Friday 17 May 2013

Confronting Islam . . . . or Not, Part II

Playing Pop Music to Break Down the Walls

In Part I of "Confronting Islam . . . . or Not" we had recourse to a series of essays [Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies From Communism to Islamism, edited by Katharine Cornell Gorka and Patrick Sookhdeo (McLean, Va: The Westminster Institute/Isaac Publishing, 2012.)] The point was made that the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union gained traction when Western leaders began to "tell the truth" about communist dictatorships.  Prior to that time the received wisdom was that it was dangerous to tell the truth because it risked provoking the Soviet Union into belligerent reactions. 

The general theme of the essays in the above collection is that one must fight and win the ideological war.  It is equally, if not more important, than winning the military or intelligence or economic conflicts.  Yet it is the war front which the US in particular and the West in general are remarkably unwilling to acknowledge.  Today the West has retreated to a quietism and pacificism when it comes to Islam worse than its early conduct of the Cold War. 

The lengths to which the US government has gone to cover over the influence of Islamic doctrine, beliefs, traditions and practices upon Islamic terrorism is literally incredible.
  When Major Hasan shot down and murdered work colleagues at Fort Hood whilst shouting Allahu akbar ("Allah is great") the authorities throughout the US government moved swiftly to remove any reference to Islam from its propaganda narrative.  It referred instead to a "work based incident" or a "man caused disaster".  Why?  Well, one does not want to offend Islamic nations or individual believers.  We read that the FBI and other policing authorities have removed all reference to Islamic terrorism from their training and operations manuals.  Speak no evil, hear no evil.   


This is far, far worse than the quietism of the Cold War period.  What has been done with respect to Islamic terrorism in the past ten years would be tantamount to excising the word "communism" from the lexicon of the US government during the Cold War.  The United States refuses to call a spade a spade.  It refuses to tell the truth.  It spins. 

As is always the case, such follies convince no-one.  They certainly do not convince the public.  All that they produce is a disrespect and distrust of the authorities and politicians.  They are seen to be dissemblers and liars.  They certainly do not convince Islamic states who see confirmation of their belief that the West is spineless, exhausted and blinded by its relentless immoralities.  They confirm that the West is unable to resist.  Paradoxically such lies by Western authorities embolden Islamic states to support terrorism: it is working.  They believe in the ideological war.  The West ignores it, thinking that ideological confrontation is a denial of Western "values" which preach toleration of all views and ideas. 

In one sense the West is fighting its own ideological war.  It is like the boxer who enters a ring with no opponent and dances furiously, unleashing massive air-punches.  His opponent is imaginary.  The West thinks its ideological opponent is anyone who does not believe in tolerance and the open acceptance of all ideas.  In the West, for example, homosexuality=marriage=holiness=truth=all round good guys.  Or, abortion=freedom=human rights=women's rights=all round good gals.  Evil is when the aforementioned equations are challenged or denied.  Evil is when intolerance stalks the room.  

The overwhelming majority of the rest of the humans on the planet are too smart to get sucked into that sort of idiocy.  Consequently, Islamic nations and Islamic people in general think the West is a paper tiger.  They will not begin to respect the West or believe in its integrity until it is bold enough to call Islam out for its immorality and intrinsic evils.  And the West is incapable of doing that until it calls out its own immoralities and intrinsic evils. 

Thus it is highly unlikely the West will ever be able to fight the ideological war against Islam.  President Obama has been the worst--but it is unlikely that any US president in this generation would be any different.  Obama came into office as an ideological president. He entered the ring and began boxing furiously against imaginary opponents.  He spoke a good deal about justice, but for Obama and the US in general justice has come to mean tolerance for everyone else.
In his inaugural address, President Obama said that "our security emanates from the justice of our cause."  However, security can emanate from the justness of a cause only if others share the same conception of justice. That, after all, is the substance of what wars of ideas are all about.  How, then, is President Obama conveying that sense of justice, particularly to the Muslim world?

