Roger Cohen on Islam for the 21st-Century

Muslim and Mosque
'The State of Things'
Jewel Samad
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
New York Times

The violent and threatening Muslim reaction to this stupid film The Innocence of Muslims is forcing the hand of several prominent columnists, both liberals and conservatives, and writing in "A 21st-Century Islam" (NYT, September 21, 2012), Roger Cohen's turn has now come:

The Muslim world cannot have it both ways. It cannot place Islam at the center of political life -- and in extreme cases political violence -- while at the same time declaring that the religion is off-limits to contestation and ridicule.

An excellent point. Politics proceeds by debate, so if Islamists and other pious Muslims want to engage in the political process, they'll have to grow tougher skin elsewhere than the middle of their forehead! Or as Cohen puts it:

Politics is a rough-and-tumble game. If the emergent Islamic parties of nations in transition -- like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia -- are to honor the terms of democratic governance they will have to concede that they have no monopoly on truth, that the prescriptions of Islam are malleable and debatable, and that significant currents in their societies have different convictions and even faiths.

They have no choice, for the Islamist alternative is unworkable:

The world has tried Islamic republics. It found them oxymoronic. As Iran illustrates, they don't work: Republican institutions, shaped by the wishes of men and women, fall victim to the Islamic superstructure, supposedly shaped by God.

That Islamic superstructure, of course, is the fundamental, ultimate aim of Islamists, and the West must deal prudently, in full awareness of this goal, with such Islamists:

But the West will not do so by compromising its own values. The porn-grade American movie that started the unrest was pitiful. The murderous violence that followed from Cairo to Benghazi was criminal. Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper, then had a strong editorial case for mocking the religious fundamentalism that produced the killing; it chose to do so through caricatures of Muhammad.

Gérard Biard, the editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, put the case well: "We're a newspaper that respects French law. Now, if there's a law that is different in Kabul or Riyadh, we're not going to bother ourselves with respecting it." Alluding to all the violence, Biard asked: "Are we supposed to not do that news?"

He is right. There are too many hypocrisies in Islam -- deploring attacks on it while often casting scorn on Judaism and Christianity, claiming the mantle of peace while inspiring violence -- for it to expect to be spared the cartoonist's arrows.

As I was telling my wife last evening, the film is so stupefyingly stupid, I couldn't even endure watching the trailer on YouTube -- I had to exit that virtual cinema after only a minute and a half! Nonetheless, violent Muslim reaction to the clip has had the beneficial result of goading many, from the political spectrum's rebel-red left to its true-blue right, into affirming explicit support for freedom of expression, probably because the film is so monumentally stupid, no Westerner would possibly imagine that anyone could be legitimately offended.

No true Westerner, anyway . . .

The Trouble with Europe, the Future of Korea?

Rachel Donadio

Photo by Jacqueline Mia Foster
New York Times

Well . . . the trouble with Italy, anyway (and Korea's future?). Rachel Donadio, in "Stuck in Recession, Italy Takes on Labor Laws That Divide the Generations" (NYT, March 19, 2012), describes a problem that plagues Italy (and likely other European countries), a welfare state that advantages the old, disadvantages the young, stifles the economy, and is no longer paying for itself:

[A] generational divide . . . is crippling the Italian labor market. While older workers came of age with guaranteed jobs and ironclad contracts granting generous pensions and full benefits, younger Italians . . . are now paying the price. They are lucky to find temporary work, which offers few benefits or stability . . . . [U]nions, business groups and countless governments have invested in the status quo to protect their constituents, at the expense of economic growth. Without . . . changes, . . . Italy is headed toward an economic and social implosion, with a rise in under-the-table work and a looming pension crunch . . . . Italy's employment rate and productivity have been stunted by high labor costs . . . [. L]owering the cost of firing workers and increasing protections for shorter-term contracts would encourage companies to hire, stimulating growth . . . . "We have to get away from a dual labor market where some are overly protected, while others totally lack protection and benefits when unemployed," the prime minister [Mario Monti] said shortly after taking office . . . . [adding] that "equity and growth" would be the watchwords . . . and that he aimed to increase employment . . . . The most delicate topic . . . is the infamous Article 18 of the Italian labor statute of the 1970s . . . . It states that workers cannot be fired without just cause and, if fired, can sue their companies to be reinstated . . . [and] generally win . . . . While such cases are pending in the . . . slow legal system, companies . . . [must] keep fired workers on the payroll . . . at the expense of a company's solvency.

