Andrew Bostom is one of my
favorite Counterjihad authors. So when I discovered from the Counter Jihad Report that a
Bostom speech was posted on his website a few days ago I was quite pleased to
watch it. Below is the entire post from Bostom’s blog which includes the text
of the speech.
Bostom talks of the failure of the Bush Administration’s
concept of bringing Western democratic principles to overthrown dictatorships
and hostile Muslim leadership. In hindsight, Bostom is correct to criticize
this Bush Agenda; however, the concept was correct. History has shown that
bringing democracy to repressive regimes (e.g.
conquered Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan at the end of WWII) was and is
highly successful. Not only have the citizens flourished when despotism was
removed but once repressive regimes have chosen a path of peaceful dialogue and
trade with their conquerors. UNFORTUNATELY, the nation-building paradigm does
not work in a culture under the domination of a millennia of Islamic cultural
brainwashing.
JRH 8/31/16
*******************
VIDEO of My AFA Speech, “Islam, Mindslaughter, and the
Catastrophic ‘Lewis Doctrine'”
By Andrew Bostom
August 28, 2016 1:46
PM
Many thanks to Scott Jacobs for uploading the video of my
speech last Sunday 8/21/16 at the American Freedom Alliance conference in Los
Angeles entitled, “Islam and Western Civilization: Can They
Co-Exist?”
The text in its entirety was posted at PJ Media last Monday
8/22/16, with the title, “Islam,
Mindslaughter, and the Catastrophic ‘Lewis Doctrine’.” I was able
to present about ~70% of the full text provided below the embedded video.
VIDEO: Andrew Bostom at the AFA
Conference: "Islam, Mindslaughter, & the Catastrophic "Lewis
Doctrine'"
Posted by Democracy
Broadcasting
Published on Aug 28, 2016
http://DemocracyBroadcasting.com Dr. Andrew Bostom at the
AFA Conference: "Islam, Mindslaughter, and the Catastrophic 'The Lewis
Doctrine'." Dr. Andrew Bostom examines Dr. Bernard Lewis' legacy at
American Freedom Alliance's "Islam and Western Civilization Conference"
in Los Angeles, 8/21/16.
See: https://pjmedia.com/blog/islam-mindslaughter-and-the-catastrophic-lewis-doctrine/
See: https://pjmedia.com/blog/islam-mindslaughter-and-the-catastrophic-lewis-doctrine/
Islam, Mindslaughter, and the Catastrophic “Lewis
Doctrine”
Andrew Bostom
Text of a speech delivered Sunday, August 21, 2016 at the
American Freedom Alliance conference in Los Angeles entitled, “Islam and Western Civilization: Can They
Co-Exist?”
**
Col. Douglas MacGregor is a respected military strategist, who was a heroic tank commander during
the 1991 Iraq war. As the Gen McChrystal scandal broke in 2010, Col MacGregor,
who attended West Point with McChrystal, and was angered by the US military’s
disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan “nation building” efforts, commented accurately,
The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars
to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense
Successful lobbying for that miserably failed utopianism was
accomplished by bowdlerizing Islam—indeed mindslaughtering it, a
powerful term I will introduce. My discussion will identify the ultimate source
of “gravitas” for that bowdlerization process, and key elements of the
Islam—not “Islamism,” or “radical Islam”—bowdlerized.
