Got Your Back

Joe Klein's taking some hits in the blogosphere, and J-Pod's loving it:

I don't know what the rules should be, but since today my sometime friend Joe Klein chose to describe the eminent Bernard Lewis, who has forgotten more about Islam than Joe Klein has ever known about any subject, as a "quasi-racist" because of Lewis's unbelievably well-informed ideas about the interplay of Islam and nationhood — which include the "quasi-racist" notion that Muslims can govern themselves democratically — I say: Let the netroots chew him up.

But here's the thing: Lewis' views of Muslims are "quasi-racist" or whatever the appropriate term is for holding the sort of views about the members of a religious group that one would term "racist" were they held about a racial group. This is actually not inconsistent with the fact that Lewis is considerably more knowledgeable about the history of the Islamic world than I am, and my guess is that he knows more about this than Klein does as well. Colonial regimes in Africa were full of administrators who both new a bunch of stuff about Africa and also happened to be white supremacists -- both attributes were important job qualifications.

Meanwhile, Bush (and Podhoretz) aren't relying on Lewis to help them bone up before a Jeopardy appearance -- they're seeking expert support for their pre-existing commitment to the proposition that there's nothing wrong with U.S. policy toward the Muslim world that a little additional brutality couldn't fix.

Comments

"little" s/b "lot of" but otherwise, yes.

Posted by Doug | May 24, 2007 4:45 PM

But here's the thing: Lewis' views of Muslims are "quasi-racist" or whatever the appropriate term is for holding the sort of views about the members of a religious group that one would term "racist" were they held about a racial group.

The word you're looking for is "Orientalist."

Posted by Ben | May 24, 2007 4:56 PM

I'm getting tired of this whole "liberals are racists who think that Muslims can't handle Democracy" thing that right-wingers pull out from time to time. In addition to the fact that it's an absurd strawman, I just find it disgusting as an argument marshalled by people in support of war. If only we bombed them a little more they would understand freedom!

Posted by justin | May 24, 2007 4:57 PM

Citing Bernard Lewis in support of policy towards Muslims is an unusually reliable indicator that the author considers Muslims to be subhuman.

Posted by otto | May 24, 2007 4:57 PM

"But here's the thing: Lewis' views of Muslims are "quasi-racist" or whatever the appropriate term is for holding the sort of views about the members of a religious group that one would term "racist" were they held about a racial group"

Religion is separate from race in thatit is a belief system which then dictates action. It is racist to say that all blacks eat watermelon and chicken. It is not "quasi-racist" to say that all Catholics eat wafers and drink wine.

I'm not sure "quasi-racist" works unless you're conflating "Muslim" with "Arab," something which is exceedingly common.

Posted by Tom | May 24, 2007 5:11 PM

I think the word you want is 'bigoted'.

I'm not sure I'd try too hard to figure out good and separate definitions for religious and racial affiliations, as both are social constructs and - particularly the latter - notoriously difficult to define.

Posted by Warren Terra | May 24, 2007 5:23 PM

what is the proof that Lewis is a bigot? That is an ugly accusation to make about a person. Proof, please.

Posted by chris | May 24, 2007 5:32 PM

From the link, Klein says...

"It tends to buy utopian neoconservative fantasies or quasi-racist musings of elderly scholars like Bernard Lewis: The Arabs only understand strength."

Klein says nothing about Islam, democracy or nationhood.

I guess the phrase we're grasping for isn't "bigoted" or "quasi-racist," it's "reading comprehension."

Posted by Tom | May 24, 2007 5:33 PM

What an absurd post. Lewis isn't commenting on any racial characteristic, he is commenting on cultural differences. Matthew might as well call "racist" the idea that europeans are more politically left-wing than Americans or that South Americans are more interested in soccer than Americans.

Posted by Al | May 24, 2007 5:42 PM

I've read some Bernard Lewis, but can't argue intelligently one way or another off the top of my head about whether his views could accurately be described as "quasi-racist."

However, where I come from if you accuse someone of being "quasi-racist" you're supposed to back it up with something more than a snarky, insubstantial paragraph.

Posted by ostap | May 24, 2007 5:44 PM

Well this is a nice bit of distraction.

The point of Klein's post is that Bush and his administration are operation under an "Arabs only understand strength" philosophy which is wrong and has been a failure. Furthermore, that Edward's national security knowlege is not demonstrably worse than that of the current administation.

