The real “metastasized anti-Semitism”
Daisy Kahn, one of the developers of the 9/11 mosque, had this to say in an interview yesterday:
Khan said she believed the project would be built.
“Of course, it has to go ahead,” she said. “There’s so much at stake.”
Asked if America was “Islamophobic,” Khan responded that it’s like “metastasized anti-Semitism.”
“It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia ”” it’s hate of Muslims,” she said. “And we are deeply concerned.”
That’s an interesting phrase I’ve never heard before—“metastasized anti-Semitism.” A metastasis is, of course, the spread of a cancer from one part of the body (the primary cancer site) to another (secondary) site. The hallmark of a metastasis is that, in the new site, the cancer cells histologically resemble those at the old site and are identifiable as such.
Arabic and Hebrew are both part of the linguistic group known as Semitic, so if the term “Semite” is used in the linguistic sense, it refers to both groups. But the word “anti-Semitism” refers solely to anti-Jewish beliefs and actions, and always has:
It was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, “The Victory of Germandom over Jewry”. Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the “League for Anti-Semitism”.
This has not usually stopped Muslim Arabs and their liberal/left defenders in recent years from playing a form of anti-Semitic victimhood as their trump card, as Kahn has done. In fact, even on this blog, when the term “anti-Semitism” is mentioned I often draw visitors who comment that, since Arabs are Semites themselves, they therefore cannot be called anti-Semitic.
But of course they can, when they exhibit vicious hatred of Jews as a group, rather than mere disapproval of Israel’s policies. And, curiously enough, if you’re looking for a good fit, the term “metastasized anti-Semitism” can best be applied to anti-Jewish hatred in the Muslim Arab world.
In fact, there’s an entire scholarly book about it, written by Bernard Lewis and entitled Semites and Anti-Semites. If anti-Semitism is a German phrase coined by a German spreading anti-Jewish sentiment, and anti-Semitism reached its zenith (so far, anyway) as practiced by the Nazis before and during World War II, then its true metastasis, its direct spread from the original site to a more distant one, occurred between Nazi Germany and Arab Muslim nations during that time:
[Lewis] argues that the role of Jews in the classical Islamic world was noteworthy mainly for its unimportance.
Anti-Semitism entered Moslem culture only with the growth of European influence in the Middle East, a process that began 150 years ago. Along with guns, medicine-and the opera, the Moslems imported anti-Semitism, and it flourished. Perhaps the most startling part of Semites and Anti-Semites (Norton, 283 pages, $18.95) is the chapter that demonstrates the widespread admiration in the Middle East for Hitler and the Nazis. The Palestinian leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met Hitler in Berlin in 1941 and later joined the Nazi effort; Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser turned into a major haven for Nazis; and Anwar Sadat worked closely with German agents during World War II. This admiration remains alive: As recently as 1982, the newspaper of Egypt’s Liberal Party referred to Hitler as “that great man.”
But it was the Arab armies’ frequent military defeats at the hands of Israel that created the real need for anti-Semitism. Seeking a way to explain the Jews’ unexpected success, many Arabs turned to the great body of anti-Semitic literature developed in Europe for just such purposes. The results have been spectacular: Israelis and Jews everywhere have become satanic figures in the Arabic media. These are not fringe writings, either; as Mr. Lewis observes, “Classical anti-Semitism is an essential part of Arab intellectual life at the present time-almost as much as happened in Nazi Germany.” In 1970, emotions reached such a pitch that one of the world’s most outstandingly anti-Semitic tracts, a document forged by the czars’ secret police in the 1890s and titled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, turned up on the best-seller list in Lebanon.
The standard themes of European anti-Semitism first appeared in Iraq and Egypt, then became prominent in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran. As a group, these countries “have become the main center of international anti-Semitism, from which anti-Semitic literature and other propaganda is distributed all over the world.” Just as the scourge of anti-Semitism died out in its European homeland, ironically, it was reborn in the Middle East.
