypass the opposition in the 'struggle for justice'. The term 'Nakba' must revert to its initial meaning: an accusation directed by the Palestinian refugees at their Arab and Palestinian leaders for having dragged them into a needless, unjust and disastrous war against their Jewish neighbours. Only by confronting that false victimhood narrative head-on and erasing it to the ground can the opposition impose a new and valid victimhood narrative that calls for revolt against the nefarious leaders and propagandists of the anti-Zionist 'resistance'.
There are 2 angles to this demolition enterprise: (1) Factual (easy): 'Who started the war (for Muslim supremacy in Palestine)?' Who was the first to resort to violence? It clearly wasn't the Zionists, who never broke off negotiations in search of a compromise solution that would accommodate the national aspirations of both peoples. (2) Factual and judgemental (less easy): The democratic argument of the Palestinian natural majority in the country vs the equally large or even larger constituency of diaspora Jews of the Zionists. Was it lawful for the Palestinians and Arabs to completely discount their ambitions and rights to national self-determination in Palestine? Which ties to the Jabotinsky asymmetry-argument in favour of a democratic Jewish-majority state in the whole of Palestine: the Jews had no other Jewish-majority state to which they could have emigrated, unlike the Palestinian Muslims who had a large choice of neighbouring Muslim-majority states (if they absolutely didn't wish to live under Jewish democratic rule).
How can we prove that Palestinian advocates are bad faith actors, who know that their position is indefensible? By the strenuous efforts they make on the factual angle (1) not to deny, but to effectively hide their overwhelming responsibility for the war that led to the Nakba. If confronted in a way that forced them to explicitly deny their responsibility, they would already have lost: because the facts are overwhelmingly against them. By the equally strenuous efforts they make on the factual and judgemental angle (2) not to deny, but to effectively dissimulate their disregard for the Jewish diaspora constituency of the Zionists when insisting on the democratic argument of their natural majority in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate. If confronted in a way that forced them to explicitly explain their disregard for Jewish diaspora rights and to defend their refusal to become a (large) minority in a democratic Jewish-majority state, a refusal so principled that in their eyes it justified war against the Zionist enterprise, they would already have lost: because they would be forced to acknowledge that the only reason for rejecting a Muslim minority situation under democratic Jewish rule, while accepting a Jewish minority situation under Muslim rule, is their ideology of Muslim supremacism as it is dictated by the religion of political Islam.
In conclusion one can say: a Palestinian partner in good faith negotiations for peace can only be a Palestinian counterpart who renounces Muslim political supremacism; a Palestinian or Arab counterpart who does not renounce Muslim political supremacism cannot be a partner in good faith negotiations for peace.
This conclusion should have been already glaringly obvious to everyone during the entire history of the conflict since the British Mandate. That it was not acknowledged as such for all that time by the US/EU governments can only be explained either by antisemitism, i.e. a blinding prejudice against the Zionist cause, or by Islamophobia, i.e. a blinding fear of confronting Muslim prejudice. If 'never again is now' Oct 7 should be the end of that. Israel's main political effort, after defending herself militarily and making her case to the US/EU governments, should be her support for a Palestinian political opposition party that wants to become a good faith partner for peace, and thereby would pull the rug out from under the Islamist anti-Zionist cause pursued relentlessly and aggressively by the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
The prerequisites for negotiating a 1SS or 2SS are the same
[It should go without saying that these are my opinions and that I do not expect to have a vote in the matter.]
(1) Palestinians admit defeat in this 100-year holy war for Muslim supremacy in Palestine, for which they also accept full responsibility.
(2) Palestinians are willing to prove their good faith: (i) by acknowledging that it was an unlawful war from the outset and by accepting the consequences of their defeat, such as the forfeiture of the 'right of return'; (ii) by surrendering into captivity the political and military leadership that is compromised by the unlawful war (support for terrorism and 'armed resistance') and by disarming all terrorists and 'resistance fighters'; (iii) by accepting that negotiations on return or compensation of refugees must include both groups of refugees, the Palestinian refugees and the Jewish refugees from other Arab countries; (iv) by accepting that the Jewish state is a democratic Jewish-majority state, either in the whole of Palestine (1SS) or in Israel (2SS): because there is no other Jewish-majority state to which Jews can emigrate if they do not wish to live under Muslim-majority rule, while there is a large choice of neighbouring Muslim-majority states to which Muslims can emigrate if they do not wish to live under democratic Jewish-majority rule.
The 1SS has 2 advantages: (a) it corresponds to the wish of both peoples to settle in the whole of Palestine, which in a 2SS can only be satisfied if the 2 independent states welcome as foreign residents citizens of the other state; (b) it offers better security guarantees because there will only be one defence and police force that remains under the ultimate control of the Jewish majority. It has 1 disadvantage: under the Jewish-majority constraint it offers less possibilities for the return of Palestinian diaspora refugees than a separate independent Palestinian state.
The good-faith guarantees are essential for achieving a just and lasting peace, and can only be offered by a new Palestinian political representation that has broad popular support, while the whole old leadership will have to be disarmed, imprisoned or exiled. As the war in Gaza shows, this may well be the hardest part, if Fatah and the other armed groups do not surrender.
Settlements are composed of real estate and residents: a 2SS in which both states do not welcome foreign residents of the other state is off to a bad start.
Jordan and Egypt: a 1SS will need agreements with both peace partners either to grant Jordanian or Egyptian citizenship to Palestinian diaspora refugees before welcoming them as foreign residents with local citizenship rights into Israel/Palestine; or to resettle Palestinian diaspora refugees that cannot return to the new binational state with full citizenship rights because of the Jewish-majority constraint (unless some other failsafe constitutional mechanism is found that guarantees what the Jewish majority is designed to guarantee in a democratic state - openness to unrestricted Jewish immigration (Law of Return) and Jewish control of the defence and security forces).
Lebanon: a Palestinian withdrawal from the anti-Zionist war will pull the rug out from under the islamist cause of the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates, and possibly encourage Lebanese Muslims and Christians to oust Hezbollah with Israel/Palestine as its ally.
Normalising Arab governments: although reluctant to say so openly, they already wish to extricate themselves from the anti-Zionist war, and may be of help when settling the Palestinian diaspora refugee problem.
"Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value."