Italy -- and Europe -- has to solve this very pressing problem, and the solution will mean fewer benefits for those whom the welfare state has long protected. The irony for me is that just as Europe's welfare system is falling apart in some countries, South Korea's government is beginning to move toward a welfare system without seeming to give this enormous change much thought. For instance, Seoul's current Leftist mayor, Park Won-soon (of the Democratic United Party), pushed for free meals provided to all elementary school students in Seoul -- all of them! -- because the mayor and others on the Left didn't want only impoverished students to receive free meals, for that would 'shame' them in the eyes of their peers. One sees where this sort of 'thinking' would logically lead: welfare for everybody so that nobody is ashamed to be on the dole! The Korean Left's ideological sentimentality overrides reason.

And Korea's government spending is already increasing so precipitously that Lee Eun-joo, in "Piling debt could haunt economic growth" (JoongAng Daily, March 20, 2012), notes the money spent on public works, public housing, and the like, and adds up the cost:

According to data compiled by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance and the Bank of Korea, Korea's public sector's debt, including debt held by central and provisional governments as well as state-run companies, reached 789.4 trillion won ($703 billion) as of the end of the third quarter last year, up 9.2 percent from the previous year. This is double the government's budget of 325.4 trillion won for 2012.

In the same issue of the JoongAng Daily, Yu Jung-jae editorializes about "The real consequences of welfare," noting that both Left and Right share blame for thoughtless welfare policies. Why would the Korean Right join in? Yu reminds us that much social welfare legislation began in Germany under the right-wing Bismarck as a means of exerting control over society since a state that offered pensions held more power over its citizens. That perhaps was true of a Prussian-inspired authoritarian state like Germany's in the late 19th century, but in a democratic state, the political parties support social welfare because it's popular and gets politicians votes, and that dynamic goes on year after year until the entire system begins to implode, as in Greece or Italy, as well as other European countries.

The good news is that some Koreans see the looming problems, and I hope that their more sensible warnings receive a hearing. Korea has a strong economy and a population with a work ethic. I'd hate to see that ruined by thoughtless welfare policies that only serve to land Korea in European-style problems.

Not that I would oppose a reasonable social welfare program for those in need, but the definition of 'neediness' seems rather elastic . . .

Malise Ruthven on the Rightwing Terrorist Anders Behring Breivik

Anders Behring Breivik

Leaving Oslo Municipal Court, Norway

July 25, 2011

Rex Features/AP Photo

(Image from New York Review of Books)

Malise Ruthven has a useful, insightful article, "The New European Far-Right," in a blog for the New York Review of Books (August 9, 2011), and I largely agree with his analysis of the rightwing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik:

Judging from his manifesto, Breivik is an obsessive man, with an idée fixe about the evils of Islam and multiculturalism. He believes that European leaders, especially those belonging to social democratic parties, are cultural traitors who are inflicting irreversible damage on their countries. Hence his attack on Utoya island, where the flower of Norway's social democratic youth -- reservoir of its future leaders -- were gathered. He wants to see all Muslims expelled or repatriated unless they allow themselves to be converted into believing or "cultural Christians." These aims may seem impracticable -- but given the history of population expulsions and exchanges that he cites at some length in his document, they are neither utopian or millenarian.

The right is being awfully quick to disown the fellow -- and understandably so -- but Ruthven acknowledges the parallels, even to the mainstream right:

His anxieties may be vastly exaggerated, but his ideas are presented systematically, and are generally consistent with the critiques of Islam and multiculturalism appearing in the mainstream press, as well as right-wing blogs. It would be premature, even dangerous, to suppose that the source of his action can only be understood by reference to synaptic glitches in an individual psychopath's brain.