The book review I just quoted was written in 1986. Since then, unfortunately, we’ve learned that reports of the death of anti-Semitism in Europe have been greatly exaggerated; although, fortunately, Nazism as a mass movement seems to be no more. And it is ironic indeed that the torch of anti-Semitism has been successfully passed from the dying Nazi movement to Arab and Muslim lands, where it has flourished—and, yes, metastasized.
My opinion of “Vlad the Impaler” has changed drastically in the last 20 years. Much like my opinion of Cortez.
“…since Arabs are Semites themselves, they therefore cannot be called anti-Semitic. ”
Reminds me rather of fifth graders, who triumphantly tell you that there are only four fingers on your hand because one of them is a thumb.
With liberals, often intimidated by academic-sounding arguments, I usually say that Semitic as a language family is not a concept that carries over into ethnic descriptions, noting those speaking Indo-European languages (that would be us, most Europeans, South America, Australia, India, Iran…) vary greatly in race and culture.
ck – Agreed. Vlad Dracul remains a hero to Romanians. He was held hostage in Turkey as a young prince and learned the methods of bloody intimidation from them. Putting 30,000 heads on pikes was normal warfare east of Romania, but seems shocking to Western Europeans. It worked, for awhile, against the Turks.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing likewise. The Holocaust was new to Europe, and so seems to us like an unprecedented evil. No, it was just normal Asian tactics erupting into Europe. They have mass slaughter of entire populations a few times a century if you start your recording at Ukraine & Belarus and further east – all the way to the Pacific, actually.
Robert Kaplan draws sharp cultural lines where Protestant/Catholic Europe switches to Orthodox, and Orthodox to Muslim. The corruption and tyranny rachet up far at both lines.
Daisy Khan is not simply “one of the developers of the 9/11 mosque”; she’s the wife of the mosque’s leader, Imam Feisal Rauf! Was this not even mentioned on This Week with Christiane Amanpour?
Thank you for expounding that, that makes a lot of sense. I’m sure you know this by now but I have a lebanese-armenian parent and in a lot of ways I am still trying to autopsy my own childhood to make it make sense. This kind of helps make some connections.
I have mentioned here before about the “victimhood” culture of the armenians which kind of drives me nuts but it appears to me that victimhood is a part of every ME culture – like ethnic Lebanese, as well as Jews, Arabs, Greeks, etc.
The point about anti-semitism metastasizing after WWII actually makes a lot of sense too. Here is the narrative about the ME that I was taught from the cradle (later tossed it):
“Jews and Palestinians lived in peace in Palestine until in 1948 the evil Jews of Europe and Russia moved in and kicked out the poor innocent Palestinians. They wrecked their homes and livelihoods and now the poor things are stuck in refugee camps until all the Jews leave. Therefore all Jews everywhere are evil and are taking over the world and will arrest us for anti-semitism if they find out we think like this.” They call it “occupied palestine” among other ridiculousness.
It seems like that fits the timeline of the situation pretty well. The older literature of 1950’s lebanon definitely shows a place that was much less hateful than now.
One of the leftists’ more infuriating habits is to characterize opposition to repugnant people/ behaviors as a “phobia.”
Am I afraid of Muslims? No. But people stone to death 13-year old rape victims need to be killed. All of them. (The Pokemon directive – got get ’em all.) Along with their apologists.
what about the whole “rocks crying out there is a jew behind me” thing? I dont think the NAZI’s started that! Was it in one of the the Hadiths or the Koran? Or that third level of books?
Well said, Occam’s Beard.
The one reassuring aspect of this recent controversy, as well as the AZ immigration law, CA Prop 8, and criticism of Obama’s policies, is that we’ve finally reached a point where simply pointing and yelling “Racist!”, “Homophobe!”, “Jingoistic bigot!”, or “Islamophobe” is no longer effective.
I watch shows like Morning Joe and I’m amazed at how unwilling they are to acknowledge any valid source for disagreement w/them (the typical liberal line). And they’re quite frustrated that they can no longer drive the narrative, that they can no longer silence dissent with name-calling.
jon baker: there are some passages in the Koran that seem to respect Jews, and others that seem to be anti-Semitic. But despite those latter passages (one of which you have referred to), virulent anti-Semitism was not commonplace in the Muslim Arab world until right before the World War II era and afterward. That is what Lewis’s book describes.