"Man betrachte z.B. den Koran: dieses schlechte Buch war hinreichend, eine Weltreligion zu begründen, das metaphysische Bedürfniß zahlloser Millionen Menschen seit 1200 Jahren zu befriedigen, die Grundlage ihrer Moral und einer bedeutenden Verachtung des Todes zu werden, wie auch, sie zu blutigen Kriegen und den ausgedehntesten Eroberungen zu begeistern. Wir finden in ihm die traurigste und ärmlichste Gestalt des Theismus."
"Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial."
"The usefulness of Mohammedanism lies in its intrinsic vacuousness: there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. This simple creed of the unity of God imposes no intellectual or higher spiritual demands upon the believer, but promises to satisfy all his most carnal urges, even allowing him to pursue a course of self-indulgence and extreme sensuality in the afterlife. - The Koran is a confused and disorganised literary production, an embarrassing potpourri of Talmudic fable and pre-Islamist paganism; yet despite its lack of sophisticated content, it is reputed by believers to be a miracle, for how could a book meant to be recited in such mellifluous cadences as our wonderful Koran be composed by Mohammed, an illiterate peasant, save by the inspiration of the Angel Gabriel? Thus, when recited, this demonic production seems to cast an hypnotic spell bewitching and subduing all those believers within hearing distance, which may explain the wild popularity of certain Koranic readers down throughout the ages, such as the mediaeval Hafiz. - Also, the bellicose character of this book with its repeated calls of "Raise your swords and slay the unbelievers!" is enough to inspire a savage fanaticism in even the simplest and most self-effacing of believers. This means that the Koran isn't so much a religious book as it is a fiery call to arms; as such, it is the most disgusting piece of propaganda ever written, shamelessly enlisting the disenfranchised and exploiting the emotional volatility of the young as the raw material by which it spreads its tentacles."
(The last quote from Arthur Schopenhauer I could never find in the German original. So it may not be from Schopenhauer, although it very much sounds like him.)
Sam Harris in conversation with Rory Stewart (comments)
"2 people who essentially agreed on everything except how important the problem was." That is a very good summary of the discussion, and basically amounts to saying that they completely failed to clear up the confusion that still exists on this issue. Because the importance of a problem is what makes a problem into a problem. Unimportant problems aren't problems that need not be discussed at all.
This whole exchange they're having about separating criticism of the religion from criticism of the people who follow the religion is puzzling. How can that even make sense? Except maybe in the sense of 'I hate the sin, not the sinner' (provided the sinner repents). Criticising religious beliefs nobody holds would be a waste of time. You criticise them because you find the people who hold them and act on them reprehensible. (And yes, you can even feel hatred for a couple who murder their daughter with kitchen knives because of an unwanted pregnancy.) Since when are people entitled to be shielded from criticism? As long as they have the opportunity to defend themselves and prove the criticism wrong? Now obviously the islamists when devising their islamophobia tactics have discovered that there is a similarity between their own honour-shame mentality and the recently developed victimhood mentality in the West (as opposed to the more classical integrity culture): it's enough to declare yourself 'offended in your honour' or 'victimised' to put the offender or victimiser in the wrong. Together with also more recent anti-discrimination legislation this offers nice opportunities for triumphalist religious warriors to attack their kafir fellow citizens: I declare this or that to be a requirement of my religion, and if you don't go along with it, I'll sue you for (islamophobic) discrimination on religious grounds. Endless battles about veils (a faux religious requirement), prayer times and spaces, separation of the sexes in public swimming pools, and so on and so forth. I finally made up my mind about the rules against veils in educational settings after reading a long article in the newspaper about a Muslim young woman complaining bitterly about the injustice of her giving up her dream to become a MD because of these rules. All I could think was: "Thank God, no patient will ever come into the care of that obtuse and narrow-minded woman!" PS: On integrity culture - Dante Alighieri in the 13th century wrote about how praise for your honesty constitutes an affront to every honest man, and similar things erased by our praise and victimhood feelgood culture.
"It’s always twisted so now Muslims feel like instead of tackling issues we have to defend ourselves from ignorant people who think all Muslims are the same." But why do they feel this way? Because ignorant people constantly say that all Muslims are the same? Very doubtful, because that doesn't happen. Or because they do feel that the criticism is hitting home and it makes them feel uneasy enough to wish to deflect? - So I also have the impression that far too many 'moderate' Muslims cannot handle criticism of Islam well, not because it is either absurdly unfounded or not concerning them (in which cases they would just ignore it), but exactly because it is founded and does concern them. And that is what makes them easy prey for the islamists, who succeed in convincing them that they are surrounded by hostile Western islamophobes. - Too many 'moderate' Muslims feeling offended by criticism of Islam also explains why this islamophobia accusation devised by islamists works so well with Western 'true' islamophobes like Rory Stewart, 'true' islamophobes being the not-prejudiced kind who sincerely do not want to give offence and take the islamists' accusation of prejudice to heart even when it is entirely unjustified! - Therefore Sam Harris is right to conclude that we have a serious problem with too many Muslims who cannot handle criticism well. Which is intimidating by and of itself.
You and Rory are indeed correct in your overall depiction of Muslims and Islam. But then you concede: "I am as Islamophobic as anyone when it comes to certain tendencies ..." Without making the slightest effort to address Sam Harris's fears about these 'tendencies' in the spiritual and political development of the Muslim world. Doesn't that mean that the way in which you and Rory are correct is entirely beside the point? - Since Oct 7 there is not only a war going on in Gaza, there is also an Al Aqsa Flood of anti-Zionist hatred pouring out from the Muslim world and its Western sympathisers. Searching for Muslim voices of reason, I did find out that on October 9, 2023 the Global Imams Council issued a Public Statement Condemning the Recent Hamas Terrorist Attacks. In that public statement the GIC referred to the fatwa issued against Hamas by the Islamic Fatwa Council on March 9, 2023. (Statement and fatwa can easily be found on their respective web sites.) From the fatwa I understand that the IFC had effectively called for #HamasSurrenderNOW even before Hamas had launched its attack. But clearly these Muslim voices of reason are completely ignored, not only by Hamas, but also by a man such as the American Islamic scholar Omar Suleiman, close to the Muslim Brotherhood apparently and with a huge following, who manifests himself on Twitter as a relentless 'compassionate' holy war propagandist without ever mentioning Hamas. Is then Sam Harris not right to worry about 'certain tendencies' promoting genocidal war against Israel in the name of Islamic justice and with the help of Iran and its IRGC affiliates?
