We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Among the things that can be blamed for the failure and inferiority of the Arab world are fatalism, religious rifts, intolerance, the ban on freedom of speech, injustice and inequality, uncritical acceptance of the written word, hostility toward the sciences, inefficient use of time and the neglect of women’s education
Is this the National Review? Free Republic? The Daily Telegraph? The Economist?
No, it’s Arab nationalist Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi writing in his book The Nature of Tyranny
The year of publication? 1901
Plus ça change….
Over on muslimpundit there is an interesting analysis of Arafat‘s self-serving objectives for Palestine and his ‘credibility gap’. Adil Farooq administers boot-to-groin therapy where it is needed as usual.
Editors note: On December 15, David Deutsch observed that the same people howling that the ‘Osama bin Laden Tape’ was a CIA produced fake designed to blame him for the September 11 atrocities, were the same people taking to the streets in his support because…he they believed he was behind the September 11th attrocities…presenting an interesting logical dilemma.
Dr. Deutsch, I believe, makes eminent sense. I had also been thinking about why there is such widespread scepticism in the Muslim world with regard to the authenticity of the tape, but now I think it’s a symptom of a thought process of exactly the type Dr. Deutsch suggests.
It’s a good question, because this is what I have been wondering about. The belief of the myth of the doctored bin Laden tape, for these people, is natural because it is part of a whole bigger outlook, a bigger myth, which includes the common elements of oppression and redemption. These kinds of superstitious notions tend to be produced quite commonly in history wherever people somehow perceive themselves, rightly or wrongly, as being oppressed. As far as I can tell in the case of the pan-Islamists, it seems to be a product of what they perceive to be “oppressive” behaviour from others. They have been led to believe – to the level of certainty – that they are subject to the oppression of the ‘west’, which has closed all doors for their progress, prosperity and even freedom to lead a life. You may have seen an article from memri.com entitled Why I Hate America, by a Palestinian journalist, and it includes these titbits:
America is the tormentor of my people. It is to me, as a Palestinian, what Nazi Germany was to the Jews. America is the all-powerful devil that spreads oppression and death in my neighborhood…”
America is the author of 53 years of suffering, death, bereavement, occupation, oppression, homelessness and victimization… the usurper of my people’s right to human rights, democracy, civil liberties, development and a dignified life…
You get the idea, he’s not exactly a happy bunny. He has a similar beef with the Jews, as well. (As you know, these rants are typical of beliefs that serve their leaders hidden agendas by deflecting popular frustration with such autocratic regimes, by feeding a mass frenzy by allowing, and even encouraging, clerics and the media circus to promote anti-Western, anti-modern and anti-Jewish propaganda.) So when social conditions include an oppression of people, then virtually all become vulnerable by seeking what they regard as reassuring certainties.
Oppression lends itself to credulity, and under such conditions the critical faculties of people break down, and adopt the first voice of dissent they hear. They seek a solution wherever they can find one. So when they are vulnerable and afraid, the leaders only have to offer the flimsiest of proofs, and human credulity does the rest. Through all of this, the masses suffer and end up pointing the fingers at the “west” or Israel, who then come to be regarded as the root of their problems. Not only that, the helplessness that comes with such long-term oppression lends itself to a myth of some sort of belief in a future rescue intervention.
This is why I agree with Dr. Deutsch when he says that there is a “psychological incentive” in these Muslim areas, which expresses a “deep admiration” for bin Laden. For bin Laden is widely considered by pan-Islamists to be an embodiment of redemption, through his unbelievably dramatic attacks on the U.S., and what he represents to many Muslims. They rejoice as what they come to see as a “slap in the face” of America, the crown of the west. Extremists especially, and virtually all pan-Islamists now see their messiah in the form of a universal caliphate, a common leadership for Muslims, which they see as rescuing them from what they perceive to be the injustice of the “west”. For them, this harkens back to the “glorious golden age” of their past, which they believe was cruelly taken from them by outsiders, notably the “West” and the Jews. This is why bin Laden makes extensive use of history, and generally speaking, pan-Islamists tend to be quite conscious about it and, even though the history that they preach is almost always inaccurate, they remain quite jealous of their version of events. Their belief in their ultimate redemption is extremely strong. They find it very difficult to condemn this man, thereby giving rise to excuses such as inadequate proof.
In my time, I have come face to face with a multitude of pan-Islamic protagonists, including the relatively zealous down to the somewhat milder breeds, and in all cases it becomes obvious that they share a particular outlook upon life. It’s a very emotional philosophy, and for them life is recast as a morality play, a tale of hubris and downfall. The attack on America was an unavoidable event for them, something that was effectively divinely sanctioned, and therefore deserved. The astonishing thing I found, was that these type of Muslims find it perversely seductive – not because it offers an easy way out, but because it doesn’t. Because for them it offers gratification, some kind of pleasure when it comes to dispensing painful “advice” with a clear conscience, safe and secure in the belief that they are not being heartless but merely practising tough love. This would explain the “far leftist” stance that many have adopted especially in the aftermath of September 11.
