Republicans Kind of Suck … Which Is Why They Will Win Huge in November
Because in the Democratic land of epic, mega, ultra, apocalyptic levels of sucking, those who kinda suck are king
By Frank J. Fleming
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/republicans-kind-of-suck-which-is-why-they-will-win-huge-in-november/?singlepage=true

This election season has been hard on pundits. The Democrats are going to get massacred in November, and it’s really obvious to pretty much everyone exactly why — which makes writing political commentary like trying to come up with a long-winded explanation for why two plus two equals four.

Here’s my attempt.

Doesn’t it suck when you have a dog that barks all night? Everyone hates that. It’s annoying. It can even drive you pretty crazy if it goes on long enough. People hate that.

Know what also sucks? A zombie apocalypse. That’s when society collapses due to some spreading zombie virus, and most of your friends and family are dead, and you have to scrounge for food to survive while the walking dead threaten you around every corner. People also hate that.

So, we’re all agreed that a barking dog and a zombie apocalypse both suck. Everyone following so far?

Now let’s look at what led us to the political situation we’re in. During the second term of the Bush presidency people just got fed up with Republicans. They were idiots, they were no good at the whole fiscal conservatism thing (which is sort of the whole point of them), we had these wars that seemed to be going nowhere, and the economy was beginning to fail. They sucked, and people were sick and tired of them.

Thus people turned to the Democrats. And Obama.

Let’s just say they also sucked.

AMERICANS: “So, the economy is pretty bad and there’s high employment. You think you can do something about that?”

DEMOCRATS AND OBAMA: “We can spend a trillion dollars we don’t have on pork and stuff.”

AMERICANS: “No … that’s not what we want. We’d really like you not to do that.”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re stupid. We’re doing it anyway.”

AMERICANS: “That’s not going to help us get jobs!”

DEMOCRATS: “Sure it will; millions of them … though they may be invisible. You’ll have to trust us they exist. And guess what else we’ll do: We’ll create a giant new government program to take over health care.”

AMERICANS: “That has nothing to do with jobs!”

DEMOCRATS: “We don’t care about that anymore. We really want a giant new health care program. We’re sure you’ll love it.”

AMERICANS: “Don’t pass that bill. You hear me? Absolutely do not pass that bill.”

DEMOCRATS: “Believe me; you’ll love it. It has … well, I don’t know what exactly is in the bill, but we’re sure it’s great.”

AMERICANS: “Listen to me: DO. NOT. PASS. THAT. BILL.”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re not the boss of me! We’re doing it anyway!”

AMERICANS: “Look what you did! Now the economy is way worse, we’re even deeper in debt, and we have a bunch of new laws we don’t want!”

DEMOCRATS: “You’re racist.”

AMERICANS: “Wha … How is that racist?”

DEMOCRATS: “Now you’re getting violent! Stop being violent and racist, you ignorant hillbillies! And remember to vote Democrat in November.”

So the Democrats sucked. But not just plain old, usual politician sucked, but epic levels of suck where it’s hard to find an analog in human history that conveys the same level of suckitude. It was sheer incompetence plus arrogance — and those things do not complement each other well. We’re talking sucking that distorts time and space like a black hole.

It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck — but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart. Or, to use Obama’s favorite analogy, you have a car stuck in ditch, so you call the mechanic, but the only tool he brings with him is a sledgehammer. And then he smashes your car to pieces and charges you $100,000 for his service. Finally, he calls you racist for complaining. Obama and the Democrats have been so awful, it’s hard for the human brain to even comprehend.

But the Democrats will counter that the Republicans also suck. And while this is true, it’s not really going to help them. As I pointed out before, both a dog incessantly barking and a zombie apocalypse are things that everyone would agree suck. Yet no one during a zombie apocalypse, while hiding out in a boarded up mall, would turn to the other survivors and say, “We don’t want to kill all the zombies; then we’d have to go back to being woken up at night by that annoying dog next door.” But this is the best argument the Democrats can come up with. “Remember how awful the Republicans and Bush were? You hated them. You don’t want to go back to that.” Yes, why would people want to go back to when 6% unemployment was considered high?