I like Rory Stewart very much and find it very hard to believe that he is not a good-faith actor. But on this issue of islamophobia he is weirdly confused. I mean, how can he not see that this accusation of islamophobia has been devised by islamists and has been used relentlessly and in an organised manner for more than 20 years already to silence critics of Islam and to intimidate both 'moderate' Muslims and 'unbelievers' in the West? And with so much success that we are still debating the issue in 2024! How come the fatwa against Salman Rushdie of 1989 wasn't enough to let everybody understand? There is this Jewish American historian Richard Landes of BostonU who tries to explain that failure in his last book 'Can The Whole World Be Wrong? - Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism, and Global Jihad' (2022).
I read the book on his walk from Herat to Kabul. These hospitable encounters were rather formal affairs, with people sitting around rooms in a closely observed order. I don't think he ever got a chance to look behind the curtain where the women were kept. He admits that his walking alone was dangerous, but less so because he didn't carry a weapon, apart from his walking stick. He was close at one point to laying down in the snow to die, but his dog edged him on. He obviously knows a lot about walking. And also about the futility of nation building efforts by ever rotating Western consultants who do not speak the language. But he never even mentions the youth bulge explanation for the endless political violence disrupting every attempt at compromise and stability.
Rory Stewart didn't mention Sam Harris on this other podcast. But he did say that there is a movement that deliberately stokes islamophobia with exaggerated claims ('islamists are running the country' - 'the mayor of London is controlled by islamists') and that he considers it to be a greater problem than the threat posed by the islamists themselves. But this official line of 'islamophobia' is the bigger problem, put forward for more than 20 years already, is exactly what put wind in the sails of the anti-islamic movement. As long as the islamist activists are left to the police to deal with and not brought under control by the Muslim community itself, the threat they pose can only grow. And the Muslim community, which is the first target of the islamists, will be all the more intimidated by them when they get the justified impression that the government is ignoring the problem and leaving them to their own devices.
There is a true problem with islamophobia, although not the one we are normally reminded of. There are 4 groups of players in this game. (1) The bigoted Western islamophobes who hate all Muslims and seek to confront them, expel them, etc. (2) The honest Western islamophobes like Rory Stewart, who are sincerely afraid of giving offence to Muslims, who take the accusation of islamophobia to heart even when it is not justified, and who play the role of appeasers when they say that islamophobia is the bigger problem, not islamist activism. (3) The islamist activists who have devised the accusation of islamophobia, not to combat islamophobia, but to stoke it in order to provoke that 'clash of civilisations' between all Westerners and all Muslims they wish for. (4) Moderate Muslims, whom the islamist activists can easily convince that they are surrounded everywhere by hostile Western islamophobes and thereby separate from Western society, because they have difficulty distinguishing between prejudiced Western islamophobes of group (1) and honest Western islamophobes of group (2). The truly problematic group from the Western point of view is the group (2) of appeasers: although they are the natural allies of the moderate Muslims (4) against the islamist activists (3), they do not appear as sufficiently trustworthy to their natural allies, because they give the justified impression, by downplaying the islamist threat, of not being willing to address the threat effectively and leaving their allies to their own devices when confronting the islamist activists in their community. - Islamophobia being not yet the 'bigger problem' in our multicultural Western societies does not exclude that further neglect of the islamist threat cannot make it the bigger problem one day, and inspire populist politicians not to defend but to shut down our open societies in a potentially violent confrontation with our Muslim communities, exactly as wished for by the islamists.
Islamophobia is invalid criticism of a distorted perception of the beliefs and teachings of Islam that is meant to denigrate the people who believe in it and therefore offensive to people who do NOT hold these distorted beliefs. Valid criticism of the beliefs and teachings of Islam is not meant to denigrate people and only offensive to people who do hold them. In both cases the offended believers may defend themselves by accusing you of islamophobia. Although I suspect that in the first case the defence will be more often than not of the kind "you're talking islamophobic nonsense, no Muslim holds that kind of distorted belief". Which makes the true islamophobia defence of the kind "you just hate Muslims" utterly suspect as coming from a Muslim who cannot accept valid criticism. And that may be the core of the problem: that Muslims cannot allow their beliefs to be criticised. I mean, the most basic valid criticism of Islam after all is: "Who authorised you to call me an unbeliever?" PS: This 'can you still tell the truth when the truth hurts' conundrum only seems to come up in honour-shame cultures (you feel no shame so long as you're not caught) and in our present victimhood culture, much less in the more classical integrity-guilt culture (you feel guilt even when you're not caught).
What is frustrating and astonishing is that the 'you cannot generalise in this way' defence is still used so routinely, when it is nothing but a red herring. When I say 'Muslims this or that' I don't mean to say 'all Muslims ...' (or I would be saying it) nor 'a negligible number of Muslims ...' (or I wouldn't be talking about them), I mean to say 'too many Muslims ...' for me not to talk about them.
I more and more believe that this absolute prohibition on questioning the Quran and on leaving the faith, punishable not only in the afterlife, but already in this life (by death) is effectively the central tenet of Islam, asking for absolute submission and spiritual imprisonment. Tom Holland has this hypothesis that the Quran and the hadith were only written down after the conquest of Jerusalem and consciously devised to supersede the Christian and Jewish religion of the conquered peoples. The inspiration may have come from the Prophet originally, whose existence is not in doubt, but it is impossible to know what has been added, changed or omitted in the texts when they were fixed. Inserting the absolute prohibition to doubt that the text corresponds to the original revelation (God's word) looks very much like a master stroke of manipulation, if manipulation there was. Which we cannot exclude, as there is no way to prove the contrary. Checkmate!
Yasmine Mohammed is very good in evoking the spiritual prison of Islam as it is experienced in everyday life. "I was afraid even of contemplating being critical of my religion, because Allah would have found out immediately. - My mother had no other choice than to kill me, if she wanted to save her own soul from eternal hellfire." So it looks like Islam is a religion very much suited as the foundation for a police state, with informers informing also on themselves, something even the German STASI never attained. Nevertheless, in Iran there seem to be quite a number of people who have collectively overcome their religious paranoia. Institutionally the regime remains very solid, however, and one cannot expect it to go down without putting up a very bloody fight. It is scary, no doubt about that.
