The Power of Popular Culture Chapter 7 Part # 1 Islam and Politics in the 21st Century
The issue of religion is anything but inconsequential in the modern world; on the contrary it is a major concern in American politics and American culture. This is true even though many people in our supposedly post-religion era have wanted it to go away, have wanted to dismiss what they see as an obsolete mode of thinking, an obsolete set of myths, and an obsolete code of morality. If nothing else, the re-emergence of Islam as the enemy of all other religions and the enemy of the West in general and the United States in particular, should have put to rest the Atheist narrative about the end of religion. That Islam has the character it does, a religion created to overthrow all other faiths, was obscured through all the years of the Cold War, but with the end of that costly conflict, and end to a period of time when Muslims felt threatened by Soviet militant Atheism and were willing to enter alliances with Western nations, the status quo ante bellum has reasserted itself. We have re-entered the 19th century, the era of the Mahdi and the Madhist state in Sudan, the era of jihads throughout Dar al-Islam, and the rise of other organized movements meant to defeat or even destroy Western civilization. Because, you see, according to the teachings of Muhammad's religion, the only way to achieve world peace is through Muslim domination of everything else, especially through coerced conversions to Islam. Not that the pundit class is remotely competent to discuss the subject. A case in point was the unbelievably uninformed discussion of religion during the Mark Shields and David Brooks segment of the PBS News Hour on February 3, 2017. At issue was the Trump executive order banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. According to both commentators, one on the Right and the other representing the Left, "of course," in discussing Islam, we are talking about a generic religion with some superficial ornamentation that sets it apart from the others. Were large numbers of Buddhists from Laos, Viet Nam, and Cambodia refugees in the 1970s? We can see what happened to them, they integrated into American society and all went well. Why should we expect anything different from Muslims? The depth of such ignorance is commonplace, of course. It is endemic to the press and television. Journalists feel no responsibility to make themselves informed; they feel free to pontificate on the basis of their ignorance because no-one challenges that ignorance. Because other journalists are just as uninformed. And because they have internalized the establishment narrative that Islam is essentially peaceful. Which has been the official line ever since William Clinton and George W. Bush. That this point of view happens to be fallacious does not register because it can't. Ignorance is pervasive at the highest editorial levels and down the chain of command to reporters in the trenches. Its all pathetic and inexcusable. The hoi polloi is almost as uninformed even if things are not as bad as before 2001. But, to the extent it is representative, a focus group featured on Fox news, about 20 people selected randomly, also showed us rampant ignorance in action: People shouting at each other, people making one unsubstantiated claim after another, basing opinions on mischaracterizations founded on half truths or nothing more than headlines or miscellany that might or might not be true. However, if you are informed it is possible to make irrefutable arguments, either setting the record straight about verifiable facts or by making comparisons that make use of verifiable facts. Suppose the ban was on Germans during the late 1930s? Would either Shields or Brooks have put Nazism in the same category as other political systems? Would they have insisted that inasmuch as we absorbed several million eastern European Jews in the early years of the 20th century we should anticipate similar behavior from Nazi immigrants? For that is what this amounts to. This metaphor can only be taken so far. Many Germans from a decade before, including my grandparents, were Germans -getting the hell out of the country before the Nazis made things worse; they were anti-Nazi. However, in a strong sense the metaphor is very useful. But let us presume, for the years 1937 - 1938, thousands of Germans who were Nazis who wanted to flee Hitler's Germany. Say that they all were followers of Ernst Rohm, opponents of Hitler but no less Nazis for that fact. Among them were Germans who were mostly apolitical, functionaries and merchants, among them were women and children, but all were at least nominal Nazis and some were dedicated storm troopers. Should we have let them immigrate to the United States? After all, look at this poor child crying, this young mother who lost everything when she left Bremen, this older man who is dealer in clothing fabrics. Surely we should welcome them into our country for humanitarian reasons -shouldn't we? Really? Welcome Nazis ? What is Islam but a classical-era version of Fascism? Or of some kind of totalitarianism. This is not only a modern-day opinion. Nor is banning Muslims from the United States a 21st century innovation. Two recent articles make this unmistakably clear. The first, by Khaled Beydoun, was published in the Washington Post under the title: "America banned Muslims long before Donald Trump." The other, dated January 