Vincent was blind to the forces that killed him

Following the murder of writer Steven Vincent in Iraq last week, Islam expert Andy Bostom, who met Vincent briefly last February, wrote the following e-mail to Israeli columnist Caroline Glick. His views of the reasons for and the meaning of Vincent’s death complement my own.

Dear Caroline,

Steven Vincent was indeed a very brave and honorable man. However, when I met him in February he was utterly lacking in an understanding of the jihad we face, and I believe he may have died, tragically, without having ever achieved understanding. He attended a Bat Ye’or lecture with me that February in Washington, DC, and told me he thought she was paranoid in her book, Eurabia. Paranoid, I asked him—when there are Shari’a tribunals in Europe, and jihadist policies (i.e., policide) vis à vis Israel that are openly supported by EU politicians and abetted by the Euro-Arab Dialogue infrastructure, which parrots guidelines enunciated by the Arab League and Organization of the Islamic Conference? He turned and walked away—didn’t jibe with his worldview.

Journalists such as Vincent have developed no real understanding of our jihadist enemy, in all its guises and all its fronts. We need people with Vincent’s raw courage … to see and state the obvious: that the various Muslim countries are light years behind the West, hate it with great passion, and would gladly destroy it and replace it with Islamic Shari’a.

… All I am saying is that Steven was drawn into a hopeless situation by disinformation, and to some extent his own denial. And the most tragic irony of all is that he was probably betrayed by some of the very same folks he thought he was championing. Disinformation and denial about Islam is the gravest danger we all face. And I see far too many Jewish and Gentile pseudo-intellectuals engaged in both. The solution is straightforward: Talk honestly about Islam, and like Bolshevism it may begin to collapse on its own hideous falsehoods, or at least remove itself from the sociopolitical affairs of states and societies. Reagan spoke honestly about Communism, without being accused of demonizing all the inhabitants of Communist countries. We need the same honesty about Islam and less b.s. about how “we can’t demonize 1.2 billion people.” We are talking about a dangerous sociopolitical creed with jihad as one its central pillars, not 1.2 billion individual people, many of whom, thank goodness don’t believe in its hideous tenets.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 08, 2005 10:20 PM | Send