One would normally expect that Muslims living in the West would assimilate even without much intellectual questioning of their religion, simply by adopting the less repressive mores of their Western surroundings, and then exert a liberating influence on their family members back home. It is of course what the islamist activists are afraid of when they strenuously warn their coreligionists against assimilation, starting with their own families. Nevertheless, it remains somewhat puzzling that they seem to be so successful with their intimidation tactics. Women do after all go out and work (and no woman likes to be beaten up at home or even raped). Children do go to Western schools and have Western friends (and no youngster likes to have music or dancing forbidden to them). But Boualem Sansal somewhere points out that it isn't the Algerian Muslims living in France who try to warn their families in Algeria against the islamists, it's the other way around. The only explanation I can think of is that it's not just islamist activists who play a role, but Muslim men in general, and young men especially, who try to mask their own insecurity when growing up in the West by turning into homegrown little disciplinarians. But it's just weird in a way.
Even if Sam Harris (the West) gave the impression that he is thoroughly convinced that ALL Muslims are caught up in a violent and fanatical religion, in other words, that he is an incorrigible islamophobe, how would that deter the "substantial minorities (and in some countries, majorities) of Muslims fighting for modern, morally acceptable interpretations of the text"? Could it not on the contrary encourage them to fight even harder and more publicly in order to prove Sam Harris (the West) wrong? Do you honestly believe that anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world comes first and foremost from reforming Muslims offended by Western islamophobia? And not from islamists who do all they can to stoke islamophobia in the West in order to make the 'clash of civilizations' the unavoidable outcome they wish for? Was it really Western islamophobia that crushed the spirit of modernising Persians and thereby opened the way for Ayatollah Khomeini to successfully conduct a reactionary Islamic revolution in Iran? I understand Sam Harris as saying very boldly: I am indeed afraid of the spiritual and political development of the Muslim world in general, and here are my reasons. Why would you want him to tie himself into knots like Rory Stewart only to lose his audience both in the West and the Muslim world with a message no less confusing and ineffectual than the one already sent out by our US and EU governments?
What I would have liked to ask Rory Stewart: Why would Sam Harris, or anyone else for that matter, want to fight reforming and tolerant Muslims, when there are so many worthier adversaries in the Muslim world? Unless you categorically deny that those Muslim enemies of Western liberal democracies exist, why would you object to his 'tarring them with a single brush' when you keep in mind what Wikipedia calls the 'paradox of tolerance': if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them. (Karl Popper describes the paradox as arising from the self-contradictory idea that, in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.)
Jihad, and more generally the easy justification of violence, as if it were a legitimate substitute for negotiation, are one aspect of the problem. But more disturbing even is this supreme idea of Islamic justice that seems to go without even the notion of impartiality. As if Muslim suffering by itself were enough to prove injustice and hold the unbelievers to account. In Palestine under the British mandate, as the majority in the country they fought against Jewish immigration for their exclusive right of national self-determination in Palestine (or more exactly: Muslim supremacy), discounting diaspora Jews and refusing compromise, and then very quickly resorted to violence as if it were nothing. Since then they complain about the Nakba without even mentioning the war that led to it, as if the Zionists were to blame for both the war and the Nakba.
"The ability to develop mechanisms, let alone political institutions, based on principles of liberalism, secularism and pluralism have been made difficult by ..." Can we agree that the development of liberal and democratic institutions, even when they are made more difficult by outside interventions, will ultimately have to be accomplished by these Muslim-majority societies themselves? And that until now they have failed MAINLY for internal reasons to withstand the emergence of brutal dictatorial regimes almost everywhere? And as many of those regimes, including the initially secular regime of Saddam Hussein, have used political Islam to legitimise their brutal dictatorial behaviour in the eyes of the faithful, that political Islam is not to be discounted as a major obstacle? I mean, the secular Kemal Atatürk has tried to make a start with modernising Turkey, but has since then been supplanted by the populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has used political Islam to build his plebiscitary majority. And no, I don't mean to say that there is only one political Islam. There are obviously several of them. But they all seem to have a strong tendency to fight each other violently and not to submit to some institutional democratic compromise that regulates the competition for political power without the need for violence.
"Religion is used by the powerful to manipulate people." Which the powerful can only do successfully when the religion gains traction with the people and turns them into obedient pawns of the powerful. If your Marxian analysis agrees with that, what then is your point of contention with armchair philosopher Sam Harris? Sympathy with the powerful whenever they are anti-Western?
I would think that the House of Commons incident is less indicative of the danger to our open society from Islam than what is happening less visibly inside the Muslim communities of our European countries. So Rory Stewart can be right when he downplays the incident and still be wrong in a major way about the issue under discussion.
If his friend's reporting fits with Rory Stewart's point that Islamic repression of freedom of thought varies between Muslim-majority countries, how does that defeat Sam Harris's thesis that Islamic repression of freedom of thought is widespread in Muslim-majority countries and a major obstacle to the emergence of liberal and democratic institutions? - Holding the USA (or the West) solely and directly responsible for violent death in the world, when there were other actors such as fascists, communists and islamists actively participating in these conflicts, and most of the time even initiating these conflicts, is just stupid beyond belief. To be sure, that kind of simplistic and one-sided anti-Western sentiment is shared by a lot of ideologues around the world. Does that make it less stupid?
'Not all Muslims are the same' and 'Islam doesn't explain everything' are truisms, you do realise that, don't you? I don't know much about Sam Harris, but from what I have heard on this podcast, I find it hard to believe that he is out to disprove truisms. The Mossadegh story isn't as clear cut as you want us to believe. The Shah was an authoritarian, but a rather timid and naive one who wanted to be loved by his people while modernising the country. The Savak was bad, but feeble compared to the repressive apparatus set up by Saddam Hussein or Khomeini. The main point however is: the reactionary Islamic revolution conducted by Khomeini was entirely guided by his brand of political Islam and would not have succeeded without its Islamic appeal to the larger population of faithful Muslims. (The Shah's military also played a crucial role, by standing aside and not crushing the popular uprising, with the Shah himself abstaining from giving the order.) Why is that so difficult to accept? Especially since many intellectuals or politicians thinking along secular lines like yourself never expected that this inspiration by political Islam would be anything else but transitory, that acts of political and economical expediency would soon alter the course taken by the new regime and prevent an archaic theocracy from taking root. As a student I had a little essay to write on the Iranian events, and not knowing much about the events or Iran, I still remember how I ended it in typical journalistic fashion with a sentence somewhat like this: "Whether the mullahs will be able to govern a modern industrialising country in a way that finds lasting support from the majority of the population remains to be seen!" That their version of political Islam would be so suitable for organising a police state that more than 50 years later would become an even greater threat to the region than even the pessimists predicted, I couldn't fathom at the time. Why you, with the benefit of hindsight, still refuse to see it is equally beyond me.
