VFR reader writes with some criticisms. I’ve put my replies to him in brackets.
Dear Mr. Auster:
Here are comments on some random items on your site over the last week or so. I wrote this before seeing the things posted over the last few hours.
1. On Bat Yeor: I have not read Bat Yeor’s Eurabia, but have been favorably impressed by the excerpts I have seen. However, the item you reproduced caused me to have second thoughts.
a. There is something wrong with BY’s understanding of dhimmitude. Dhimmis were conquered people, their position was in no sense voluntary.
To compare the position of Greeks, Jews, etc, under the Ottomans to the cowardly, traitorous behavior of too many modern day Westerners is to insult the real dhimmis and flatter the latter….
b. Janissaries were forcibly recruited and converted as children,they were not dhimmis. They were a product of specialized brainwashing, so to speak. They also held an honored place in the state, a high one that irked born Turks.
c. The implication that Israel has been fighting wars of liberation from dhimmitude is misleading on several grounds. First, the Arabs have quite often spoke or implied they would either massacre or drive out the Israelis, their aims are far more extreme than reducing the Jews to dhimmitude. Second, it is, I think, misleading to characterize the Arab Israeli conflict as a religious one, although it is becoming one. The Arab states fighting Israel were, at least the militarily important ones, secularized nationalist states. Wafd and Nasserite Egypt, Transjordan, and Syria, were not particular influenced by Islam or Islamism during the earlier wars. And Arab Christians also disliked and opposed Israel and probably still do. They are just less fanatical about it than the Muslims.
[LA reply: These are interesting points. I think that Bat Ye’or does tend at times to use dhimmitude as an all-embracing metaphor and explanation, and that this may be open to question. I will forward your points to her and see what she has to say, though she may not have time to reply.]
d. It is a wild exaggeration to imply that the European governments have been peddling anti-Semitism as part of a devil’s bargain with the Arabs/Muslims for 30 years. A resurgence of outright anti-Semitism is something recent and probably unwanted by these crumbs, bad as they are.
In fact, it must be admitted that it is the reverse that has been the case, to some extent. The constant breast—beating over the Holocaust, with the frequent insinuation or open assertion that it was not just the Nazis or even the Germans in general who were responsible for the destruction of European Jews, but all Europeans or Christians, which has been common since the 1970s, has done a lot to demoralize the West. It probably has also to some extent stirred some resentment against Jews for making false accusations or assisting those who do.
[LA reply: I don’t believe that what’s happening in Europe is necessarily anti-Semitic per se; but certainly Europe for some years has been increasingly pro-Palestinian, pro-terrorist, and anti-Israel. I found fascinating BY’s suggestion that the Europeans’ abandoment of morality in supporting the Moslem barbarians who seek to destroy Israel had morally crippled the Europeans when it comes to defending Europe itself against those same Moslem barbarians.]
2. I believe that you take left or even mainstream sloganizing about freedom, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, cultural equality far too seriously. I do not disagree with you about the moral inadequacy of making tolerance and diversity the “measure of all measures” (Fitzjames Stephens demolished “diversity” back in the 19th century!) but I would maintain that the left does not really believe in them, they are just weapons against the ” right” and Western civilization. Multiculturalism almost always comes attached with a rider, namely that the West is less equal than other cultures. As for tolerance and freedom, a simple word game, I think, is often useful in exposing the way people really think. Merely substitute fascist, Nazi, or Ku Klux Klan for Communist, Muslim, Islamist, Japanese-American, etc…. the results are enlightening. Look at the left’s behavior on college campuses; you will be disabused of any notion that they take free speech seriously!
[LA reply: I don’t agree. It’s not just the left that makes a cult of these slogans, but the (so-called) right. Politics consists very largely of speech. I would argue that the president and his neoconservative supporters certainly do believe that “freedom,” imposed by force if necessary, is the answer to Moslem extremism. I would further argue that the constant paeans to freedom and democracy have had an enormous (and enormously distorting) effect on people’s ability to understand political reality. People believe these ideas; these ideas prevent rational and realistic discussion of the Islam problem; and therefore it is essential that these ideas be combatted.]
3. I would be most interested in seeing any speculations you have to offer on what would happen if the West were subjected to an attack along the lines outlined by Farah.
[LA reply: There is a blog entry today discussing Tom Tancredo’s and Hugh Fitzgerald’s deterrence proposals. I haven’t thought further about what we would/should do if terrorists used nuclear weapons in America. I think the response would be fierce, at least on the order of what we did to Japan.]
4. I disagree with you on certain points about Islam. Namely, you take an excessively dark view of traditional, mainstream Islam, and understate the difference between it and Islamists such as Bin Laden. (The latter in my view are even worse than is usually said.) It also seems to me that it is obvious that there were and are moderate, modernist Muslims. It is, however childish, in my view, to stake all on the latter (who have been having a bad time for the last 30 years and have been decreasing rather than increasing) and to pretend, as Blair did in his recent utterances, that the Islamists are only a tiny minority. I do not disagree with you on most practical questions relating to these problems. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any on which I disagree.
[LA reply: On the one point of our disagreement, I explained in “The Search for Moderate Islam, Part I” how even Daniel Pipes admits, in some of his writings, that there is not and never has been such a thing as moderate Islam, other than as a feeling or aspiration among essentially powerless individuals and small groups.]