People do remember how much the Republicans suck, and they know where it tops out … and that is nowhere near as bad as the Democrats are today. Like with the barking dog, it’s annoying, but you know it’s not going to cause the collapse of civilization as we know it. Not so with the zombie apocalypse; who knows how bad that could get if left to continue? Same with the Democrats and Obama; people have never dealt with anything this horrible their entire lives, and they aren’t that curious to see how much worse it can be.

So the Republicans kinda suck, and that’s why they’re going to win huge this November. Because in the land of epic, mega, ultra, apocalyptic levels of sucking, those who kinda suck are king. Or at least are going to win in a landslide.

Because once the zombie apocalypse is over, the annoying neighbor dog is going to be music to your ears.

For a little while, at least.

Frank J. Fleming writes political humor at IMAO.us and bought a shock collar to keep his dog from barking.

[Sal] Oh, and Mo: more than 70% of US citizens strongly disapprove of both the bailouts and the passage of Obamacare.  Certainly not EVERY American, but also most certainly a large enough majority of voters to carry Republicans to that huge November win that the article is talking about.


Geert Wilders, Western Sages, and Totalitarian Islam
Wilders has joined with the centuries of distinguished scholars who reached the exact same conclusions about Islam back when it was politically acceptable to voice such concerns
By Andrew G. Bostom
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/geert-wilders-western-sages-and-totalitarian-islam/?singlepage=true

In April 2008, during his keynote address to the first conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, Professor Bernard Lewis warned of the ominous limits on scholarly analysis of Islam imposed by political correctness and multiculturalism:

"The degree of thought control, of limitations on freedom of speech and expression is without parallel in the Western world since the eighteenth century and in some cases longer than that. … It seems to me it’s a very dangerous situation, because it makes any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam, to say the least, dangerous. Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had."

The politicized prosecution of Dutch MP Geert Wilders for his free speech criticism of Islam is a case study illustrating Professor Lewis’ most grave concerns. But it is also possible that the outrageous proceedings against Geert Wilders may have pushed the Western freedom-stifling agenda of Islamic correctness too far.

This past Friday (10/15/10) Dutch prosecutors asked the presiding judges to acquit Mr. Wilders on all charges of inciting hate and discrimination. Wilders was unsurprisingly “very happy” with the prosecutors’ recommendations, adding with his usual plainspoken lucidity:

"I do not insult, I do not incite to hatred, I do not discriminate. The only thing I do and will continue to do is to speak the truth."

As the Associated Press reported, however, there was a caveat:

"The move by prosecutors signaled their belief the case against Wilders was weak, although judges could still disagree and convict him. The defense begins its case next week and a verdict is scheduled for next month."

Former U.S. federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy underscores this concern regarding the presiding judges. He reminds us that the Dutch prosecutors never desired to charge Wilders, but they were in effect “overruled” by the Dutch judiciary:

"In 2008, the office of the public prosecutor declined to charge him. The lunatic judges are the ones who’ve been behind this all along, representative as they are of the transnational progressive thinking responsible for having such “crimes” on the books in the first place. In 2009, the Dutch Court of Appeals issued an order essentially overruling the prosecutors and ordering that Wilders be charged."

With refreshing sobriety, Dutch prosecutor Birgit van Roessel argued in her summation that Wilders’ statements were made as an integral part of the public debate “about the immigration and integration of non-Western foreigners, especially Muslims. Standpoints can vary considerably and emotions can run high, but … it is a debate that it must be possible to have.”

And most importantly, Ms. van Roessel further acknowledged:

"Many of Wilders’ statements seemed to denounce Islam as an ideology or its growing influence in the Netherlands, rather than being intended as an abuse of Muslims as a people or group."

During a March 2009 interview with the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, Wilders had earlier rejected the notion he “hates Muslims,” while providing a frank characterization of the totalitarian nature of Islam:

"I have nothing against the people. I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values."

By making this latter claim, Wilders shattered a corrosive modern taboo, enforced rigidly and without forgiveness by cultural relativist politicians and government bureaucrats as well as influential “savants” in media, academia, and religion.

