Crush Your Enemy

Via Chris Bertram, a fascinating Reason interview with Ayan Hirsi Ali in which we see clearly that while people certainly shouldn't be killed or threatened with physical harm on account of their ridiculous views, nor should we simply valorize the views of anyone -- no matter how ridiculous those views may be -- merely because they've been threatened with harm on account of them:

Reason: Should we acknowledge that organized religion has sometimes sparked precisely the kinds of emancipation movements that could lift Islam into modern times? Slavery in the United States ended in part because of opposition by prominent church members and the communities they galvanized. The Polish Catholic Church helped defeat the Jaruzelski puppet regime. Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.

Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

This is crazy stuff, and it's frightening that AEI has gone so far 'round the bend that they've decided these are the kind of views they want their institution to be promoting. I know Norm Ornstein doesn't like it when people think he must be a hysteric promoting a violent clash of civilizations just because he works with a bunch of colleagues who busy themselves trying to promote a violent clash of civilizations, but that's kind of what you get when these are your colleagues.

Comments

It may not make her views correct, but Hirsi Ali has far better reasons for feeling like that than most AEI nuts. She suffered a lot in her youth at the hands of Islamically inspired nutty relatives, which I think explains her vehemence. I would forgive a girl rescued from the clutches of some of these lunatic Christian sects a lot of anti-Christian vehemence, too. Doesn't mean that you have to go and agree with her though...

Posted by JohnTh | October 15, 2007 10:00 AM

Hirsi Ali is respected in America because we are afraid of Muslims and she plays right into those fears. No one would have paid her any attention on or before September 10, 2001.

Posted by Peter | October 15, 2007 10:00 AM

To make the obvious opint, she's Rushdie squared. He was a liberal "Muslim" who became a political hack after his unpleasant experiences with extremists, but whose output is still interesting.

Muslims gave her an extremely rough time, so she is angry. Her anger however does not manifest itself in productive (War against Islam would not be productive) or interesting (Submission is pointless, obvious and ridiculous) ways.

On a vaguely related note, what are the specifics of her or her party's voting record in the Dutch Parliament?

Posted by Moral Panicker | October 15, 2007 10:15 AM

She suffered a lot in her youth at the hands of Islamically inspired nutty relatives,

Yes, and for that a Muslim farmer living in Thailand should be crushed under the boot of the American military.

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 10:20 AM

Staggering. You don't have the ability to substantively refute, much less intelligently address, what Ali says, so what do you do? Call names. (Rushdie is a "political hack"??) Her point is that Moslem ideologues are not interested in peace. The empirical evidence (e.g. Thailand, Bali, India, the Philippines, Israel, Nigeria, Sudan, Holland, Belgium, England, New York, Russia) backs her up. You might not like the conclusions she draws from the data, but to suggest she is promoting a "clash of civilizations" simply by telling the truth is an obscenity.

The sun does not stop shinning just because you might be able to stick your head fully up your tail. Ali is a genuine heroine.

Posted by Eagle613 | October 15, 2007 10:32 AM

I know Norm Ornstein doesn't like it when people think he must be a hysteric promoting a violent clash of civilizations just because he works with a bunch of colleagues who busy themselves trying to promote a violent clash of civilizations, but that's kind of what you get when these are your colleagues.

Go to the "Voices" tab, look to the right, look to the left, and ask yourself whether you're comfortable with a "lumping" view-attribution rule.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 15, 2007 10:35 AM

Her point is that Moslem ideologues are not interested in peace. The empirical evidence (e.g. Thailand, Bali, India, the Philippines, Israel, Nigeria, Sudan, Holland, Belgium, England, New York, Russia) backs her up.

Utterly and completely wrong, and ironic, considering your use of the term evidence. Whatever the ideologues say or want, the vast majority of the Muslim people in those places are not engaged in violence whatsoever. The Muslim radicals who are engaged in actual violence or support of violence have to be apprehended if possible and if not, killed. Islam is in desperate need of reform and that change must start with the people who don't commit violence but also don't condemn it. But to suggest that Muslim people who do not take part in violence or lend material support for violence should be crushed is inhuman, not to mention unworkable and self-defeating.

Hirsi Ali was specifically asked if she meant that all Muslim should be crushed, and, to the extent that her answer is coherent at all, she indicates that she should. Which is yet another reason why she shouldn't be taken seriously.

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 10:38 AM

Good job, Matthew Yglesias. I didn't know until now that the left believes is "crazy stuff" fighting against oppression, theocracy, fascism. Oh, yes, we're deeply committed to fight against Dubya's oppression, theocracy and fascism in this country while sipping a glass of Chardonnay.

Posted by Christian Rocca | October 15, 2007 10:39 AM

Hitchens apparently went altogether unhinged at at FFRF (see Pharyngula) and has also called for total war on Islam.

I'd like to ask one of these people how, practically speaking, you can destroy Islam. Kill all 1.5 billion Muslims? Only most of them? How exactly? With air strikes against all Muslim states? A ground war all over Asia and Africa? Nuclear weapons? And how do you deal with American and European Muslims? Concentration camps? How exactly does one fight a religion as widespread and populous as Islam?

Posted by Aris | October 15, 2007 10:41 AM

It's understandable that she's angry - but acting on that anger is obviously not wise

Panicker, with respect to her party's record in Dutch parliament: that's complicated, as she actually switched parties. Her original affiliation was the Party of Labor (left in Netherlands, hard-left in US terms). She then made a high profile switch to enter parliament for the Liberal party - (right wing in NL, centre-left in US). The latter tend to vote for US-supporting actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as lower taxes and tougher policies on immigration.