Your allusion to the Islamic Golden Age in mediaeval times is a bit of a two-sided sword, I believe. The scientific, cultural and economic flourishing was actually driven mainly by the conquered (converted or tolerated) peoples and not so much by the Arab conquerors. It was made possible by the conquerors feeling solidly in power and confident enough to adopt a more liberal and tolerant attitude toward the peoples over which they ruled. So one could say that there is a sequence 'political/military supremacy' -> 'liberal and tolerant Islam' -> 'flourishing civil society' and another one 'political/military inferiority' -> 'repressive Islam' -> 'impoverished civil society'. Whether that corresponds to your idea of religion adapting to politics and not the other way around I don't know. One could draw from it the conclusion that in the West we can do no better than lay down our arms and let ourselves be politically conquered by the Muslims in the hope that they will then gradually adopt a more liberal and tolerant form of Islam. I find it a bit far-fetched and demeaning, but maybe that is what our left leaning elites have in mind, who knows? Michel Houellebecq wrote a whole book on it (which I haven't read).
You're touching on an aspect of Islam and Muslim societies that I believe isn't factored in enough: the way in which the religion of Muslim supremacy directly props up the self-esteem of ordinary people (the so-called Arab or better Muslim street). How political reforms granting civic equality to non-Muslims by the colonial powers or the Ottomans or the Shah could inflame the feelings of ordinary not very political people and instigate riots and mobs. It is said that Nasser was dragged against his will into the 1967 6-day war by the pressure of the Arab street he had whipped up beyond his control. When you hear Jews from Muslim countries describe their former life as dhimmi, it is all about the daily humiliation inflicted on them by ordinary contemptuous Muslims and the strict prohibition for them to defend themselves in the slightest, with children being trained even from a young age to spit on them or throw rocks at them in the confidence that they could not retaliate without suffering dire consequences. In other words, a Muslim commoner could deem himself socially superior to an unbeliever and express contempt for him even when that unbeliever was a renowned Jewish ophthalmologist. - A few years ago when a Jewish historian on some French radio programme alluded to this kind of quotidian antisemitism 'imbibed by Muslims with their mother's milk' the islamophobia crowd created a huge stink and with the help of respectable anti-racist human rights organisations dragged the poor guy through the courts (he was lucky and acquitted in the end).
You are indeed repeating yourself, without ever going beyond vacuous phrases like "religion never changes by itself, but only when it has to catch up with political reality". In a strange way you are very intellectual and unpolitical. What I think Sam Harris is trying to do is the following: convince people, and especially politically influential people in the West, that they have to send a much clearer message than they have hitherto done to both islamists and Muslims in general, that as an open society we will not tolerate intolerant religious beliefs and behaviours, and that we will act accordingly wherever that is constitutionally possible. (Banning of veils in educational settings and public sector employment; mosques and religious teacher selection; associations and their funding; etc.) It will help to 'change the religion' when it instils sufficient confidence into those Muslims in our Western countries who are willing to assimilate and to react in order to rid themselves of the oppressive influence exerted by the islamist activists in their midst who try to set them against Western liberal society. (How they are going to do that will be up to them, but especially local governments and schools should make it clear to them that they are willing to help wherever possible.) That it is still an uphill struggle is apparent from this podcast, when Sam Harris cannot even convince an open-minded British ex-politician that islamophobia is not the bigger problem in our multicultural Western societies, unless further neglect of the islamist threat makes it the bigger problem and inspires populist politicians not to defend but to shut down our open societies in a potentially violent confrontation with our Muslim communities, exactly as wished for by the islamists. I suspect that Sam Harris would also like to make intellectuals and politicians with a global reach better understand the nature and the gravity of the threat that emanates from the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates so that they make better choices when they are confronting that threat as in the current war against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Ansar Allah in Yemen, etc.
Commenter 1: "Rory, you are experiencing the intellectual turmoil that comes from rejecting reason ... don't fight it, you are a smart guy. (..) I was being facetious." - Me: "Really? But your comment is much, much better when it is not meant ironically, for Rory should indeed understand that the intellectual turmoil he's experiencing comes from his conscience rebelling against his rejecting reason." - Commenter 2: "I don't think Rory rejects Sam's reasons, just his own humanity and intuition is telling him that ultimately we are all human and that confuting an ideology so deeply rooted in a society and its people as innately bad isn't the way to address the issue." - Me: "If that were true, why doesn't Rory say so and explain how he would address Sam's legitimate concerns? - No, Rory is a true islamophobe, sincerely afraid of offending Muslims, because he cannot separate anymore the Muslim sinner from the Muslim supremacist sin. And that is a truly dangerous position, because it means that he has stopped recognising his own humanity in the other side (the Muslims). When you cannot tell your brother anymore why he is seriously wrong, you stopped being his brother, full stop. - The islamists have invented the accusation of islamophobia for their own Muslim supremacist reasons, and the West, like Rory Stewart, out of sincere islamophobia, has largely taken it to heart, which in the eyes of Muslims makes Westerners look devious and insincere. Because it would indeed be far more honest to respond to the charge of islamophobia straightforwardly with a declaration of war against ALL Muslims who do not renounce Muslim supremacism, as we cannot tolerate Muslim intolerance if we want to keep our open and free societies open and free. - When Muslims do not express revulsion at the idea of avenging the Prophet's honour by murdering the entire editorial board of Charlie Hebdo, how can they be surprised at being met with the same revulsion? But surprised they are. And therefore profoundly despised. - In the West we're all far more islamophobic than we care to admit. And not admitting it, even to ourselves, is a profound mistake. Because it reveals that we do not understand ourselves and our so called universal values we keep talking about without knowing how to embody and demonstrate them. And there can be no doubt about who's benefiting most from that confusion, when the West is clearly weakened by it."
