The lesson

I’ll give the lesson at the start: When speaking about other groups that need to be excluded from your society, use objective, descriptive language that you can stand by, not fighting words that you will be forced to retract.

The pope said:

“I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address which were considered offensive. These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.”

There are two statements here. The “deeply sorry” part is still the non-apology apology that the pope and the Vatican have been using all along. It is absurd to say you’re sorry for the reactions of other people. You can only be sorry for your own actions. Yet almost all the discussion has been about the “deeply sorry” part.

The second part is the meaningful part, where the pope dissociates himself from the infamous quote. He probably had to do that. It was too sweeping a statement, to say that everything that Muhammad brought was evil and inhuman; that is to condemn the religion and way of life of a billion people as evil and inhuman. The pope blundered badly. He either should not have used that quote, which, in any case, he did not need in order to advance his theme that Islam is based on force, or when he made it he should have said that it doesn’t reflect his views.

From the start I was enthusiastic about that statement because of its confrontational nature. But also from the start, alone among pro-pope conservatives, I clearly said: This is an insult to Islam, let’s be honest about that. (See this and this.) Realistically, the pope being in his position could not stand by an insult to Islam. But, as I have argued, all is not lost because, as a reading of the pope’s lecture shows, his main statement stands, and it remains a devastating indictment of the core of Islam that can serve as a basis for a Western rejection of Islam (a point I will expand on later).

The real question at the moment is, will the pope, having made one of the most politically incorrect statements ever and having been “burned” for it, lose the heart for continuing his all-important critique of Islam?

And this brings us to the main lesson to be learned here. It is a theme I have stressed since VFR began. Conservatives and Western patriots need to speak clear, objective, and judgmental language about Islam and about other groups with whom we have a problem, without using excessively emotional or charged language like “evil.” Such language always creates a powerful counter-reaction, getting the speaker killed (like Meyer Kahane), or getting the speaker in trouble with the law (like Orianna Fallaci and Nick Griffin), or at the least forcing the speaker to retract his statement and thus harming his cause (like Pope Benedict).

The classic example of counterproductive rhetorical excess is Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell should have made his points about the dangers of unassimilable Asian immigration in Britain without recourse to the sensational line from Virgil, “I seem to see the Tiber foaming with much blood,” phraseology that helped provoke a reaction against him that destroyed his political career, silenced criticism of immigration in Britain for the nest 50 years, and led to the ruin of that country. Conservatives still haven’t learned the Powell lesson. We seem to feel our only choice is between politically correct silence on one hand and hypercharged statements on the other.

By way of a better alternative, consider the way I discuss Islam in my many articles on the subject. I have said repeatedly and in the clearest terms that jihad war, the subjugation of non-Muslims, and the totalistic rule of sharia are inherent to Islam, that Islam is a mortal danger to our civilization and our freedoms, and that we must roll it back and isolate it and prevent it from ever gaining influence and power over us. Yet I never have called Islam simply “evil.” I do not demonize Islam. I do not say I want to destroy Islam. Rather I say: Islam is objectively a danger to us, and we must defend ourselves by containing Islam. If the religion of Islam were to disappear from the earth, that would be a deliverance, but I have no designs to make that happen. If Muslims want their religion, they are welcome to it, but only in their own lands where it can have no effect on us.

Surely principled criticism of our adversary combined with radical policy recommendations that will protect us from him—a solidly grounded position that we can defend from all politically correct attacks—is better than the more typical conservative response to our adversary, which is lots of emotional hot rhetoric without principle and without policy.

- end of initial entry -

Maureen writes:

1. I have mailed the Pope’s email address to everyone I know so that they all can write to the Vatican expressing their support for his principled stand.

2. You are advocating a policy of “containment” for Islam. I don’t think it will work. Containment worked for Russia because Russia was for centuries a Christian ethnic group; when the atheist blight of Lenin’s Bolshevik ideology died out, Russia returned to its roots. When the last of the Soviet elite died out, the new generation of Russians reverted to “type.”

But Islam has been and will remain a hodgepodge of moral obscenities sanctioned for eternity by the Quran and by the example of the life of its morally degenerate Prophet.

The only antidote to this barbarian garbled re-telling of the Old and New Testaments is eradication by violent confrontation—in addition to containment and removal.

LA replies:

I understand where you’re coming from, as far as your desires are concerned to free the world of this menace. But what precisely do you mean by “eradication by violent confrontation”? Spell out what you think we should and could do that will achieve this.

Maureen replies:

If we could just get to the point of “drawing the line”—containment—I think that the violent confrontation aspect would clarify itself as a matter of course. At that point, we should be willing to step up to the military plate—go beyond containment.

Paul Cella writes:

Excellent essay. I think you’ve the got things about right. One point I would add is that, while I agree that we should be circumspect and rational in criticizing Islam as such, we ought not recoil from hard words about certain Islamic doctrines. For example, we should hesitate to call jihad a wicked doctrine—because that is the only proper word for a doctrine which gives conquest, aggression, plunder, treachery, rapine, and subjugation the glow of piety. Pronouncing that jihad is, indeed, an evil doctrine, is a necessary prerequisite to calling for its proscription in law. In other words, if we desire to enact a jihad-sedition law, we need to be bold in describing the doctrine of jihad as wicked and intolerable.

LA replies:

Thank you. I agree completely with your qualification. To say that specific things are wicked or evil is fine. The real core of the pope’s lecture is that imposing religion by sword and fire is evil. That is a correct and totally defensible point. If he had kept to that point, there would have been no problem. But from the start I was conflicted about the sweeping nature of the comment, “everything Muhammad brought was evil and inhuman,” and I did not work out that conflict until after the pope had retracted the comment and I realized he should never have made it in the first place.

“Everything Muhammad brought was evil and inhuman” was the pope’s “rivers of blood.” It was a rhetorical indulgence that his main argument did not require and that distracted attention from his main argument. His main argument, which is exactly what we need to hear, is that the core of Islam is the imposition of religion by violence, which is evil, and therefore Islam is a danger to us.

The other day I had said, let us pray that the pope does not give ground. But the ground I was talking about, namely the quote that everything that Muhammad brought was evil and inhuman, was not the right ground. That was not a ground worth fighting for. The ground worth fighting for is the pope’s own profound argument about the evil of jihad, which in turn proceeds from the Islamic belief in a god who is pure arbitrary will unconnected with reason and goodness. And since these beliefs are central to Islam (though they are not the totality of Islam), this understanding can become the basis of a principled Western rejection—and ejection—of Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 18, 2006 09:46 AM | Send