Many on the anti-Islam right have been adamant that their writings could not have influenced Breivik because he has been planning an attack since the latter 1990s, several years before most of them were even concerned about Islam. But can we believe Breivik's claim? Do we have any writings from him that date to the latter 1990s? And even if we do, we can't assume that he learned nothing later from the anti-Islam right in Europe and the US. His advocacy and practice of violence, however, do distinguish Breivik from most of the anti-Islam right. His emphasis upon Western Civilization, on the other hand, is something that he shares with the anti-Islam right, and it distinguishes him from the nationalist, racist, and fundamentalist right. His call for war, though, reminds one more of Al-Qaeda and other Islamists. Ruthven notes many of these points:

As Thomas Hegghammer, the Norwegian expert on Islamism, has argued, Breivik is in some respects an occidental mirror of Osama bin Laden -- a dangerous monster, perhaps, but not necessarily an irrational one. Breivik's manifesto, Hegghammer explains, departs from established categories of right-wing extremism such as ultra-nationalism, white supremacism, or Christian fundamentalism, to reveal "a new doctrine of civilizational war that represents the closest thing yet to a Christian version of al-Qaeda." The concept of "civilizational conflict" or "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, first articulated by Bernard Lewis, is shared by many on the right and some in Europe's liberal mainstream.

Both Breivik and the leaders of al-Qaeda see themselves as engaged in a conflict that extends back to the Crusades, with both of them using references to medieval chivalry. Both have resorted to catastrophic violence on behalf of transnational entities: the Ummah or "community" of all Muslims in the case of al-Qaeda, and "Europe" in the case of Breivik. Both frame their struggle as wars of survival, with the emphasis placed on defending a religiously-based culture rather than a distinctive nationality or ethnicity. Both hate their respective governments for "collaborating" with the outside enemy. Both use the language of martyrdom. Where Islamists refer to suicide bombings as "martyrdom operations" Breivik refers to an individual "martyr cell" in anticipation of his attack on defenseless youngsters. Both, as Hegghammer notes, lament the erosion of patriarchy and the emancipation of women.

Just as al-Qaeda represents an extreme, activist variant of political views held by a much wider constituency of Muslim radicals, most of whom would never consider crossing the boundary between thinking and action, so Breivik (judging from his manifesto) holds a broad range of positions common to what might be called the "counter-jihadist" or "paranoid right." This is represented -- among others -- by Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller in the US, the controversial Dutch legislator Geert Wilders, and Bat Ye'or and Melanie Phillips in Britain. All these writers -- most of whom have denounced the Utoya massacre in the most unequivocal terms -- subscribe to variants of the thesis that Europe is sleepwalking into cultural disaster or (in the case of Phillips) enabling Islamist terrorists to gain a foothold.

I disagree with Ruthven's designation of most of these "counter-jihadists" as the "paranoid right," though I find Geller so emotionally over the top that I can't bring myself to read her writings, and I find Ye'or interesting but bordering on a conspiracy-theory interpretation in her Eurabia history. As for Spencer, he is full of information, but consistently sarcastic -- not my style, though I do read him. I also regularly read a site unmentioned by Ruthven, Gates of Vienna. The couple who maintain this blog are more to the right than I am, but they're refreshingly honest, even in acknowledging the parallels between Breivik's views and their own, minus the violence:

In fact, that's one of the disturbing things about Anders Breivik -- when simply voicing his opinions, he sounded a lot like normal, non-violent people who oppose the Islamization of the West. And this is not all that surprising, given that he plagiarized quite a number of us for his manifesto, but it's still disconcerting to read about it.

I could acknowledge some of the same things. Breivik shares a lot of ideas in common with things that I've written about on this blog, excepting the advocacy of violence against Muslims and the nondistinction between Islam and Islamism. My opposition to radical Islamists is partly grounded in my views on the evil of terrorism, especially its killing of innocent people. I also maintain a distinction between Islam and Islamism, the latter being the political use of Islam, though I acknowledge that the line distinguishing the two is not easy to draw.

But to return to Breivik . . . in my view, he is both sane and rational, and therefore to be judged in moral terms as evil, just as Osama Bin Ladin was evil, for the shooting of dozens of young people on the island of Utoya and the use of passenger planes to kill nearly 3000 innocent civilians in the World Trade Center were both evil acts.

I think that most of us should be able to agree upon this.

Anders Behring Breivik: Rightwing Christian Terrorist?

Anders Behring Breivik

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Marmot's Hole blog had a discussion going on as to whether or not Anders Behring Breivik, the Norway shooter, was an insane spree killer or a rightwing terrorist. My initial assumption was that he was a crazed killer, but I soon began to re-evaluate that, and noted why in a comment:

He might be insane, but the sole reason that I would have for thinking so would be that he did something most of us would think is crazy.

But so did the Unabomber, the Oklahoma Bomber, and the 9/11 terrorists. They all did things that I would at first judge as crazy. But I don't think any of them were insane.

