"Islamism" vs. Occam's razor: Made in West

Dr. Daniel Pipes is a knowledgeable commentator on Islam. His expertise has been sought by policy-makers up to the level of US president. That's enough for me to get interested in Dr. Pipes's opinion, trying to form my dilettante own. Sometimes it is different from his. But first things first.

When America, helped by its few remaining allies, defeated Saddam Hussein, a bloody, bestial and bloated with pride autocrat, it found nothing better than to elect Barack Hussein as President. This is as if to prove that the inevitable associations with Saddam, with Osama, with 9-11, with anything Islam, are of no concern to the home of the brave. The symbolism of this is significant, even though, of course, there is little similarity between the two rulers. If there is any, however (perish the thought), it includes the fact that both have had a relatively thin connection with the religion that provided them with their names.

Saddam was a socialist—of his national kind—and would turn to Islam as a matter of convenience. Just as Islam's founder used to, Saddam used his “religion” to justify his atrocities. Like Muhammad, he had to do that quite a bit, and in his environment Islam generally has wider currency than in the US, being integral part of tradition. While Barack is undoubtedly a socialist of a kind too, his environment gives him much less opportunities to apply his love for the “prettiest”sounds of Islam, and much more for applying the version of Christianity that he was taught by Rev. Wright—the only one he's ever known. Nevertheless, one can't accuse Barack of fully neglecting his “grandfather's” religion. As need be, he recites the Muslim statement of faith, curses those who insult Muhammad, strenuously protects women's "right" to wear hijab, and extols Islamic “learning.” Occasionally, he even (mis)speaks  of himself as a Muslim.

Like his predecessor Bush II, he considers Islam “religion of peace”— despite all the proof to the contrary, from the Islamic scripture to the bloody history of Muslim conquest to the incessant and growing terror committed in the name of Islam. Individual and group terror, which has replaced Muslim nations' terror due to their military inferiority, is very successful. The West, ridden with guilt and ashamed of its religion, lacks moral clarity and ideologic spine. In fact, ideology is a curse word. Because of that, the reaction to Islam's terror is the opposite to rational: instead of Westerners' protecting themselves from the carriers of the murderous ideology, as they would from a foreign invasion, more of those carriers are imported to spread it. Just as Israel, under the same post-ideologic Western pressure and wishful thinking, gives up its hard-won territories for nothing in return, the West loses its territorial and ideological integrity to the alien invasion as well. The losses are tangible: Muslim settlers in the West tend to congregate geographically, squeezing out the infidels, and tend not to assimilate culturally. In effect, parts of countries become off limits to their prior inhabitants. This is combined with the political changes resulting from politicians' seeking votes from the growing Muslim block. Progressives—some from ignorance, others from the need to fight the evils of capitalism, yet others simply sharing antisemitism that is so respected in Islam—provide an abundant supply of collaborationists.

The argument is, of course, that it is “Islamism” that is bad, while Islam is as good as, if not better than, Judaism and Christianity. By implication, Islam should be as acceptable to the West as Judeo-Christian beliefs. Muslims do list those beliefs on the same breath: “Jews and Crusaders.” They do not, obviously, list Islam on the same breath, supposedly another “Abrahamic religion,” nor does anybody with a scintilla of knowledge in the West seriously consider it as another facet of the tripartite system. It does not take much to prove that both “Abrahamic religion” and “Islamism” are Western inventions.

Clearly, even in a culture that fully accepts death sentence, not everybody would want to be an executioner. Similarly, it is no proof of Islam's general rejection of terror that not every Muslim is a terrorist. Anybody familiar with Islamic writings and history knows that terror has played a central role in the spread of Islam.  But why not listen to the prime-minister of a Muslim country, elected from a Muslim party—shouldn't he be trusted as a better expert than the Western thinkers when he says there is no “moderate Islam”? In Erdogan's words, “If you say moderate Islam, then an alternative is created, and that is immoderate Islam. As a Muslim, I can't accept such a concept.” Then, as behooves a fine logician he is, he goes on to state the opposite to what he said: “Islam rejects extreme concepts. I am not an extreme Muslim. We are Muslims who have found a middle road.” Middle—between what and what? If he is not an “extreme” one, what is he if not “moderate,” if confused? His point is, anyway, that he is not a terrorist (who said he was?), and that terror cannot be called “Islamic” just as it could not be called Christian or Jewish. Of course, it could—such as when terror is committed in the name of Christianity, as it was during Jewish pogroms in Russia. Terror committed in the name of Islam, accompanied with proclaiming glory to the Islamic deity, Allah, is Muslim terror. The Turkish army chief General Buyukanit puts it succinctly: “There are certain circles that want to add the title of 'moderate Islam' to the Republic of Turkey. The source of such a title does not come from within Turkey but foreign circles.”