31, 2017, by Daniel Burke, appeared at the CNN website, entitled "America's long history of 'vetting' Muslims." Comments here draw on both articles. It all goes back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, a time of overt racism in most of the country and, needless to say, of scholarship that would not pass most modern tests of objectivity. However, we can make allowance for both limitations to focus on one fact, American hostility toward Muslims from the very beginning of the republic. Including Jefferson, by the way. Much is made of the fact that the nation's third president owned a copy of the Koran. However, book ownership does not necessarily mean, so to speak, book "believership." Jefferson had a copy of Muhammad's opus because he wanted to know something useful about the beliefs of America's enemies, specifically the Barbary pirates. Why? Because, under the name of Islam, they were capturing American merchant ships and enslaving American sailors, demanding tribute to free the ships or the men. Jefferson's response, in a message delivered to Congress, was to order American frigates to go to war with the Barbary Muslims. Which he did, successfully, something enshrined in the Marine hymn with the words "shores of Tripoli. " Jefferson defeated the Muslims and forced them to respect American rights. Jefferson was outraged at the values of Muslims and would have none of it. John Adams, who also owned a Koran for the same reason, corresponded regularly with Jefferson in that time period and reported to him in 1814 that Muhammad was a "military fanatic" who really knew no higher good than what his followers could take by force of arms. Adams also called Muhammad a "false prophet," called Islam a religion based on "absurdities" and something that is an "infection" upon humanity. The 1790 law, as the Times article put it : "...limited citizenship to “ any alien, being a free white person...” This "drastically restricted the ability of Muslims to become citizens. The requirement meant that immigrants seeking lawful residence and citizenship were compelled to convince authorities that they fit within the statutory definition of whiteness. Arabs, along with Italians, Jews and others, were forced to litigate their identities in line with prevailing conceptions of whiteness." There were de facto exceptions, such as free people of color, who could not vote but who otherwise, in most places, had rights of white people. Indeed, in few locations, these free blacks (or mulattos) owned slaves themselves. Which was hardly unique to America. Slavery was commonplace all over the world, it wasn't until France led the way at this time that any nation regarded slavery as unacceptable. Even in France resident foreign nationals might maintain their slaves as personal servants or the like. Which says that racial categories of the era only became dysfunctional at a much later time. In 1790 in the United States it was very difficult to disentangle religion and race, especially as soon as any non-Christian religion was part of the discussion. After all, who knew better? The discipline of Comparative Religion would not even begin until the early 19th century and primarily only effected merchants in the export / import trade, a few scholars, and foreign missionaries. If you were an Arab you were a Muslim, was how most Americans thought. It did not matter that you might be a Lebanese Christian or a Christian from Upper Egypt. If you "looked like a Muslim" you were a Muslim. In other words, Trump's ban on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries is anything but a huge break with "the nation's traditions of religious tolerance and welcoming immigrants." You can almost say that nothing is further from the truth. Which most Americans would know except that with the rise of STEM education at the expense of everything else, with the demotion of US History to an also-ran in the schools, they do not know at all, and most journalists do not know it either. What the law of 1970 did was to formalize unofficial practice and, in the process, make it just about impossible for Muslims -Arabs, South Asians, etc.- from entering the United states or, if they got that far, from ever becoming citizens. This would persist until the end of World War II. Even the 20,000 or so estimated black Muslim slaves in the South ceased to be Muslims after a while. Their masters would not tolerate any such thing and if they were to observe any religion the rule was that it could only be some form of Christianity. To continue with the Times article, "Courts unwaveringly framed Islam as hostile to American ideals and society, casting Muslim immigrants as outside the bounds of whiteness and a threat to the identity and national security of the United States" In 1891, for instance, U.S. Courts painted Islam as more than merely a foreign religion, but rather as a rival ideology and "enemy race." The Supreme Court that year was clear about "the intense hostility of the people of Moslem faith to all other sects, and particularly to Christians." A host of very respected historical leaders have said something similar, starting with John Quincy Adams in the 1820s to Winston Churchill in the 20th century -and into our own era Among the exceptions to this characterization was Bertrand Russell, who took the view that Islam was more like Bolshevism. Critics of Islam include names that most readers will be familiar