Peters’s incoherence on Islam

In an interview at FrontPage Magazine to tout his new book on Islam’s war against the West, Ralph Peters says he has been rethinking his past positions. He says that he was wrong to believe that Arab Muslim democracy was possible (he gets credit for admitting this). He says that he was wrong to believe Bush would really fight in Iraq (I was wrong on that one, too). But as for the rest, he’s as confused and contradictory as ever.

First, he says that the Muslim conflict with the West is based in religion and ethnicity, not in sociology and economics. Sounding like Samuel Huntington, he writes:

Anyway, the Age of Ideology is over. Done. Finished. Kaputt. And thank God. But the bad news is that it only means we’ve returned to the human mainstream, to wars of blood and belief, fought over ethnic and religious issues. These are the default identities over which human beings have slaughtered each other since the days of myth. And the wars tend to be bloody and uncompromising.

Again, our enemies want to exterminate us. We want to reason with them. They kill as many of the innocent as they can—while we court-martial our soldiers for every mistake. Which brings us back to the problem of a political elite—on both sides of the aisle—that no longer feels obliged to serve in uniform, that is utterly out of touch with the average man and woman, which takes polls more seriously than religion, and which believes that all of the world’s problems can be solved through negotiations. Well, good luck.

Echoing my critique of the “non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism,” he condemns at length the Western observers who fail to see the religious roots of jihadism:

In Washington, both Dems and Republicans continue to insist—against tidal waves of evidence to the contrary—that religion has nothing to do with religious wars. When I brief the D.C. crowd, I tell them that it pays to listen to what your enemy says now and then. And our enemies have declared uncompromising religious war on us. We don’t have to like it. And this isn’t a religious war from our side (at least, not yet). But our deadliest enemies truly believe that they are on a mission from their God to kill us. And they’re out to prove it. Yet, the Washington crowd keeps trying to explain everything in term of 20th-century sociology, economics or American misdeeds. Well, sorry, folks. All those factors may matter, but they’re secondary to the fanatical faith of the terrorists and other assorted murderers we face.

This is good—Peters seems to be showing more intellectual seriousness about the nature of Islam than he has in the past. Unfortunately, having declared that the Islamic war against the West is motivated by religion and a religious desire to exterminate us, and having mocked those who says it’s about economics, he then proceeds to reverse himself:

FP: What are the roots of the terror being perpetrated against us?

Peters: The utter failure of Islamic civilization between Morocco and Pakistan. The Islamic world’s values, traditions, structures and practices are thoroughly uncompetitive in the 21st century (and already were in the last century). All that they hold dear holds them back. Islamists and their sympathizers are humiliated by their self-wrought failures, angry at our success, sick with jealousy, and desperately in need of a hot date. The greater Middle East is one vast psycho-ward. And no, I’m not being flippant or exaggerating—the region’s Muslim societies are mentally and morally diseased.

Since Peters is saying that the cause of the backwardness is religion, it may not be immediately clear that he is undercutting his previous position that that Islamic extremism is about religion. But in fact he is making two opposed points: (1) that their religion tells the Muslims to kill as many of us as they can, and (2) that their religion makes them backward, and that their backwardness makes them hate us.

Now that he’s contradicted himself on the religious issue, he returns to the one theme on which he is ever-constant: that Europeans are natural-born ethnic killers who will expel or wipe out all the Muslims in Europe the moment they get tired of them, and therefore Islam poses no danger to Europe:

FP: “Eurabia” is a true nightmare scenario, correct?

Peters: No. Malthusian linear projections never fulfill themselves (and hysteria is never productive). But, beyond that, the notion that Europe, the continent that’s exported more death and destruction than any other, is going to just shuffle wimpily to its doom is crazy. The Europeans have been playing pacifist dress-up while we protected them, but, sufficiently threatened, they’ll revert to their historical pattern—which is to over-react. Europe’s Muslims may prove to be the real endangered species; after all, Europe’s history of dealing with rejected minorities veers between genocide and, for the lucky, ethnic cleansing. For me, the question isn’t whether Muslims will take over Europe, but whether Europe will simply expel them or kill any number of them first. Sound far-fetched? How would the Holocaust have sounded to an educated German (or Brit, or American) in 1932? Europe is a killer continent. When the chips are down, it will kill again.

So, to summarize:

• Peters says that the West is facing a big threat from Islam—and he says it’s not facing a threat at all (since the Europeans will just kill the Muslims, poof).

• Peters says that Islamic extremism is driven by religion, not sociology and economics—and he says that Islamic extremism is not driven by religion but by economic and civilizational backwardness and the need for a hot date.

• Peters says that Muslims want to exterminate us—and he says that we should do nothing to prevent more Muslims from coming into the West.

I reach the latter conclusion based on Peters’s silence on immigration in this interview and elsewhere, and on his swipe at the Europeans for their supposed bigotry in this interview and elsewhere. Since the Muslims want to exterminate Westerners, doesn’t he think it’s good that Europe (as he imagines) would not hesitate to expel the Muslims? No, he doesn’t think that. Peter’s dominant emotion as always is a roiling resentment against Europe and the West for their hatred of the Other. Remember that last year he wrote an insane column in which he accused the leading scholarly Islam critics of being Nazi-like goons lusting to liquidate all Muslims. Being such a passionate opponent of ethnic bias, Peters would clearly not support immigration restrictions on Muslims. Yet he says we’re in a war of blood and belief, fought over ethnic and religious issues, in which the enemy wants to exterminate us. Well, then, how are we to fight such a war and defend ourselves from such an enemy? He doesn’t give us the slightest idea. He remains a crazed ranter, who, despite his evident inability to think coherently about the Muslim problem and what to do about it, gets to appear regularly on tv, write a weekly column in the New York Post, do interviews in FrontPage Magazine, and publish book after book, telling us about … the Muslim problem and what to do about it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 19, 2007 12:34 PM | Send