The Blacklist Declassified

🌎 A Clash of Civilizations?

 
I should acknowledge that I have a viewpoint here. I read the fatwa against ISIS by Sheik Abdullah bin Bayyah http://bit.ly/1muiqar. His perspective draws directly from Islamic scriptures. It reminded me of following the logic of medieval Christianity. It is hard not to see a lot of tugging against the text.

Seeing the struggle against ISIS as a “war of civilizations” (medieval vs the Enlightenment) is not difficult. Perhaps President Obama is correct that the best tactic is to not acknowledge any legitimacy to ISIS’ claim to being “true Islam,” but is there a cost here in terms of our understanding of what we are dealing with? Is the media becoming a propaganda tool for the Administration’s ideology? Should the media, rather, focus on simple explication (something quite out of fashion in journalism departments), as Graeme Wood is trying to do http://theatln.tc/1wEYU0g? Regardless of my viewpoint, I have tried to present a balanced set of viewpoints in this backgrounder.

💙💙 TheAtlantic, Peter Beinart: ISIS Is Not Waging a War Against Western Civilization http://theatln.tc/1NUF2wO A primer for Marco Rubio [ and Jeb Bush ]
// 11/14/2015

Vox, Max Fisher: The perfect response to people who blame Islam for ISIS http://bit.ly/1kXlHPC
// 9/24/2015

TheAtlantic, Matt Ford: The West Point Professor Who Contemplated a Coup http://theatln.tc/1WUeZLV
// 8/31/2015, “That doesn’t mean ISIS isn’t reprehensible or dangerous, especially to those under its control in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Its members have committed numerous crimes against humanity, including the attempted genocide of the Yazidi people. But does ISIS—today, at this moment, in 2015—pose an existential threat? Not even close.”

IslamicMonthly, Mohamed Ghilan: Is ISIS Islamic or Not? It Doesn’t Matter http://bit.ly/1lqaLuB
// 3/15/2015

NewRepublic, Mehdi Hasam: How Islamic Is the Islamic State? Not at All. http://bit.ly/1HRLvlJ What The Atlantic got wrong about ISIS
// 3/12/2015

💙💙 TheAtlantic, Graeme Wood: What #ISIS Really Wants http://theatln.tc/1wEYU0g
// Mar 2015 (pub date), “The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.” (Subtitle)

● ISIS’ “religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and … it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.”

● “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

● “Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

● “Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, ’embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion’ that neglects ‘what their religion has historically and legally required.’ Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an ‘interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.'”

● “The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in 1924.”

● “Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000 years—was a communal obligation.”

● “The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.”

● “The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions.”

● “Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to dangerous decisions.”

● “One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement”

● “And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself.”

● “Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing.”
“It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State ‘a problem with Islam.’ The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.”

● “That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time.”

⋙ TheAtlantic, Caner K Dagli: The Phony Islam of #ISIS http://theatln.tc/1zBaDYn
// 2/27/2015, “The group’s interpretation of the religion is not literal. It is not serious. And saying otherwise puts Muslims in an impossible situation.” (Subtitle)
● “Wood’s entire essay implies that such a rejection of ISIS by other Muslims can only be hypocritical or naive, and that ISIS members and supporters follow the texts of Islam as faithfully and seriously as anyone.”
↥ ↧
⋙ TheAtlantic, Graeme Wood: ‘What ISIS Really Wants’: The Response http://theatln.tc/1GcPThS

DailyBeast, Dean Obeidallah: Why Calling ISIS Islamic Only Plays Into Its Hands http://thebea.st/1N5btcR
// 2/20/2015, “ISIS wants us to believe its actions are based in Islam because it frames the conflict as a religious war between the West and Islam.”

VaticanInsider: Parolin at the UN: It is wrong to think in terms of a “clash of civilizations” http://bit.ly/1zHOJIl
// 10/1/2014, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secy of State for the Vatican “spoke about a ‘new form of terrorism” which is a phenomenton of globalisation. ‘We are seeing a totally new phenomenon,’ Parolin said. This should not be seen so much as a disease that is common in certain human environments, but rather, in terms of its global dimension.

It is no longer countries or political groups that are using terrorism as an instrument, the Vatican Secretary of State said, referring implicitly to the Islamic State’s jihadists. For the first time ever, it is a terrorist organization that is ‘threatening all States, vowing to dissolve them and to replace them with a pseudo-religious world government.’ It uses global communication tools to recruit proselytes, ‘attracting from around the world young people who are often disillusioned by a widespread indifference and a dearth of values in wealthier societies.’