But Wilders’ assessment not only comports with scholarly observations made (primarily) before the advent of the postmodern Western scourge of cultural relativism, it is supported by contemporary hard polling data from 2006 -2007, and a more recent follow-up reported February 25, 2009. At present, overwhelming Muslim majorities — i.e., better than two-thirds (see the weighted average calculated here) of a well-conducted survey of the world’s most significant and populous Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries — want these immoderate outcomes: “strict application” of Shari’a, Islamic law, and a global caliphate.

Specifically, the World Public Opinion.org/ University of Maryland poll (released February 25, 2009) indicated the following about our putative Muslim ally nations of Egypt and Pakistan: 81% of the Muslims of “moderate” Egypt, the largest Arab Muslim nation, desire a “strict” application of Shari’a, Islamic law; 76% of Pakistan’s Muslims — one of the most important and sizable non-Arab Muslim populations — want this outcome. Furthermore, 70% of Egyptian Muslims and 69% of Pakistani Muslims desire the re-creation of a “single Islamic state or caliphate.” Elsewhere, I have detailed the totalitarian impact of these fulfilled Islamic desires — based upon their doctrinal and historical application across space and time.

And these concrete data validate eminent Western scholarly appraisals of Islamic despotism, or in modern parlance, totalitarianism. Repeatedly for 100 years, between the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, important scholars and intellectuals — for example, the historians Jacob Burckhardt, Waldemar Gurian, and Karl Wittfogel, philosopher Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung (the founder of modern analytical psychiatry), Protestant theologian Karl Barth, sociologist Jules Monnerot (one of the pre-eminent 20th century scholars of Islamic law), G.H. Bousquet, and even the contemporary Western eminence grise on Islamic civilization, Bernard Lewis — have all referred to Islam as a despotic or totalitarian ideology.

For example, being imbued with fanaticism was the ultimate source of Muhammad’s great strength and led to his triumph as a despot, according to Burckhardt. Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897), an iconic figure in the annals of Western historiography, believed it was the solemn duty of Western civilization’s heirs to study and acknowledge their own unique cultural inheritance — starting with the culture and heritage of classical Athens. Burckhardt emphasized how the Western conception of freedom was engendered in Athens, where its flowering was accompanied by the production of some of history’s most sublime literary and artistic works. Moreover, while Burckhardt affirmed the irreducible nature of freedom and upheld equality before the law, he decried the notion — a pervasive, rigidly enforced dogma at present — that all ways of life, opinions, and beliefs were of equal value.

Burckhardt argued that this conceptual reductio ad absurdum would destroy Western culture, heralding a return to barbarism. And contra the Western legacy of Athens — epitomized by freedom — Burckhardt referred to Islam as a despotic, or in 20th century terms, totalitarian ideology:

"All religions are exclusive, but Islam is quite notably so, and immediately it developed into a state which seemed to be all of a piece with the religion. The Koran is its spiritual and secular book of law. Its statutes embrace all areas of life … and remain set and rigid; the very narrow Arab mind imposes this nature on many nationalities and thus remolds them for all time (a profound, extensive spiritual bondage!) This is the power of Islam in itself. At the same time, the form of the world empire as well as of the states gradually detaching themselves from it cannot be anything but a despotic monarchy. The very reason and excuse for existence, the holy war, and the possible world conquest, do not brook any other form."

"The strongest proof of real, extremely despotic power in Islam is the fact that it has been able to invalidate, in such large measure, the entire history (customs, religion, previous way of looking at things, earlier imagination) of the peoples converted to it. It accomplished this only by instilling into them a new religious arrogance which was stronger than everything and induced them to be ashamed of their past."

A century later, historian Waldemar Gurian, in 1945, sees Burckhardt’s description of Muhammad as critically important for understanding Hitler’s temperament and historical role, both leaders having been consummate practitioners of reductionist demagoguery — “radical simplifiers.”

Slightly earlier, during an interview conducted in the late 1930s (published in 1939), Karl Jung was asked: “ … had [he] any views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development?” Jung replied, in reference to the Nazi fervor that had gripped Germany:

"We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad.  The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future."

Also published in 1939 was Karl Barth’s assessment (from The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day) of the similarity between Fascist totalitarianism and Islam:

"Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill — with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet."