I lived in Holland at the time she first started out, and my impression was that she was slowly driven nuts by the fact that the Dutch were quite unwilling to deal with the fundamental fact that Dutch tolerant, liberal values are totally at odds with almost any mainstream interpretation of Islam. Of course, the reason that they were (and are) unwilling to deal with that is the pragmatic one that it wouldn't really help them, here and now, and would only make everything worse. However, due to her previous experiences all she could think to do was yell harder just how different Muslims were, which earned her the homicidal attentions of the extremists, which further incited her, to her present levels of rage

Posted by JohnTh | October 15, 2007 10:42 AM

Apparently, the excellent anthropologist of Islam, Saba Mahmood (the author of the difficult but illuminating, "The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject") has a forthcoming essay dissecting the connections between individuals like Hirsan Ali and the neoconservative, Islamophobic right. From what I've heard, the essay questions the supposed "feminism" of those who batter Islam over its treatment of women. She also excavates the money-media nexus that keeps this particular outrage machine rolling.

Posted by dadanarchist | October 15, 2007 10:45 AM

Christian Rocca: Oh, yes, we're deeply committed to fight against Dubya's oppression, theocracy and fascism in this country while sipping a glass of Chardonnay.

Please see my questions right below your post, and try to answer it: I'd like nothing better than to totally and thoroughly extinguish oppression, theocracy, fascism, superstition, ignorance, medievalism, etc. But I think advocating as the best way to do this total extermination of people who carry a religious label is lunacy.
___________________________

Posted by Aris | October 15, 2007 10:47 AM

It's perfectly sensible to believe that serious Islam (and serious religion more generally) are fundamentally at odds with, and a grave threat to, liberal values and at the same time not to believe that the appropriate response to this threat is always more wars (though sometimes it may be). I was saddened when I heard that Hirsi Ali's pro-liberal fight lead her to line up with the nuts at AEI.

On the other hand, her natural liberal allies really did abandon her. I was at the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam a few years ago. At the end of the tour, they have this thing where they show a bunch of film clips of various people making various potentially offensive statements, and then asking the audience to vote electronically on which statements should be legally banned. One of the clips was of Hirsi Ali saying her stuff. That is, to the people who run the Anne Frank house (and who are presumably sincere about tolerance), there is at least some notion that the kinds of things she says are fundamentally illegitimate like Nazi hate speech. Crazy.

David J. Balan

Posted by David J. Balan | October 15, 2007 10:53 AM

I deplore radical religious fundamentalism of all kinds. But I think calling for the ouster of everything Muslim from Western societies will only further entrench radical Islam and push fence-sitters onto the side of fundamentalism. Nothing is more galvanizing for a fanatical minority than cruel oppression by the majority.

Why should people, all people, embrace Western ideals? Because we celebrate justice, liberty, opportunity, and rationality. These are greatest attributes of the human condition, and the Enlightenment helped put these ideals on a pedestal. We aren't going to defeat a radical, nihilistic ideology because we have the biggest bombs. In fact, that will only make things worse.

Does this mean we should seek out Al Qaeda's top dogs, break bread with them and smokem' peace pipe? Of course not. They are the head of a venomous snake, and I fully support taking the necessary steps to bring them to "justice".

But Al Qaeda is a failing organization with maybe a few thousand adherents, a good chuck of them living in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not quite the Third Reich, if you ask me. Yet, their ideology gains some traction and holds some influence in the Muslim world because we let it. We have made no concerted effort to show the Mideast the hope that entailed in genuine democracy and liberty. Instead, we occupy a formerly secular nation with too few troops for nearly five years only to bring about a bloody, nasty sectarian civil war. We can do better...

Posted by CKT | October 15, 2007 11:07 AM

I'm inclined to agree with David. One can point out both that muslim extremism is incompatible with maintaining and open, free, tolerant society while at the same time acknowledging that Hirsi Ali is off her rocker and spewing nonsense.

Ultimately, when asked to define what "defeating Islam" means, she doesn't really have an answer. She mouths some platitudes and seems to think we should be less accomodating of Muslims in our communities, but ultimately can't tell us what "defeat 1.5 billion muslims" means.

Posted by Tyro | October 15, 2007 11:09 AM

David J. Balan: On the other hand, her natural liberal allies really did abandon her.

Excellent post, very well said. And this puzzles me too, and I don't know whether liberals abandoned her and made her turn toward right-wing radicalism, or whether liberals detected her right-wing radicalism and abandoned her.

Here's a little more cognitive dissonance for you: Watch this video of Wafa Sultan railing against mysticism and medievalism and tell me if you don't agree with at least 98% of what she says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WLoasfOLpQ. Very classy and very gutsy too, I thought.

But then... I found out that she runs around with the same domestic crazies as Hirsi Ali.

While it's true that the fundamentalist strands of Islam are the most virulent expression of the medieval mindset, there are more than a billion Muslims in the world. As with any religion, different adherents interpret their holy books differently, and some, depending on the local culture, customs, history, educational level, etc. can be downright dangerous. But it's too simplistic to delegate all who may share a religious label as believing exactly the same thing and implementing their faith in the same way. Ironically, the crazies who have now assumed Wafa, Hirsi Ali and Hitchens have done more to promote medievalism and to undermine freedom and progress in this country than Muslim terrorists could ever hope to accomplish.
___________________________

Posted by Aris | October 15, 2007 11:09 AM

There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

s/b "There comes a moment when I get you to crush my enemies for me."

max
['I'd be very interested to know how may testimonies circulated during the Crusades from Muslims for Jesus.']