with, starting with examples from history such as Martin Luther, Voltaire, and _Alexis de Tocqueville_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville) , someone who is quoted frequently by historians of America. Here is what he said about Islam: "I studied the Kuran a great deal ... I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammed." G. K. Chesterton was a serious critic, as was Henry Corbin the Orientalist, and literary figure Hilaire Belloc. More recent critics include Brigitte Bardot, arrested five times for her comments critical of Islam -France does not have the equivalent of the First Amendment. Then there is Salman Rushdie -who made the mistake of satirizing Islam in a novel. His penalty was a sentence of death by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Luckily for Rushdie, his Muslim critics have been unable to carry out Khomeini's 'death fatwa,' but another critic was not so lucky. That was Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by a Muslim fanatic in the street in the Netherlands in 2004. Other foreign authors who are critics of Islam include Taslima Nasrin, Dayanand Saraswati, Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, and Aryind Ghosh. Special mention should be made of Ibn Warraq, a Pakistani ex-Muslim who became one of the world's leading scholars of Islam in the process of tearing it apart from top to bottom, exposing its numerous flaws, moral failures, contradictions, factually incorrect claims, and general absurdity. There is a special class of critics of Islam, Atheists. Among them are Sam Harris, the late _Christopher Hitchens_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens) , Richard Dawkins, and Bill Mahar. Atheists tend to be touchy on the subject because, at least among those who have taken the time to become informed, they know full well that Islam condemns them to death for the horrible "sin" of unbelief. And it isn't only Atheists. Many others are under sentence of death in absentia, as it were, for a wide variety of so-called "offenses" (like talking to a Muslim about Jesus, or when a Muslim converts to some other religion) that the news media never tells you about (1) because of their own gross ignorance of even the most basic facts, and (2) because, by choice, they systematically ignore or even defame people who are critical of Islam. Which is another consequence of eight years of pro-Muslim propaganda from Barack Obama. We are only in the beginning stages of correcting for eight years of misinformation, falsehoods about Islam that have seeped into Popular Culture in many ways, and widespread absorption of sugar-coated myths about Islam due to media biases in favor of Muhammad's religion. What should be added is another counterfactual narrative -to the effect that all religions foment violence. Not that there have not been cases of violence on the part of Hindus, Zoroastrians, Shintoists, etc., in the past, including the fairly recent past. During the later T'ang dynasty in China there was a massive pogrom against Buddhists committed by Confucians; for that matter, the Jews of the Hasmonean dynasty committed many acts of violence against various Pagan groups which were all treated as equivalent even though there were, in fact, many Pagan religions some of which were peaceful. However, you can also say that in many or possibly most cases these acts were carried out despite the teachings of a religion. This is certainly true with respect to Christianity and Buddhism, both of which are based on more-or-less pacifist premises. Violence, in these religions, has almost always been caused by involvement of a faith with a state. And states carry out wars for purposes of defense or survival or expansion. But some religions are utterly pacifistic, like the Jain religion of India, and the Baha'i Faith, and like various Christian groups, notably the Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites. There is nothing like this in Islam. More to the point here, Americans whose primary source of information about religion is the mass media seldom know the basic facts. Indeed, this form of ignorance can be lethal. There have been few acts of overt anti-Muslim violence since 9/11; one was notable, in late 2001, because the victim was a Sikh, and more recently a congregation of Sikhs in Wisconsin was targeted for the same reason. Then in February of 2017 a swarthy skinned Hindu was murdered in Nebraska by someone angry at Muslims. What is more troubling is that public policy can be based directly on ignorance, no-one the wiser because "no-one" bothers to actually study religion, especially Islam, and feels justified in concluding that opposition to Islam is unfair and un-American because, after all, only a few criminals act on the basis of a horribly distorted version of Islam that is unrelated to the "real thing." Not that anyone can say for sure, but David Horowitz has cited a Pew opinion poll from the Mid East and South Asia that tells us that Muslim support for jihadists stands at 43% of all believers, hence that out of about 1.0 billion Muslims in question, more than 400 million are pro-jihad even if "only" several hundred thousand young men ever take part in such warfare although not all at once. This would seem to be more than "a few." After all, where is anything comparable found among Christians or Buddhists? What must be pointed out is the fact that perceptions of Muslims vary greatly by