“After the September 11 attacks, Parolin told the UN, ‘some media and ‘think tanks’ oversimplified that tragic moment by interpreting all subsequent and problematic situations in terms of a clash of civilizations. This view ignored longstanding and profound experiences of good relations between cultures, ethnic groups and religions, and interpreted through this lens other complex situations such as the Middle Eastern question and those civil conflicts presently occurring elsewhere.’ ‘At times, unilateral solutions have been favoured over those grounded in international law.’

‘The methods adopted, likewise, have not always respected the established order or particular cultural circumstances of peoples.’ The clash of civilisations mindset ‘play[ed] on existing fears and prejudices,’ leading ‘to reactions of a xenophobic nature that, paradoxically, then serve to reinforce the very sentiments at the heart of terrorism itself.'”

“‘A financial system governed only by speculation and the maximization of profits, or one in which individual persons are regarded as disposable items in a culture of waste, could be tantamount, in certain circumstances, to an offence against human dignity. It follows, therefore, that the UN and its member states have an urgent and grave responsibility for the poor and excluded, mindful always that social and economic justice is an essential condition for peace.'”

Pres. Obama to United Nations: So we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations http://1.usa.gov/1HOBIMv
// 9/24/2014 “We have reaffirmed again and again that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. Islam teaches peace. Muslims the world over aspire to live with dignity and a sense of justice. And when it comes to America and Islam, there is no us and them, there is only us — because millions of Muslim Americans are part of the fabric of our country.

“So we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations. Belief in permanent religious war is the misguided refuge of extremists who cannot build or create anything, and therefore peddle only fanaticism and hate. And it is no exaggeration to say that humanity’s future depends on us uniting against those who would divide us along the fault lines of tribe or sect, race or religion.”

MiddleEastMonitor, Lamis Andoni: ISIS and the ‘clash of the civilisations’ http://bit.ly/1462unc
// 9/16/2014, “If we listen carefully to what the Islamic State (ISIS) and its supporters are saying, we see a vision of the world in a state of ongoing war between the West and Islam. The essence of this war is religion, not colonial policies, as if colonialism has never targeted any other non-Muslim nations and Christians as well. We find a distorted promotion of the saying ‘clash of the civilisations’, although it ultimately serves military intervention in the region.”

“The ‘clash of the civilisations’ is an orientalist theory that views the clash of the Arab and Islamic worlds with the Western civilisation as an inevitable result of the ‘civilisation’ gap between the two sides; the ‘civilised and high-class’ West and the ‘barbaric’ East. It uses this distorted logic to justify America’s colonial wars, including the war on terrorism, the bombing of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and everything in between.”

“The orientalist historian Bernard Lewis first coined the term ‘clash of Civilisations’ to prove that there is no existence of an Arab world, but a group of sects or factions, while Israel has the features and characteristics of a state, and therefore, the Arab world can be dissolved. He was followed by Samuel Huntington, who used the term as the title to his book in which he states that there will be an ongoing clash between the West and Islam in the future.”

“The goal was to find a new enemy to replace communism in order to justify America’s domination and the arms industry and dealers after the fall of the Soviet Union. The ‘clash of civilisations’ has now become part of the official Western psychology, and a part of the American people and army’s incitement as a part of undermining the humanity of the nations targeted by American wars.”

HuffPo: Pope Francis Warns Against Third World War: ‘War Is Madness’ http://huff.to/1y0cYkS
// 9/15/2014

ZeroHedge: “World War III May Have Already Begun“, Pope Francis Warns http://bit.ly/1x93mSQ
// 9/14/2014, “‘Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep,’ he said. ‘Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction,’ he said”

WorldPublicForum, Akeel Bilgrami: Identity and the Clash of Civilisations http://bit.ly/1CNgSyU
// 9/10/2014, Wikipedia, on Said: “Edward Wadie Said (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd]; Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and public intellectual who helped found the critical-theory field of postcolonialism.”

“As a cultural critic, Said is best known for the 1978 book Orientalism. In it, he analyses the cultural representations that are the basis of Orientalism, a term he redefined to refer to the West’s patronizing perceptions and depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies—’the East’.”

“Orientalism concluded that Western writing about the Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak, and feminised Other, an existential condition contrasted with the rational, strong, and masculine West.”

“[F]or much of the time throughout the period of the Crusades, there was indeed an exemplification of what Said’s first remark suggests: a dialog and exchange even as there is a clash.”