Posted by max | October 15, 2007 11:36 AM

I really hate oppressive backwards religious beliefs and people who oppress people in their name.

Maybe threatening war everywhere and actually blowing up a number of places will help.

Maybe it won't.

In any case, it is clear that since my conscience is involved, and no one else is worthy of the consideration I give to my conscience, let's go ahead and just assume that the aggression and war stuff will work.

If it doesn't, and people aren't freed, and don't end up better off, feh, who cares; what matters is that I convinced myself that I cared about liberating others from oppression, etc.

The little people can worry about the details of how things work out on the ground. Not me.

Posted by El Cid | October 15, 2007 11:59 AM

Islam needs to be crushed! What the hell does that even mean? We need to stop wasting time with these token ex-Moslems who think that the US army should be at their disposal to settle their personal scores. You wanna fight? Get you own frickin army!

Posted by 2cynicalbyhalf | October 15, 2007 12:01 PM

Her point is that Moslem ideologues are not interested in peace.

Can we wipe your ass off the planet then? You are quite a bit closer and if we are going to start getting rid of useless, violent, fools it only makes sense to start locally.

Posted by Ed Marshall | October 15, 2007 12:13 PM

Islam neeeds to be isolated. Separationism is the key. Stop all Muslim migration into the West. Cede Palestine back to the Arabs and bring the Ashkenazi Jews back to Europe and America, which is where most of them already are. Continue buying their oil and exporting them our goods.

Posted by Sidney Potter | October 15, 2007 12:15 PM

Aris wrote: "I'd like to ask one of these people how, practically speaking, you can destroy Islam. Kill all 1.5 billion Muslims? Only most of them? How exactly? With air strikes against all Muslim states? A ground war all over Asia and Africa? Nuclear weapons? And how do you deal with American and European Muslims? Concentration camps? How exactly does one fight a religion as widespread and populous as Islam?"

No, there's a liberal and all-american way. By spreading freedom, liberty, tolerance and fighting the totalitarian ideology out of Islam in the very same way you americans did (I'm italian) against fascism, nazism and communism. How? By helping the dissidents over there and in the west. Or, I would say, by standing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the liberal people like her who want to get rid of tiranny and oppression and totalitarism. Is that simple? No. But it's much more helpful if you understand who are your allies and friends.

Posted by Christian Rocca | October 15, 2007 12:22 PM

Her point is that Moslem ideologues are not interested in peace.

Neoconservative ideologues are not interested in peace, either, but unlike the people that committed terrorist acts they have great amounts of power, access to a large standing military, and enough nukes to turn this planet into ash many times over.

Posted by Joshua | October 15, 2007 12:29 PM

I'm all for spreading liberty and democracy. Radical fundamentalist religion is a nefarious way of thinking. But the eliminationist rhetoric has got to go.

Really, replace "Islam" with "Judaism" in Ali's screed and how is that any different than what the Nazi's had to say in the 1930's?

Posted by CKT | October 15, 2007 12:31 PM

Nothing much wrong with what the Nazis were saying. They were arguing for separationism too. They and Zionist Jews collaborated in encouraging Jewish emigration out of Germany and into Palestine.

Posted by Fred | October 15, 2007 12:36 PM

"[A] forthcoming essay dissecting the connections between individuals like Hirsan Ali and the neoconservative, Islamophobic right."

Just to be clear, you really believe that the problem is not the imams yelling "kill the Jews", or the crowds who murder Christian nuns because of a cartoon, or the institutionalized oppression in Saudi Arabia (try putting up a Christmas tree), Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Sudan, or the pogroms in Nigeria because of a beauty contest, or the oppression or women, or the stoning of homosexuals, or the indoctrination of children to believe that Islam will rule the world, but rather the "neoconservative, Islamophobic right"? And you have a problem with Ali because she calls for the West to stand up and protect its values, and oppose the forces of reaction?

Stop chanting "not all Moslems are radicals" as if this mantra will make the problem go away - there were plenty of good Germans, too. The truth is that the "radicals" are the political actors, while the "silent majority" either buys into the program, or does not care when "infidels" die.

The West defeated the Soviets, and can defeat (as Ali puts it) the Moslems as well. My sense, however, is that most of the people on this board are so afraid that they will justify anything and everything to avoid having to act. Or is it that your hatred for the US and "neoconservatives" is so pathological that you find Saudi Arabia and Pakistan preferable?

Posted by Eagle613 | October 15, 2007 12:39 PM

Quivering in terror. That's us,eagle. Good thing we got heroes like you to protect us from religious bigotry in other countries.

Just like y'all protected us from conservative Christians in Latin America who tortured and murdered leftists. Stop the fascists there before they come up here Oh, wait, they were on America's side. Or Reagan's. It's so confusing.

Posted by Donald | October 15, 2007 12:49 PM

No, there's a liberal and all-american way. By spreading freedom, liberty, tolerance and fighting the totalitarian ideology out of Islam..

I'm sure the prescription of drink, drugs, abortion on demand and the opportunity for their daughters to star in pornography will go down a bundle.

We can't reform them, and they can't reform us. Multiculturalism has failed. Separation is the only sensible path.

Posted by Lester | October 15, 2007 12:50 PM

CKT - are you serious? Were the Jews in Germany murdering apostates? Blowing up schools and pizza parlors? Killing Bhuddist teachers? Preaching world conquest? Planning genocide as per the Hamas charter?