Obama's initial Muslim outreach effort came in his June, 2009 speech in Cairo.  It followed and should be contrasted to a speech he gave in Accra, Ghana immediately prior to it.  In Accra, the president spoke some hard truths about what is required for sustainable democratic governance and how African countries had failed in the past.  He did not flinch in his denunciation of African strongmen or widespread corruption.  These hard truths were absent from his Cairo speech.  On other words, he spoke powerfully to the poor (Ghana) and meekly to the powerful (Egypt), or truth to the poor and fantasy to the powerful.  The differences were pronounced.  Why?

The only rhetorical strategy that can make any sense of the Cairo speech is: instead of confronting the unreality of the world in which most Arabs live (which would have generated resentment), Obama decided to embrace it, enter into it, and then try to change it from without by changing the meaning of some words.  [Robert R. Reilly, "Public Diplomacy in an Age of Global Terrorism: Lessons from the Past,"  Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies From Communism to Islamism, edited by Katharine Cornell Gorka and Patrick Sookhdeo (McLean, Va: The Westminster Institute/Isaac Publishing, 2012.), p.155.]

What Reilly means by "changing the meaning of words" is that Obama deliberately chose then, and since, to ignore the injustices and intrinsic iniquities that come directly out of Islamic doctrines.  Attacking African strongmen and corruption is one thing.  But Obama apparently thinks that by not speaking of Islamic evils they will simply cease to exist.  He (and the West) can conjure them away. 
However, despite the absurdities of some of the remarks, obviously delivered in obsequiesence (sic) to the Arab world, the president did try to express and advance the principles of  equality and democracy within the Muslim world.  The problem is that such attempts are bound to fail when they do not address the principal obstacles to their acceptance.  In fact, none of these obstacles was mentioned except in the most general way, and never as being in any way Islamic.  It is, after all, "the dignity of all human beings," which Obama vigorously espouses that is at question in Islam according to its own revelation and legal doctrines, which are inimical to the proposition that all people are created equal.  Why not simply say this?

Perhaps President Obama did not say this because he thinks that not saying it makes it no longer so.  Rather than conforming his words to reality, he tends to think that reality will conform itself to his words.  (Reilly op cit., p. 156.)
Devastating blows landed upon imaginary opponents by a furiously febrile air boxer.  If nothing else, this makes the West a laughing stock in the Islamic world who know the truth!  Obama and the US are derided because they have come to think that their rhetoric makes truth: theirs is the Creator Word that brings the world into a new reality.
This mistaken mission of giving Arabs a new vision of themselves from within their own delusional world was reflected in Secretary  of State Hillary Clinton's extraordinary remark about President Assad that what "we have tried to do with him is to give him an alternative vision of himself."  Apparently he has not embraced his doppelganger and is perfectly content with his old self, which he maintains in power at the cost of hundreds of Syrian lives.  (Ibid. p.157).
How could such inanities proceed from an American administration?  They proceed because the West has an inane ideology, which it tries to impose upon the world by rhetorical conjuring tricks.  But it is a mythical, make-believe ideology which is believed only in the West.  The rest of the world knows better. 

One of the explanations for this ineptitude lies in the prevailing secularism of the West.  Because it tells itself that religion is bunk, the West struggles to understand nations and peoples who think very differently about their faith and the truths they believe are ultimate.  In the West, there are no ultimate truths--apart from tolerance of all truths, which makes all truths merely relative.

Reilly concludes with the following questions:
How do you fashion a public diplomacy strategy based upon the belief that the United States does not represent any permanent truths?  As was mentioned earlier regarding the Cold War, a form of absolutism fighting a form of relativism always has the upper hand.  Who wants to die to prove that nothing is absolutely true?  How exactly is one supposed to promote this idea?  By playing pop music, and hoping that the walls come tumbling down?  (Ibid., p. 161.)
How, indeed.

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