Der Spiegel is back to its favorite pastime: analyzing America’s pathologies–this time, islamophobia. Today’s well-researched article describes Pam Geller’s eye shadow, but doesn’t mention the significance of Cordoba, the fact that the building involved was hit by the landing gear of an attacking plane, or the mysterious funding. Naturally, it also praises Obama for reminding us of our values.
I am totally with Occam’s first sentence. In fact, I consider it a mark of my lack of bigotry that race, religion, and ethnicity play no part in my deciding that someone is repugnant. Even if Rauf were moderate (newer evidence makes this seem unlikely), his inability to understand the reactions to his mosque certainly indicates that he is too stupid to be a builder of bridges. You would think self-respecting Muslims would be ashamed of him.
That Germans, of all people, can talk about other people’s pathologies is proof positive that God does not exist, especially with lightning being so cheap.
Religious freedom is not absolute. We did not and would not (even today) tolerate the Aztec religion. How does human sacrifice by the Aztecs differ fundamentally from stoning rape victims to death by Muslims? If anything, that’s even worse. At least the human sacrifices were prisoners of war, and had had a chance to defend themselves, albeit unsuccessfully. Thirteen year-old girls, not so much.
Unimportant factoid; Marr eventually denounced his own anti-Semitic thinking.
I would like to first mention that Ms. Daisy Khan is conflating “anti-semite” and “anti-Islam”, as if Islam and Arab are the same thing.
Second, I would like to express my appreciation for the history lesson, and I don’t doubt that it is largely true.
But it doesn’t seem to wash with some of the more infamous lines found in the Qur’an.
I’m not completely convinced that anti-Semitism is entirely a European import.
Anna, I would recommend Robert Kaplan’s books, but there is always a caution in reading about how people in a region think and relating it to how their American versions think. The Americans are the ones that did leave those places, however much they might retain some of the installed narratives. Perhaps it is a way of feeling connected to one’s roots. I’ve worked with Boston Irish who still distrust “Protestants,” for events two centuries ago, even though there’s quite a variety of Protestants here. But it doesn’t seem to affect how they dealt with Protestants they’d worked with here.
My mom and pop were both Shiite Persian Muslims. When I was a child I partook in an all too familiar annual religious ritual during which an effigy of Omar, who was a revered Sunni’s martyr but was much hated by Persian Shiites, would be fashioned out of sticks and cloth, then all the faithful would gather, curse it, spit on it, then set it on fire and watch it burn in a great celebratory hooting and hollering. Sunnis had their own anti-Shiite rituals.This kind of bizarre Muhammadan behavior was the norm in all Islamic territories until European colonialists brought modern ideas into Islamistan. Every single Islamic county except two were colonized by European kuffar and thanks to these colonialists, the inter-Islamic savagery came to a merciful end.Today in a post colonial period, with abundance of Petrodollars and independence from Europe(and Russia), both Shiites and Sunnis are hard at work rekindling the inter-Islamic antagonism that was mostly forgotten during the past two centuries of colonial rule.
I say to Imam Faisal Abdel Rauf-a Sunni Muslim no doubt-to start building bridges between the two hostile Muslim sects first, starting,for example, from Gilgit-Balistan, and then worry about building bridges between the great Satan and Muslims. As it stands now the good imam, his wife and all contributors are hard at works promoting Sunni Islam much to the chagrin of Shiite Islam.I got bad news for the good Imam: sooner or later the American infidel, and/or the “Zionist International Conspiracy” will find it expedient to rile one willing Muslim sect against another equally willing Muslim sect and regrettably watch the surrealistic savagery that ensues.
They do what they do because we have been declawed, no longer able to even protect ourselves from made movements, all this is just fighting over whats left of the carcass.
Der Speigel would be well-advised to go to a “Nazi Babe of the Month” format and leave critical thinking and analysis to others.
Max Rose, does no one wear the ‘white hat’ in your world view? I mean other than the “colonialists”?
sarcasm? nuance? sorry.