Show me where Ali advocates anything like the Nuremburg Laws. Show me where Ali advocates anything like the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem (a phrase first coined, by the way, by a Moslem cleric who came to Germany offering to mobilize the Moslem world to join the Nazis). Show me where Ali does anything but take the facts, and make policy prescriptions for the sole purpose of protecting individual freedom and Western democracy.

Why are you so afraid of the truth?

Posted by Eagle613 | October 15, 2007 12:50 PM

Didn't Ali call for the banning of the anti-immigration Belgian political party Vlaams Belang? This woman does not want an end to Muslim immigration into Europe. So she's part of the problem, not the solution.

Posted by Comte | October 15, 2007 12:55 PM

I find it hilarious that Sidney Potter has endorsed OBL's political program and no one has said anything.

Hirsi Ali explicitly calls for banning free speech rights for Muslims and apparently for banning conversions as well. The Muslim "infiltration" into schools and colleges must be stopped --- what exactly this means I have no idea - perhaps Muslims cannot be allowed to form clubs. Also no Muslims burning flags, this is a crime so horrible that only Muslims must be stopped from doing it. Also no Muslim religious or private schools. Essentially she wants to ban most forms of religious expression for Muslims only.

Thankfully we have a Constitution in the United States.

Posted by tequila | October 15, 2007 1:10 PM

Separation is the only sensible path.

If you can look at the state of the world as it stands and think that economic, cultural or physical isolation is possible, you're nuts.

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 1:17 PM

"Show me where Ali does anything but take the facts, and make policy prescriptions for the sole purpose of protecting individual freedom and Western democracy."

Sort of the fascist's path to individual freedom and democracy. Not sort of, just the fascist's way.

Posted by Jennifer | October 15, 2007 1:53 PM

This notion of 'crushing' your enemies is at the root of Ali's anti-liberalism. It simply is not part of the liberal creed that partisans of views in a society should be crushed. There may be circumstances that call for limiting the right to free speech and assembly and religious belief, but when a person outlining those circumstances talks of crushing and war, I think we can assume they aren't a fair judge of circumstances. So it is with Hirsi Ali, who seems to want to import a peculiar European bigotry into the U.S. The U.S., here, really is a much better model - there has been a lot more opportunity for Muslims here, and there simply isn't the ever present hostility between Muslim and Christian and Jew in the U.S. that there may be in the Netherlands.

The reason one doesn't want to start 'crushing' Moslems, or Southern Baptists, even if you don't believe in what the Moslems or Southern Baptists believe in, is two-fold - one is a moral respect for a person's control over his own beliefs, which is part of the total respect for persons; the other is that the mechanisms for 'crushing' are inherently anti-democratic. Which is why I believe that the neo-con credo - and Ali is definitely a neo-con - should be a variation of that phrase that came out of the vietnam war about having to destroy the village in order to save it. For the neo-cons, it is: we had to destroy democracy in order to spread it. This is why they support anti-democratic, and even authoritarian measures domestically - in the U.S. and the UK, especially, this has meant extending executive power enormously - while pretending to spread democracy by invading countries.

If one takes 'war' as the only possible model of disagreement, you will be lead, inevitably, to real wars.

Posted by roger | October 15, 2007 2:05 PM

There was an interesting set of points made, I think by the pre-neocon era Hirsi Ali, which went something along the lines of
1) I believe that rigorous belief in the tenets of Islam is incompatible with a good, healthy paticipation in a tolerant Western society
2) Therefore the logical thing is to try and persuade Moslems living in Western countries that their beliefs are wrong - to convert them to atheism, if you will.
3) Yet almost everyone gets extremely upset if you talk openly about trying to persuade Moslems to stop being Moslems, even though the overwhelming majority of people in the West think that their beliefs are in fact not true.

So to read her current remarks charitably, in the context which I think she may have meant them - Islam is a bad and incorrect set of beliefs, as Communism is. We defeated Communism by being firm and, eventually, by persuading them that their belief were wrong. Equally, we should therefore strive to contain Islam, and over time eliminate not the practitioners of Islam but their practices - the 'ideology', as she calls it

This does raise the interesting point - why should 'fighting' and 'defeating' Islam in this sense be morally any worse than fighting conservatism or communism or white supremacy? Why should a particular ideology get a pass just because it is a religion? If you believe someone has a whole bunch of wrong thoughts, aren't you obliged to try and talk them out it?

Again, I fully understand that it's most likely not smart and will lead to a lot of even more angry and alienated Moslems, but 5 years ago I remember being quite interested in the contradictions she raised

Posted by JohnTh | October 15, 2007 2:32 PM

Where did all these new wingnuts come from? Somebody google "Ayan Hirsi Ali" and come up with this? Also, how much you want to bet that Eagle613 would shit his pants if he were actually confronted with any sort of threat?

Posted by Mike | October 15, 2007 3:16 PM

If you can look at the state of the world as it stands and think that economic, cultural or physical isolation is possible, you're nuts.

Of course, physical isolation is possible. Just cease large scale immigration. Some degree of cultural and economic transmission will continue much as it did before the 1970s.

Posted by Reza | October 15, 2007 3:19 PM

Freddie,

Not to speak for someone else, but I don't think a *total* separation was what earlier commentators meant. However, stopping Muslim immigration, not tolerating anti-Western (in a both cultural and political sense) speech in what is in most of Europe state-subsidized mosques, and encouraging assimilation, seems reasonable. Since cultures mixed together cause so much turmoil, why not just let people do whatever they want in their part of the world, put our own house in order, and mind our own business? The multi-cultural societies we've been trying to build has failed miserably, especially in Europe, so why continue down that path?

