The Über Suspect

Coined by reader Jeff in England, the “Usual Suspects” is VFR’s term for those Islam critics who continually warn that Islam threatens our very civilization, but who never utter a single peep about why this disaster is occurring and about what we can do to stop it, namely they never say that Islam has gained and is gaining power in the West through immigration and that an indispensable means of stopping it from gaining further power is to stop Muslim immigration.

Today we add to the list of Suspects the Über Suspect, Bernard Lewis, The World’s Most Distinguished Scholar on Islam, who told the editorial board of the Jerusalem Post that Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe.” A year or two ago, Lewis made a big splash by announcing that Europe would be Islamized by the end of this century. Now he seems to have moved up the event considerably. And, in classic “Suspect” style, Lewis attributes this looming historical catastrophe, not to the concrete fact that millions of Muslims were permitted to enter Europe, but to the vague abstractions “political correctness” and “loss of confidence”:

“Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture.” Europeans had “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement,” “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism,” said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.

Here’s where most people including conservatives get fooled. They read the above passage, and to them Lewis sounds conservative. After all, he’s attacking PC. He’s saying Europeans should have loyalty to their civilization. He’s calling on Europeans to oppose the Islamization of Europe. How much more conservative can you get? In fact, according to the Jerusalem Post’s account, Lewis doesn’t say what a “non-politically correct” and “confident” Europe would have done differently to prevent the Islamization of Europe. Like Mark Steyn and the rest of the Suspects, Lewis acts as though the Islamization would have magically stopped by itself, without the Europeans actually doing anything differently, if only the Europeans had had “confidence” and had not been “politically correct.” By the same token, he also doesn’t say that Europe could still slow this process of Islamization today by stopping all further Islamic immigration; and he doesn’t say that Europe could reverse the process of Islamization by reversing the Muslim immigration.

Nor would we expect him to say such, uh, politically incorrect, things. After all, this is the same brilliant man who has spent his career lambasting Europe as morally inferior to Islam because medieval Islam was more “tolerant” to the Jews than medieval Europe was. So you can bet that if Europe had actually started to manifest a concern for its survival twenty or ten or five years ago and stopped letting Muslims into Europe, Lewis would have condemned the Europeans for their intolerance toward a people who historically had been more tolerant than themselves!

In any case, isn’t it remarkable that the world’s greatest Islam scholar never noticed that Islam was taking over Europe until, by his own estimation, it’s too late to stop it? Suppose there had been a Bernard Lewis of Communism, the world’s most distinguished scholar on Marxism-Leninism, and one day in the 1970s this conservative icon suddenly came out and declared that Communism was about to take over the world and that there was nothing to be done about it. Wouldn’t people have wondered why this great expert had not noticed this threat developing sooner, when it was still possible to prevent it? Wouldn’t people have wondered where his loyalties really lay?

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Matthew H. writes:

I think Lewis’s and Steyn’s attributing European acquiescence in the face of Islam to “lack of confidence” or “political correctness” is itself attributable to the same conditions as manifested in the writers themselves. After all, what would a self-confident and non-politically correct Europe do in the face of the Islamic menace? Why, end Muslim immigration and enforce out-migration of Muslims already living there, of course. But plainly to say so would be to transgress the bounds of political correctness, which neither of these writer has the guts, that is the self-confidence, to do.

One would think that men such as these would be successful and respected enough not to feel intimidated by the ephemeral threat of being sneered at by leftists. And, surely, we in America have some time left before we need to trim our speech from fear of Islamic violence to ourselves and our families. Yet, somehow, they cannot bring themselves to advocate plainly, or even mention, policies to which their analyses obviously lead.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

In reply to your correspondent Matthew H., I would remark that Steyn’s and Lewis’ success is based precisely on their refusal to say the kinds of things he is suggesting. Their success is the exception that illustrates the rule, as it were. Many people, who consider themselves conservatives because they are filled with anxiety and nervousness over the impending cultural and demographic cataclysm, are nonetheless so addled by their liberal educations (and the relentless liberal agitprop with which mass media bombards them daily) that they cannot quite articulate what is the matter.

Steyn and his kind—that is, neoconservatives—are so successful in this environment precisely because most people are caught between the terror around them and their inability to object meaningfully to its causes. Neoconservatives like Steyn give voice to their fears, confirm their anxieties, and affirm that their despair is not totally groundless. But they stop short of actually offending the liberal orthodoxies to which their audience’s minds are subject. Neoconservatism is thus a brilliantly conceived political movement that achieves power by capitalizing on the public’s fear and disgust over liberalism’s manifest results, while refusing to challenge liberalism’s crippling dogmas. It gains power by virtue of its (often boastfully proclaimed) willingness to make absolutely any compromise on conservative principle, the instant it is deemed “impractical” to do otherwise. Neocons have consequently all but abandoned the fight on a whole range of issues, for brute reasons of expediency, while continuing to sound the alarms civilizational ruin.

And it works—they have achieved gigantic political power. Steyn sells thousands upon thousands of his useless little books and columns, and Bill Kristol is one of the leading and influential voices of “conservatism” in America, although neither one of them has uttered a non-liberal word in years. Steyn especially has figured out the enormous payoff for writers willing to tell people the “hard facts” about their impending doom—while refusing to tell them about the equally hard facts about how that doom might be averted.

Alas.

LA replies:

Very well put. Mr. McLaughlin has shown that the real function of neoconservatism is not to oppose liberalism but to legitimize liberalism by providing an outlet for people to “let off steam” about the inevitable results of liberal policies without their actually challenging those policies. As I wrote in the 90s, liberalism and todays’ “conservatism” are the two wings of the same bird of prey; it needs both wings to fly.

Carl Simpson writes:

Let me get this straight—just so I don’t get confused.

1. Lewis says Muslims are about to take over Europe.

2. This is because Europeans have lost “self-confidence”, embraced “political correctness”, etc.

3. Lewis has repeatedly stated how superior and more tolerant Islam was towards Jews, for example, than medieval Christian Europe was (an assertion that has been seriously challenged by Bostom, Trifkovic, Spencer, and others) and even went so far as to state that any anti-Semitism in today’s Islam is a transplant from Christianity.

So, by adding 1, 2, and 3 we get: Lewis is now (presumably) unhappy because Europeans have faithfully followed the prescriptions of leftist intellectuals like himself—abandoning all faith in God, country, tradition, culture and morality and replacing it with a vacuous materialistic nihilism, the natural result of which has been the Muslim invasion and impending takeover of Europe.

Is Lewis genuinely unhappy about all this? Or, is he actually almost smug about it à la Steyn?

Wow, we’re really going to meet the challenge of jihad and sharia with guys like Lewis giving advice to the folks controlling the levers of power.

Like you, I am left wondering where Lewis’ loyalties are.

LA adds:

Über Suspect is really the correct phrase for Lewis because not only is he a “Suspect” in the usual sense used by VFR, but he is the mastermind (or rather master liar/apologist) behind so much of the inadequate or dhimmi response to Islam. According to Robert Spencer, in his debate on radio with Dinesh D’Souza this week DD repeatedly referenced Lewis as his authority. As Spencer put it, this is no longer the Argument from Authority, it’s the Argument from Bernard Lewis.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2007 10:08 AM | Send