**
Tuesday August 2nd, (2016) Khizr Khan, who achieved
notoriety for his condemnation of Donald Trump at the Democratic National
Convention, had the temerity to tell Anderson
Cooper “I do not stand for any Sharia Law because there is no such thing.” Except
when he, Khan, notes it does exist, as in his 1983 essay published in the Houston
Journal of International Law, “JURISTIC CLASSIFICATION OF ISLAMIC LAW”, which
used the word “Sharia” 8X, including this usage:
“All other juridical works
which have been written during more than thirteen centuries are very rich and
indispensable, but they must always be subordinated to the Shari’ah…”
CNN’s Anderson Cooper did not even challenge Khan’s
mendacious, self-contradictory assertion let alone follow-up on Khan’s effusive written praise of two
prominent, modern global Sharia promoting ideologues, Said Ramadan, and
A.K. Brohi, making plain Khan’s support for so-called “Sharia-based human
rights.” The Khan-Cooper exchange illustrates, starkly, the contemporary
equivalent of what the great chronicler of Soviet Communist mass murder, Robert
Conquest, appositely characterized as MINDSLAUGHTER—a
brilliantly evocative term for delusive Western apologetics regarding the
ideology of Communism, and the tangible horrors its Communist votaries
inflicted. Conquest decried those numerous “Western
intellectuals or near intellectuals” of the 1930s through the 1950s whose
willful delusions about the Soviet Union, “will be incredible to later students
of mental aberration.” He observed,
“One role of the democratic
media is, of course, to criticize their own governments, and draw attention to
the faults and failings of their own country. But when this results in a
transfer of loyalties to a far worse and thoroughly inimical culture, or at
least to a largely uncritical favoring of such a culture, it becomes a
morbid affliction—involving, often enough, the uncritical acceptance of
that culture’s own standards”
His critique of Western media highlights a cultural
self-loathing tendency which has persisted and intensified over the intervening
decades, and is now manifest in the bowdlerized public discussion of Islam. Tragically,
such MINDSLAUGHTERED Islamic discourse extends to an iconic figure in
conservative punditry on Islam, while the impact of this doyen’s policymaking
advice has been disastrous.
Samuel Huntington acknowledged his indebtedness
to Bernard Lewis’s 1990 essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” for
Huntington’s book title, “The Clash of Civilizations.” Lewis, as Huntington
notes (on p. 213), in 1990, had pronounced,
This is no less than a clash of
civilizations—that perhaps irrational, but surely historic reaction of an
ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and
the worldwide expansion of both.
Oracle-like font of Islamic wisdom to a large
swath of conservative policymaking elites, Bernard Lewis added this caveat:
It is crucially important
that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also
equally irrational reaction against that rival.
Despite his own morally equivocating advice, Lewis himself
convinced the Bush 2 administration to pursue what became known, aptly, as “The Lewis Doctrine,” which was not only an irrational, but
a catastrophic response to the eminently rational Islamic doctrine of jihad.
Peter Waldman’s methodical, well-sourced Feb 3,
2004 WSJ investigative report (“A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers U.S. in Terrorism Fight
Bernard Lewis’s Blueprint—Sowing Arab Democracy—Is Facing a Test in Iraq”)
stands as important confirmation of the overarching ideology which spurred the March, 2003 Iraq invasion.
Waldman meticulously documented how Lewis exerted profound influence in shaping
the Bush II administration’s “Islamic democracy agenda”—invading Iraq being the
sine qua non manifestation of this
“Lewis Doctrine.” Lewis, as Waldman notes, began evangelizing his “Doctrine” to the highest
level Bush II administration officials just over a week after 9/11,
accompanied, significantly, by the late Ahmad Chalabi, a likely “vector”
of Iranian influence.
Eight days after the Sept. 11
[2001] attacks, with the Pentagon still smoldering,
Mr. Lewis addressed the U.S. Defense Policy Board. Mr. Lewis and a
friend, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi –now [circa 2/2004]
a member of the interim Iraqi Governing Council—argued for a military takeover
of Iraq to avert still-worse terrorism in the future…
Call it the Lewis Doctrine.
..Mr. Lewis’s diagnosis of the Muslim world’s malaise, and his
call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in the Mideast...
As mentor and informal adviser to some top U.S. officials, Mr. Lewis has helped
coax the White House to shed decades of thinking about Arab regimes and the use
of military power. Gone is the notion that U.S. policy in the oil-rich region
should promote stability above all, even if it means taking tyrants as friends. Also
gone is the corollary notion that fostering democratic values in these lands
risks destabilizing them. Instead, the Lewis Doctrine says
fostering Mideast democracy is not only wise but imperative.