There is no need to "crush" Islam or try to make Muslim countries Western. Let just Western countries remain Western and Muslim ones Muslim. Let's live and let live, and for God's sake, let's stop trying to change one another.

Posted by Norway | October 15, 2007 3:42 PM

not tolerating anti-Western (in a both cultural and political sense) speech in what is in most of Europe state-subsidized mosques, and encouraging assimilation, seems reasonable.

Except that freedom of speech, and of religion-- as long as the practice of that religion does not infringe on the rights of anyone else-- are fundamental Western, liberal values. Here again we have the schizophrenic nature of the "war of cultures" model. We need to defend liberal, Western democracies against the Muslim hordes, and how do we do it? By abandoning the most basic liberal, Western, and democratic values.

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 3:54 PM

Except that freedom of speech, and of religion-- as long as the practice of that religion does not infringe on the rights of anyone else-- are fundamental Western, liberal values.

Yes, and Muslims and others are free to excercise those rights in their own traditional lands. It's pretty simple: if you want liberalism and the welfare state to survive, oppose the mass immigration of non-Westerners.

Posted by Kuplet | October 15, 2007 4:07 PM

Sure, freedom of speech is important, but there is no reason why the state should *subsidize* hate speech. That is preposterous, but it happens in nearly every European country.

Still, many European countries have laws against hate speech, but they don't seem to apply to anti-Western hate speech. Either remove the laws or make them applicable to all hate-speech.

Not that I'm expecting any of this to actually happen.

Posted by Norway | October 15, 2007 4:07 PM

Norway, I think you have that backwards. For the past twenty years the problem in the world has been repeated, genocidal attacks on Moslems, from Bosnia to Chechnya to Iraq. Of course, that history has also shown an astonishing patience by the Moslem population, by and large, and a tolerance that will surely go down as one of the more hopeful signs that human progress is possible.

After stealing its wealth from the rest of the world for four hundred years, the European nations are now having to deal, somewhat, with the victims of their thefts and murders. Yet all that viciousness did build a prosperity which can assimilate masses from Africa and the Middle East, and I don't imagine, even if by some magic wand the immigrant flow is cut off, that those populations are leaving. Rather, it looks like Europe is going to be lucky enough to be ethnically and religiously diverse - it is a sort of Americanization of the continent. The Europeans can only benefit. Among the benefits for us all, I think, will be a check on the Bush era policy of unprovoked aggression against other countries - Sarkozy might talk tough about Iran, but both the unpopularity of the U.S. and the war in Iraq and the numerous part of the French population that is now Muslim will most likely make it politically impossible for him to pull a Tony Blair.

So, more immigration, more multiculturalism, and more mixing - that is what Europe needs. It is what has given the U.S. the edge for the past thirty years - look at the names and the histories, for instance, of the U.S. noble prize winners in science and a third are from foreign countries. Or look up the names of the professors of the natural sciences at the great American universities - again, you'll find a third are immigrants. Without that brain drain, the U.S. system of debt and a swollen service sector would surely have buckled.

Posted by roger | October 15, 2007 4:13 PM

So who decides what is "anti-Western hate speech" that should be suppressed? I love conservatives who rail against government interference in private affairs, but have no problem giving them the power to regulate speech. Hey, you know I find a lot of fundamentalist christian speech to be offensive. Can I ban them too?

Posted by Col Bat Guano | October 15, 2007 4:14 PM

Guano,

I think you misunderstand me. The (almost) absolute free speech that is allowed under the American system has never really been accepted in Europe. And as I said twice now, my main point is that there is no reason the state should subsidize hate-speech.

Roger,

I disagree with you too fundamentally to even argue. Let's just agree to disagree.

Posted by Norway | October 15, 2007 4:23 PM

I think you misunderstand me. The (almost) absolute free speech that is allowed under the American system has never really been accepted in Europe. And as I said twice now, my main point is that there is no reason the state should subsidize hate-speech.

The fact that it hasn't been accepted in the past is not a compelling argument that it shouldn't be in the future. And you are working under the assumption that banning or criminalizing certain types of speech works to damage those ideologies or movements. But that is patently false, and is undermined by numerous examples in history or contemporarily. See, for example, Germany, where Nazism is outlawed, and where there is an enormous neo-Nazi movement, which is strengthened by its outlaw status, which plays directly into the persecution complex these hate movements manipulate so skillfully. The United States, with its largely unfettered free speech, does not have anything resembling the home-grown radical Islam problem the Europeans do, with their controls on speech. So what sense is what you're saying making?

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 4:29 PM

So, more immigration, more multiculturalism, and more mixing - that is what Europe needs. It is what has given the U.S. the edge for the past thirty years - look at the names and the histories, for instance, of the U.S. noble prize winners in science and a third are from foreign countries.

What's given America the edge is a freer market economy. And as for ethnic heterogenity being the key to economic success, it doesn't seem to have been important to countries like Japan, Korea, China, Finland, etc.

Importing masses of Third World immigrants into Europe is going to produce the same social tensions now befalling America. The one and only beneficial by-product is that it will kill off liberalism as we now understand it.

Posted by Awacks | October 15, 2007 4:32 PM

Freddie,

You have a good argument about Nazism and Germany, I'll give you that. Will you agree with me that the state should stop *subsidizing* hate-speech though? Such as when the Friday prayer includes the encouragement to kill Jews?

