Words

WORDS

it has always been maintained here, wrongly in the opinion of the administration and almost all "respectable" opinion, that the war we are now engaged in is one with the civilization of islam, not with one terrorist group or rogue state. part of the reason why that opinion is viewed as so paranoid and psychotic is the, commendable, contemporary aversion toward unfairly tarring a group with too broad a brush.

that commendable aversion however has taken the uncommendable leap from rule of thumb to prohibition and in that i think there is not just a discourse objection to register but an insidious consequence to policy.

the discourse objection to group references is that not every single member of the group has the complained of characteristic. duh, as they say. but to dispense with this tiresome point let it be said that i do not mean by holding that our war is with islam that our war is with every single muslim worldwide.

the problem with having to make that tautological point is that for most people that ends the discussion. since i concede that in not every muslim chest there beats the heart of osama bin laden it is viewed as just not cricket to continue to claim that we are at war with islam. but i do.

words have consequences. a single individual may be described as both a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist" and there are no two more opposed words in the language today. although i am in the political discourse equivalent of siberia with my opinion that the war is with islam, EVERYONE uses the word "war" to describe what we're doing here. president bush says we are at "war" with terrorism, osama bin laden says we are at war,the men in birkenstocks and the ladies in sensible shoes, those who have no power to exercise in their lives and therefore believe that any exercise of power by those who have it is icky, those who missed the call of the 60's protest generation, all those who protest, protest against the "war." even as sensible and angst-ridden a chap as thomas ("it's not that islam is an angry religion, it is just that a lot of muslims are angry") friedman holds that we are at war. and of course i hold that we are at war.

and here i register my own discourse objection. "war" is one of the most extreme words there is but it has been devalued by discourse abuse of it's horrific meaning. there are all kinds of wars now, wars on poverty, wars on aids, wars on racism, worthy goals all but those are not wars. if nothing else a war is (1) a military action (2) by one people against another. president bush's war on terrorism is no more definite than those social scourges. and i defy anyone to deconstruct all that thomas friedman has written in the last year and a half and define what the hell it is that he says we are at war with. you have to have a clearly defined enemy to have a war that means what the word is intended to mean.

and here my opponents attempt to hoist me on my own petard. they say i don't even meet the second prong of the my own definition, that for there to be a war there must be a clearly defined enemy. they say islam has no state boundaries, it is a religion, so therefore we can't be at war with it.

that view is too facile; in fact my view has a direct, immediate historical antecedent and that is the war we just fought, and won, against communism. communism was the religion to end allegiance to all religions. it had no state boundaries, there were communist states but there were also communists worldwide, including freely-elected ones in western governments like france, england and italy. even the united states had a communist congressman or two. we were certainly at war with communism even though we didn't shoot an m-16 at france's jacques berlenguer.

islam is as totalitarian a philosophy as communism and as hostile to the united states. if anything, it is at least as confined to specific states as communism: the entire arab world plus turkey, pakistan, indonesia and a handful of others and of course saying that does not mean that to be consistent we must shoot all pakistani convenience store owners or taxi cab drivers.

two things happened yesterday that should and will cause a change in some peoples views of islam and of individual muslims, and policy change should result. the first was the arrest of sgt.asan akbar for the grenade attack in camp pennsylvania in kuwait. as soon as i heard that he was a muslim i knew the motive. it was, as he has now said, because of his opposition to this war, because the united states was attacking a muslim state, not as every military veteran i heard speak on the matter say, a result of battlefield "cabin fever," or some such. that he was a muslim acting out of pan-islamic solidarity was viewed as unfortunate by most.

it should not have been. former under secretary frank gaffney was the only one, i heard at least, who made the obvious point that we better pay closer attention to muslims in our military than we have in the past and he went on to say that it was his understanding that something like nine of the fifteen muslim chaplains in the military preach the violent, intolerant wahibbi strain, that adopted as the official variant of islam by our "friends" the saudis, it turns out. finally gaffney made another point that all those who work in the american criminal justice system know already, that this same totalitarian islam is also taught in our prisons. if memory serves, it was in prison that dirty-bomber wannabe jose padilla also was converted to islam.

i do not propose that we round up every muslim and put him in a concentration camp, but those teachings in our military and in our prisons must stop, just as we are now intensively investigating certain muslim mosques and charities for what they are preaching and who they are financing, just as i say we should order saudi arabia, pakistan, et al to stop their teaching that jews are pigs and snakes and that jewish women should be enslaved for the pleasure of muslim men.

i would further hold that it is more important that we keep an eye on individual muslims in this country than we did individual germans and japanese during world war ii. a german-american did not equal a nazi, nor a japanese-american a loyalist of tojo but islam is a totalitarian philosophy and though most, i would guess, american muslims love and are loyal to america, their religion is generally hostile to other religions, to tolerance, to diversity, and to seperation of church and state, three pretty bedrock principles of the american republic.

the second development last night was the publication, at least on the internet, of the seminal cover story in the new york times magazine by paul berman on the radical islamic philosopher sayyid qutb. berman's article appears balanced, which is frightening because he was so moved by the intellectual depth and keen analysis of qutb and especially one book, "in the shade of the qur'an," frightening because he shows how so much violence and hatred is combined with so much brilliance and beauty. he makes the obvious analogy to das kapital, still the most intellectually rigorous critique of capitalism ever made, even though it's rigor was the philosophical basis for the barbarous soviet state, and to nietzsche, whose existentialism still thrills even as his ubermensch was a harbinger of the nazis "great man."

the new york times, especially the sunday edition, especially the magazine, is the most prominent outlet for ideas in the west. this article will result in the publication of a new edition of this, till now, obscure book, and it may cause a change in the views of islam held by many influential opinion-makers, maybe even thomas friedman.

-benjamin harris