Now J-Pod switches the argument to a bunch of harumpfing about "How DARE you impugn Bernard Lewis in such a manner!"

Wonderful.

The point is not Bernard Lewis. The point is Edwards and Bush.

Posted by Tom | May 24, 2007 5:55 PM

For another opinion of Professor Bernard Lewis, see Professor Fouad Ajami's essay about him

If you let Bush Derangement Syndrome keep you from reading Bernard Lewis's work, that's your loss. Interesting though, that, as Ajami writes:

"The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which once translated one of Mr. Lewis's books into Arabic, said that his book was "the work of a candid friend or an honest enemy. Either way, the Brotherhood said, it was the work of "someone who disdains falsification."

It would be sad if smart young liberals were less open-minded about Bernard Lewis's work than the Muslim Brotherhood.

Posted by Fred | May 24, 2007 6:24 PM

What an absurd post. Lewis isn't commenting on any racial characteristic, he is commenting on cultural differences.

The ability to self-govern, however, is something uniquely human. By insisting (as many neocons and other Middle East pseudo-scholars continue to do) that people who are either Arab or Muslim have an inability to govern themselves without our supervision and assistance, they are perpetuating a longstanding dehumanization of those people. It's not terribly different than how we dehumanized Africans in this country by always saying "well, they can't possibly be allowed to fend for themselves so they're better off being our hired labor force."

Posted by thehim | May 24, 2007 6:26 PM

Another snippet from Ajami's essay on Lewis:

"In the American academy, he may be swimming against the currents of postmodernism and postcolonial history... But countless Arab and Iranian and Turkish readers recognize their tormented civilization in what he has written. They know that he has not come to the material of their history driven by bad faith, or by a desire for dominion."

Why would a bigot or a "quasi-racist" take the time to learn Arabic, Persian and other Middle Eastern languages, so he could spend decades doing original research on the Muslim world? Is this the typical M.O. of a bigot, to devote his life to scholarship of those he hates? How absurd.

Posted by Fred | May 24, 2007 6:33 PM

The eminent Bernard Lewis, who has forgotten more about Islam than Joe Klein has ever known

My guess is that David Broder has forgotten more than Lewis has, but why do these people brag about it?

Lewis has done his homework, but even his early books were tendentious, and by now he's a political hack.

Posted by John Emerson | May 24, 2007 6:38 PM

Matt,

You are the one who wants to buy a gun to defend yourself from African-American criminals in your neighborhood. It's time for you, JPod, Bernard Lewis, and everybody else to declare a moratorium on smearing people you disagree with as racists. Nothing gets in the way of clear thinking these days more than charges of "racism!" and "anti-Semitism!"

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 24, 2007 6:41 PM

The reality is that there are long-lasting differences in average behavior among groups. If those discussions are driven out of the public sphere, then policy-makers are being intellectually disarmed, and worse decisions will follow. (As has happened over and over again.)

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 24, 2007 6:44 PM

Oh, I should have posted my last comment here instead of the Steyn thread. Islamophobe is a silly term. Racist is close enough for me, but a little vague. I like anti-Muslim bigot.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 24, 2007 6:44 PM

Are you trying to say you aren't a racist, Steve?

The only thing I really found redeeming about your writing and ideas was that I thought you were pretty openly racist instead of hiding behind all that "cultural" crap like the rest of your ilk does these days.

Posted by Ed Marshall | May 24, 2007 6:45 PM

It's time for you, JPod, Bernard Lewis, and everybody else to declare a moratorium on smearing people you disagree with as racists.
--Steve Sailer

I disagree with lots of people who aren't racists. But you in particular are a racist. A really weird crackpot racist, yes, but it's only the racist part that makes everyone hate you.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 24, 2007 6:49 PM

I'm a realist.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 24, 2007 6:54 PM

You are the one who wants to buy a gun to defend yourself from African-American criminals in your neighborhood.

Remind me, was it Matt who identified the criminals in question as African-American... or was it you?

Posted by Steve | May 24, 2007 7:02 PM

You people should show Steve Sailer some respect -- the man has been right about more things than Matt Yglesias.

For example, two years ago, Sailer suggested that France pay Muslim immigrants to leave.

And now? Voilà! France to pay immigrants to leave

Posted by Dave | May 24, 2007 7:14 PM

"Remind me, was it Matt who identified the criminals in question as African-American... or was it you?"