Jules Monnerot’s 1949 Sociologie du Communisme was translated into English and published as Sociology and Psychology of Communism in 1953. Monnerot elaborated at length upon a brief but remarkably prescient observation by Bertrand Russell, published already in 1920, which compared emerging Bolshevism to Islam. Russell had noted in his The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism:

"Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam. … Those who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and commit intellectual suicide. Even if all the doctrines of Bolshevism were true, this would still be the case, since no unbiased examination of them is tolerated. … Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism [Islam] rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world."

Monnerot made very explicit connections between pre-modern Islamic and 20th century communist totalitarianism. The title of his first chapter dubbed communism “The Twentieth Century Islam.” He elucidates these two primary shared characteristics of Islam and Communism: “conversion” — followed by subversion — from within, and the fusion of “religion” and state. But Monnerot’s brilliant, remarkably compendious analysis in Chapter 1 also introduces the modern Western reader to apposite examples from Islam’s enduring legacy of jihad — Mahmud of Ghazni, Togrul Beg, Alp Arslan, the Fatimids of Egypt, the Shiite Persian Safavids, and even the ostensibly “pacific, benevolent” Sufis. Here are extracts from the first chapter:

"There is a resemblance between the use made of Marxism by the present masters of the totalitarian world and the conversion of nomadic barbarians … such as the Turkish mercenaries Mahmud of Ghazna [Ghazni; modern Afghanistan], [and the Turcomen of Asia Minor] Togrul Beg, and Alp Arslan to the universal religion[s] of the civilization[s] they threatened, namely … Islam. … Like Stalin’s Marxism, their conversion gave them the pretext for disrupting civilization from within; as converts they were able to attack in the name of the true Faith the very societies which had brought the Faith to them. In the same way the Marxist chiefs of totalitarian Russia attack Western society from within, attempting to destroy the social structure of European countries for the sake of the socialism to which these countries themselves gave birth."

"Communism takes the field both as a secular religion and as a universal State; it is therefore … comparable to Islam. … Soviet Russia (to use the name it gives itself, although it is a misdescription of the regime) is not the first empire in which the temporal and public power goes hand in hand with a shadowy power which works outside the imperial frontiers to undermine the social structure of neighboring States. The Islamic East affords several examples of a like duality and duplicity. The Egyptian Fatimids, and later the Persian Safavids, were the animators and propagators, from the heart of their own States, of an active and organizing legend, an historical myth, calculated to make fanatics and obtain their total devotion, designed to create in neighboring States an underworld of ruthless gangsters. The eponymous ancestor of the Safavids was a saint from whom they magically derived the religious authority in whose name they operated. They were Shi’is of Arabian origin, and the militant order they founded was dedicated to propaganda and “nucleation” throughout the whole of Persia and Asia Minor. It recruited “militants” and “adherents” and “sympathizers.” These were the Sufis. As rulers, their sympathies were recognized by other sovereigns in the same way that Stalin, head of the State, is recognized by other heads of States, and rightly, as the leader of world communism. This merging of religion and politics was a major characteristic of the Islamic world in its victorious period. It allowed the head of a State to operate beyond his own frontiers in the capacity of the commander of the faithful (Amir-al-muminin); and in this way a Caliph was able to count upon docile instruments, or captive souls, wherever there were men who recognized his authority. The territorial frontiers which seemed to remove some of his subjects from his jurisdiction were nothing more than material obstacles; armed force might compel him to feign respect for the frontier, but propaganda and subterranean warfare could continue no less actively beyond it."

"Religions of this kind acknowledge no frontiers. Soviet Russia is merely the geographical center from which communist influence radiates; it is an “Islam” on the march, and it regards its frontiers at any given moment as purely provisional and temporary. Communism, like victorious Islam, makes no distinction between politics and religion. … To an educated European or American, unless he is himself a communist, it appears that communists are religious fanatics in the service of an expansionist empire which is striving for world dominion. But communists see it differently: for them communism is what ought to be, and the whole of history, the whole past of humanity, takes its meaning from this future event. … Communism is a faith, and it has in Russia a sort of fatherland; but such a fatherland cannot be a country like any other. Russia is to communism what the Abbasid empire was to Islam. Communism … is a religious sect of world conquerors for whom Russia is simply the strongpoint from which the attack is launched."