“All that changed with Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt and the British conquest of India. Now, the health of hostility, which I just described, was eroded and a quite different tenor of relations developed with condescension and feelings of superiority bred on colonial attitudes on the one side and a feeling of defensiveness and resentment bred upon defeat and the loss of autonomy on the other. For this sort of relation the term ‘clash’ is a complete misnomer for that would mean a conquest is being passed off as a clash. And since these attitudes characterize the relations between the West and Islam to this day, it is a self-serving misdiagnosis of the present situation for Huntington, and those influenced by him, to describe the current situation as ‘a clash.'”

“…economic arrangements that are materially exploitative…” “And so it remains a conquest, passing itself off as a clash.” “Whatever it is that one has, one does not have a dialog with a master.”

“Identities are most obviously formed under conditions of demoralization…”

“Islam becomes a source of collective comfort, inspires a sense of autonomy and self-respect, and sometimes provides a source and site of mobilization with a declared ‘anti-imperialist’ thrust.”

“So, both triumphalism [Scotland, Israel] and feelings of defeat generate identities, no doubt for very different reasons.”

“…Amartya Sen has made much of in his recent book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006).”

“…class is more fundamental than these other categories of gender, race, and caste”

“If such gains that have been made in the areas of race, gender, and caste politics had undermined capital and the corporate domination of the political economies in the societies in which the gains were made, then they would never have been allowed.” [emph mine]

💙  TheHill, James Jeffrey: Is Islamism compatible with democracy? http://bit.ly/1wiK6CB
// 9/5/2014
“Islamism is not a form of the Muslim faith…; it is a political ideology”
Islamism “is a political ideology that strives to derive legitimacy from Islam”
“Islamist political parties are a subset of ideologically driven political movements”
“Democracy … is based on the integrity & free choice of the individual”
“democratic experience places the state at the service of the individual”
‘incompatible w the idea of the state serving a pluralistic & ever-changing populace’
“Under Islamism, the govt necessarily becomes a ‘tool’ for the ideological movement”
Under Islamism, “the role of the individual … is to serve the greater, transcendental cause”
// “Any ideological approach to governance, be it religious or philosophical, such as Marxism, is incompatible with the idea of the state working to serve a pluralistic and ever-changing populace. Under Islamism, the government necessarily becomes a “tool” for the ideological movement to enforce creed, manifest in Islam with the prohibition on renouncing religion in any form. In such a cause-based construct, the role of the individual, rather like that of a soldier in the military, is to serve the greater, transcendental cause.”

NYT, Ross Douthat: No One Expects the Caliphate http://nyti.ms/1jKqFsj
↥ ↧
Remarkable! ➔ 💙💙 NewRepublic, Mark Lilla: The Truth About Our Libertarian Age: Why the dogma of democracy doesn’t always make the world better http://bit.ly/1sXX2gn
// 6/17/2014, sweeping, joycean : #highlyrec
⇈ ⇊
● “we have not thought nearly enough about the end of the Cold War”
● “we have not thought about the “intellectual vacuum that [the end of the Cold War] left behind”
● “Never since the end of World War II, & perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow & clueless”
●  “we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in”
●  “The connection between words & things has snapped”
●  “The end of ideology has not meant the lifting of clouds”
●  The end of ideology “has brought a fog so thick that we can no longer read what is right before us”
●  Two great ideologies – progressive & counter-revolutionary – have been eclipsed & left behind a libertarian shell
●  “An[y] ideology … holds us in its grasp with an enchanting picture of reality”
●  ‘Two grand narratives … a progressive one culminating in a liberating revolution v an apocalyptic one ending w natural order restored’
●  “The ideological narrative of the European left was a cross between Prometheus Bound & the life of Jesus” // Then there was Cambodia, and the music stopped. [totally agree, but no one talks about it.]
●  The story of the counter-revolutionary right “was a cross between the legend of the golem & the Book of Revelation”
●  “The forces of reaction … never could control the forces of revolution in the 19thC, which were scientific, economic, & technological as well”
●  “The forces of reaction … never could control the forces of revolution in the 19thC, which were scientific, economic, & technological as well” as political
●  “into [the fray] leapt nationalist redeemers” …but “we have now made our way into the mind of fascism”
●  “To speak about such matters is already, [just] two decades on, to conjure up a lost world …”
●  “Try to convey the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989 to young students todayAmerican, European, even Chinese students—and you are left feeling like a blind poet singing of lost Atlantis” …. “Students simply do not feel the psychological pull of ideology today, and find it hard to imagine a captive mind.”
● Bell: We “did not imagine that the will to inquire would itself wither. But it has.”
●  the left “thinks that the age of ideology never ended & that a new “hegemonic worldview” has simply replaced fascism & communism’

● “Americans call it democratic capitalism and are delighted with it; Europeans call it neoliberalism and are unhappy with it.”