Kuplet's comment above seems to make some sense. It's ironic that we're loosing our values at home while trying to push them on the rest of the world.

Posted by Norway | October 15, 2007 4:38 PM

Awacks, do try to understand capitalism before you defend it. The international labor market is actually restricted by immigration laws. That's called being against the free market. Now, you can be for or against the free market, you can pick and chose, but you can't be for the free market by declaring you are against the free market.

Well, unless you use Bushian logic.

As for your examples of ethnic homogeneity, Japan is the only one that really works. China, of course, has succeeded in assimilating a great mass of ethnically diverse people into one called the Chinese, but that doesn't mean that the Southern Chineses speak the same dialect or have the same customs as the northern Chinese. Your other examples are either minor (Finland?) or have depended on great amounts of development aid, like Korea, as well as using a totally different ethnicity - American - to defend them.

The great thing about American ethnic diversity is that, counter to your prediction, it looks more likely that conservative attempts to pursue racial politics against immigrants will end up sidelining conservatives. This happened in California during the eighties, and I'm pretty confident that the Republican party handing the Hispanic vote to the democrats is not going to "defeat liberalism."

This is all a little abstract. There won't be any 'separation' of Moslem and Christian, there won't be any neo-Nazi expulsion of Muslims from Europe, and the global economy can't arbitrarily freeze labor movements and continue to be globalized. Ain't gonna happen. I'm happy to see more hybridization, more multiculturalism and the like, but whether I am happy or not, that is the way history seems to be going.

Posted by roger | October 15, 2007 4:43 PM

Will you agree with me that the state should stop *subsidizing* hate-speech though? Such as when the Friday prayer includes the encouragement to kill Jews?

No argument here.

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 4:54 PM

Free markets do not exist in pure abstract forms, and operate in all variety of circumstances with regards to local laws, practices and restrictions. Hence capitalism began and thrived in countries with little or no immigration. Trade, not immigration, is all that's necessary for global capitalism.

Your idea that successful economies can simply be explained by aid (though not Africa, obviously) shows you have no grasp of developmental economics.

As to the future ethnic make-up of America and Europe that is indeed the 'way it seems to be going' but it will herald the end of liberalism.

Posted by Mulligan | October 15, 2007 4:58 PM

And as I said twice now, my main point is that there is no reason the state should subsidize hate-speech.

You don't really believe that state subsidies are what is keeping hate-speech going do you?

Posted by Col Bat Guano | October 15, 2007 5:01 PM

Just out of curiousity, what's the deal with normal people spelling "Muslim" and crazy people "Moslem"? (Roger as the exception). It there some subtle insult associated with the latter spelling or something?

I

Posted by djw | October 15, 2007 5:34 PM

Just out of curiousity, what's the deal with normal people spelling "Muslim" and crazy people "Moslem"? (Roger as the exception). It there some subtle insult associated with the latter spelling or something?

I

Posted by djw | October 15, 2007 5:34 PM

Freddie the Freak:

"We need to defend liberal, Western democracies against the ------ hordes, and how do we do it?"

By showing how slimy rotten people like you are.

Posted by Jennifer | October 15, 2007 5:42 PM

"So, more immigration, more multiculturalism, and more mixing - that is what Europe needs. It is what has given the U.S. the edge for the past thirty years - look at the names and the histories, for instance, of the U.S. noble prize winners in science and a third are from foreign countries.

What's given America the edge is a freer market economy. And as for ethnic heterogenity being the key to economic success, it doesn't seem to have been important to countries like Japan, Korea, China, Finland, etc.

Importing masses of Third World immigrants into Europe is going to produce the same social tensions now befalling America. The one and only beneficial by-product is that it will kill off liberalism as we now understand it.

Posted by Awacks | October 15, 2007 4:32 PM"

The funny thing is that we've done pretty well in this country since immigration laws were liberalized. Muslim-Americans are actually wealthier and more educated than the average American. Muslims serve in our government and military patriotically. Malcolm X, ironically, realized that white people weren't fundamentally evil and came to support racial understanding in the US after taking part in the hajj to Mecca. It's Europe that's full of racist crap. We may have our problems here in the US, but at least Muslims who put in the effort here can do well. In France, around 40% of university-educated Muslims are unemployed. Every family member I have in Europe is a secular ethnic minority and all but one of them complain all the time that Europeans are so fucking racist and we aren't even Muslims. Where are Europe's Martin Luther Kings, its William Lloyd Gsrrisons, its Frederick Douglasses? When an imam in Europe spouts Salafi bullshit, it's normal. When an imam in New Jersey recently started trending towards Wahhabism, his congregation sued him and the mosque to get him kicked off the board and fired.

I'm not really sure what Hirsi Ali expects to accomplish. I respect her ability to survive, her ability to recognize her own past mistakes (such as supporting the fatwa against Rushdie, etc.), but she has fallen (like Hitchens) into another extremist trap after escaping her old one. She also tends to confuse Islam in Northeast Africa and the Gulf with Islam worldwide. Islam as it has been practiced by the majority of Muslims in India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang, Malaysia, etc. bears little resemblance to the Islam in Saudi Arabia since the days of al-Wahhab. In fact, attacks like the Bali attacks have in part been against Muslim liberalism. When AQ bombs fellow Muslims, the local population tends to become less supportive of things like suicide bombing. Bin Laden was furious with al-Zarqawi over the Amman bombings because he knew it would make AQ's goals harder to reach in the long run.

Posted by Reality Man | October 15, 2007 5:49 PM

"Just out of curiousity, what's the deal with normal people spelling "Muslim" and crazy people "Moslem"? (Roger as the exception). It there some subtle insult associated with the latter spelling or something?