Steve who do you think the violent criminals are in D.C., lefty Jewish bloggers? It's your sort of deliberate obtuseness that makes people want to read Steve Sailer for some objectivity on issues lefties are too scared to be honest about (e.g., immigration).

Fortunately, honesty is spreading (if slowly). See, for example, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute call a spade a spade on the Department of Justices specious claim that the FDNY is racist because not enough blacks can pass its written test:

"Aren’t blacks getting embarrassed by this sort of excuse-making? The demand for double standards is becoming ever more pathetic... No black athlete demands that a race track be shortened or a basketball hoop lowered to accommodate him.

Posted by Fred | May 24, 2007 7:23 PM

Steve who do you think the violent criminals are in D.C., lefty Jewish bloggers?

Let me get this straight. You're defending Sailer's statement that Matt "wants to buy a gun to defend himself from African-American criminals in his neighborhood." You think that was a fair statement, because statistically, most of the criminals in D.C. are black. Is that your position?

A little more context. Some people contend Sailer is obsessed with race. His rebuttal is to point out that since Matt wants to defend himself against crime, and most of the criminals in his area are black, Matt actually wants to defend himself against black crime, and therefore Matt is just as bad on matters of race.

My point was simply that Sailer, and not Matt, is the one who brought race into it. Like always. If you can't let someone say "I want to protect myself against criminals" without clarifying that most of the criminals in their area are black, and therefore they must want to defend themselves against BLACK criminals, yes, you might just be obsessed with race.

Posted by Steve | May 24, 2007 8:55 PM

It's true that one is not racist for simply noticing that a higher percentage of handgun crimes are committed by African-Americans. Statistically, that's true. However, I do think we have a problem when people really don't have any desire to understand why that happens and they just assume that African-Americans are culturally more prone to violence. The reality of the disparity comes from the nature of the drug war, where it's enforced, and what it does to African American communities. But it's an issue that progressives won't touch with a ten-foot pole. It's just easier to buy a gun and pretend that it's only the Republicans' fault.

Posted by thehim | May 24, 2007 9:04 PM

Fred,

other than the many substantive things wrong in your post, it's either deliberately inflammatory or spectacularly clueless to choose to employ the phrase "call a spade a spade" in this context.

Al,

What an absurd post. Lewis isn't commenting on any racial characteristic, he is commenting on cultural differences. Matthew might as well call "racist" the idea that europeans are more politically left-wing than Americans or that South Americans are more interested in soccer than Americans.

Even for your standards, this is ludicrous. Unless you think that a banal observation about sporting preference is exactly like saying that a group of people are incapable of effective self-government.

(If you want to argue based on the example of UEFA and FIFA, that Europeans and South Americans are incapable of effective governance, I will concede the validity of the point. Of course, by the same token, David Stern indicates that Americans have a taste for blind authoritarianism without regard for consequences...)

Posted by Pooh | May 24, 2007 9:06 PM

I'm sure Bernard Lewis knows a lot about his subject and his multi-lingualism is impressive. But it doesn't follow that such a person is particularly wise and insightful. I like the image from colonial Africa someone threw out above of European master and native African subject where knowledge of the other doesn't preclude inhabiting a dominating, racist frame. I read Edward Said's whole schpiel on the Orientalism of scholars like Lewis way back when, and he gets deep into this whole issue of internalized superiority/objectification. I've forgotten a lot of it.

Also, Fred, I think I agree with you in certain respects on immigration. We may have different emphases, but not all Lefties are dis-honest about the issue. It's largely the Hillary Clintonish, neo-liberal, globalist-elite Democrats who get bogged down in their own P.C. rat's maze. Obfuscation is an easier route than clairvoyance sometimes.

Posted by Warren | May 24, 2007 9:16 PM

I'm sure Matt wants gun control laws eased in DC so he can buy a gun to defend himself from another home invasion by Charles Krauthammer. Or maybe he's worried that Marty Peretz and Bernard Lewis are going to break into his house.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 24, 2007 9:55 PM

Bernard Lewis is an old fool. He helped promote the politically correct neocon lie in 2002 that we should invade Iraq because it was ripe for democracy. Foreign correspondent Georgie Ann Geyer wrote of an American Enterprise Institute meeting in 2002:

"At the same meeting, asked why he thought Iraq could be democratized, Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis repeated what he said at each of these meetings: “I had four graduate students from Iraq and they were very impressive.”"

