Left-handed Complement

MUDGE’S Musings

Sept. 11, 2001 was Pearl Harbor for this generation of the people of the U.S.

And, while Pearl Harbor shocked that generation into the realization that the world they lived in was suddenly at war, in reality that war had begun almost every else many years before.

In fact, John Keegan, the outstanding military historian, begins his eminently readable history of World War II with the Versailles Peace Conference that ended World War I, because the errors of omission and commission committed there at the end of the first Great War set into motion the geopolitical forces that led inexorably to the second.

Indeed, Margaret MacMillan’s excellent history of that conference, Paris 1919, illustrates that we reap today, 88 years later, in the Middle East and Balkans, just to name two of the most egregious examples, the bitter harvest of many of the often well-intentioned but ill-chosen decisions made there.

Thus, our War on Terrorism, declared after the tragedy of the Twin Towers, was similar to our declaration of war against Japan on Dec. 8, 1941: We came very, very late to an undeclared war that, at a minimum, could be traced back to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, or even the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or even way back, to take the extraordinarily long view, to the Crusades.

Western culture has shared the planet with Islam for 1,300 turbulent years (as if the preceding 5 billion were any less so!).

One might posit that Western Europe learned imperialism from the example set by Islamic culture. It is a fact that the enslaving of sub-Saharan African people by Europeans was learned from, aided and abetted by Arabic traders, who had begun the horrifying practice centuries before Henry the Navigator set his fearless explorers loose.

All this as introduction to some interesting reading encountered this week.

Islam, the Marxism of Our Time by Theodore Dalrymple

Some troubling signs in Europe

17 September 2007

From an Islamist point of view, the news from Europe looks good. The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect’s spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion.” At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism.

According to Le Figaro, 70 percent of Muslims in France intend to keep the fast during Ramadan, up from 60 percent in 1989. Better still, from the Islamist point of view, non-practicing Muslims feel increasing social pressure to comply with the fast, whether they want to or not. The tide is thus running in the Islamists’ favor.

The writer’s analogy: that fundamentalist Islam has become the refuge for the young and disaffected in Western culture, in the way that superficial Marxism was for previous generations.

[Per L-HC’s reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]

Islam, the Marxism of Our Time by Theodore Dalrymple

All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.

This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.

A blogger I had not before encountered, but added to the  thanks to this submission, a psychiatrist calling herself Dr. Sanity, responded to the City Journal article, by indicting the current state of Western culture that is providing safe harbor for Islamic fanaticism.

Dr. Sanity: Islam and Marxism: A marriage made in Allah’s socialist paradise

In an article from City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple makes a compelling case that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our time.

I want to take Dalrymple’s analysis one step further. Islam is not simply the alternative that today’s angst-ridden, alienated youth turn to because Marxism is waning in intellectual circles; it’s extremism and violence resonates harmonically with the socialist revolutionaries of the 20th century; and they have appropriated the jihad as an essential component of their political and intellectual strategy to revive Marxism in the 21st century.

Let us take a look at the strategy and how it has evolved to include the Islamic fanatics.

Multiculturalism and political correctness are two of the fundamental pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious tenets that have been widely disseminated by intellectuals unable to abandon socialism even after its crushing failures in the 20th century. Along with a third component, radical environmentalism, they make up three key foundations of leftist dogma that have been slowly, but relentlessly, absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last decade or so–but primarily since the end of the Cold War.

All three have been incorporated into most K-12 curricula as well as the academic curricula in Western university and colleges. In combination, they are the toxic by-products of postmodern relativism.

Dr. Sanity includes a useful map (MUDGE loves maps) of the evolution of the Marxist/Islamist union.

[Per L-HC’s reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]

Dr. Sanity: ISLAM AND MARXISM – A MARRIAGE MADE IN ALLAH’S SOCIALIST PARADISE

A bracing analysis. Thanks, Dr. Sanity!

Finally, since there’s a war on, we turn to this look at a less than formal effort to reach the “Arab Street” with a more balanced view of U.S. policy:

At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.

So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?

Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”

The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.

The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.

Imagine! The George III-marginalized State Department actually figuring out how to used that new-fangled Internet thingy, and blogging in a potentially useful way!. The mind bloggles. Sort of a micro version of Radio Free Europe; one has to wonder whether the effort is worth the expenditure, however tiny.

[Per L-HC’s reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]

At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate – New York Times

So, what do we learn from today’s trifecta of stories related to Islamic culture and its transactions with the West?

We’re at war, people.

Not the war that the simplistic Bush administration (as in naively incompetent, for which there is no excuse nearly seven years in) would have you believe.

We’re at war with Islam (as the Western world has been for 1,300 years); and with our own university-grown pestilences of “multiculturalism, political correctness, and radical environmentalism,” as Dr. Sanity reminds us. And there’s no moral high ground in war.

And I don’t believe that we’re winning.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Non-commercial Note!: the links to Amazon.com used above are for the convenience of faithful reader and represents no commercial relationship whatsoever. Left-Handed Complement should be so fortunate as to ever collect remuneration of any kind for this endeavor. I can link, so I link. It’s technology. It’s cool. Deal with it.