“…virulent anti-Semitism was not commonplace in the Muslim Arab world until right before the World War II era.”
I don’t have time tonite to extensively debate that, but starting with the 1929 Hebron massacre might be a good place to start Neo:
http://www.hebron.com/english/articles.php?cat_id=102
Perfected Democrat: there is nothing to debate; we are essentially in agreement. I am taking the long view of history, and am including the 20s as being part of the pre-WWII period. The Hebron riots were apparently organized by the major figure for German/Nazi influence in the Arab world both before and during WWII, the Grand Mufti al-Husayni.
Husayni had fought as an officer with the Ottomans, allied with the Germans, during WWI. The ties between the Arabists of the 20s, of which al-Husayni was probably the most prominent, and the Germans and up-coming Nazis, were strong.
But prior to al-Husayni’s influence in the 20s, when Arab anti-Semitism really got going, massacres and murderous hatred were the exception rather than the rule in Arab lands. The rule was a more petty form of persecution (dhimmitude).
Hajj Amin al-Husseini also had the distinction of raising a Waffen SS volunteer division, the 13th Mountain Division “Handschar”, which was staffed overwhelmingly by Muslims from Croatia (a few Croatian Catholics rounded it out). It also fought in the Balkans, mostly in counterguerrilla operations against both the Serb Chetniks and Tito’s communists. Once again, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shows his true colors — SS black mixed with Muslim green.
I admit it: I hate islam. islam is a gutter ‘religion’, of no use to Western Societies and with no place in Western societies. For me, islam is an evil totalitarian political ideology no different from national socialism or communism. It just has the fictional cover of religion about it to soothe the unknowing masses.
I think this taqqiya-spouting imam and his wife are my enemies. Period.
They want to build bridges? I’ll settle for them building a short pier on which they can both take long walks, well, maybe one long walk – provided the water is properly chummed first.
Islam is an evil totalitarian ideology. There is nothing in Islam that is moral. It teaches its followers to destroy non-conformers.
If someone here can tell me one good thing about Islam, I’d like to read it.
BTW the injunction to give charity applies only to Muslims giving charity to other Muslims. Islam doesn’t even support the giving of charity to the nonbeliever.
When I was a child I partook in an all too familiar annual religious ritual during which an effigy of Omar, who was a revered Sunni’s martyr but was much hated by Persian Shiites, would be fashioned out of sticks and cloth, then all the faithful would gather, curse it, spit on it, then set it on fire and watch it burn in a great celebratory hooting and hollering. Sunnis had their own anti-Shiite rituals.This kind of bizarre Muhammadan behavior was the norm in all Islamic territories until European colonialists brought modern ideas into Islamistan.
LOL Sounds just like ‘Bonfire Night’ here in England. Just substitute Guy Fawkes for Omar. Oh, and definitely no spitting!
Hi Neo, “debate” might not be the correct word to use… However, I read into that particular comment the intimation that muslim rule was relatively benign; while perhaps a definition of degree, I see muslim rule as not unlike historical European-Christian culture in the context that both could be relatively benign for maybe “somewhat” significant periods, but then explode in spates of horrendous pogroms or mass murder, while the racist like undertone (dhimmitude in the case of the muslims) always simmered under the surface; perhaps a nuance of, debate?
on Aug 24…
1349 / 6,000 Jews, blamed for the Plague, are killed in Mainz
1391 Jews of Palma Majorca massacred
1572 King Charles IX orders massacre of thousands of French Protestants [hint: St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre]
1662 Act of Uniformity requires English to accept book of Common Prayer
1814 British forces captured Washington, D.C., and burned down many landmarks
1821: Mexico gained its independence from Spain with the Treaty of Cordoba. [timely, no?]