Monnerot returns briefly to Islam’s paradigmatic fusion of religion and state in Chapter 12, titled “Twentieth Century Absolutism,” invoking another relevant historical example — the Ottoman empire and its brutal jihad enslavement and forced conversion to Islam of subjected Christian children for the slave soldier devshirme-janissary system:

"Islam has provided the type of society in which the political and the sacred are indissolubly merged. The law of the Koran was religious, political, and civil all in one; and an infidel could be no more than a tributary. In history and in law he appeared as an object, but not as a participating subject; and the Ottoman empire was interested in the children of infidels only because they could be recruited as janissaries. During the great period of Islamic conquests the State, in so far as it existed in our sense of the word, participated in the sacred doctrine of the prophet [Muhammad] and was its embodiment and life. The companions of the prophet, partakers in the revolutionary legitimacy, did not constitute a Church; nor do the secular religions inherent in 20th century absolutisms, but the power of the prophetic elite (which is what the party’s “summit” is at the moment when the new State is created) is all the more absolute for being, as it were, a condensation of the power of the whole society. And the leader represents the extreme point of condensation."

Bernard Lewis, in his 1954 essay “Communism and Islam,” expounded upon on the quintessence of totalitarian Islam, and how it was antithetical in nature to Western democracy, while sharing important features of Communist totalitarianism — most notably, global domination via jihad:

"I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition. … Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical-attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West. … In point of fact, except for the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. … [I]t was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God’s vicegerent on earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld the law; but with the decline of the caliphate and the growth of military dictatorship, Muslim jurists and theologians accommodated their teachings to the changed situation and extended the religious duty of obedience to any effective authority, however impious, however barbarous. For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as 'tyranny is better than anarchy' and 'whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.'”

"Quite obviously, the Ulama [religious leaders] of Islam are very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which- the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as 'There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet' was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith — a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy — might well strike a responsive note.'"

Karl Wittfogel’s seminal 1957 analysis of pre-modern Eastern totalitarianism, Oriental Despotism — A Comparative Study of Total Power, contains insights on Islam that are particularly illuminating, and ever-relevant to present-era tribulations deriving from the unreformed (and even unexamined) mandates of Islamic supremacism. Underpinning Islamic “absolutism,” Wittfogel notes, is the same Koranic injunction (Koran 4:59) — cited by Islamic legists from Mawardi (d. 1058) to Mawdudi (d. 1979) — as legitimizing the totalitarian caliphate system:

"The Koran exhorts believers to obey not only Allah and his prophet, but also “those in authority amongst you.” In the absolutist states established by Mohammed’s followers, this passage was invoked to emphasize the importance of obedience in maintaining governmental authority."

Wittfogel’s candor extends to these unapologetic observations contrasting Ottoman and Medieval Western European regulation of guilds, and the nature of Islamic religious “tolerance” — more aptly, non-Muslim dhimmitude under Islamic law:

"In Ottoman Turkey officials inspected the markets and controlled the prices, weight, and measurements, thus fulfilling functions which in the burgher-controlled towns of Medieval Europe were usually the responsibility of the urban authorities. Furthermore, the state, which in most countries of feudal Europe collected few if any taxes from the urban centers of strongly developed guild power, was able in Turkey to tax the guilds and, as elsewhere in the Orient, to employ its fiscal agents the headmen of these corporations, who distributed the tax-quotas of their members and who were personally responsible for their payment.

[F]ollowers of these creeds [Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism] had to accept an inferior status both politically and socially, and they were prevented from spreading their ideas. The laws forbade conversion from Christianity to Judaism or vice versa; and penalties for apostasy from Islam were severe. Christians were not permitted to beat their wooden boards (these boards were used as bells) loudly, or sing in their churches with raised voices, or assemble in the presence of Muslims, or display their 'idolatry,' 'nor to invite to it, nor show a cross,' on their churches. No wonder that the religious minorities — who during the Turkish period were set apart in organizations called millet– vegetated rather than throve. The head of the millet was nominated by the millet but appointed by the sultan; once in office he was given just enough power to enable him to collect the taxes imposed on his community by the state."