Waldman also demonstrated how Lewis successfully indoctrinated the
ultimate Bush II administration leadership to pursue his utopian design:
President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and most likely, National
Security adviser (and later Secretary of State), Condoleezza Rice, as well.
I contend, after careful review, that the miserably failed
“Lewis Doctrine” was a sham
castle of dangerous, MINDSLAUGHTERED misrepresentations built upon
four pillars: dhimmitude denial; Islamic Jew-hatred denial; Sharia obfuscation;
and Lewis’s own inexplicable volte face on his gimlet-eyed 1950s assessments of
Islamic totalitarianism, and “hurriyya,” the Islamic antithesis of Western
freedom.
Regarding the imposition of the dhimma, Islam’s humiliating
pact of submission for non-Muslims, per Koran 9:29, and the alleged
absence of theological Jew-hatred in
Islam, Lewis made these oracular, if vacuous and counterfactual, summary pronouncements, across three
decades:
[1974] The dhimma on the whole
worked well. The non-Muslims managed to thrive under Muslim rule, and even
to make significant contributions to Islamic civilization. The restrictions
were not onerous, and were usually less severe in practice than in theory. As
long as the non-Muslim communities accepted and conformed to the status of
tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were not troubled.
[1984] In Islamic society
hostility to the Jew is non-theological. It is not related to any specific
Islamic doctrine, nor to any specific circumstance in Islamic history. For
Muslims it is not part of the birth-pangs of their religion, as it is for
Christians.
[2006] “dhimmi”-tude [derisively
hyphenated] subservience and persecution and ill treatment of Jews… [is a] myth.
Shlomo Dov [S. D.] Goitein (d. 1985), unlike Lewis, was a
historian, who specialized in the study of Muslim, non-Muslim relations.
Goitein, whose seminal research findings were widely published, most notably in
the monumental five-volume work A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish
Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza
(1967–1993), was Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University, and a Lewis
colleague while at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The New York
Times obituary for Professor Goitein (published on February 10, 1985)
noted, correctly, that his prolific writings on Islamic culture, and
Muslim-non-Muslim relations, were “standard works for scholars in both fields.”
Contra Lewis’s uninformed, whitewashed drivel, here is what Goitein wrote
on the subject of non-Muslim dhimmis under Muslim rule, that is, “the
dhimma covenant,” circa 1970:
[T]he Muslim state was
quite the opposite of the ideals propagated by…the principles embedded in
the constitution of the United States. An Islamic state was part
of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was mal
al-muslumin, the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not
citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders
under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term
dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to
them. They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and
humiliating laws. . . . As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions,
soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam
was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence. . . .
In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling
or even complete extinction of the minorities
“The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,” my own exhaustive treatise, included voluminous
materials Lewis never bothered to compile, let alone analyze with comparable
intellectual honesty. My careful analyses demonstrated, irrefragably, that the
Koran, its classical and modern exegeses by Islam’s greatest commentators, and
the traditions of Muhammad, and the nascent Muslim community, are rife
with virulent, conspiratorial Jew-hating motifs that have been acted upon by
Muslims, vis-Ã -vis Jews, across space and time, from the advent of Islam, till
now.
The Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is
marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine
indictment, conviction, and punishment process. Presently, Al Azhar Koranic
litanies of 20 to 25 verses describing fixed negative traits of the Jews are
popular, widely disseminated, and endorsed in the writings and public
statements of this Vatican of Sunni Islam’s last two Papal equivalents, the
late Grand Imam Tantawi, and current Grand Imam al-Tayeb. Such Jew-hating
Koranic “highlights” include: Jews as prophet
killers, updated in the hadith to include Muhammad himself—allegedly poisoned
to death by a Jewess, in a Jewish conspiracy, while the Shiite hadith further hold the
Jews responsible for the deaths of Ali, and his son Hussein—meriting permanent
debasement and humiliation (Koran 2:61/3:112); Jews as apes, or apes and pigs
(Koran 2:65; 5:60, 7:166)—a Koranic epithet Muhammad personally directed at the
Jews according to the sira before the Muslims subdued, and he personally slaughtered,
by beheading, all the post-pubescent males, some 700-900, of the Jewish tribe
Banu Qurayza; Jews as inveterate conspirators against Islam (the ancient
Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Koran 5:64), who
harbor the greatest enmity towards the Muslim creed (Koran 5:82). The Jews’
ultimate sin and punishment are made clear in the Koran: they are the devil’s
minions (4:51/60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and
if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews who understand their
faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes
and pigs (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).