I

Posted by djw | October 15, 2007 5:34 PM"

Orientalism fans tend to see Moslem in their favorite "beware of the brown hordes" tracts a lot.

Posted by Reality Man | October 15, 2007 5:53 PM

See, for example, Germany, where Nazism is outlawed, and where there is an enormous neo-Nazi movement, which is strengthened by its outlaw status, which plays directly into the persecution complex these hate movements manipulate so skillfully.

Freddie, you present your opinion as if it where fact, yet this issue is very controversial and your take on it is frankly not very persuasive.

1.) Do you want to make Neo-Nazism lawful in Germany? Do you really want hordes of Neo-Nazis brandishing huge Swastika banners marching through the Brandenburg Gate? There are 200.000 Jews in Germany, which for understandable reasons are very sensitive to Neo-Nazi activity. I can assure you that the vast majority would leave immediately if the German government would legalize Neo-Nazi activities - who could want that?

2.) Since Neo_nazi activities have always been banned in postwar Germany, you simply cannot have any proof that there would be fewer Neo-Nazis, if their activities were made lawful. You can only guess and my guess would be that there would be more. The German Neo-Nazis actively target disaffected groups and disoriented young people and there is never a shortage of them in any society. In fact the biggest growth factor for the movement was the German reunification, which resulted in many such disaffected people - the increase in membership didn't have anything to do with laws prohibiting Neo-Nazi activities.

3.) The popular persecution complex of the German Neo-Nazi movement is only tangentially related to the laws forbidding Neo-Nazi activities. To give you an example, the most popular rallying cries of the movement for decades was "Freedom for Rudolf Hess", not some prominent Neo-Nazi unfairly jailed , but a real Nazi tried at Nuremberg, as you will know. Even if you allowed all Neo-Nazi activity in Germany, I'm very sure they would find something that makes them feel persecuted and victimized - it is essential to their propaganda and to the psychology of their active and prospective followers.

Posted by novakant | October 15, 2007 5:57 PM

Freddie the Freak:

"We need to defend liberal, Western democracies against the ------ hordes, and how do we do it?"

By showing how slimy rotten people like you are.

I think if you read a little more carefully, and read the context, you'll see I was mocking that thinking. I wrote that as a way to demonstrate the contradiction in that thinking. Please, read carefully before you respond.

Posted by Freddie | October 15, 2007 5:58 PM

Also, are we supposed to defeat the AK Party in Turkey or something? Is Fareed Zakaria's wine-tasting Islam-ness supposed to scare us? Were we supposed to be scared of that radical Muslim Freddie Mercury?

Posted by Reality Man | October 15, 2007 5:59 PM

Were we supposed to be scared of that radical Muslim Freddie Mercury?

Erm, hate to nitpick, but Freddie Mercury was of Indian descent, his parents were Parsi-Zoroastrians.

Posted by novakant | October 15, 2007 6:23 PM

Mulligan, you unfortunately don't know what you are talking about. When you say, "Free markets do not exist in pure abstract forms, and operate in all variety of circumstances with regards to local laws, practices and restrictions," that is very true. Regulation of any market is, to my mind, necessary - and it is pretty much where all the lines have converged in 20th century economics. But this is sheer balderdash: "Hence capitalism began and thrived in countries with little or no immigration." Hence implies there is some logical connection between one sentence and the other. There is none, and you have supplied none. In fact, Solow's residual - that part of growth that depends on human capital - thrives on open societies that are, by their institutional nature, open to other religions and ethnicities. Holland and Venice, the first republics in Europe to develop trade to the point that they could reduce their agriculture sector to below self-subsistent levels (because they fed themselves on grain they traded for) were notoriously open. Shakespeare imagined Othello being set in Venice for good reason - the Venitians employed Moors, Greeks, Turks, Slavs, and others in developing their economy. And that ethnic mix, in turn, was the channel through which they got their technological superiority, for instance in glass. Similarly, the Dutch were the first European republic to welcome Jews - as well as fleeing dissenters from all over Europe. And they were the first to develop modern financial institutions. The English welcomed the Huguenots and the Jews, and in the 18th century - their takeoff century - experienced a huge influx of Scots, which was complained about bitterly. The Scots also provided their advance guard as the English went robbing and raping around the world. And the U.S. from the first was a patchwork of all of Europe's immigrants. The story is well known. The same things that are being said about Eurabia were said about late 19th century New York City, with its million Jews immigrating from Russia.

I'm not saying there is an iron law that you have to be mixed and multiculty at the first stage of development, but if you don't open up, eventually you will start faultering. Japan is undergoing a demographic crisis that, rationally, it should do something about by opening up to Koreans and Chinese, but it won't. And in fact that is one reason its fall from the 80s to the 90s happened - the U.S. took the brainy Koreans that could have been doing high tech stuff in Japan.

In the U.S., the most resistant area to immigration - except of course in the 18th century, when it came in the form of kidnapping - was the South. And of course the South was a third world country until after WWII. But the old South was broken by the civil rights movement, and now you can walk down streets in Atlanta and hear more vietnamese and spanish than English - thank god. The reason some Southern cities - Atlanta, Houston, Dallas - have made it big is that they stopped being insular.

This doesn't imply an unrestricted flow of immigrants, which simply provides too many shocks for a culture. But life is changing even in Europe - it is becoming more Eurabia like. Turkish hip hop artists are being imitated by 'pure blood' German kids. Cuisines are changing, the look of cities are changing. It will keep Europe from being a moribund, incestuous place, and force Europeans to start seriously investing in education, for instance. It will be great!

