Christopher Hitchens [1] has a number of religious phobias surrounding him. His latest book would seem to indicate that point, amply. They seem to me unreasoning phobias. For all that he has the symptoms of the Islamo-Facist movement cataloged fairly well, his conclusions on the diagnosis are so far off base as to at least partially discredit his cataloging… Particularly where he attributes the same motivations to Christianity.
Still, he’s nailed the symptom here, in speaking on Islamo-facist rage, and the reaction of our press to it:
I have actually seen some of these demonstrations, most recently in Islamabad, and all I would do if I were a news editor is ask my camera team to take several steps back from the shot. We could then see a few dozen gesticulating men (very few women for some reason), their mustaches writhing as they scatter lighter fluid on a book or a flag or a hastily made effigy. Around them, a two-deep encirclement of camera crews. When the lights are turned off, the little gang disperses. And you may have noticed that the camera is always steady and in close-up on the flames, which it wouldn’t be if there was a big, surging mob involved.
Hitch isn’t saying anything new, here. However, he has managed to lay down in less than a paragraph, the crux of the entire problem with this supposed Arab rage. It is the same problem as generates any number of suicide bombers, as I commented to James Joyner [2] earlier this morning. What we’re up against, my friends, is a group of people who understand very clearly that this is a public relations battle. A war, if you will, of information. Or, perhaps more correctly, misinformation.
Hitch makes a second point, also, which should be at the head of our domestic political discourse today, here in the west. Hitch is correctly identifying how we ought to be approaching the problem… essentially ignoring the claims of insult.
We may have to put up with the Rage Boys of the world, but we ought not to do their work for them, and we must not cry before we have been hurt. In front of me is a copy of this week’s Economist, which states that Rushdie’s 1989 death warrant was “punishment for the book’s unflattering depiction of the Prophet Muhammad [3].” There is no direct depiction of the prophet in this work of fiction, and the reverie about his many wives occurs in the dream of a madman. Nobody in Ayatollah Khomeini’s circle could possibly have read the book for him before he issued a fatwah, which made it dangerous to possess. Yet on that occasion, the bookstore chains of America pulled The Satanic Verses from their shelves, just as Borders shamefully pulled Free Inquiry (a magazine for which I write) after it reproduced the Danish cartoons. Rage Boy keenly looks forward to anger, while we worriedly anticipate trouble, and fret about etiquette, and prepare the next retreat. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean living at the pleasure of Rage Boy, and that I am not prepared to do.
Allow me the liberty of paraphrasing this one; Kissing their backsides, as some people in the west have counseled, is not going to make them hate us any less. Indeed, I’m beginning to think that such claims of insults and outrage, should be discounted totally. This injury, this insult we keep hearing about, which supposedly results in all this apparent irrationality, is nothing of this sort. Thus are we greeted with pictures in the newspapers and on the web, of Islamo-facists acting irrationally, in reaction to the Pope’s statement that the followers of Islam are irrational, for example. It’s little ironic twists like that, that give us the clue, that perhaps we’ve got the problem misidentified.
It is easy , perhaps too easy, and maybe amusing , in a dark, fatalistic sort of way, to suggest that our enemy is acting irrationally… that the responses to every perceived insult sends them off the deep end, into emotionalism usually unseen in western cultures. Far from being irrational, however, their actions are actually quite rational, when one looks at the larger picture. The Islamic extremists is nothing if not pragmatic; if they find that getting ‘angry’ works to the end of giving them power over the west, they will continue to use the tactic. And yes, I would consider the withdrawing “Satanic Verses” and the Danish Cartoons from the shelves to be prime examples of the act of butt kissing.
I think we can safely take “Palestine” was a another example… What we are witness to in that case, is a hyperextended 40 year long exercise in backside kissing. That situation demonstrates quite clearly that no amount of “respect for their sensibilities” is going to solve the problem. What have all those concessions over the last 40 years brought us, except more demands? That, in fact, has been the pattern all along. It’s somewhat axiomatic to say that we should have learned from Neville Chamberlain that appeasement doesn’t work. The history of supposed Arab rage does nothing but bear that lesson out.
Make no mistake, my friends, we are involved in a long-term political battle, and one we must win. In both the cases of the suicide bomber, and the cases of what Hitch is pleased to call “Islamic rage boy”, what we have is a recognition of a long term political fight. A struggle for ultimate power, possibly years into the future. As I have suggested in the past, any kind of guerrilla warfare including suicide bombing, is a recognition that there is no way to win on a military bases, and therefore the battle must be waged in terms of public opinion. Both methods are of a piece;they are designed to break down the will of those whom the Islamo- Facists wish to conquer. The trouble is, it’s a fight they are currently winning, because there are so many of our own western society, who refuse to recognize the situation as such.
In labeling it a political fight, my comments should not be construed as diminishing the validity of the military fight, currently going on in Afghanistan, and Iraq. Certainly, military action is required in those countries. And, frankly, I think, Iran as well. But let’s recognize, as Carl Von Clausewitz did, nearly 200 years gone: war is an inexorable part of politics.
I, for one, consider war to be ugly enough so is only to be worth waging if you plan to win. Alas that for some, namely the political left in this country, that determination has yet to be made. … that if it is delayed much longer, it never will be… which of course results in what Hitch describes as living (or, dying) at the pleasure of Islamic rage boy.