Other neocons pushed the same party line about how advanced the Iraqis were:

"The end of September at the Heritage Foundation, I listened to the neoconservative writer Robert Kagan speak volubly about the “large middle class in Iraq” and how Iraq could “become a protectorate like Bosnia and Kosovo.” Those of us who had bothered to go to Iraq over the years knew that most of the middle class had left two decades ago and that the cruel realities of Iraq made the Balkans look like Switzerland.

"At the beginning of October at the American Enterprise Institute, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who like most of the exiles had not been home for decades, described the coming war as “an opportunity as large as the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1917” and said the new Iraqi state would be composed not of ethnic minorities but of citizens and insisted that it would be “demilitarized and renounce the use of force.”"

http://amconmag.com/2006/2006_01_16/article1.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 24, 2007 10:03 PM

My sense of things is that in this neighborhood one has more to fear from immigrants from El Salvador than from black people, who tend to be either respectable middle class types, old people, little kids, or East African small businessmen.

I primarily want a gun to shoot targets, though. If someone tried to mug me (happened once in Amsterdam, never in DC or NYC), I think I'd rather fork over the money than get into a shooting match.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | May 24, 2007 10:36 PM

"I primarily want a gun to shoot targets, though. "

oh great--now Yglesias is blaming the crime-wave on *targets*!!

sure, everybody is so P.C. about blacks and all, but it's perfectly fine to dump on targets, and nobody ever sticks up for their rights.

oh, and Sailer? You really are a pathetic, obsessive, racist. Just in case you're still trying to fool yourself that you're a brave, honest, open-minded truth-teller.

Forget it--you're a classic case, a David Duke who passed a stats course.

Posted by tar | May 24, 2007 10:48 PM

If the definition of a racist is someone who notices that, on average, there are differences between different groups, than Sailer -- and everyone else who is honest and has eyes -- is a racist.

I think a more accurate definition of racist is someone who bears hatred toward other races. I don't think that describes Sailer, at least not with respect to blacks. I've read a bunch of his stuff, and I haven't seen him ever call blacks racial epithets, or say anything about blacks that isn't true. On the contrary, Sailer has on occasion praised black accomplishments in certain fields, and -- unlike most lefties -- he has proposed policies that might help blacks, particularly the lower-achieving ones.

Sailer does seem to have some issues with Jews, but not to the extent that I'd call him an anti-Jew (I eschew the ambiguous term "semite", since Arabs are semites as well). He is usually factually accurate in his writings about Jews, though he does seem to enjoy exposing lefty Jews when they indulge in anti-white elitism, and he also seems to like regurgitating historic instances of bad behavior by Jews, e.g., Jewish involvement in Stalinist purges, etc.

I disagree with Sailer's sentiments about Bernard Lewis -- if he was over-optimistic about Iraq's chances at becoming a democracy, I think it's less because he had some smart Iraqi grad students than because he's old enough to remember when Iraq was a democracy: from the establishment of its constitutional monarchy in 1925 to the military coup in 1958. Sailer is right, though, that political correctness and delusions of egalitarianism did inform the Bush administration's optimism on Iraq (as those ideas inform the administrations immigration policy).

Posted by Fred | May 24, 2007 11:16 PM

happened once in Amsterdam, never in DC or NYC

so the question is, did they look muslim?

look, lewis has done some good work on the ottomans. he knows more about the muslim world that 99% of people because most people aren't intelligent, and so if you have a modicum of intelligence you can seem erudite. i find his work interesting, but yeah, it is on the turks that he's a hard-core scholar, on the rest he's a much smarter mark steyn (yes, i know he knows the languages, but his simplifications of arab and persian history are far less subtle or nuanced than turkish history). as for muslims and quasi-racism and all that, there isn't an either/or dynamic here. people tend to assume muslim = brown person, and so obviously there's a psychological intersection. that being said, if you turned a lot of turks, arabs and persians into catholics who spoke italian you wouldn't think anything was wrong. so it obviously isn't necessarily a racial issue. but the key about this quasi-racist crap is that most of my liberal friends talk about evangelical christians like they're sub-human brutes. is that "quasi-racist"? beware when you conflate belief with essential identity. there's a reason we're way more offended by the idea of racial segregation than religious segregation (which we tolerate throughout the arab world, and to some extent israel).