What currently makes me lean toward judging this recent killer sane is that he spent nearly ten years planning this atrocity and that he has written a manifesto to explain his actions. The ideas come from the right, the violence from the extreme right. I'm pretty sure of this because I've been reading since 9/11 on Islamism, the Left, and the Right in an attempt to get a handle on what's happening and where we're headed, and I recognize many of his expressions.

I suppose that he could be a political terrorist and insane, but "evil" [rather than "insane"] might be a better designation.

We'll see for sure as we learn more from his writings.

After posting that comment, I learned a bit more, so I posted another comment:

Time Magazine has a short article on the motives of Anders Behring Breivik. Two terrorism experts are cited concerning Breivik's manifesto: 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College calls the manifesto "a complete mirroring of al-Qaeda, a cut-and-paste image of a jihadist manifesto."

Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism expert at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, agrees: "The document mirrors al-Qaeda ideology in a few important ways. The principal aim is to expel Muslims from Europe, just as al-Qaeda wants to expel Westerners from the holy lands."

I've read articles by Ranstorp and Hegghammer, and I've always found them levelheaded on terrorism.

None of this would mean that Breivik suffers no psychological problems. He might indeed have problems, but these wouldn't necessarily preclude his being a terrorist. Mohamed Atta had weird views about sexual purity, but that doesn't exclude him from the ranks of terrorist.

Breivik is quoted elsewhere as saying that killing too many is better than killing too few. He chose his target with the aim of generating as much horror as possible, much as the 9/11 terrorist chose their target and method.

From what I've seen of Breivik's writings by now, I don't see how I can do other than conclude that he draws upon the right, including the extreme right, for his political ideology. But he's wrong to believe that his action will galvanize the right in the way that 9/11 galvanized Islamists.

Most of those on the right whom he cited in his manifesto have expressed revulsion at what he did. He'll find little support for political violence except among the extreme right, i.e., people like him.

I'm still waiting for easy access to Breivik's manifesto. I won't have time to read all 1500 pages, but if I can search for key words, I know what to look for. Breivik has been called a "Christian Fundamentalist." I don't think he's quite that, but the question of his connection to Christianity does arise. Here's a quote, courtesy of Time Magazine, from his interview with himself:

Around 2000, I realized that the democratic struggle against the Islamization of Europe, and European multiculturalism, was lost. It is simply not possible to compete with democratic regimes that import millions of voters. Forty years of dialogue with the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists had ended up as a disaster. It would now only take 50 to 70 years before we, Europeans, were the minority. So I decided to explore alternative forms of opposition. But the biggest problem then was that there were no options for me at all. There was no known armed culturally conservative, or Christian, anti-jihad movement.

Note that Breivik's wording uses "Christian" and "culturally conservative" interchangeably. This doesn't sound like personal Christian piety, but rather an identification with Europe's Christian identity, focused on a time when European Christians were fighting holy wars against Islam, the time of the Crusades. In the Time Magazine article "Killer's Manifesto: The Politics Behind the Norway Slaughter" (July 24, 2011), William Boston tells us more about Breivik's fascination with the Crusades:

The secret society Breivik describes aims to re-create the Knights Templar. Known by their trademark white mantles bearing a red cross, the Knights Templar were skilled fighters during the Crusades who wielded enormous political and economic influence during the Middle Ages. Breivik wrote that there was a secret meeting in London in April 2002 to rebuild the order and that nine people representing eight European countries attended.

Breivik's Christianity looks to be militant and political, not especially pious, but there is this, one of the recent entries in his journal, courtesy of The Telegraph, from the article "Norway shooting: Anders Breivik's diary of terror":

Saturday June 11 I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.

This isn't the manner in which pious Christians usually pray to God -- pious Christians don't presume to explain things to an omniscient God -- and Breivik admits that he hasn't prayed "in a very long time," but he sounds sincere. Six weeks later, he bombed Norway's Labor Party government in Oslo and shot dozens of the Labor Party's youth on Utøya Island. Some might wonder why Breivik didn't target Muslims if his aim was to expel Islam from Europe. I think that I can answer that question. Many on the right have noted the far Left's alliance of convenience with Islamism, but some have gone further and denounced the entire Left as composed of traitors to European civilization. The step from calling Leftists traitors to the conclusion that they deserve execution is not a very large one since the traditional penalty for treason has been death. I've not seen bloggers themselves calling for death to Leftists (though I don't doubt that such bloggers exist), but I have occasionally encountered comments that come close to demanding such extreme measures.

