Hatewatch Briefing 2006-04-14 (March 2006)

Welcome! This briefing will be looking hard at the dark places the mainstream media sometimes seem determined to look away from, to better understand our declared enemies on their own terms and without illusions. Our goal is to bring you some of the top jihadi rants, idiotarian seething, and old-school Jew-hatred from around the world, leaving you more informed, more aware, and pretty disgusted every month. This Winds of Change.NET HateWatch briefing is brought to you by Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric. Past briefings and posts on related topics can be found here.

A combination of unfortunate situations has prevented us from consistently posting HateWatch briefings in recent months. We apologize, and now expect to return to a more consistent schedule. This briefing will cover - albeit belatedly - trends and issues that emerged or crystallized in March 2006 and that we expect to be of continuing significance in the months to come.

HIGHLIGHTED TOPICS

• Religious Hate: Global Islamist violence; Religiously-justified degradation of women; Threats against Muslim apostates; Literally genocidal anti-gay incitement; Palestinian incitement and the international donors who fund it; Anti-Semitic incitement in the Arab press; Jews who are not so much self-loathing as just kind of anti-Semitic; Some people not sure if religiously-motivated violence on students meant to advance Islamist causes is "terrorism"; Islamists actually have read the Koran; Anti-Semitic arson in the US; Anti-Semitic humor in France and Egypt

• Idiotarian Seethings: March Cartoon Jihad roundup; Jimmy Carter still doesn't understand Islamism; The Muslim world gave us a lot of inventions - most of them a very long time ago; Generally smart conservatives go idiotarian for like a day and a half, attack Jill Carroll; Hamas won't moderate (sorry!); Mearsheimer and Walt glibness; The Academy Awards happened

• Race and Culture: Cynthia McKinney uses race-baiting to excuse her criminal violence; Yale admits Taliban member; American academy more than a little out of touch with prudence, people; Pro-immigrant activists are not very persuasive; Arab news outlet a little gullible about anti-Bush stories

• A Hopeful Note: Intellectuals issue manifestos against Islamism; Israeli-Arab soccer players refuse to boycott Denmark; Southeast Asian Muslims march against terrorism; Wafa Sultan dismantles Islamist cleric; US students agitate against Islamist intimidation; New Hampshire engages in measured, non-sectarian deliberation about gay marriage

Religious Hate:

• In March, Islamist terrorists committed suicide murders in Israel and Pakistan. They also launched brutal attacks in Thailand. This activity does not happen in a vacuum: new polling in Indonesia demonstrates that there is a committed if small base of support for almost any kind of gruesome Islamist violence.

• Even as officials in London rejected demands that a female student be allowed to don full Islamic garb, women in Chechneya were being told to wear headscarves or else. We submit to you that creeping markers of inferiority will degrade those who are marked and embolden those who do the marking. Eventually, symbolically enforced inferiority metastasizes - the psychological rush of superiority requires a stronger dosage. Today, decades of mundane degradation inflicted on Muslim women has led to a situation where thousands are murdered every year because their lives are esteemed less than their families' "honor".

• If you're Muslim, learn to get comfortable with the idea of staying that way. Seriously.

• In Iraq "the moderate" Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has declared that gays should be killed in the worst way possible. Now, it could be that the pathological relationship between the sexes and genders in the Arab world (even in secular states like Syria) has created a climate of repression that triggers widespread anxiety about gender. Or it could be, as the always eager Islamism-apologist Juan Cole suggests, that so much vitriol is aimed at gays because we got rid of Saddam. Because hey, anything's possible. And what about the anti-gay bigotry in the rest of the Arab world? Also because we removed Saddam. Obviously.
  
  Islam, of course, does not approach having a monopoly on literally murderous homophobia: Toledo Democrat Merrill Keiser, Jr. wants the state to exterminate homosexuals.

• So what if the Palestinians get more international funding than any other population anywhere else in the world, despite the whole being-a-terrorist-people thing? And so what if a lot of that money comes from the United Nations, an organization ostensibly dedicated to creating world peace? And so what again if a decent amount of these donations go towards textbooks that incite violence and indoctrinate children:

  [Describe] Zionism as "a racist ideology and political movement that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century" and inform readers that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were "a group of confidential resolutions adopted by the [Basel Zionist] Congress ... the goal of which is world domination" - [P]rovide Middle East maps with no] mention of Israel - [Give] students this assignment: "Let us research and write [an essay] about one of the Palestinian martyr leaders [suicide bombers]

  It's none of your business... because you know what, the Palestinians are a terribly oppressed group. If they choose to become soulless terrorists who send children to murder other children, that's the way the cookie crumbles. And while we have your attention - it's also none of your business if they use your money to do it.