●  Current libertarianism: “It begins with basic liberal principles—the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority, tolerance—and advances no further”

●  It is shocking to see how slow Europeans have been to recognize how seriously the EU jeopardizes … self-government’

● “until now modern constitutional democracies have developed only w/in the context of sovereign nation-states”
● a nation-state “is large enough [for] people to think beyond their local interests, but not so large that they feel they have no control” over their lives”
●  The nation-state “gives [citizens] the means of calling govts to account” Historically speaking, this is a very hard trick to pull off”
We are “unable or just unwilling to distinguish the varieties of non-democracy that exist today”, we instead speak of their ‘human rights records'” which tell us much less than we think they do”
● “No [other] peoples are as libertarian as Americans have become today”
●  Other cultures “prize goods that individualism destroys” [≃ intangibles that are “good”]

● “The truth is that billions of people will not be living in liberal democracies in our lifetimes”
●  “Without the rule of law and a respected constitution, without professional bureaucracies that treat citizens impartially, without the subordination of the military to civilian rule, without regulatory bodies to keep economic transactions transparent, without social norms that encourage civic engagement and law-abidingness—without all of this, modern liberal democracy is impossible.”

●  The next Nobel Peace Prize “should go to the [person] who develops a model of constitutional theocracy [for] Muslim countries … ”
●  “Our hubris” is to think  “… all we have to do is stick to our ‘democratic values’ & econ models & faith in the individual & all will be well”
●  “The end of the Cold War destroyed whatever confidence in ideology still remained in the West”
●  ‘But the end of the Cold War also seems to have destroyed our will to understand’
●  “Once we had a nostalgia for the future. Today we have an amnesia for the present”   //➔ Wow!

 
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Dartmouth, Edward Said [ColumbiaU]: Essay: Reflections on Exile [pdf] http://bit.ly/1wPRmWw
// 2002, quoting Hugh of St Victor, a 12th Century monk from Saxony: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a practiced beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the whole world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; but the perfect man has extinguished his.” p. 147

“Hugo [Auerbach] twice makes it clear that the ‘strong’ or ‘perfect’ man achieves independence or detachment by working through attachments; not by rejecting them…. What is true of all exile is not that home or love of home are lost but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

“Regard experiences as if they are about to disappear. What is it that anchors the in reality? What would you save of them? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is ‘sweet’ but whose circumstances make it impossible to recapture this sweetness can answer these questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)
“There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be.”

Edward W. Said: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Convergences: Inventories of the Present) [book] http://amzn.to/1vi35HV including “Clash of Definitions”
// 2002

NYT, Martha Nussbaum: Review of Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays: The End of Orthodoxy – For Edward Said, exile means a critical distance from all cultural identities http://nyti.ms/13Ac4xo
// 2/18/2001

TheGuardian, Maya Jaggi [UK]: Review: Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays: The Edward Said Reader http://bit.ly/1xpaX1A
// 12/1/2001, Edward Said: “arguably the most influential intellectual of our time”

“Palestinian-American, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and the most persuasive voice in the west for Palestinian self-determination”

“His essay ‘The Clash of Definitions’ should be read by anyone interested in the intellectual history of the present ‘war on terrorism’ and its unstable elision into a war on Islam.”

“As Said points out: ‘What is described as ‘Islam’ [in Europe and the US] belongs to the discourse of Orientalism, a construction fabricated to whip up feelings of hostility and antipathy against a part of the world that happens to be of strategic importance.’ The simplistic ascription of ‘Muslim rage’ to those supposedly resentful of western modernity makes economic and political problems appear timeless and intractable.”

“‘Seeing the world as a foreign land makes possible originality of vision,’ writes Said, for whom the exile’s predicament is ‘as close as we come in the modern era to tragedy’.”

“While ‘the very idea of identity involves fantasy, manipulation, invention, construction’, seeing civilisations as clashing monoliths obscures their silent exchange and dialogue, hybridity and mingling. ‘There are no insulated cultures or civilisations,’ Said writes. ‘The more insistent we are on separation, the more inaccurate we are about ourselves and others.'”

“‘American intellectuals,’ he says, ‘owe it to our country to fight the coarse anti-intellectualism, bullying, injustice, and provincialism that disfigure its career as the last superpower.’ It is not least his work against separatism and artificial barriers, or the notion of ‘us versus them’, that makes Said a crucial and persuasive reader of the world.”

MEF/UMassAmherst, Edward Said (ColumbiaU): The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ [transcript] http://bit.ly/1CNh29v
// 1998

Foreign Affairs, Samuel P Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations? http://fam.ag/1HNrxYt
// Summer 1993