Controversies: August 2006 Archives

From Power Line:

The bottom line is, Hezbollah went the distance and was still standing--firing rockets--at the end. It emerges with its stature enhanced.

That's an understatement -- Hezbollah has just won its brief war with Israel. To the Arab mind, if a challenger tries to displace the ruler, and the ruler remains in power, the ruler is the winner. That's why Saddam claimed to be the winner in the first Gulf War, because he remained president of Iraq even though his military forces were demolished. In turn, the challenger might gain in status if he lives to fight another day, but if he is utterly defeated, he is despised and forgotten.

By that logic, Hezbollah was the power in southern Lebanon, and Israel tried to displace it. Hezbollah is still in power, ergo they won. As the challenger, Israel is now despised because it is seen as the greater power in the region -- yet it did not use its full force to defeat Hezbollah. Now other Arab (and Persian) rulers will seek to take advantage of this victory.

You think this is "ethnic stereotyping"? I tell you that this description can be confirmed by anyone who has studied Middle Eastern politics without ideological blinders. Displays of compassion or restraint are interpreted as weakness. Shows of strength, even when they are untethered to anything resembling morality, are always respected even coming from hated enemies.

The State of Israel has known this since its inception, and has chosen its tactics accordingly. That explains why in the Palestinian areas under its control, Israel has chosen to treat the Palestinians with high-handed disdain, giving them daily, visible reminders of their material inferiority and powerlessness. This fuels the nihilistic rage of the Palestinians, who strike back with increasing desperation; from this shame, suicide bombers are born.

Looking at it from the other side, though, what choice does Israel have? "Treat the Palestinians with love and respect," you reply. That will only invite more attacks, as when the odious murderer Arafat launched a suicide-bombing campaign in 2000 after Israel offered 97% of the Palestinian territories in exchange for peace. In this decade, Israel evacuated southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and in return it got rockets launched against its population centers. What would happen if it gave up the Golan Heights and the West Bank? Likely it would get more of the same, and twice as bad.

I sympathize with the Israelis' plight, but ultimately, agreeing to this cease-fire does not mean "the fighting will stop." It will simply postpone the fighting until a later time, when Hezbollah has replenished its weapons and men, and is newly motivated to spill fresh Jewish blood. The State of Israel will have two choices: 1) suffer another defeat, and concede its eventual dissolution at the hands; or 2) respond with devastating force. This will almost certainly kill far more people tomorrow, innocent and otherwise, than defeating Hezbollah today.

That is what Michael Ledeen was getting at in his latest NRO column: "If we do not do the logical and sensible things, if we do not deploy the massive political weapons at our disposal, we will end by doing terrible things." Hitler could have been stopped when he invaded the Rhineland -- his generals agreed that if the French showed the slightest resistance, they would turn their troops around and depose the government. But France did nothing, and a war that could have been stopped with a few minor skirmishes ended with the wholesale destruction of entire cities.

False peace is the hallmark of our time, and our descendants will rightly despise us for believing in it -- assuming they will still teach history in their schools, along with memorizing the Koran.

Here are a couple of pictures of pro-terrorist demonstrators on Saturday, August 13, 2006. These lads were on their way to Lafayette Park, right across the street from the White House. I was eating a picnic lunch with my older three kids in front of the Reagan Building's fountain on 13th Street.

The sign is from International ANSWER, a communist front group that constantly organizes marches and demonstrations.

That's a Palestinian flag, as you probably know already. When the flag guy saw me snapping a picture, he asked if he could tell me why he was there.

"Oh, I know why you're here," I said. "You're here to defend the terrorists of Hezbollah."

"We are here to protest the illegal Israeli invasion of Lebanon...."

"Who started it?" I interrupted.

Flag guy looked startled for a moment, then continued. "The Israelis occupied Lebanon for 18 years...."

"Yeah, but they left six years ago. Who started firing the rockets?"

Not listening, he continued his rote speech. "They are killing civilians..."

"Who fired the rockets?"

"...acting as occupiers..."

"Who fired the rockets?"

"...illegal war..."

"You can't even answer a straight question," I said, getting more frustrated. "Why did the Israelis invade Lebanon?"

"Israel has been killing women and children in Lebanon...."

"No." Looking back to make sure my kids were still out of earshot, I replied, "They have been killing Hezbollah. And I hope they kill every single one of them. Every single one of those bastard terrorists."

Flag guy continued to spew the same lines he memorized on the trip from Detroit. (That's a guess, but his friend was wearing a Detroit Tigers cap.) I shook my head and walked back to the fountain, convinced that no meaningful dialogue was possible.