A brilliant, scrupulously documented 72pp/202 ref 1937 essay in French by rabbi,
and Islamic scholar Georges Vajda on the hadith (which Lewis never analyzed,
but I felt privileged to have fully translated into English for the first time,
and included in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism), demonstrated that
stubborn malevolence is the Jews defining worldly characteristic in these
traditions. Rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of
jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of
treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “…sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no
scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews,
and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as
dhimmis, treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”
Vajda’s research on the hadith further illustrates how Sunni Muslim eschatology
emphasizes the Jews supreme hostility toward Islam. Jews are described as
adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Antichrist— and, per other
traditions, the Dajjâl is in fact Jewish. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his
Jewish companions will be slaughtered—everything will deliver them up except
for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to several canonical hadith,
Muhammad himself reportedly declared if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or
a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew
behind me; come and kill him!” Vajda also emphasizes how the notion of jihad
war “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology:
Not only are the Jews vanquished
in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the
fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains,
but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the
Jews.
Lastly, a profound anti-Jewish,
and racist motif, put forth in early Muslim Sunni historiography,
as well as the Shiite hadith literature, is most assuredly, contra Lewis, a
part of “the birth pangs” of Islam: the story of Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged
renegade Yemenite Jew, and, per Sunnis founder of the heterodox Shi’ite sect.
Sunnis held him responsible—identified as a black (i.e., a racist motif,
as well!) Jew—for promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the
rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s
“political innocence”, culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly
Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian
strife. Authoritative Shiite authors claimed this identifiably black Jew
was guilty of perverting and warping the message of Caliph Ali’s true (Shiite)
followers. Mainstream Shiites thus designated Abdullah Ibn Saba an avatar of
extreme, heretical beliefs, for which Caliph Ali purportedly had Ibn Saba
burned alive, as described in Shiite hadith.
The entirety of this ugly Islamic doctrine—shared, with
minimal variation, by Sunni and Shiite Islam alike—begot chronic, grinding
oppression, interspersed with paroxysms of violence, including sporadic, mass
murderous pogroms, which affected Jewish communities in Palestine, Yemen,
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and even mythically tolerant Muslim Spain, to
the west, as well as Turkey, to the north, and Iraq and Iran, to the east.
Modern Zionism, culminating in the re-establishment of Israel, governed by Jews
fully liberated from 13 centuries of jihad-imposed dhimmitude in their
ancestral homeland, has re-invigorated Islam’s annihilationist strains of
Jew-hatred.
During a Pew Forum interview April 27, 2006 Bernard Lewis opined rather defensively about
Islam’s religio-political “law,” the Sharia:
“[W]hen we talk of Muslim law, I
would remind you that we are talking about law. Sharia is a system of law and
adjudication, not of lynching and terror. It is a law that lays down
rules, rules for evidence, for indictment, for defense and the rest of it,
quite a different matter from what has been happening recently.”
But Lewis doesn’t elaborate on those “rules,” or any
of the elements of Sharia which make it so noxious! I will. Briefly.
