Posted on 05/01/2007 6:07:49 AM PDT by Pokey78
from National Review
On the day the Royal Navy’s hostages were released, I chanced to be reading a poem from Reflections On Islam, a terrific collection of essays by George Jonas. The verse is by Nizar Qabbani, and it is his ode to the intifada:
O mad people of Gaza,
a thousand greetings to the mad
The age of political reason
has long departed
so teach us madness
Or as the larky motto you used to find on the wall of the typing pool put it: You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps. For the madness of the intifada and the jihad and Islamist imperialism is calculated, and highly effective. There is, as Jonas sees it, method in their madness.
Do you remember that little difficulty a few months back over the Pope’s indelicate quotation of Manuel II? Many Muslims were very upset about his speech (or his speech as reported on the BBC et al), so they protested outside Westminster Cathedral in London demanding “capital punishment” for the Pope, and they issued a fatwa in Pakistan calling on Muslims to kill His Holiness, and they firebombed a Greek Orthodox Church and an Anglican Church in Nablus, and they murdered a nun in Somalia and a couple of Christians in Iraq. As Tasnim Aslam of the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad helpfully clarified, “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.” So don’t say we’re violent or we’ll kill you. As I wrote in National Review at the time, quod erat demonstrandum.
But that’s a debating society line. Islam isn’t interested in winning the debate, it’s interested in winning the real fight – the clash of civilizations, the war, society, culture, the whole magilla. That’s why it doesn’t care about the inherent contradictions of the argument: in the Middle East early in 2002, I lost count of the number of Muslims I met who believed simultaneously (a) that 9/11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) that it was a great victory for Islam. Likewise, it’s no stretch to feel affronted at the implication that you’re violently irrational and to threaten to murder anyone who says so. Western societies value logic because we value talk, and talks, and talking, on and on and on: that’s pretty much all we do, to the point where, faced with any challenge from Darfur to the Iranian nuclear program, our objective is to reduce the issue to just something else to talk about interminably. But, if you don’t prize debate and you merely want to win, getting hung up on logic is only going to get in your way. Take the most devastating rapier wit you know – Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward – and put him on a late-night subway train up against a psycho with a baseball bat. The withering putdown, the devastating aphorism will avail him nought.
The quality of your argument is only important if you want to win by persuasion. But it’s irrelevant if you want to win by intimidation. I’m personally very happy to defend my columns in robust debate, but after five years I’m a bit bored by having to respond to Muslim groups’ demands (in America) that I be fired and (in Canada) that I be brought before the totalitarian-lite kangaroo courts of the country’s ghastly “human rights commissions”. Publishers like hate-mail; they’re less keen on running up legal bills defending nuisance suits. So it’s easier just to avoid the subject – as an Australian novelist recently discovered when his book on a, ah, certain topical theme was mysteriously canceled.
That’s the advantage of madness as a strategy. If one party to the dispute forswears sanity, then the obligation is on the other to be sane for both of them. Thus, if a bunch of Iranian pirates kidnap some British seamen in Iraqi waters, it is the British whom the world calls on to show restraint and to defuse the situation. If an obscure Danish newspaper prints some offensive cartoons and in reaction Muslims murder people around the planet, well, that just shows we all need to be more sensitive about Islamophobia. But, if Muslims blow up dozens of commuters on the London Underground and in reaction a minor talk-show host ventures some tentative remarks about whether Islam really is a religion of piece, well, that also shows we all need to be more sensitive about Islamophobia. Do this long enough and eventually you’ll achieve the exquisite sensitivity of the European Union’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. In 2003, their report on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe found that “many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups”, and so (according to The Daily Telegraph) a “political decision” was taken not to publish it because of “fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims”.
Got that? The EU’s principal “fear” about an actual ongoing epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could hypothetically provoke an epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims.
And so the more the enemies of free society step on our feet the more we tiptoe around. After the release of the Royal Navy hostages, the Right Reverend Tom Burns, Roman Catholic Bishop of the Armed Forces, praised the Iranians for their “forgiveness”. “Over the past two weeks,” said the Bishop, “there has been a unity of purpose between Britain and Iran, whereby everyone has sought justice and forgiveness.”
Really? In what alternative universe is that? Maybe the insanity is contagious. As the columnist Jack Kelly wrote, “The infidels Allah wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.” And so these twin psychoses – Islamist rage and our determination never to see it – continue their valse macabre on the brink of catastrophe.
Thank you! Thank you! Two Steyn pings are twice as nice as one, LOL!
I agree with that!
The best writer of our time hits the nail on the head once again.
Brilliant essay which articulates so clearly what I’ve believed all along—that the central problem with the Middle East is that it’s full of crazy people.
FYI PING
Does Canada have “reeducation camps” yet? Or did the new conservative momentum end the madness?
It requires a tremendous amount of suspension of reason and logic to accept it; no wonder its adherents are so unhinged. I think a fundamental problem with it is that its “God” is a purely arbitrary entity that has no internal order of his own, and is knowable to the faithful only through the acceptance of the external ritual laws communicated to Mohammed. If there is no law within God, and hence no natural law within creation, everything becomes a positive construct which must then be imposed from the outside.
It’s completely different from our mentality, which seeks reason within things. Of course, this goes right back to what Steyn says...
bttt
Right, the Islamists are not interested in winning any debate. The pope said as much in his Regensburg speech. That’s why the Euroweenies were upset. All they want to do is talk.
“Take the most devastating rapier wit you know – Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward – and put him on a late-night subway train up against a psycho with a baseball bat. The withering putdown, the devastating aphorism will avail him nought.”
Not necessarily. If the witty guy was actually ARMED, the combination of intelligence and weaponry could be powerful.
More from Mark Steyn.
And of course many Christian theologians today buy Averroes. What is most modern Biblical scholarship but a refusal to defend the rationality of Scripture?
Steyn would forgo the wit and stick with the rapier (or the handgun he carries in his case).
bttt
IIRC Siger Brabant, very much influenced by Averroes, argued much this same idea to Thomas Aquinas. And was of course shot down.
It's really chilling how he manages to cut through the crap and unmask our greatest weaknesses - weaknesses which we refuse to see, and which may well be fatal.
LOL—I loooooooooove that picture! (Doesn’t he look somewhat Colin Firth-ish, but you know that he is Mark Steyn, which makes it that much better?)
Thanks for posting it! :)
” If one party to the dispute forswears sanity, then the obligation is on the other to be sane for both of them.”
Substitute morality for sanity, and the point is even stronger.
“Torture is immoral and we won’t do it.”
“Torture is what we do and we’re going to kill you.”
Guess who’s going to win?
Bump!
There comes a point where we have to stop talking and start annihilating. That time came on 9/11, but the left has reduced us not only to talk, but to blathering rhetoric that is getting good and innocent people killed. Moral relativism is not logic, it is anti-logic and does as much harm to righteous action as pacifism does to national defense. It encourages the enemy and binds our own hands.
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