|
Lewis continues his whitewash of Islam
A documentary on the return of anti-Semitism, airing on PBS Monday evening, will feature among others Bernard Lewis. According to a description of the show:
Princeton historian Bernard Lewis draws a useful distinction between Christian and Muslim anti-Semitism over the centuries. In the Islamic world, the Jew, though not equal, was tolerated and did not carry the satanic aura painted in medieval Europe, said Lewis, who “credited” British and other Christian theologians with introducing modern anti-Semitism into the Arab world.This is bad. Lewis bases his evaluation on the worst instances of treatment of Jews in Europe and the best treatment of Jews by Muslims, ignoring all the times when Muslims treated Jews worse than Europeans did, and, further, closing his eyes to Muslim mistreatment of Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus. In pursuit of his anti-Christian, pro-Islam agenda, he covers up the history of Islam’s relations with the Jews. As William Muir tells in his mammoth 19th century Life of Mahomet, which is based entirely on Islamic sources, from the moment Jews rejected Muhammad’s claim that he was the Jewish Messiah, they became the number one object of Muhammad’s and his followers’ formidable hate, a status that has continued for 1,400 years. The sickening motifs of gross Jew hatred and murderous demonization appearing in official newspapers in Egypt and other Muslim countries today draw directly on the classic Islamic texts. The references to Jews as pigs and monkeys, the endless iterations and variations on “The stones and trees will call out, Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him,” all this was there from the beginning. For Lewis to deny the Jew hatred at Islam’s core and describe Islam as tolerant and Europe as the real source of Muslim anti-Semitism is unforgivable. In short, Lewis is an anti-Christian apologist for Islam. His naïveté about Islam, combined with his extraordinary influence among intelligentsia and politians who treat him as an intellectual god, and the uncritical plaudits that are tossed at him wherever his name appears, makes him a menace. He championed Oslo, and is still promoting the disastrous idea that America can democratize the Muslim world. He apparently played the leading role in making Bush and Cheney believe that. And I know he’s persuasive because the only time that democratization briefly seemed somewhat plausible or potentially plausible to me (I never became a supporter) was when I saw Lewis in an hour-long interview with Charlie Rose in early 2003. Meanwhile, the administration was won over by him totally.
Not only was Lewis’s main argument—that the whole Muslim world was deeply though quietly yearning for the U.S. to take decisive forceful steps that would push those countries into democracy—incorrect, it was also incoherent. As can be seen in this article (under the subhead “In Cheney’s bunker”), Lewis pushed Kemalization on the Bush administration, meaning installing a tough leader who would impose change on Muslims. Apparently Chalabi was thought of as playing the Kemal role in Iraq. Of course that’s not what we did, yet Lewis has fully supported our policy anyway. Democratization—basing government on popular elections and individual rights—is the opposite of Kemalization, which forces a Muslim society to secularize. (We see a similar contradiction in those neocons who before the war supposedly supported a quick handover to a group of exiles headed by Chalabi, but then fully supported the actual democratization policy we pursued after the invasion which was nothing like that.) Again, Kemalization means secularization through despotism. Democratization means basing the government on the will of the people, which in a Muslim country means Islamization. The Bush policy is democratization, not Kemalization. Lewis apparently supported Kemalization, while at the same time eloquently supporting democratization. The upshot is that the brilliant Lewis showed as little desire and ability to resolve the contradictory aims for Iraq prior to the war as the twin pinheads Bush and Rice (in support of the latter assertion see my comments on Richard Lowry’s article, “What Went Wrong?”). The one thing Kemalization and democratization have in common—at least in Lewis’s handling of them—is the belief that the U.S. could impose its desired vision of society on the Muslims. Of course, real Kemalization cannot begin via foreign occupation, it has to arise within the society itself, as happened in Turkey.
Also, the author of the article I linked, though he is a Lewis basher, also doesn’t seem to grasp that Kemalization and democratization are mutually exclusive. As Francis Schaeffer writes in The God Who is There, the principle of truth is antithesis, or, as I would put it, non-contradiction (if A is true, not-A is false), whereas in the 20th century Western man adopted the Hegelian/relativist notion that truth is synthesis (A and not-A are both true). So it seems that for Lewis, the neocons, and the Bush administration, there was no contradictions between democratization and Kemalization, and they could be both pursued in the same country at the same time.
Email entry |