G.H. Bousquet (d. 1978), one of the foremost 20th century scholars of Islamic law, explained how Islam’s unique institution of jihad war and its eternal quest to impose the Shari’a on all of humanity represented the quintessence of Islamic totalitarianism. Writing in 1950, Bousquet further warned that these ancient Muslim doctrines remained alive and relevant to the modern era:

"Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer. … Viewed from this angle, the study of Muhammadan Law (dry and forbidding though it may appear to be to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh), is of great importance to the world of today."

Two contemporary assessments confirm the ongoing importance of Bousquet’s warning regarding Islamic law, and the totalitarian impulse of Islam.

In a brilliant, dispassionate modern analysis, Ibn Warraq describes 14 characteristics of “Ur Fascism” as enumerated by Umberto Eco, analyzing their potential relationship to the major determinants of Islamic governance and aspirations, through the present. He adduces salient examples which reflect the key attributes discussed by Eco: the unique institution of jihad war; the establishment of a caliphate under “Allah’s viceregent on earth,” the caliph, ruled by Islamic law, i.e., Shari’a, a rigid system of subservience and sacralized discrimination against non-Muslims and Muslim women, devoid of basic freedoms of conscience and expression. Warraq’s assessment confirms what G.H. Bousquet concluded (in 1950) from his career studying the historical development and implementation of Islamic law.

Finally, Arun Shourie’s The World of Fatwas analyzes the stultifying and dangerous living legacy of the Islamic doctrine being imparted by the orthodox Muslim religious establishment in his native India and repeated throughout the Muslim world. After providing copious examples, he maintains:

"It is of the very essence of a totalitarian ideology that it enforces its right to regulate the totality of life. The Koran, the Hadith, the fatwas represent one continuous endeavor in this respect: they aim at controlling every single aspect of life. … The ideology [of Islam] is premised not just on the belief that believers are eternally separate from, and eternally superior to non-believers. It is premised on eternal hostility between the two. Fanaticism and terrorism, [and] aggression are the inevitable results of this worldview. Accordingly, the ideology makes it well-nigh impossible for Muslims to live peaceably in societies in which Muslims are just one of several communities. Indeed, it makes it impossible for an Islamic state to live peaceably in a world where there are non-Islamic states also …"

And Shourie concludes with this germane admonition:

"[W]e must expose, and work to thwart concessions by our opportunist politicians which are meant to appease, and will in the end strengthen the grip of these reactionary elements …"

Geert Wilders’ keen, if blunt conceptions articulate contemporary realities, while restating seminal insights on Islam observed by great scholars whose works antedate the present day morbid affliction of cultural relativism. The tragic rejection of freedom of conscience by mainstream Islamic religious and political institutions representing all Muslim nations, and the global Islamic umma — a living sine qua non of Islamic totalitarianism — provides irrefragable confirmation that Wilders’ characterization of Islam as a totalitarian ideology is accurate.

Andrew Bostom (http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/) is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005/2008) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008).


The Closing of the Muslim Mind
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/18/the-closing-of-the-muslim-mind/

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert R. Reilly, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, and National Review, among many other publications. A member of the board of the Middle East Media Research Institute and a former director of the Voice of America, he has taught at the National Defense University, served in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His latest book is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, just been published by ISI Press.

FP: Robert R. Reilly, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin with what inspired you to write The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

Reilly: Several things.  Professionally, I was working in the “war of ideas” area both at the Voice of America and then at the Defense Department.  One cannot fight a war of ideas unless one understands the ideas one is at war with.  Our 9/11 attackers justified themselves in terms of their Muslim faith.  Therefore, I was ineluctably led into a deep study of Islamic theology and into an examination of what constitutes justice in Islam.

I was also intrigued by Bernard Lewis’ work, which so effectively laid out “what went wrong” in the Islamic world without exactly telling us “why” it went wrong.  I began searching for the answer.

FP: What is the main argument of your book and how is your book original?

Reilly: I did not find the answer to my question in any one place, or I would not have written the book.  I discovered bits and pieces here and there.  I put them together into what I hope is a coherent answer to the question of “why it went wrong?” I wrote the book for myself and for any others who are intrigued by the same question as to how this once great culture so totally collapsed in on itself and became so frustrated that it bred these Islamist terrorists.

My general thesis is that Islamism is a spiritual pathology based on a deformed theology that has produced a dysfunctional culture.  I know this is a mouthful, and I take some 200 pages to explain it.  In short, the source of the problem is a profound misconception as to who God is.