I tend to think that the 'secular' misunderstanding of religion in the West is a major weakness when dealing with Islam and Muslims. Simply put: faith isn't science, we are all agnostic, i.e. unable to know anything about a transcendent God, and therefore we are all reduced to have faith, even when we do not recognize it as a religion. The question isn't whether you believe in God, the question is what it is you believe in. Religious doctrines are never more than signposts, they aren't the road itself, which leads to Rome even without the signposts. And the doctrines have normally arisen to guard against error, and are not meant to be taken as positive instructions for anything else. I only understood this after discovering Eric Voegelin, a not very well known German-American philosopher of history. Pope Benedict's thinking is close to Voegelin, and I still believe that the pope's Regensburg lecture of 2006 on 'Faith and Reason', in which he criticised both Islamic absolutism and Western scientism as rationally deficient, was the pope's honest and personal attempt to see whether a dialogue with Islam was possible. He was, of course, quickly deterred by the offended and violent reactions coming from the Islamic world, with Erdogan in the lead. In a similar vein, there is Frank van Dun, a not very well known Belgian philosopher of natural law, who has a convincing article on the Decalogue as the 'Perfect Law of Freedom'.
Sam Harris on Islamophobia
"The status quo is intolerable, and should be intolerable to Muslims themselves. They should be mortified that their community is so uniquely combustible, so uniquely uncivil, so incapable of self-reflection and self-criticism, so dangerously childish, so desperate to make the whole world its 'safe space'. (...) There is only one religion on Earth that has normalised this level of fanaticism. And it isn't an expression of bigotry to notice that this is totally antithetical to everything civilised people value in the 21st century. The Octobre 7th attacks in Israel changed the way many of us think about the vulnerability of open societies. They changed the way we think about immigration and failures of assimilation, and they revealed a level of moral confusion in our universities and other institutions that is as astonishing as it is masochistic. (...) There have been nearly fifty-thousand acts of Islamic terrorism in the last forty years, ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries, most had nothing to do with Israel or Jews. There have been 82 attacks in France and over 2000 in Pakistan during this period. Do you want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists, you just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, you just need a wider Muslim community that won't condemn jihadism, but pretends that the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself or call for the death of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad and yet who will not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily over the world in the name of their religion. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas or the Islamic State or any specific instance of jihadist savagery without bothsiding anything, then we will know that something has changed. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest not over cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that we have made a modicum of progress. The Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to deradicalise itself, it has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is. And it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what is so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic or insane their behaviour. If the Muslim community and the political left can't stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness leads to right-wing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won't create secure borders, fascists will. And that is a world none of us should want to live in."
Islamophobia is the accusation directed by self-righteous and obtuse Muslim supremacists at whatever they rightfully perceive as criticism of their supremacist beliefs and expectations. When Westerners then tie themselves into knots to refute the accusation and appease Muslim supremacists, the latter are further incensed and strengthened in their supremacist beliefs by what they rightfully perceive as Western hypocrisy and double standards. - There will be no end to the misunderstandings between confused Westerners and obtuse Muslims (meaning 'annoyingly insensitive and slow to understand') as long as Westerners do not learn how to acknowledge the legitimacy of the demand contained in the slogan #DownWithWhiteSupremacism by responding with the equally legitimate demand of #DownWithMuslimSupremacism. - To self-righteous and obtuse Muslim supremacists 'justice' means that Allah will assist them in defeating and punishing their opponents. To everybody else this understanding of justice is a clear sign of imbecility, if not of outright blasphemy. Because the abdication of human sovereignty by submission to God's word as contained in the Quran and the abolition of personal responsibility for the execution of God's will leads directly to the usurpation of God's place when Muslims pronounce judgement on their fellow men, sentence them to death and personally execute the death sentence. In other words, it's not so much the violence-proneness that is the problem, it's the easy and blasphemous justification of the violence producing the violence-proneness that is the problem.
- door de
koningin, die zeer goed het verschil kan appreciëren tussen complimentjes en
sweet talk
Die
georganiseerde kinderachtigheid in onze samenleving! Alsof complimentjes niet
meer dan een soort luxueuse verwenkuur zijn. Waarbij vergeten wordt dat
complimenten moeten verdiend worden om geloofwaardig te zijn. Al die
professionele opvoeders die vergeten hun rol van volwassene te spelen, omdat
zij zelf nooit hun adolescentie ontgroeid zijn. En niets anders kunnen dan
kinderachtig doen tegen kinderen, die op die manier natuurlijk mismeesterd
worden.
Goed zijn
op school is normaal, daarvoor ga je tenslotte naar school. Slecht zijn vraagt
om uitleg. Alleen wanneer het uitzonderlijk goed is is een compliment verdiend:
wanneer de volwassene zelf verbaasd is en dus ook eerlijk zijn bewondering kan
uitdrukken. Educatieve complimentjes zijn vooral een toegave aan het
belangengeöriënteerde denken: je moet kinderen belonen. Geen wonder dat de
kinderen de complimentjes ook alleen zo opvatten, en er dan gaan om vragen!
Tracy: je zegt alleen maar dat het slecht is, nooit dat het goed is, met 6
jaar, toen zij begon te schrijven en altijd weer haar potlood verkeerd
vasthield. Het was gewoon niet goed genoeg!
Philip Greenspun on MIT as a 'no praise
zone': when you did alright, nobody said anything; when you were having
difficulties, you got an answer to your questions like: "you're having
trouble with that problem because you don't know anything and aren't working
hard enough".
Kickers Dixmille Sandalen voor de Koningin (rechtervoet zonder voet noch tenen)
Sweet
talk is iets helemaal anders dan 'complimentjes', en zoals iedereen kan ik er
niet genoeg van krijgen: hoe minder verdiend, hoe beter! Voor mij, voor mij,
voor mij, het centrum van mijn wereld! Keizertje is vaak te moe om eraan te
denken, en ik het doe het dan maar zelf. Ik doe graag dingen zelf. Koop mij een
paar sandalen in de Kickers-shop voor €55, verrast als ik was dat zij zo mooie
sandalen maken, en bewonder dan luidop mijn eigen voeten en tenen! Luidop,
nietwaar, als hij moe is is dat nodig om de aandacht te trekken. En om de
aandacht is het mij tenslotte te doen, niet om de sandalen. En om wat daaruit volgt,
natuurlijk. En
als er iets volgt, dan beperk ik mijn sweet talk geenszins tot mijn eigen
voeten en tenen, wat had je gedacht. Dan
zijn er geen grenzen meer die niet overschreden mogen worden! La joie innée
d'exister!