All these facts, and more, are considered in Dr. Pipes's blog entry of 2004 and its updates—without much discussion of whether Erdogan and other Muslims who reject the concept of “moderate vs. immoderate” Islam are right or wrong. Those facts are also recently revisited in Dr. Pipes's May 2013 Washington Times article “Islam and its infidels: How extremists distorted a religion of millions.” There he mentions the same arguments, but as given by his opponents, which is to say the opponents of the division of Islam into "moderate" and "Islamist" that he supports.

Unfortunately, that article presents no support for an entity termed “Islamism” to counter the continuities and consistencies in Islam. Contrary to Dr. Pipes's view, Muslims never needed to “absorb” from Europeans the concept of ideology: Islam has been a totalitarian ideology, by both intent and implementation, from Muhammad's times. Cultural and other achievements listed in the article, the fluctuating proportions of the “extremists,” and variation within Islam that includes “quietists,” are irrelevant. Variation exists among the followers of any ideology, as humans are thankfully not a eusocial species. After all, Schindler was a card-carrying Nazi too. That is no proof of “moderate Nazism,” however.

“Islamism” remains a redundancy invented in the West, however convenient and comfortable it might be to add an “-ism” and thus truncate the distribution of individual devotion to Islam's scriptural ideologic principles. Collapsing that dimension into the categories of “secularism,” “apologism,” and “islamism,” as suggested in Dr. Pipes's article, has no foundation in reality, if only because there are no natural/scriptural boundaries between these groupings. “Quietism” of Sufis, so frequently thought of in the West as meditative mystics, wine-imbibing poets and whirling dervishes, did not prevent Shamil Basayev and other Sufis from multiple terror acts, including the mass murder of non-Muslim children in the Beslan school. Hopefully we won't try now to invent “extremist” and “moderate” Sufis—like the rest of Muslims, they obviously represent a continuum. Historically, Sufis, organized into knight-like orders with blind obedience of members to the leader, have been fanatical warriors spearheading Islamic conquest.

Contrary to Dr. Pipes, adding an “-ism” to Islam is not at all similar to creating a term like fascism—rather, the analog to “Islamism” would be “fascismism,” a clear redundancy. It might be comfortable to think that “Islamism” allows us to fear only “10 to 15 percent of Muslims”rather than all 1.3 bln of them—even though I'd fail to take any comfort in the 10%, especially when it translates into 130,000,000 of vicious “Islamists.” There is no need, however, as Occam's razor warns us, to multiply entities when not necessary—and necessity cannot result from our need in comfort. The attempts to reify a novel entity of “Islamism” only show how well religious mimicry continues to serve Islam to mislead the wishfully thinking West.

J Dead-End

I am not a journalist to track the news. So it is only recently that I have come across a month-old column in The Jewish Chronicle authored by the two co-chairs of J Street-Pittsburgh ("Obama: ‘You must create the change you want to see’"). By itself, it is of little interest and was not a news item even when it was published. It only regurgitates approvingly some points made by Obama in his speech to Israeli students when he finally descended in his presidential glory on the bothersome country with its insufferable Prime Minister. Remember the president's sharing Sarkozy's hot mic revelations about the "liar" with whom poor Obama has to "deal" so often? The column is hardly made more interesting by its arrogant absurdities, which include calling Obama’s decision to talk to young people (instead of the Knesset) “a way to elevate the discussion about peace above the typical rancor of their leaders.” Ah, those benighted rancorous Israeli leaders - so beneath the station of our soaring president and the "co-chairs" whom I'd call paternalistic were they not women. What is interesting is not what is in, but what is not in that column – nor is it in the Obama speech.

First, missing are not only the Members of the Knesset. Obama addressed young Israelis but not young Palestinian Arabs. This is consistent with what he, along with his many mouthpieces including J Street, considers the cause of the lack of any progress in the "peace process". Nevertheless, even his words could have provided a clue to the only realistic solution. He said, "Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland..." - and the logical conclusion could well be, "the Palestinian Arabs should build theirs". That would place some responsibility on the Arabs' shoulders. The Jewish state had been built and existed de facto before it was declared in 1948. All the attempts, if any, that the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza have made to create a semblance of a working state have failed - the latest with Fayyad's resignation. Lo and behold, we now find out, he "feuded" with Abbas, the "Palestinian president" (whose term, for what it had been worth, expired in January 2009). These are the two people whom Obama, in torturous English making two persons into one entity that is on a par with a state, called Israel's "true partner" - half of which is now gone. The only state structure that functions in the "Palestinian state", declared recently for the second time, is the numerous "security forces" that double as terror groups.