political affiliation. That is, there is the real world and perceptions of Democrats and Republicans -which are in different universes. Geller published an article by _Cheryl Chumley_ (http://pamelageller.com/author/cheryl-chumley/) for February 7, 2017, entitled: "Democrats, By and Large, See Islam as Peaceful as Christianity: Poll" This is in reference to a CBS survey of 1,019 adults days before which asked questions about the kinds of behaviors typical of followers of the world's major religions. The results are incredible: "Two-thirds of Democrats participating in a new CBS survey said that Islam fosters violence – but so do all the other religions, including Christianity." This defies comprehension because this kind of outlook is removed from reality as much as it is. Worse, 10 % of Democrats actually believe that Islam is more peaceful than other religions. This compares with 63% of conservatives, not necessarily Republicans, who regard Islam as much more violent; just 2% saw Islam as more peaceful. Why the different opinions? If there is some other conclusion that makes sense please let me know, but the most obvious explanation would seem to be that Democrats are far more likely to believe what they are told by the mainstream media, which, not exactly a secret, skews Left in sync with the views of the Democratic Party. Again, which is "normal" for the TV networks and the Big Press, but which is anything but normal for conservatives who get most of their news from alternative sources. Which is not to say that Fox News is a magnitude different, but is different enough to raise questions that are not asked in the MSM. And conservatives -and Independents- are far more likely to take religion more seriously and also to visit websites that take a critical view of Islam, like sarcastically named "Religion of Peace." Religion of Peace, by the way, reports that as of February 24, 2017, Muslim terrorists have killed 30, 384 people in the name of Islam. For the sake of accuracy we should note that zero is not literally true, and certainly not true in parts of southeast Asia or parts of Africa; in those areas we probably are discussing several hundred religiously motivated attacks against others committed by non-Muslims. But, aside from this, here is the approximate death toll for which other religions are responsible since 2001: Christianity.......0 Buddhism.........0 Hinduism..........0 Confucianism....0 Taoism.............0 This being the case how is it possible for Democrats to believe that Islam is no more violent that other religions? The "mainstream" news media isn't mainstream after all, it presents a ridiculously distorted view of Islam that is based on pure ignorance if not willful denial of factual information. And among its sins, the mainstream media ignores or belittles critics of Islam as if they were all purveying snake oil to the benighted masses. Actually, it is the other way around. In any case there are more and more critics of Islam and they deserve to be far better known than most of them now are. Here are the names of various notable critics of Islam: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Pat Condell Melanie Phillips Robert Spencer Pamela Geller Steve Emerson Brigitte Gabriel Nonie Darwish Mark Steyn David Horowitz Some of these people have gone to lengths to document Muslim crimes and atrocities on a regular basis. Pamela Geller is most notable. Her website, Geller Reports, with new content every day, documents crimes committed by Muslims around the world, atrocities of every description, honor killings, beheadings of captives, forced marriages of pre-teen girls, torture of prisoners, terrorist attacks, murders, a whole range of outrages carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam. Yet the so-called "mainstream media" almost never reports any of this news. Any of it -unless it rises to the level of mass killings or bomb blasts at public events. Here are some examples of what the media has de facto censored out of existence, all reported from various issues of Geller's website, and there are literally thousands of other stories she has published. Geller is, by the way, a newswoman who once oversaw the New York Observer: * Catholic Charities Resettled Muslim Who Waged Jihad at Ohio State University. * Muslim teen to be first fully-covered contestant in Miss Minnesota USA * Jihad knife rampage at St. Cloud mall. 8 stabbed, Muslim asked victims if they were Muslim * Shariah: Illinois to create official state government Muslim council. * Kashmir: 10 dead as Muslims riot after [police] killing of jihad terrorist * Now German police say Cologne mass sex attack involved over 2,000 Muslim men. * Islamic state beheads four soccer players after declaring the sport anti-Islamic * Muslim convert charged with attempt to bomb Jewish synagogue in Florida. There are still other critics of Islam, quite a few in fact, but the point should be reasonably clear. In the early 2000s there were hardly any critics. Most of those -like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes- carefully qualified their views and were careful not to condemn Islam as a religion, preferring to try and find some way to stay in the good graces of the elite establishment. Now there is a new generation of critics who feel free to openly express their contempt for a religion that resembles nothing so much as Fascism. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