The Sharia, Islam’s canon law is
traceable to Koranic verses and edicts (45:18, 42:13, 42:21, 5:48; 4:34,
5:33-34, 5:38, 8:12-14; 9:5, 9:29, 24:2-4), as further elaborated in the
“hadith,” or traditions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and the earliest Muslim
community, and codified into formal “legal” rulings by Islam’s greatest
classical legists. Sharia is a retrogressive
development compared with the evolution of clear distinctions between “ritual,
the law, moral doctrine, good customs in society, etc.,” within Western
European Christendom, and it is utterly incompatible with the conceptions of
human rights enshrined in the US Bill of Rights. Liberty-crushing, and
dehumanizing, Sharia sanctions:
open-ended jihadism to subjugate the
world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties —
including freedom of conscience and speech — enforced by imprisonment, beating,
or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable
pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments
which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning to death for
adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption. Compounding these fundamental
freedom and dignity-abrogating iniquities, “matters of procedure” under Islamic law are
antithetical to Western conceptions of the rule of law: “evidentiary proof,”
is non-existent by Western
legal standards, and the Sharia doctrine of siyasa (“government”
or “administration”), grants wide latitude to the ruling elites,
rendering permissible arbitrary
threats, beatings, and imprisonments of defendants to extract “confessions,”
particularly from “dubious” suspects. Clearly, Sharia “standards,” which
do not even seek evidentiary legal truth, and allow threats, imprisonment, and
beatings of defendants to obtain “confessions,” while sanctioning explicit,
blatant legal discrimination against women and non-Muslims, are intellectually
and morally inferior to the antithetical concepts which underpin Western law.
In light of the still raging 2006 Danish cartoons
controversy, regarding the “crime” of blaspheming Islam’s prophet,
specifically, thus spake Lewis, the Islamic Yoda
of our generation, circa April, 2006:
“The jurists on the whole tend
to take a rather mild view of this offense.”
Really? Carl Brockelmann (d.1956), the renowned
scholar of Semitic languages, and arguably the foremost Orientalist of his
generation, made these candid observations in 1939 about the Sharia’s
injunctions pertaining to penal law in general, and so-called “blasphemy and
apostasy,” specifically—Islamic Law being “valid” eternally, and all too widely
applied in Brockelmann’s era, through the present.
“The penal code of Islam has
remained on a rather primitive level…Blasphemy
with respect to Allah, the Prophet, and his predecessors is punished by death,
as is defection from Islam, if the culprit persists in his disbelief.”
Consider the modern views on blasphemy articulated by the late
Ayatollah Montazeri (d. Dec 2009), gushingly championed by fervent Lewis
acolytes Michael Ledeen and Reuel Gerecht, and deemed the enlightened spiritual godfather of the
so-called Iranian Green Movement. The good Ayatollah adhered rigorously to the
traditionalist Shiite dogma on “sabb,” or blasphemy, i.e., instant, lethal
punishment of the offender, declaring,
“In cases of sabb al-Nabi
[blasphemy against a prophet, in particular, Muhammad]…if the witness does not
have fear of his or her life it is obligatory for him or her to kill the
insulter.”
“Rising Restrictions on Religion,” a report by the Pew Research
Center issued August 9, 2011, examined the issue of “defamation” of religion,
tracking countries where various penalties are enforced for apostasy, blasphemy
or criticism of religions. “While such laws are sometimes promoted as a way
to protect religion, in practice they often serve to punish religious
minorities whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox or heretical,” the report
noted. The Pew report, consistent with Brockelmann’s assessment from 1939, found that application of the
Sharia at present resulted in a disproportionate number of Muslim countries,
21—Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq,
Jordan, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia,
Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Western Sahara and Yemen—registering the highest
(i.e., worst) persecution scores on their scale. Furthermore, the
Pew investigators observed,
Eight-in-ten countries in the
Middle East-North Africa region have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or
defamation of religion, the highest share of any region. These penalties are
enforced in 60% of the countries in the region.