Later, I heard that the demonstration had attracted 30,000 people. That's a risible falsehood, unless the demonstration spilled over from Lafayette Park to the adjoining streets, or maybe the Ellipse. The park just isn't big enough. When I worked around the corner, my Web development team used to have meetings in the park when the weather was nice. (It wasn't a big team -- we only needed a couple of park benches.) You'd have to stack people like cordwood to get 30,000 protesters in there. Check out this satellite map to get an idea of the park's scale.

In my last entry, I made a (very brief) argument for referring to Islamist radicals as "Islamic fascists." Han, an astute commenter who has obviously thought through this issue, demurred: he thinks "Islamic fascism" is an attempt to cram their non-Western ideology into our own Western categories.

Below is a response to his objection -- not a refutation, because I don't think we disagree about the nature of Islam, or the threat that Islamic radicalism poses to the West. Han's words are in italics.

I define historical fascism as a theory of organising society premised on supreme authority invested in one leader,

Al Qaeda's avowed goal is to re-establish an Islamic caliph, ruling all Muslims around the world. Bin Laden probably saw himself in that role of supreme leader; we have to assume that it remains one of their objectives.

regulation of industry,

Point well taken: besides oil, the Muslim world (particularly the Arab part of it) has little industry worth mentioning. But presumably the economic sphere would not fall outside the caliph's authority.

a generous welfare programme,

Hamas and Hezbollah have extensive welfare infrastructures. To a lesser extent, Al Qaeda was known for its almsgiving until it was forced to keep a much lower profile.

cross-class solidarity based upon nationalism,

Islamic radicalism fits the bill here, too -- they just have a different idea of what constitutes a "nation." More on that in a bit.

and nationalisation/single party control of civic organisations.

Again, it's difficult to imagine that a caliph (or any Islamist religious authority) would consider civic organizations to fall outside his purview.

The universalist aspirations of the Islamists just doesn't fit the bill. They are not nationalists, and they seem generally unconcerned with the problems of industrial society that Fascism (along with Communism, Social Democracy, &c.) was attempting to solve.

Islamism is very much a reaction to modern industrial (and information-age) society. In part, it derives its legitimacy among the Muslim masses because it poses as the defender of traditional values and family structures, much as Mussolini and Hitler clothed their radical intentions in conservative garb.

Unlike the fascists, who believed in control of church by the state, the Islamists seem to believe in control of the state by the mosque.

I respectfully disagree with this statement, for the same reason that I believe the Islamists are nationalists. Their conception of national identity is based, not on blood, language, or soil, but solely on whether an individual accepts their interpretation of the Koran. They do not believe in "state sovereignty" because God alone is sovereign and does not delegate that authority to earthly powers, contrary to what St. Paul said about the role of the state as God's inperfect instrument of justice on earth.

Further, they make no distinction between "state" and "mosque" because the Koran makes no distinction between divine law and civil law. Jesus said that we owe ultimate allegiance to God, but we have temporal duties to the state as long as we are living. As Pryce-Jones points out, the Koran sanctions Islam and the family as the only two divinely-blessed institutions. There's no room for "civic institutions" such as unions, associations, corporations, etc. They might exist, but to a Muslim they have no real meaning or value in themselves, and they all must be ultimately subsumed by religious authorities or families.

...[W]e ought to accept the Islamists' claims that they represent true Islam....The left likes to imagine that despite what they say, the Islamists are really just doing some class struggle, and the right likes to imagine that it is fighting the Cold War again.

Correct on all counts. The secular Left is completely incapable of understanding radical Islam, because of its cramped and inadequate view of what human beings are. The Right would like to recast Islamism as Marxism because 1) it was a recent enemy and the public remembers it; 2) right-wingers are sensitive to the charge that they are trying to start a "religious war"; and 3) we eventually beat the commies, so it's comforting to think that by applying similar strategies, we can beat the Islamists.

As to whether the Islamic radicals represent "true Islam," Han may well be correct to agree with them. We might be disagreeing about nothing more than ideological forensics: he thinks the tendencies which I describe as "fascist" are intrinsic to Islam, and contain no imported ideas because they were there from the beginning. I think the tendencies were there from the start, but they were mixed with Western fascist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, making the nasty brew that has wreaked its vile mayhem around the world.

Ultimately, we do agree on one thing, unless I'm misreading Han -- that Islamic radicalism, by whatever name, is a totalizing movement that represents an existential threat to the West.

You know, if Mel became a Muslim, Hollywood would probably be fine with his alleged anti-semitism.