1858 Richmond “Daily Dispatch” reports 90 blacks arrested for learning
1876 Riot abolishes fairs in Amsterdam, 2 killed [anyone care to let us know what they were rioting over?]
1904 Field battle at Liao-Yang-200,000 Japanese against 150,000 Russian
1914 German troops occupy Namur Belgium
1929 Palestinians attack orthodox Jews in Jerusalem
1931 France and U.S.S.R. sign neutrality/no attack treaty [yesterday was the anniversary of hitler stalin pact]
1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt gives FBI authority to pursuit fascists and communists [but not his friends i guess]
1939 Germany and U.S.S.R. sign 10-year non-aggression pact [notice france was first]
1942 Transport nr 23 departs with French Jews to nazi-Germany [interesting what pact signers did, no?]
1944 General LeClercs troops open assault on Paris
1950 Operation Magic Carpet concludes transporting 45,000 Yemenite Jews
1954 Eisenhower signs Communist Control Act, outlawing the Communist Party
1961 Former nazi leader Johannes Vorster becomes South Africa’s minister of justice (if the shoe fits…)
1970 Bomb kills 1 at University of Wisconsin’s Army Math Research Center in Madison
1981 Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life for Lennon’s murder
Pliny the elder died today…
Vesuvius erupts, making lots of freaky statues…
and the right very honorable Wilberforce was born today.. who is he? well, if you dont know who helped stop slavery, then what do you know?
today Archibald Loughry died in an indian massacre detailed by roosevelt in his history…
In the year the 1781 the Indians of the area were causing much trouble and a need for a militia was recognized so the important men of the area met at John Proctor house who was a neighbor of Archibald Lochry. They issued a proclamation under the authority of George Washington and an Army was formed Archibald was promoted to Colonel. He was told to form an army and to meet General Clark who was to lead the expedition west to find the warring Indians. Lochry was able to raise about 50 men and pick-up more on his was to met Clark. To make a very long story short Archibald was killed on the expedition. He was killed near what is now Miami Ohio on a island. Some of the deserting troops of General Clarks forces joined up with the Indians and help kill almost all of Lochry Army.
and so much other stuff…
http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/storm-knocks-down-tree-that-cheered-anne-frank-21547176
Storm knocks down tree that cheered Anne Frank
Artfldgr: If you compare that record of violence against Jews by Muslim Arabs for the many centuries prior to the 1920s to violence against Jews in Europe during the same time, you’ll see that for the most part the former compares favorably (less frequent and for the most part less severe).
After WWII Europe become largely Jundenfrei, courtesy of the Nazis. And Arab lands became Judenfrei as well, although the latter occurred mostly through postwar, post-Israel, emigration from those countries. The effect, however, is the same: in both cases, areas in which Jews had lived for thousands of years became nearly entirely free of them, and the Jewish population of the world now clusters predominantly in two places: Israel and the US.
Promethea: I’ll take you up on that.
There are contradictory messages in Islam; parts of the Koran are tolerant and parts are not. If Muslims would jettison the latter and follow the former, we’d have much less of a problem. That’s what people mean when they call for reform in Islam. But it hasn’t happened, and that’s the real problem. If anything, the trend has been the opposite.
Neo–the Qura’n is laid out (except for the first verse) by length of each sura–shortest to longest–and not by chronology orby subject. But, if you look at it chronologically, which is how Muslim religious experts look at it, it falls into two parts–the early verses that were “received” by Muhammad in the beginning of his prophetic career when he lived in Mecca, and the later verses, that Muhammad received after he and his followers had fled to Medina (the Hajj).
Muslim religious scholars interpret the Qur’an using the key technique of “naskh” or abrogation, which is that the earlier, more peaceful verses are abrogated, nullified, superseded, and canceled by the later, much more militant, violent and xenophobic verses ,and the last “received” verse in the Qur’an. is verse 9, the “Sura of the Sword” i.e. which contains the command from Allah to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them,” which verse alone Muslim scholars say abrogates more than 120 prior more pacific verses; facts that Muslms and their apologists do not like to share with us “unbelievers”
Another way Muslims look at the chronological progression in the violence of these suras is that in the beginning of his prophetic career, when Muhammad was initially trying to gather adherents adn Islam was very vulnerable, he needed for his new religoin to appear innocuous so as not to atttract the hostility of the existing Christian, Jewish and Pagan communities in Mecca, so these early, initial verses stressed peace, accomodation and harmony, then there was a middle period in which the verses now counseled a more aggressive self-defence and, finally, in the later Medinan verses when Islam was secure and growing , these verses counseled aggreeeive attack against all unbelievers and terrorism, warfare and slaughter.