As a predictable consequence of this Sharia-based
application of apostasy and blasphemy laws by Islamic governments, the Pew
report also documented that,
…the
share of national governments that showed hostility toward minority religions
involving physical violence was much higher in countries where laws against
blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion are actively enforced
Bernard Lewis’s April 2006 apologetic on the Sharia was
complemented by the stunning claim he made during a lecture delivered
July 16, 2006 about the transferability of Western democracy to despotic Muslim
societies, such as Iraq. He concluded with the statement, “Either we bring
them freedom, or they destroy us,” which was published as, “Bring Them
Freedom Or They Destroy Us,” and disseminated widely. Yet Lewis never
elucidated the yawning gap between Western and Islamic conceptions of freedom—hurriyya
in Arabic. This omission was striking given his contribution to the official Encyclopedia
of Islam entry on hurriyya. Lewis
egregiously omitted not only his earlier writings on hurriyya but
what he had also termed the “authoritarian
or even totalitarian” essence of Islamic societies.
Hurriyya, “freedom,” is—as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the
lionized “Greatest Sufi Master,” expressed
it “perfect slavery,” and following Islamic law slavishly
throughout one’s life was paramount to hurriyya. Bernard Lewis, in his
Encyclopedia of Islam analysis of hurriyya,
discusses this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman Empire, through the
contemporary era. Lewis maintained,
…there
is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or
conduct of government-to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which
underlies the development of political thought in the West.
Lewis also makes the important point that
Western colonialism transiently ameliorated this chronic situation:
During the period of British and
French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though
often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and
better protected than either before or after.
And Lewis concludes his entry by observing that Islamic
societies forsook even their inchoate democratic experiments,
In the final revulsion against
the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no
value to Muslims.
Lewis, viewed the immediate post-World War II era of
democratic experimentation by Muslim societies as an objective failure , rooted
in Islamic totalitarianism, which he compared directly to Communist
totalitarianism, in his 1954 essay, “Communism and Islam,” noting their
“uncomfortable resemblances” with some apprehension. Lewis characterized the “political
history of Islam,” as “one of almost unrelieved autocracy.” He added,
“[I]t was authoritarian,
often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or
representative assemblies of any kind…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”
Directly comparing Islam and Communism, Lewis observed:
“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 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.”
Consistent with Bernard Lewis’s admonition, “Bring Them Freedom
Or They Destroy Us,” the US military, at an enormous cost of blood and
treasure, liberated Afghanistan and Iraq from despotic regimes. However, as
facilitated by the Sharia-based Afghan and Iraqi constitutions the US military
occupation helped midwife—which formally negated freedom of conscience, and
promoted the persecution of non-Muslim religious minorities—“they,”
i.e., the Muslim denizens of Afghanistan and Iraq have chosen to reject the
opportunity for Western freedom “we” provided them, and
transmogrified it into “hurriyya.” With sad predictability, Lewis, in an
April 2, 2011 Wall Street Journal interview, managed to reject
his own 1950s characterizations of Islam as authoritarian, even totalitarian,
while burbling his subsequent oft repeated pieties about the putative tolerant,
anti-authoritarian “tradition” of Islam, to cast a hopeful light on the Arab
Spring:
The whole Islamic tradition is
very clearly against autocratic and irresponsible rule.. We have a much better
chance of establishing…some
sort of open, tolerant society, if it’s done within their systems, according to
their traditions.
Finally, in May, 2012, George W. Bush appeared to have
learned nothing from the Iraq democratization debacle, and how it repudiated
his blind adherence to the “Lewis Doctrine.” Mr. Bush hectored critics who did
not share his ebullient cognitive dissonance about the then unfolding so-called
Arab Spring phenomenon, declaring
Some look at the risks inherent
in democratic change, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, and
find the dangers too great. America, they argue, should be content with
supporting the flawed leaders they know, in the name of stability.
Bush II even made the outrageous claim that the, de
facto Springtime for Sharia in Araby was
tantamount to “the broadest challenge to authoritarian rule since the
collapse of Soviet Communism.”
Far more important than mere hypocrisy—a ubiquitous human
trait—is the catastrophic legacy of his own Islamic negationism Bernard Lewis
has bequeathed to Western policymaking elites.
__________________
Andrew Bostom About / Contact
Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism ” (Prometheus, November,
2008)
You can contact Dr. Bostom at info@andrewbostom.org
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