So, the West is hated a lot, and it is not surprising that the relatively extremist folk would go into denial over the authenticity of the tape. To admit shamefacedly that the West was right, and that their hero is guilty, would not be in their interests. Thus, they are not about to admit that they are wrong. However, some really do believe that bin Laden is innocent, as they are far more incredulous of the West’s honesty in any case. Indeed, their newspapers have peddled lie after lie, and focused so much upon exaggerated accounts of Muslims being brutally treated in the “West”, along with other unfavourable commentary on the war in Afghanistan, which supposedly vindicate such anti-western beliefs. Many of these people don’t have any issue with ascribing to morally relativistic beliefs, and therefore they will not even have an issue with the hypocrisy of their situation over the tape.
by Adil Farooq
Adil Farooq runs the highly recommended muslimpundit blogsite and is struggling to drive contemporary Muslim thought kicking and screaming back to Aristotelean traditions of rationality and intellectual enquiry in the spirit of ibn-Rushd.
No doubt fearful that having Al Qaeda members floating around their country is going to result in US military action against Yeman, it seems that the government of Yeman has decided to not be the next ‘Taliban’ on the US hit list. Pravda reports (As usual in Pravda the English in the article is a bit bizarre)
Today, in Yemen a wide-ranging operation started to annihilate Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad’s structures in the country. The operation is being carried out by units of an anti-terrorist special subdivision leaded Ahmed Ali, the president’s older son. The operation is simultaneously carried out in Marib, Al-Jauf, Shabva and Hadramaut provinces, where training camps and bases of the terrorists are supposed to be situated. Spiritual leader of Yemenite extremists is sheikh Abdelmajid Az-Zindani regarded by FBI as a very dangerous. He is the leader of the opposition Reform Party and of illegal organization Islamic Jihad, connected with Al-Qaeda.
It may well be that the best thing to come out of the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan, due to the presence of Al Qaeda, is a message has been heard loud and clear throughout the Islamic world: playing host to third parties who engage in the mass murder of Americans can be extremely hazardous to your government’s health.
A tip of the turban to Charles Tupper Jr for pointing out the Pravda article
After much poking around, I cannot find any particular significance about 11 Sept 1970 that Natalie was wondering about. The dates of any significance I found were:
On 6 September 1970 the PFLP carried out one of the most memorable hijackings in history prior to September 11 2001. This was the simultaneous hijack to Jordan of a Swissair DC-8 and a TWA 707.
On 12 September, this was followd by the hijacking of a BOAC VC-10. All aircraft were forced to land at Dawson Field, outside Amman. At the same time another group of PFLP hijackers hijacked a Pan American 747 to Cairo and blew it up there. The Jordanians were deeply divided on what to do about the hijackers. The day after the destruction of the hijacked planes King Hussein declared martial law and sacked his pro-Palestinian prime minister.
As far as I can figure, it was 14 September when it all finally went horribly pear shaped. The Jordanian army and Palestinians directly came to blows when the Jordanians attacked the Palestinian base at Zarqa.
On the 19 September, Palestine Liberation Army and regular Syrian army armoured units invaded northern Jordan, driving towards Amman, with Arafat declared northern Jordan a ‘liberated area’. After initially loosing ground, the very professional Jordanian army counter-attacked the Syrian/PLA forces and pushed them back.
On 22 September an Arab League delegation arrived in Amman to broker a deal between the Jordanians and Palestinians.
On 24 September (or 25 Sept in one accounts I found) no sooner had the Arab delegates returned to Cairo to announce a political deal than Arafat rejected the settlement and renews his calls for the overthrow of the Jordanian Hashemite monarchy (in spite of the fact the Jordanian Army was now starting to get the upper hand throughout the country).
On 27 September King Hussein arrived in Cairo for more peace negotiations with Arafat. These came to nothing and eventually Arafat’s forces were finally completely crushed and ejected from Jordan by July 1971.
Does any one else know if there was anything special about September 11 1970 that I might have missed? If so, e-mail and tell us.
David Deutsch points out the bizarre logical knots into which the so called ‘Arab Street’ is tying itself
There is an interesting BBC article about the latest tape of Bin Laden discussing the September 11 attacks
The BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Frank Gardner, says that at street level in the Arab world, many believe the tape is a fake, a PR gimmick dreamed up by the US administration.
To believe Bin Laden innocent despite the overwhelming evidence of his guilt, one must have an overwhelming psychological incentive.
This incentive comes from a deep admiration for, and identification with, Bin Laden.