FP: Tell us about the Islamic conception of God and how it closes the human mind.

Reilly: First, I must be careful in saying that I speak only of Sunni Islam, which is by far the majority expression of the faith.  Within Sunni Islam, I speak of the Ash‘arite school of theology, which is the majority view within Sunni Islam, especially so in the Middle East.  I focus on this because the Arab world is dominant in Islam for the obvious reasons that Mohammed was an Arab and that the Quran, thought to be the literal word of God, is in Arabic.  As most Muslims accept the Quran as having existed co-eternally with God, this means that Arabic is God’s language.

The answer to your question completely hinges on God’s relationship to reason in Sunni Islam.  Is God reason, or logos, as the Greeks would say?  If God himself is reason, then it is hard to close the mind because one would then be closing oneself to God.  This, in fact, was the view of the first fully-developed theological school in Islam, the Mu‘tazilites. The Mu‘tazalites asserted the primacy of reason, and that one’s first duty is to engage in reason and, through it, to come to know God. They held that reason is a gift from God given to come to know Him through the order of his creation.  All men have this gift, not only Muslims.  Therefore, they were disposed to accept Greek philosophy and the moral truths it contained.

However, the school of theology that arose to oppose the Mu’tazilites, the Ash‘arites, held the opposite. Unfortunately, by the end of the ninth century, they prevailed and became the formative influence in Sunni Islam.  For the Ash‘arites, God is not reason, but pure will and absolute power.  He is not bound by anything, including his own word.  Since God is pure will, He has no reasons for his acts.  Thus what He does cannot be understood by man.  One of the things that God does is create the world, which also cannot be understood.

To protect their notion of God’s omnipotence, the Ash‘arites denied cause and effect in the natural world.  For God to be omnipotent, nothing else can be so much as potent.  Therefore, fire does not burn cotton; God does. Gravity does not make the rock fall; God does.  God is the direct cause of everything and there are no secondary causes.  To say otherwise is blasphemy – comparing something to the incomparable God.  Everything therefore becomes the equivalent of a miracle. By their very nature, miracles cannot be understood.  Without causality in the natural order, anything can come of anything, and nothing necessarily follows.  The world becomes incomprehensible because it is without a continuing narrative of cause and effect.

Within our Western tradition, Albert Einstein once remarked that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Thomas Aquinas put it another way. He said that we can understand the world because it was first “thought” by God.  The universe is the product of creative reason.  That is why it is comprehensible. The Ash‘arite rejoinder to Einstein’s statement would be that “the most comprehensible thing about the world is that it is incomprehensible.”  It must be incomprehensible because it is the direct consequence of God’s action, of his will, not of his reason.

Man can only understand that God has given him rules to obey in his revelation.  As a consequence of its character, this revelation must be blindly obeyed.  It is not given to be understood or questioned, but to be complied with.  Put reason aside and submit.  This is how the Sunni Muslim mind closed.  It undercut reason and its ability to know reality.  Philosophy was forbidden.  To protect its notion of God, it made reality unknowable.  This had devastating consequences.

FP: Share some statistics and facts with us to illuminate the earthly incarnations of the closed Muslim mind. In other words, paint for us the dysfunctional culture of Islam today.

Reilly: Well, there are tons of statistics put out by the UN Arab Human Development reports, all written by Arab scholars, by the way.  In brief, but for sub-Saharan Africa, the 300 million people in the Arab world would be at the bottom of every measure of human progress – education, literacy, health care, productivity, GDP, patents, etc.  Original scientific research is essentially dead.  The effort of science is to discover nature’s laws.  The teaching that these laws do not, in fact, exist (for theological reasons) is an obvious discouragement to the scientific enterprise.

Also, it is very revealing that Spain translates almost as many books in a single year as the Arab world has translated in the last thousand years.  What would Caliph al-Ma’mun, who created the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in 830 A.D. to translate books, think of the state of the Arabic world today?  He would be appalled.