Counterterrorism will need to take such folk more seriously from now on . . .

Mervyn F. Bendle on the Left, Islamism, and Religious Extremism

Quadrant Logo

Yesterday, I excerpted Mervyn F. Bendle's review of Robert R. Reilly's Closing of the Muslim Mind, and I'm now quite glad that I did, for I was introduced not only to Reilly's argument but also to a very interesting scholar in Bendle himself. He's apparently controversial in the Australian academic world because he expresses a rather vehement critique of the Left, as here, for example, when he takes on some Leftist treatments of terrorism:

[I]n 2006 I published two articles in the Australian ("Don't mention the terror", September 6; "Status quo defence fails", September 20) and another in On Line Opinion ("9/11: Treason in the Academic Comfort Zone?", September 11). These described the way in which the study of terrorism had either been ignored in Australia or had been colonised by the radical, postmodern Left, which was assimilating the study of terrorism to its prevailing ideological paradigm based on class, race, gender, anti-Americanism and cultural relativism, often under the guise of the neo-Marxist "critical terror studies" approach. My assessment was supported by two University of Queensland terrorism experts, Carl Ungerer and David Martin Jones ("Delusion reigns in terror studies", Australian, September 15, 2006). (Mervyn F. Bendle, "Hijacking Terrorism Studies," Quadrant Online, September 2008, Volume 52, Number 9)

Bendle goes on to offer an example of one 'expert' on terrorism who likens the July 2005 bombers to the Chartists, both groups having supposedly been similarly motivated by anger over a "democratic deficit" in Britain. According to this 'expert':

[There is] a parallel . . . for the four young men [that is, the Islamist terrorists] who ruthlessly attacked innocent London commuters in July 2005. The Chartist years were not that long ago. (Bendle, "Hijacking," Quadrant)

Concerning this sort of equivocating equivalency, Bendle angrily points out:

This is ridiculous: the Islamists who carried out the July 2005 bombings were not seeking political reform like the Chartists. In fact, Islamists are not seeking to extend democratic rights but rather to extinguish them. They adhere to an anti-democratic, violent, intolerant, exclusionary, xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and ultra-repressive political ideology that seeks to create a theocratic state akin to that imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and ultimately a "new Caliphate" stretching from Spain to Indonesia. (Bendle, "Hijacking," Quadrant)

Bendle is right about what such Islamists believe in and strive for, particularly those drawn to terrorism, yet the substance of Islamist ideology is often dismissed by the Left in favor of attention to "root causes" that shift blame to the West. I wouldn't tar all Leftists with the same brush, of course, for there are also scholars like Paul Berman on the Left, but Bendle is largely correct on this point.

From what I can gather, so far anyway, Bendle seems to be a solid scholar. Take a look at his fascinating article on "The Apocalyptic Imagination and Popular Culture," Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Fall 2005, Volume 11, which analyzes the apocalyptic mentality pervasive among the Christian Right in America, some of it very far on the radical Christian Right, and the ways in which it overlaps with more secular forms of apocalyptic visions on the Right (as well as with American popular culture more generally). Bendle specifically notes such writings as the explicitly religious, evangelical Left Behind eschatological series and the rather more secular, albeit ultimately theistic, dystopian Turner Diaries, which happens to be virulently racist and ideologically antisemitic as well. Here's a sample paragraph from Bendle's "Introduction":

As this paper will show, the twentieth century saw a crucial shift within the apocalyptic tradition, from what might be called a Promethean to an Augustinian view of human nature and history, i.e., from a belief in human self-determination to a conviction of human sinfulness and weakness. In secular terms this was a shift from a utopian to a dystopian vision, from humanism to anti-humanism, from progressivism to conservatism. It involved a move away from a basically optimistic outlook that complemented secular faith in human progress based on reason, science, technology and social amelioration, towards a far more pessimistic view that distrusts these values, and instead sees the near future in terms of social disintegration, violence, war and ultimate catastrophe, before a final deliverance brought by divine power . . . . It is this dark vision that now shapes the contemporary apocalyptic imagination in both its religious and secular forms. (Bendle, "Apocalyptic Imagination," Journal of Religion and Popular Culture)

Bendle can therefore not easily be construed as merely some rightwing ideologue. He's broader and more interesting than that, so far as I can tell from reading a few of his articles.

I may look further . . .