Not long after September 11, 2001, Paul Berman wrote a masterful little book called Terror and Liberalism
that electrified me the first time I read it. Later it served as a philosophical and political anchor for me as I ventured out on long and sometimes dangerous journeys in the Middle East to uncover things for myself.
He returns now with a new book called The Flight of the Intellectuals
, which is your required reading this month. It picks up, in some ways, where Terror and Liberalism left off. While we haven't had a repeat of the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on September 11, what we do have is an entirely new class of people in the Western democracies who live in hiding and under armed guard from the same sorts of killers. Salman Rushdie was but the first, and Somalia-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali
, one-time collaborator with the butchered Theo Van Gogh, is now but the most famous.
Something terrible has happened to the intellectual class during the interim period. The killers' would-be victims have been excoriated in the press, and even, in some cases, blamed for their predicament. Berman won't stand for it. As Ron Rosenbaum put it hopefully in a recent review of his new book in Slate, "Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets."
The Flight of the Intellectuals begins and ends with Tariq Ramadan, a troubling Swiss-born Islamist who has been praised to the heavens by some of the very same intellectuals who carp nastily about Hirsi Ali. Paul and I spent a recent afternoon talking about his book and some of the questions it raises.
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Tariq Ramadan is a key figure in this interview, which needs reading. Comment X-posted from MJT's site...
Michael, I'm going to give you the name of another book author who may be able to throw some light on these questions. He has a lot of parallels with Tariq Ramadan. But it's the differences that really illuminate.
His name is Mossab Hassan Yousef. His father was one of the founders of Hamas. Hence the title of his book Son of Hamas. Which accomplished something that I did not think to be possible, until I read it.
Mossab, you see, idolizes his father. And the thing that I didn't think was possible, is this:
I now believe, based on that book, that one of the founders of Hamas is a not just a decent human being, but a very good one.
[JK: Readers here will understand just how big a stretch that is.]
Now, here's where Tariq and Mossab part company. Mossab could not endorse, or even ethically continue to tolerate, either the pervasive praxis of Hamas, or the aggressive jihad that murdered civilians to no ethical end.
To the point that he converted to Christianity (!), rather than continue to be a part of it.
To read his work, is to read the voice of a morally serious man. A man who could idolize a father/ grandfather for all that is genuinely good in him, but still deliver a moral judgment that his exemplar had crossed important lines, and that this was and is wrong.
The kind of man Tariq Ramadan is NOT. and perhaps, can never be.
You probably won't hear much about Mossab among the liberal courtiers, however. And the short answer for why is that to them, he's on the enemy side.
Which is the unspoken demon at the heart of the phenomena Berman describes.
That was followed by this interesting addition from "MaxTrue":
Liberal courtier? Now there's an oxymoron:)
As I read it, the charge Berman makes is that the "intellectuals" are naively accepting Tariq Ramadan as someone you can talk to, or should listen to, because they are duped by his liberal facade and blinded by their foolish belief that dialogue with a grandson of Hassan al-Bana is worthwhile, even though he does not reject his heritage by becoming a Christian.
Meanwhile, MaxTrue and JK seem to chime in that the liberal MSM (as they say over at Mondoweiss) in the body of the NY Times are ignoring the virtuous Mossab, who knows better; they claim the NYT are ignoring poor Mossab[no judgment on Mossab intended here] because he is in the "enemy camp." The allusion appears to be that Ramadan is a murderous jihadist at heart and Ramadan and the NYT are intimate bedfellows. For what it's worth the pro-Palestinian crowd paints the NYT with similar conspiratorial motives, but from the opposite side. They claim the NYT systematically suppresses stories that illustrate Israeli abuses of the Palestinians because they are partisan hasbara hacks.
Reality, indeed, is infinitely malleable.