Sometime anecdotes tell as much or more than the statistics, especially about the effects of the denial of secondary causality on even the most practical aspects of daily life.  For instance, former British Islamist Ed Husain relates that “Hizb ut-Tahrir [an organization dedicated to the restoration of the caliphate] believed that all natural events were acts of God (though in some actions man could exercise free will), hence insurance polices were haram . . . Hizb members could not insure their cars.”  Likewise, the use of seatbelts is considered presumptuous.  If one’s allotted time has arrived, the seatbelt is superfluous.  If it has not, it is unnecessary.  One must realize that the phrase “in shā Allah [God willing]” is not simply a polite social convention, but a theological doctrine.

Those involved in training Middle Eastern military forces have encountered a lackadaisical attitude to weapon maintenance and sharp-shooting.  If God wants the bullet to hit the target, it will and, if He does not, it will not.  It has little to do with human agency or skills obtained by discipline and practice.  As the Qur’anic verse states: “When you shot it was not you who shot but God.” (8:17)

A Kurdish acquaintance told me that he went on the Hajj with a devout friend who was very much taken by the Ash’arite teaching of God as the only cause.  At the Ka’ba under the hot Saudi sun, his friend touched the black stone, which was cool.  See, he said, this is God’s direct miraculous action; how else could this stone be so cool in this heat?  My Kurdish acquaintance looked around until he found stairs descending to a refrigeration unit.  He then took his friend down to see it, and explained to him, “This is why the stone is cool.”  His friend’s reaction to this lesson was outrage.  Rational knowledge was a threat to his religious certainty.  The refrigeration unit, a product of rational knowledge, was an assault on his theology.

FP: Why is the West, aside from some few and brave thinkers, so blind in confronting the Islamist crisis?

Reilly: Self-delusion is one problem and ignorance is another.  Many in the secular West find it hard to believe that anyone takes religion seriously anymore.  Since they have lost their faith, they don’t have the ability to comprehend the terms of faith in anyone else’s life.  In fact, their incomprehension, their obliviousness to the sacred, is one of the things that inflames Islam against the West.

We are essentially facing a theological problem and a profound spiritual disorder.  People ignorant of theology are unable to recognize the nature of the problem.  They want to create another economic development program in the Middle East, as if that will solve it.  This is delusional and a total waste.  The problem needs to be addressed at the level at which it exists, not by sociologists or psychiatrists.

FP: What hope is there that some kind of “moderate” Islam can ever emerge?

Reilly: I suppose you could say that there is always hope where there is prayer.  So we had better start praying.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century there was far more intellectual ferment for reconciling Islam and modern science, for finding ways to adopt the best of the West to the Muslim world.  These efforts largely failed.  Things are now likely to get worse, not better.

The intellectual impetus in the Muslim world is not with those who see the need to reopen the foreclosed questions from the ninth century as to who God is and what his relationship to reason is.  (There are such Muslim thinkers but they get no support from us.)  It is with those who wish to return to the seventh century and replicate the feats of the Companions of the Prophet in creating the greatest empire the world had seen up to that point.  The worse things get in the Muslim world, the more support these jihadists receive because they provide an explanation and a program that can be easily understood by those who deeply feel the grievances and humiliation of their situation.

It is not inevitable that the Islamists should succeed, except in the absence of any strategy to counter them.  Muslim leaders like the former president of Indonesia, the late Abdurrahman Wahid, the spiritual head of the largest Muslim organization in the world, Nahdlatul Ulama, have called for a counter-strategy that would include offering “a compelling alternative vision of Islam, one that banishes the fanatical ideology of hatred to the darkness from which it emerged.”  Wahid advocated a partnership with the non-Muslim world in a massively resourced effort to uphold human dignity, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, and the benefits of modernity before the juggernaut of Islamist ideology swamps the Muslim world. It was a compelling summons. It has yet to be answered.

There is another way to state this at its heart.  The Arab Muslim world reached its apogee when it was at its most Hellenized, i.e. under the influence of Greek philosophy.  It then underwent a process of dehellenization, a divorce from reason and the extirpation of philosophy.  Its path to recovery must be in these same terms – a rehellenization, a restoration of the status or reason and a return to philosophy.  Is that possible?  As a twentieth century Moroccan Muslim thinker put it, either the future of Islam will be Aristotelian, or it will not be.

I think the general theme is how a deformed theology produced a dysfunctional culture.

FP: Robert R. Reilly, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.