In this contect, of interest today is this video of the president’s top “terrorism Advisor” John Brennan–who is OK with not even using the term “Jihadist,” storming out of a conference room at the Washington Times in response to a question by a Times reporter as to whether, in history, there had ever been an armed Jihadist attack (http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/.
Wolla Dalbo: yes, I’m aware of the chronology and the fact that the later, more truculent hadiths trump the former. The point I was trying to make was that the earlier ones are still in the Koran, and if there were to be a reform of Islam, it would have to rely on those, and abrogate the idea that the later ones are controlling.
In my earlier comment addressed to Promethea, I was attempting to respond to her comment where she said:
There are plenty of things in Islam that are moral. The problem is whether they are predominating in the religion and its practice today and in the future.
RE: Abrogation
I think the problem is what we’re looking for isn’t moderate Muslims, it’s Muslim reformers, which are a far smaller and much harder to find group.
Neo–Above you said that you don’t agree with Promethea’s wholesale condemnation of Islam, and that “…there are plenty of things in Islam that are moral.”
Really.
Having just spent the last several years delving into all things Islamic and Muslim–both ancient and modern, and that whole repugnant, bleak, alternative universe, and coming up empty handed as far as “moral things” within and about Islam are concerned, especially things that are “moral” in actual practice, I’d like to see what “moral” things about Islam you have found to put on your list, and how–for the purposes of your reading and analyzing the Qura’n, the Hadiths and the Sira, and looking at the morality they teach, and the morality demonstrated in the contemporary Umma–you define what is “moral” and good within Islam.
And please don’t say that it is how Muslim children love their mothers and mothers love their children, for then I will have to produce the example of the current day “culture of death” practiced most especially well by the Palestinians, and many of their mothers and children (http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/all-mothers-should-sacrifice-their-children-for-palestine/) .
Wolla Dalbo: did you see my comment at 5:26 addressed to you?
Neo–yes I did, but you really didn’t answer my question about what specifically were the “moral things” in Islam as it is practiced today.
Moreover, while you hope for some way that the milder Meccan verses can be seen by Muslims as controlling, and the violent verses received at Medina can be dropped, you are aware, I take it, that the leaders of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence agreed in the 10th century A.D. that all discussion and questions concerning the doctrines and content of Islam were settled and that no further discussion or revision of its tenets were necessary or possible, which state is what is meant by the phrase, “The Gates of Ijtahad Are Closed.”
I note that some commenters have argued that Islam has, indeed, already had its “Reformation,” in the sense of “going back to the original formulation,” “to the founder, the root out of which a movement grew,” and that “root” would be Muhammad and his life and sayings and deeds, and the very first years of Islam, as laid out in the Qur’an, the Hadiths and the Sira–a world-view, actions and deeds which exemplifies and grew out of the extremely violent, pagan, honor-based tribal culture of the 7th century Saudi Arabian Peninsula, and the result of this 20th century “Reformation” (when fueled by unlimited trillions of dollars in unearned oil income) is the reanimated Islam and its Jihad that has renewed its ancient assault on all us “unbelievers” in the World and in the West.
The key figure in this 20th century “Reformation” was Hassan al-Banna (grandfather of today’s Islamic “activist” Tariq Ramadan), who founded the Muslim Brotherhood (El-Ikhwan al-Muslemeen) in 1928. al-Banna thought that Islam had been lead astray, diluted and weakened by the adoption of Western notions and practices, and that this was the reason that the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate had failed and disappeared, and an innervated Islam was at the mercy of colonialist powers, and al-Banna wanted to bring Islam back to its original, core beliefs, and for the Ikhwan to bring about the establishment of a world-wide Caliphate. It is the Ikhwan out of which sprang today’s Muslim terrorist organizations–like Hamas, and it serves as an inspiration for others like Al-Qaeda, as well as having established a myriad of stealthy Ikhwan front groups to pursue its goals. According to the list of unindicted co-conspirators from the recent Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial, these Ikhwan established/influenced front groups in the U.S. include the prominent Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a “student organization” that has chapters on many, perhaps most major college campuses in the U.S. As entered into the record by Justice Department lawyers–uncontested as to its source or contents–at the Holy Land terrorism funding trial, the Ikhwan’s strategic plan for America, dated 1991, included this key summary:
“The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions.”
