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COMMENTARY
April 6, 2011
Rudeness v. murder
A culture that puts a high value on selected printed matter, and a low value on human life, is not yet one we are prepared to deal with. But we are dealing with it, in the worst possible way: by ignoring violence; by condemning book-burning while overlooking murder.There was a brief media splash on the massacre of seven UN staff by a mob in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. They were responding to the burning of Korans by the little congregation of Terry Jones, the fundamentalist pastor in Gainesville, Florida -more than a week before. Few Afghans had heard of this event (downplayed by international media), until Hamid Karzai, our ostensible ally, made a grand theatrical gesture in condemning Jones -thus spreading a wildfire against our Western troops and aid workers. Either the Afghan president did this knowingly, maliciously, and cynically for his own political purposes -or he is incredibly stupid. To that wildfire, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of military forces in Afghanistan, and Mark Sedwill, the chief NATO representative, then added, by echoing Karzai's condemnation of Pastor Jones: "That action was hateful; it was intolerant, and it was extremely disrespectful." To my anthropological recollection of Afghanistan, this would have been taken as a confession of guilt, and a clinching signal for action. At the time of writing, the death toll from this conflagration was rising into dozens. Afghan "protests" were going strong in their fifth day, and the latest are on the campus of Kabul University. Note that: for we assume, quite wrongly, that modern, secular education must have some "enlightening" effect. Think carefully about it, for the great weight of evidence throughout Islamic realms has been to the contrary. Al Qaeda and cognate Islamist cells are very much a product of the spread of modern education. Almost every terrorist we catch, comes from the educated elite of his country, and this includes those raised in Europe and America. The formation and dissemination of radical Islamist ideas is, itself, the product of an intellectual ferment in which the received ideas of Islamic civilization were mixed with Western, post-Christian ideological notions -with explosive results. And while mosques are used to preach a very modern conception of "jihad" to the Muslim community at large, and to recruit among those with religious inclinations, the ultimate source of Islamist doctrines is not the mosque. And, while the indoctrination of the young is now done chiefly through the madrassahs, the doctrines themselves were not the product of traditional Islamic teaching. That was imparted chiefly by rote and simply did not provide categories for the kind of reasoning that was used to mould a fanatical ideological movement on analogies to 20th-century Communism and Fascism. We are harvesting the fallout from the introduction of Westernstyle universities by naive European imperialists, who quite sincerely believed they were doing their "oriental" subjects a favour. It was a progressive essay in social engineering that has ended as all such end: in appalling unforeseen consequences. This is important to our understanding of the basic problem. We assume that we are up against "tribal savages from the 13th century," and that our task is to pull these people kicking and screaming into the 21st. But this is not the reality. Instead, we are dealing with an ultra-modern, moral and intellectual plague that originated in a cross-cultural interaction -in effect, a vile syncresis of Islam and atheist materialism. And we are hamstrung in dealing with it, because our own crazy, secular notion of "multiculturalism" sabotages our response. We don't actually believe that "all cultures are equal." We don't really think that some nutjob in Florida, or rude cartoonists in Denmark, commit graver sins than vengeful Islamist mobs. We don't really believe that theatrical book-burning is on a level with increasingly frequent attacks on Christians and their churches, in many Muslim countries -in which Bibles are, incidentally, burned quite plentifully. No, we are playing with an ideology ourselves, which demands and justifies moral indifference: an absolute refusal to make judgements based on universal, self-consistent criteria. That was the strength of our Western civilization, and we have all but surrendered it. For all the blood and treasure we've invested, we have failed the Afghans. We have projected weakness where we required strength, and displayed a moral relativism that presents us as contemptible. We are, in effect, begging to be attacked. The message, from at least Petraeus and Sedwill, should have been truthful. It is that we consider Pastor Jones's behaviour to be gratuitously and obnoxiously provocative. But we consider killing people who are in no way connected with him, to be a monstrous evil, out of all comparison. Those of another, actually twisted culture (see above), may disagree. But our task is not to flatter and appease them. It is instead to recall our own untwisted principles, and make sure they prevail. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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