I very
much agree with Joanne's thinking impulse. Only, expressing just the wish is
not enough, you have to ask yourself the question: what can be done to make it
happen?
Argueing
with George Galloway is not going to draw the attention away from him. For that
you would need to draw the attention to somewhere else. Normally the most
effective way to draw attention is by setting yourself up as the center of
attention. That's what Israel should do: by accusing the world of routinely
denying the crime against humanity of which Israel is a victim since 1948, i.e.
for 65 years now, no less. And Israel could easily do that, because it is true
and easy to prove.
I wrote
an email to Angela Merkel saying the same thing, but got no reply yet. They
cannot very well reply officially: you must be out of your mind, not even
Israel is making such an absurd claim. Because that would involve them in an
explicit denial of the crime. Not replying on the other hand leaves them the
excuse of not having received my message (it was 'lost').
Dionissis,
I think, is reading too much psychology into Western politics (holocaust shame
or guilt, inferiority complex towards Jewish morality), and the subconscious is
an empty concept in any case. Unconsciousness or unawareness on the other hand
is very much at the center of Western political decisions with regard to the
'conflict': unconsciousness of the inconsequential attitude that recognises
Israel's 'right to exist' without recognising at the same time that those who
are refusing to make peace with Israel are the criminals responsible for the
conflict and not its victims. Unconsciousness which is dangerous because it can
lead to well-intentioned decisions that are wrong, self-defeating, and
amounting to blaming the victims themselves for their unfortunate fate.
To Wygart
I would say: political attitudes towards the 'conflict' are more of a sideshow
in Western politics, not symptoms of some new menace to democracy (beyond the
usual). Which isn't meant to say that making wrong decisions in the
Israel-islamist conflict cannot have seriously menacing consequences for
Western civil society. But the Jews now have a state. That state should behave
like any other state, and not like a Jewish state. It should accuse the world,
and especially the Western democracies, of being inconsequential and
anti-semitic by not recognising Israel's right to exist in peace. George
Galloway is an idiot; Jakob Augstein also is an idiot, and a far more
influential one, I would think; but they are not really valuable targets: the
valuable targets are David Cameron and Angela Merkel. And it is my conviction
that there are still enough decent Europeans who feel ashamed of their
governments' participating in that charade of a 'peace process' that
rehabilitates the criminals. They may even be a majority. But they are quite
naturally a silent majority that will never step up to shout down the
loud-talking intellectuals and politicians occupying the front of the scene.
The only chance you have to get this silent majority to express itself (find
itself some representatives to speak out for them) is by creating a focal point
for them in public discourse. In Germany, this debate about Jakob Augstein's
condemnation by the Simon Wiesenthal Center looks like a great opportunity to
do that. The Israeli government should adopt a leading role in seizing that
opportunity. (I mean, Jakob Augstein is defending Günter Grass's assertion that
it is nuclear Israel that has become the principal menace to world peace! And
he seems to be winning the debate! How can the Israeli government NOT react to
such irresponsible and idiotic nonsense? In my opinion, they cannot simply
leave that kind of defense to the SWC. It would be a show of unconscious
irresponsibility on their part not very dissimilar of the irresponsibility
displayed by the European governments themselves. Moreover, Angela Merkel
herself has already complained(!) that it is becoming increasingly difficult
for the German government to maintain a reasonable stance with these idiotic
nonsensical ideas gaining traction in German public opinion. The Israeli
government should take her up on her own words and show her how she, as
chancellor, is supposed to deal with such idotic nonsensical ideas.) This is a
fight. A fight Israel must win (i.e. cannot afford to lose - and Richard Landes
is of course right that Europe can also not afford to lose it): in such cases
you must go for the jugular, because there is no other way to win the fight.
There is now a 65-year long history that proves that point, I would think.
Sure,
Richard Landes says such things as well, but I see it either as part of his
blogging style ('fisking') or as part of a larger explanation, from which I
tend to take things selectively by applying Occam's razor. That's all I wanted
to say, as I am far more interested in understanding politics by reducing the
explanation than by enhancing it. And fundamentally I am convinced that the
most powerful explanations are the 'negatives', the things not said and done
that would make a real difference.
Miss Israel 2013 IDF Nominees
But
Dionissis, the IDF women you showed me before were lovely! Why would I
reconsider? I never doubted they knew how to defend themselves, but the
thoughts they gave me were not thoughts of abduction or stabbing, God forbid!
Mind you, in the mean time I learned a bit about how to defend myself with a
pocket-knife, because when I was bragging earlier about running around with my
pocket-knife in my pocket I didn't have the slightest idea of how the knife is
to be held and used, except for peeling an apple. Someone showed me, and I'm
better prepared now, although still much less interested in confrontation than
in seduction.
The
psychology I would be interested in is that of the 72 black-eyed houris. Here
is a compilation from islamic sources you can find on the wikipedia page on
houris: "a houri is a girl of tender age, having large breasts which are
round (pointed), and not inclined to dangle, ... with beautiful, big, and
lustrous eyes, ... her sweat will smell like musk." These same people then
complain about houris being used in Western adverts for lingerie or cars. OK, I
tend to agree that it is a form of wasteful underemployment for houris. But
these people also shoot living houris through the head with kalashnikovs! And
then bomb pizzerias with people inside or fly airplanes into tall buildings
also with people inside only to get their imaginary houris in paradise! That's
not shortsightedness. It's more like toofarsightedness! I once suggested the
idea of forming a living houri brigade to teach these boys some sense to a
Moroccan girl in that same café. And she didn't find the idea stupid! She
wasn't afraid of my staring either. And not interested at all in covering her
hair. Which was lush and not something that should be covered. On my demand she
uncovered more things for me. So sometimes you can see glimpses of hope. But
they are rare, far too rare to make a difference. (Philippe Sollers made a big
splash in 1983 with his book on "Femmes": "Le monde appartient
aux femmes, c.à.d. à la mort. Là-dessus tout le monde ment." He made a big
splash, but nobody listened, as usual.)