Another major Muslim ideologue, writer and preacher driving this “Reformation” was Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Ikhwan who spent 1948 in the U.S. as an exchange student, who traveled around, and who was disgusted, horrified and revolted by just about every aspect of free and democratic American “unbeliever” civilization that he encountered.
It was, apparently, a church sponsored dance he attended in Greely, Colorado in 1948 that “pushed Qutb over the edge” because (this was 1948 remember, and I am willing to bet this was a pretty sedate and decorous church dance, not the “roaring twenties,” flappers included, with a hip flask of Gin in their stockings, nor today’s “Girls Gone Wild,” flashing their boobs, or deafening music and aggressive rhythms, nor was there “dirty dancing, ” a “mosh pit, ” excessive drinking or drugs, the odd full term baby delivered into a toilet at the high school prom, or drugged out rockers dropping their drawers and mooning the audience, or pissing or throwing up on them), as the minister put on a record of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” shooed the wallflowers out onto the floor, and “Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion,” for it was then that the observing Qutb realized that America and its culture and society were the embodiment of “demonic licentiousness and sinful hubris.” Apparently Qutb’s writings form the basis of the Ikhwan’s preaching, and call for the destruction of the West’s unbeliever “House of War,” and of the United States in particular, and the destruction of our “ungodly and perverse” Western society, and its replacement by Islam and the return of the Caliphate.
To expand a little on your idea of “reform” within Islam, I believe that Islam has been so resistant to reform because it was deliberately designed that way, and the death penalty for apostasy and the sequence of increasing levels of social pressure and ostracism, and threats, then violence, that lead up to the ultimate penalty of death for Muslim apostasy within the Umma have been a powerful means of stopping reform and, if need be, weeding out recalcitrant, possible reformers throughout the last 1,400 years.
As a result, I note that there is not even the hint of an alternative Qur’an for potential dissidents to rally around and to champion, nor are there–outside of the handful of Muslims calling for reform who are not located within the Umma but are here in the West (and many of them now self-described former Muslims)–calls from the “masses” or intellectuals in the Umma for such reform–and despite the characterization of this or that Muslim country as “moderate,” on examination there is no major Muslim nation, or organization, or religious center, or Imam, or Mosque in the Umma of any size or visibility (or that I have heard of in the West, with the exception of people like lone wolf, Dr. Zudi Jasser) Muslims openly calling for such major reforms, and, from “the evidence on the ground,” neither are there any popular movements calling for such reforms, and calling, in particular, for the removal of violent and xenophobic and supremacist material from the Qur’an; a reform which, if adopted, would result in an estimated 90% or more of the Qur’an having to be discarded, leaving just the Five Pillars (the confession of faith, alms, the Hajj to Mecca, prayer and fasting) and a few medieval folk tales and conceptions of the world and how it functions.
What I have observed tells me that there isn’t really any call for such reforms as you envision, and even if “democracy” were to come to any of the nations of the Umma, and some reforms made, does that mean that Islam’s view of us “unbelievers” and what should happen to us (estimated to be the subject of the great majority of the Qur’an) would somehow necessarily be modified as a consequence?
I cannot help but remember that the 2006 elections among the Palestinians in the Gaza strip were supposedly “free and “democratic” elections, and yet, they resulted in the terrorist organization Hamas being voted into power.
Wolla Dalbo: who here envisions reform actually happening in Islam? I certainly do not. And I agree with you that Islam’s “reformation” was in the other direction.
As I wrote in my earlier comment to Promethea:
I see nothing that indicates that the desired changes will happen in Islam, unfortunately. And by “desired,” I mean desired by the West.