Posted by roger | October 15, 2007 8:15 PM

First of all, let's point out that this woman is an atheist. Like most atheists, including me, she has a very low opinion of religion - in this case, her previously devoutly followed religion. And as we all know, disillusioned converts are the most critical of their former belief systems. Unlike myself, who was never a particular believer, she believed - then was shocked into non-belief by 9/11.

It's not clear to me from this particular dialogue that she is referring to militarily defeating Islam, but rather "defeating" it on the battleground of ideas using social action. I could be wrong but Wikipedia gives no quotes from her advocating military actions against Muslim countries.

It's a waste of time, of course. She might just as well take on eliminating Christianity and Judaism, as well as Islam, because ultimately they are all on the same side of being against reason and freedom. But clearly her motivation is specifically to oppose Islam, because that is where she came from.

She is correct, then, in the technical sense that Islam - as well as any other monotheistic religion - should be denounced and opposed in free society.

Email me when this happens.

But it's completely irrelevant to the "war on terrorism." She overstates the case when she suggests that modern Islam is "power mad" or that it represents any significant threat against the existence of the major world powers.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 15, 2007 10:15 PM

As for German neo-Nazies, the reason they're banned is simple: the "good Germans" are still afraid that the ideology and attitude of Nazism is still potent enough in Germany to be a political threat - or at least an international embarrassment.

In fact, it's stupid of them to ban Nazi activities. Either you have a society that really IS likely to revert to Nazi ideas, or you don't. Suppressing it isn't going to change that. And if you DO have a Nazi society buried inside "normal" society, then you need to do more than ban its expression to get rid of it.

As for banning them because the Jews living in Germany would leave if they were allowed to speak openly, that's just ridiculous. Either the Jews in Germany know what's up or they don't. They either believe that Germany is presently a safe place to live based on the overall population, or they believe that Germany is forever on the verge of being Nazis and anti-Semitic. In other words, they need to make up their minds. Banning neo-Nazi expression isn't going to change that.

If German Jews can't trust Germany to stay anti-Nazi, then they NEED to leave. The Zionists are correct about that. If they don't believe that, then why should they support banning free expression of political beliefs?

And I'm not ignoring the fact that even today, sixty years later, Nazism still exerts a considerable fascination for many people. I studied it as a successful political phenomena, and I also studied Hitler's personal life, with great interest years ago. There's no doubt that Nazism, as a political and indeed religious movement, had a powerful appeal to many people - both in Germany and elsewhere in the world, including the United States.

But history has put paid to it as ever being a powerful movement again, movies and spy fiction novels notwithstanding.

What people need to watch for are political movements that are not explicitly a variant of National Socialism but which have all the same components of ideology and attitude - like Zionism, like Christian Zionism, and like neoconservatism. They may not have the flags and the uniforms - but they have the intentions and the methods.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 15, 2007 10:37 PM

I think it's sensible to dismiss things that simply can't happen. If the world's well-being depends on the elimination of Islam entirely, then we will never be will, because worldviews aren't eradicated that way. More specifically, crusades to stamp out beliefs don't work. The Romans didn't stamp out Christianity any more than the Egyptians or Persians stamped out Judaism. Christian governments couldn't crush atheism. Qin Shihuangdi didn't eradicate Confucianism and Daoism. The Mongols couldn't erase Islam, the caliphates couldn't stamp out Zoroastrianism or Hinduism, the list goes on. You can put a big crimp in a belief system by eradicating a whole lot of its followers, as happened with a lot of Native American religions. But if you feel you can't have ever have good thing G without elimination of creed E, then you're stuck, and it's perfectly appropriate for others to reject your vision of G because E is impossible.

Posted by Bruce Baugh | October 15, 2007 11:18 PM

> But if you feel you can't have ever have good
> thing G without elimination of creed E, then
> you're stuck, and it's perfectly appropriate for
> others to reject your vision of G because E is
> impossible

Not to nitpick, but defeat and erase aren't remotely the same thing. In your words, "putting a
big crimp" would be defeat.

It gets confusing since people use eliminationist
rhetoric when they actually mean defeat. For example, I vaguely get the idea that Hamas has
no problems with Jews in Palestine as long as the
Muslims are top dog.

Posted by DJ | October 16, 2007 3:15 AM

DJ: I think Hamas's offical position is that those Jews who can trace their ancestry to before 1948 (or 1937, or 1917, or whatever) will be allowed to stay - in dhimmitude, of course. The rest will be forced to leave.

Posted by Norway | October 16, 2007 3:58 AM

More specifically, crusades to stamp out beliefs don't work.

I wouldn't totally agree with that, but to me it seems clear that the closer a belief system is to pure monotheism the more resistant it is to attack.

Christianity survived over 200 years of persecution by the pagan Roman Empire, but once the Roman Empire became Christian itself, paganism was doomed. Over the next thousand years lots of pagan rulers throughout Europe converted to Christianity (in many cases without actually being militarily defeated by Christian armies), but almost no rulers converted the other way.

Similarly Islam was stronger than Christianity - Muslim conquerors could convert Christian lands to Islam, while Christianity could only reclaim Spain and the Balkans by ethnic cleansing.

The real wild card is Hinduism - neither the Muslim Mughals nor the Christian British managed to destroy it - perhaps it was "immunized" by its early encounter with Buddhism (the first universalist belief system)?

Posted by George Carty | October 19, 2007 12:45 PM