Posted by razib | May 24, 2007 11:26 PM

Matt Yglesias writes:

"My sense of things is that in this neighborhood one has more to fear from immigrants from El Salvador than from black people, who tend to be either respectable middle class types, old people, little kids, or East African small businessmen."

Thanks, that's worth knowing, especially with an immigration bill before the Senate.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 24, 2007 11:40 PM

Perhaps the crack journalistic team of Yglesias & Ackerman can investigate whether the local Salvadoran community has been infiltrated by the MS-13 gang. If so, a good follow-up would be to see what the gang members think about the proposal in the immigration bill for illegal aliens who are gang members to get a "z" visa if they renounce their gang membership.

Posted by Fred | May 24, 2007 11:49 PM

Perhaps the crack journalistic team of Yglesias & Ackerman can investigate whether the local Salvadoran community has been infiltrated by the MS-13 gang.

We have MS-13 allright.

If so, a good follow-up would be to see what the gang members think about the proposal in the immigration bill for illegal aliens who are gang members to get a "z" visa if they renounce their gang membership.

My understanding was that the DC Salvadoran community is overwhelmingly legal; some kind of legacy of the Reagan Central American policy. More generally, I would think that one of the points of a well-designed amnesty (which, I'll happily concede, the immigration bill does not offer) would be to provide a filtering mechanism to separate out illegal immigrants who commit additional crimes on top of the immigration violations from people who came to the country illegally but are otherwise basically law-abiding.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | May 24, 2007 11:56 PM

Matt,

Interesting. Good point about a filtering mechanism, though this wouldn't be necessary if so many big cities didn't have "sanctuary" policies forbidding their police to inquire about the immigration status of criminals, or to refer them to the INS/ICE.

Posted by Fred | May 25, 2007 12:17 AM

so the question is, did they look muslim?

Or as the Dutch cop put it, "was he real Dutch, or a nigger?"

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | May 25, 2007 12:21 AM

"My understanding was that the DC Salvadoran community is overwhelmingly legal"

is as true as

"My sense of things is that in this neighborhood one has more to fear from immigrants from El Salvador than from black people"

Posted by Zagnut | May 25, 2007 12:44 AM

yglesias seems to accuse someone of being a bigot every second post.

Posted by pimp hand strikes | May 25, 2007 3:25 AM

Oh, for the days when you could call a brown-skinned mud person a nigger and not be assaulted with "racist" or "bigot." Why did we ever turn away from those gentler, more civil days?

PHS, the term that people like you use nowadays is "savage." As in, "damn, the savages are running loose around here" when you see more than one black person on the street at once. Quite popular with the NYPD and other LEOs.

Posted by tequila | May 25, 2007 4:23 AM

I sort of wondered about Lewis's expertise in the moder Middle East when I noticed in his WSJ op-ed he thought that the Taliban was founded in the early 1980s as part of the anti-Soviet mujahadeen resistance.

Posted by MikeN | May 25, 2007 4:58 AM

If someone tried to mug me (happened once in Amsterdam, never in DC or NYC), I think I'd rather fork over the money than get into a shooting match

Appeaser! It's 1938 again, Neville.

Posted by otto | May 25, 2007 7:26 AM

yglesias seems to accuse someone of being a bigot every second post.

But of course. What is most important to liberals is having a sense of moral superiority.

Posted by Al | May 25, 2007 9:02 AM

No one should be surprised that a liberal would make unsubstantiated accusations of racism (or quasi-racism) against a political opponent. It is his most frequently employed parlor trick to avoid an argument on the merits. I've read this whole thread and haven't seen a single coherent argument offered for Lewis's supposed "quasi-racism".

Posted by Homer | May 25, 2007 10:11 AM

I've read this whole thread and haven't seen a single coherent argument offered for Lewis's supposed "quasi-racism"

OK, I'll repost my earlier comment, which no one responded to:

The ability to self-govern, however, is something uniquely human. By insisting (as many neocons and other Middle East pseudo-scholars continue to do) that people who are either Arab or Muslim have an inability to govern themselves without our supervision and assistance, they are perpetuating a longstanding dehumanization of those people. It's not terribly different than how we dehumanized Africans in this country by always saying "well, they can't possibly be allowed to fend for themselves so they're better off being our hired labor force."

Posted by thehim | May 25, 2007 10:54 AM

But of course. What is most important to liberals is having a sense of moral superiority.

Al, you're projecting again.

Posted by Pooh | May 25, 2007 3:06 PM