Jewish Nakbah (Pierre Rehov) - Jewish Girl with Franz Kafka's Eyes
PS: The
same Moroccan young woman (30) said very nice things about Jewish people she
had known in her childhood in Morocco. It wasn't always clear to me what she
really meant, because I had thought that these Jewish people had been driven
out before her birth. But we agreed entirely that it is all such a waste of
human happiness! And all because of politics, and the general stupidity to fall
into that trap of expecting good things from politics. That was mainly my
conclusion, because she couldn't anymore follow me there, thought that the big
people who had studied so much more than her probably knew what they were
doing! People taken individually always should know better. But for that they
need to trust themselves. Which they don't, most of the time. If I knew how to
insert pictures into these comments, I would show you another fascinating
Jewish girl having Franz Kafka's eyes, a picture I took from Pierre Rehov's
film on the "Jewish Nakbah". She's behind bars, and there is a smugly
smiling soldier guarding her. I find it an emblematic picture of this 'politics
destroying human happiness' idea. Westerners tend to brag about 'freedom', but
most of the time they don't know what they are talking about, reducing their
idea of freedom to either political freedom (elections) or economic freedom
(choosing your model of a car). It's childish and stupid. Muslims, and even
islamists like Sayyid Qutb, often complain quite sensibly about that emptiness
in Western life. I would think that that is also a good subject for a dialogue
with them. Do you know of a good islamic blog where one could try to do that?
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/538.htm PPS: About
the silent majority of decent people: I remember my Belgian grandmother almost
spitting on her own carpet each time Yassir Arafat appeared on the news!
"Den duvel" (the devil), she simply called him, missing the words and
education for a fuller explanation of her thinking.
Saw it on
VRT Canvas, on Somalia and some man (Ahmed Jama Mohamed) coming back from
London to rebuild his businesses by investing some of the profits from his
London restaurant: 4 restaurants and a beach resort 'The Village' at Jazira
Beach.
He is
also into politics in a natural human manner: feeding the tribal elders
regularly in order to attract them to his position. But doesn't really like it,
because it makes him even more of a target to the islamists than he already is,
with Al Shabaab attacking him and his businesses (one 'successful' suicide
attack).
The man
is very interesting, but the journalist doesn't ask him at all how he became
who he is. The journalist is sort of dumb, talks about brave idealism, but
doesn't understand a thing about the natural law: Ahmed is presented as some
admirable dreamer, but the really important things will have to come from
politics. He also doesn't go into the matter of the islamist threat. They are
just awful terrorists to him, without having any link to the islamic belief
system. Big omenous words ("country at the crossroads"), no real
understanding, as usual on TV.
- van de
koningin, die het eigenlijk ook eens in Italië wil bekijken, het politieke spel
en zijn meest ontmaskerende protagonisten Berlo en Beppe
Dat zat
er wel aan te komen natuurlijk, nadat de Grieken het hen met succes hebben
voorgedaan, dat ook de Italianen onze onvermoeibare eurocrisis-bestrijders een
neus zouden zetten! Nu nog de Portugezen. En waarom niet allemaal? Tegen de onmenselijke door Europa opgelegde austeriteit? Elio di Rupo en Paul Magnette zijn zoals steeds bereid ons de anti-kapitalistische weg te wijzen.
Afgrijselijk
worden ze genoemd, de afdankingen in de industrie. Slagen in het gezicht. De
Europese industrie moet beschermd worden! Door wie? Door de Europese
industriële politiek, natuurlijk, en de zich daarmee bezig houdende politici,
dat is gemakkelijk te raden. Waarmee? Met regels, sociale en milieuregels, wat
anders, en wereldwijd als het kan. Waartegen? Dat is heel wat minder duidelijk,
maar logischerwijze zou je vermoeden dat de industrie vooral tegen de
industriëlen moet beschermd worden. Die kennen er tenslotte zo weinig van dat
zij vooral de afbouw van economische activiteiten lijken na te streven.
Geobsedeerd als ze zijn door ingebeelde politieke vijanden aan wie ze slagen in
het gezicht willen verkopen. Dat zij daarbij kapitaal verliezen lijkt hen
weinig te deren, en in voorspoedige winstvooruitzichten willen ze al even
weinig geloven. Waar zoeken die kapitalistische industriëlen toch hun
eigenbelang?
De
industriële politiek is dus dringend aan een heropwekking toe. Tijdens mijn
recente studeerwerk in de politieke wetenschappen heb ik nochtans vernomen dat
zelfs de Fransen de industriële politiek aan het einde van de jaren '70
opgegeven hadden. En die hadden dus een paar decennia ervaring met economische
planning en sturende overheidsinterventies in de industrie. Eerder slechte
weliswaar, zoals die mislukte poging om van Honeywell Bull een te duchten
Frans-Britse concurrent voor IBM te maken. Zonder het minste vermoeden dat de
echte concurrent natuurlijk uit een onvoorspelbare hoek zou komen, de hoek van
Microsoft en Apple, en zonder de minste overheidssteun, hetgeen eigenlijk niet
zou mogen.
Tja, wat
moet een politicus doen, indien vooral de mislukkingen goed voorspelbaar zijn,
en de echte succesverhalen alleen maar uit onvoorspelbare hoeken komen? Niets
doen lijkt geen slechte keuze op het eerste gezicht, maar voor een politicus is
dat uitgesloten, hij moet toch met iets zijn stemmen verdienen. Door met
goedbedoelde initiatieven mislukkingen in te zamelen kan hij nog altijd een
paar stemmen verdienen met zijn goede bedoelingen. Door de zaken gewoon op hun
beloop te laten brengt hij zich in een onmogelijke positie om zijn verdienste
aan te tonen voor die onvoorspelbare successen. Hij kan ze tenslotte zo weinig
voorspellen als iemand anders.
Wijze
oude man Anthony de Jasay heeft altijd wel een paar ideetjes over hoe actieve
politici die meer willen doen dan nietsdoen hun energie zouden kunnen steken in
het weer afbreken van alles wat zij in hun ijverigheid hebben opgebouwd. Hij
argumenteert daarbij overtuigend dat de afbraak-politici grote onvoorspelbare
successen zouden kunnen hebben, en in zijn laatste stukje zelfs, ook al gehad
hebben, zoals Gerhard Schröder met zijn
arbeidsmarkthervorming in Duitsland: "One size
fits all, but not well: collective bargaining conceals and may waste a rich
source of productivity." De in de vergelijking toch redelijke Duitse
kiezers hebben het toen wel evenmin begrepen als de Italianen het vandaag
hebben willen begrijpen van Mario Monti, dat afbraak voor vooruitgang kan
zorgen.