Unfortunately and illogically, instead of Arabs' responsibilities, Obama concluded that sentence with the non-sequitur of their rights: "Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land". Put this way, that right - paraphrased by Obama from a verse in the Israeli state anthem - is denied to them by external forces. Not by the corruption of their own rulers and their dreams of vengeance and violent takeover of entire "Filastin", Israel included, but by the Israeli government, to pressure which the young Israelis were called by Obama. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the Arabs' responsibilities was made by the J Street writers of that column either. In the co-chairs' view, "the existential threat to Israel’s future" is not the Muslims/Arabs' refusal to reconcile with the Jewish state and to end the war they've been waging for as long as it exists, but "the lack of a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinians conflict" - which is, you guessed it, Israel's fault. Simple logic, however, should have told them that when one side has all the responsibilities while the other has rights only, the solution is as possible as the sound of one hand clapping. 

It is hard to imagine that neither Obama nor J Street are capable of seeing that. They cannot have missed that the only concessions ever made in the "peace process", and in the Arab-Israeli "conflict" in general, were Israeli. Those were not merely some formal diplomatic steps, but colossal territorial sacrifices - the land that had been paid in the blood of those who had recently survived a European genocide only to be promised another one by the Arabs, over and over again.

Nobody expects territorial gains made by other countries in the aftermath of defensive wars to be relinquished to their prior possessors: ask Russia about Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg. Or ask the Czechs about the Sudetenland, with the after-war wholesale expulsion of Germans from there, characterized by Churchill in 1944 as "the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting." No Arab country had ever been a legal possessor of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which were captured by Israel along with oil-rich Sinai during the defensive Six Day War, won under Nasser's and PLO's promises of genocide. Nevertheless, after its stunning victory Israel offered to forgo those gains - in exchange for peace. It was at the time not peace with the "Palestinians", who had not yet been invented, but with the Arabs in general. Nobody had talked then about another Arab "Palestinian" state in addition to the already existing one, Jordan. The Arab response was the "3 No's" of the Khartoum Resolution: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." After another victorious defensive war, Israel ceded Sinai to the thrice (at least) defeated enemy - for the empty paper of "peace", which would last only as long as Egypt is sure of its defeat if it starts another war. Then Israel ceded Gaza - to the nonentity of the "Palestinian Administration" - for nothing at all but hopes for a peaceful development, which had been seen as unfounded and lethal by whoever was willing to open an eye. Rockets from Gaza have pounded Israel ever since.

Why then, certainly knowing all this, Obama and his J Street fellow travelers do not address Arab responsibilities - the only thing that has always been needed for any positive change in the status quo? Why don't they ask for peace those who have ceaselessly waged the war - since the time when the Jewish state was at its embryonic stage? Why don't they ask Abbas who chairs the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was created to exterminate Israelis, in 1964, before any "occupation"? The PLO, whose ruling Charter calling for the violent liquidation of Israel has never been changed, and which has never stopped being a terrorist organization just because the West decided it no longer was? 

The reason is simple. They don't ask because they know it would be futile. They know they have nobody to address there - neither Abbas, the halved "partner" of Israel, the fake president of no country and a doctor of Holocaust denial, nor the assorted terrorist gangs including the Gaza rulers of Hamas, nor the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as a whole, which is ever ready to elect terrorists to rule them and celebrates mass murder including 9-11. It is a revolting hypocrisy when the J Street peaceniks, from the safety of Squirrel Hill (a cozy Pittsburgh neighborhood), call for Israelis to "demand from their political leaders to take the necessary risks for peace". They do it in full knowledge that those risks, taken by Israeli leaders so many times, are for continuing war and terror while the gains are mirages. This has been proven again and again whenever such risks were taken - with irreversible territorial losses, encouraging further terror.

Obama and his J Street cohorts are eager to submit Israel to those 100% risks for the sake of their political utopias. Knowingly unrealistic as those utopias are, they serve their purposes: to present Obama as a peacemaker statesman, and to fill the J Street co-chairs' leisure with self-important political activity and satisfy their leadership ambitions. Just like so many among the Jewish pacifist "co-chairs" in the US before and during 2nd World War, they care for nobody's peace except their own. It is no wonder J Street has decided to stop pretending to be "pro-Israel" to attract the kind of campus support it needs to "elevate" discussions to nowhere. With its vacuous pro-Arab rhetoric of unconditional "restraint" for Israel, J Street is a blind alley, a path leading to a deadly abyss.