• If you ever have the urge to condemn Arab newspapers for demonizing Jews (and then demonizing Jews some more), please don't. Remember that this hatred is "anti-Zionist" and not "anti-Semitic". Arab newspapers told us so.

• Is it still anti-Semitism when wacko religious Jews call for the physical destruction of the Jewish state (and its inhabitants) because they believe that a pre-Messianic Jewish state is an abomination? Why yes, yes it is.

• Hey, did you hear of the Islamist terrorist attack on a US campus last month? Observe closely as rhetoric scholar and security studies expert Dr. Cori Dauber spends the first half of the month going from careful to circumspect to frustrated to pissed to totally convinced that this guy was a terrorist Then again, she's probably not as qualified to describe the dynamics of language as this typical head in the sand politically correct liberal college jagoff. So everyone can just relax.

• When Saudi clerics are being insulting fellow Muslims, they sometimes assert that their interpretation of the Koran is the most credible because other Muslims - especially those from Southeast Asia - are not native Arabic speakers and so can't understand linguistic nuances. It's not a great argument, but it does get at something reasonably important: there is a dramatic asymmetry between the Western apologists who insist that Islam is a "religion of peace" and the expert Muslim scholars insist that the Koran commands violent conquest. Specifically, the latter group is actually made up of people who are experts about the Koran. Like this guy:

  According to a report in the independent Egyptian weekly Roz Al-Yusouf, Egyptian MP Ragab Hilal Hamida, from the Muslim Brotherhood, said during a parliamentary session discussing the Inter-Arab Agreement on Combating Terrorism, that the Koran encourages terrorism, and that he supports the activities of Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi. [1] The report also stated that another MP from the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Ahmad 'Askar, supported Hamida's statements, and that MPs from the governing National Democratic Party (NDP) did not denounce them, but instead joked with Ragab. In a subsequent interview with MP Hamida, Roz Al-Yusouf gave him a chance to retract his statements; however, he reiterated his position.

  Make no mistake - there is a civil war spreading through the Muslim world over the proper interpretation of Islamic texts, and we should side with the moderates. But it is idiotic to assume or to imply - as Western apologists are wont to do - that the extremists in this civil war are out and out mistaken about Islam, as if they have simply not read the Koran carefully enough.

• Sometimes, anti-Semites aren't good at persuading people that the Holocaust is a Zionist-invented myth. For times like that, there's arson.

• Anti-Semitism is very funny in France. Also in Egypt. The historical trajectories are different, but the anti-Semitic results are pretty much the same.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• As the world reacts to the cartoon riots, we move our coverage of this missed wake-up call from the Religious Hatred section to here. In Europe, secular and religious leaders began begging for forgiveness. Legal action is being taken against journalists in Denmark and across the Atlantic in Canada. These dynamics have had the predictable result of chilling speech across the spectrum of European life, from the quitodian and mundane to the traditional and spectacular:

  An annual festival of satire in Valencia has fallen foul of censorship after more than four centuries following the furore over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. In the Fallas festival, giant sculptures of the high and mighty are placed in the streets for the public to mock before being destroyed in an orgy of gunpowder and flames. It has survived attacks by the Roman Catholic church, various puritanical rulers and the Franco dictatorship... last month, the mayor, Rita Barbera, urged artists to "temper freedom with a sense of responsibility" when referring to religious subjects. At least one well known local Fallas artist admitted to removing elements from his display of comic sculptures... The artist asked not to be named, partly for fear of reprisals, partly because he did not feel proud of such "self-censorship". But this year was "different", he said. Radical Muslim leaders appeared to be looking for excuses to cause trouble.

  Meanwhile in the United States, students across the country faced obstacles to and retaliation for showing little drawings. Of course, the United States doesn't exactly have a glowing record when it comes to telling Islamists to stop feigning outrage at depictions of Mohammed.

• Jimmy Carter is staking what's left of his reputation on a very public pro-Palestinian campaign, asserting that "the pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel's colonisation of Palestine". We would have thought that Israel's willingness to forgo this "colonisation" and Hamas's response of "we'll keep trying to kill Jews anyway" would've put such statements beyond the bounds of thinking people. Almost hard to believe that the Carter administration let Iran fall to Islamo-fascism. Also last month, Carter tried to have the United Nations act against the US - at this point, though, that's pretty much gravy.

• You know how 70s and 80s educational practices are often criticized for their imbecilic obsession with finding even the thinnest excuse to boost students' self-esteem? That's pretty much what's going on here.

• Idiotarianism is an affliction that unfortunately respects no political boundaries. It is both a cause and a support for a particular ideologies - by myopically narrowing assumptions and filtering information, it allows its victims to see the world exactly as they would like it to be. And so, certain conservative bloggers found themselves awkwardly admitting to unjustifiable hastiness after some of them (and some of their co-bloggers) diagnosed freed Iraqi hostage Jill Carroll with Stockholm Syndrome. Turns out, waiting a day or two to get a hostage's story is not the worst idea (not that their expectations were exactly unjustified). And so, certain other bloggers have been rightly permitted a certain smugness for initially urging caution regarding the statements that Carroll made under duress.

• If you think that Hamas will genuinely accept the Jewish state of Israel - that is, if you agree with the Swiss or Jimmy Carter on this issue - then you are a willful idiot. With all due respect, constructing a fantasy world from fervent desires and fleeting slogans is the literal definition of pathology. We urge you and your therapist to devote time to the following question: what is it about your upbringing and ideology that causes you to ignore clear and overwhelming evidence in favor of opaque "hints" that Hamas intends to moderate?

• We had a long paragraph about Mearsheimer and Walt's dual loyalty "study". But you know what, you're either already familiar with the nuances of this debate or you're uninterested in those nuances. If we may: they're not accurate, they're not brave, and they're not good scholars. Instead, they're kind of pathetic and actually pretty cowardly. Their article could well be anti-Semitic. If it isn't, then the two of them are so bad at making critical distinctions that they were unable to even slow this guy orthis guy from using the report to justify anti-Jewish invective.

• The Academy Awards happened. You don't care, but go read Ben Stein. It'll save you time at cocktail parties.

Race and Culture:

• US Representative Cynthia McKinney assaulted an officer of the peace and then claimed that she was defending herself from racial animus. No kidding.

• Did Yale, suffering from some sort of diversity psychosis, admit a Taliban Islamo-fascist (as if there's another kind). Did they also start a campaign to suppress dissent regarding said admission? Signs point to yes.

• Speaking of Yale, American academia does not seem to be very relevant right now:

  The humanities have destroyed themselves over the past 30 years…Through an obsession with European jargon and a shallow politicization of discourse, the humanities have imploded…There’s hardly a campus you can name where the most exciting things that are happening on campus are coming from the humanities departments…I think the entire profession is in withdrawal at the moment. This is a national problem. It’s not just a Harvard problem.

• There is much to be said about the pro-immigrant marches that shook the United States at the end of last March (and Michelle Malkin has said most of it - click through, there are pictures). We are willing to admit to an uninformed agnosticism about the reform, but please don't insult us by making bad arguments or engaging in obviously stupid strategies. Don't pull kids out of school. Don't hang the US flag upside-down under the Mexican flag. Don't insist that the US is occupying Mexican land. We know you really, really think highly of your own identity - liberal activists explained the whole thing to us. But seriously - it doesn't work:

  ""I know I come from an advocacy background," says Nunez. "But I learned a lot about negotiation with Miguel (Contreras, the late Los Angeles labor chieftain) and the labor movement. It wasn't all protest. You know when we had the big march in L.A. against [the anti-illegal immigrant] Proposition 187 in '94, Miguel tried to talk me out of it. 'Are you guys crazy?' he said. But I wanted to march.

  See? Doesn't work. In fact, it's never worked... there's no good argument for why or how it could work. Persuasion just doesn't work that way.

• Yes, Arab news outlets really are that stupid eager to attack the Bush administration.

A Hopeful Note:

• Prominent intellectuals - including several Muslims - have issued a Manifesto Against Islamism:

  We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

  Other pro-moderation manifestos have also begun to appear.

• We suppose that in a world gone insane, the bravery of the Israeli-Arab players who refused to boycott a soccer game against Denmark is indeed commendable.

• In Bahrain, Muslims marched against terrorism.

• Wafa Sultan, a secular Muslim woman, took time out of her life to go on the air and totally dismantled a trepid, pathetic cleric.

• At the University of Illinois, where the editor of the student newspaper was fired for publishing the Mohammed cartoons, a Muslims student took a stand for free speech. At UNC, where an Islamist committed a terrorist act, Muslim students took a stands against violence.

• We kind of like the fact that New Hampshire defeated a gay marriage ban that was being pushed by Christian evangelicals. Even if we didn't, we would still appreciate the process by which the decision came about. We're glad that voters and representatives from the state of New Hampshire - rather than voters and representatives from across the nation - got to make this choice for New Hampshire. Deliberation on the state level can move much more quickly than national dialogues, but once it gets going national-level demagoguery tends to be shriller, dumber, and more divisive than local politics. These are not conditions conducive to sound deliberation.