This admiration and identification are derived from the fact that Bin Laden has succeeded in hurting Americans, which is the epitome of what people in that category compulsively yearn for.
In other words, it stems from those people’s belief that Bin Laden is responsible for the September 11 attacks.
They believe he isn’t responsible for the attacks because they believe he is.
I therefore guess that Frank Gardner’s men-in-the-street who believe, after seeing the videotape evidence, that Bin Laden had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, are to very high accuracy the same ones who celebrated the attacks themselves.
David Deutsch
I couldn’t resist throwing this BBC News 24 historical morsel into the stew of debate about possible cooperation between Jordan and Israel. King Hussein wanted Israel to bomb Syrian forces during the Black September crisis of 1970, according to British Government documents released thirty years later. Notice Mr Heath being as wrong about Hussein’s prospects as about everything else.
BTW, my post of earlier this afternoon now appears quite loopy. I often think this about my own past writing but to think it after a delay of hours rather than years is unusual.
When I first heard – at the school gates where I ought to be now – that some spectacular act of terrorism had taken place in America, some chime of memory struck about the date. I did wonder whether September 11 was the thirtieth anniversary of some event in Hussein’s expulsion of the Popular Front? I never did track it down, though.
Interesting predictions from both Jay Zilber and Glenn at Instapundit that Israel is setting the stage for the Jordanian reoccupation of the West Bank as the means by which Israel can avoid becoming host to what is well on the way to becoming a permanent state of Palestinian Intifada.
It is certainly a fascinating idea but I have one big question for these two esteemed blogpundits… what on earth is in it for Jordan? It seems to me that the Hashemites would have to be out of their minds to want to take on the responsibility for several million pissed off, radicalised, impoverished Palestinians.
Do not forget that in 1970-71 the Bedouin Jordanian Army forcefully crushed the PFLP after years of Palestinian agitation and violence, ejecting them from Northern Jordan at bayonet point (and leading to the creation of ‘Black September’). Do they really want to go through all of that again? Somehow I doubt it.
There is an excellent article on Rantburg about Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. It quotes some of his remarks as printed in a London based Arabic newspaper
Terrorist attacks on Western civilians are justified because they live in democracies and are directly responsible for government policies that anger Arabs, Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant implies in the latest excerpt of his memoirs. In the passages that appeared Tuesday in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Ayman al-Zawahri says the West understands only “the language of self-interest coupled with oppressive power. If we want to make them understand our rights we have to speak to them in the language they understand,” he said.
Well he is correct in one respect: the West, particularly the Anglosphere, does indeed understand that language. The problem is, we are considerably better at expressing it than they are. If they want this ‘dialogue of civilisations’ to be conducted at 3000 feet per second, ok, we can do that. That is not a dialogue we are going to be on the loosing end of.
The Islamists like poor deluded Mr. Al-Zawahri are actually in a no-win situation. If they elect to fight us, which they obviously have, we are richer by several orders of magnitude and much, much better at the whole ‘directed violence’ thing than they are… but if they do not fight us, they are still doomed. In the long run the sheer joyous banalities of globalised capitalist consumer culture will snow them under with a blizzard of addidas shoes, MP3 players, porno DVDs, air conditioning, satellite videophones and silicon enhanced actresses in very short skirts. Worst of all, we can quite happily tolerate and actually absorb the Islamic world’s best and brightests in ourcivilisation. In the final analysis either way they’re screwed.
Once more, Adil Farooq of Muslimpundit takes conspiracy theorists and the ludicrous Tony Benn to task for incoherent thinking
I am having a bit of an argument with a friend at the moment. Among a number of other things, he insists that the U.S. is fighting this war for oil, as stated some time ago by Tony Benn. This latest conspiracy to do the rounds is getting really irritating. For I thought that perhaps we are at war simply because the Al-Qaida terrorist network, which we understand to be aided and abetted by their puppet Taliban regime, were the cause of the attacks on the WTC on September 11, not to mention the Pentagon attack, and a possible attack on the White House through Flight 93.
However, should Adil mistakenly think such convoluted interpretations are the exclusive preserve of Islam’s wacko fringe and their secular socialist counterparts such as Anthony Wedgewood Benn, that is not the case. Alas similar dark prognostications can be found in the more loopy eddies of libertarian thought as well.
One example is Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One, who is a well thought out, largely coherent quasi-libertarian who writes a lot of very good and insightful stuff. Yet it seems to me he become unhinged at the first whiff of US or UK military involvement in pretty much anything. I realise he thinks me far too trusting of the state (a novel concept for me) but I regard his approach, like that of many Muslim conspiracy theorists, as a ‘theory of reflexive disbelief’ rather than one of skeptical rational analysis.
Of course the irony of sharing some aspects of world view with Emmanual’s strain of libertarianism might be lost on Muslim extremists, unless they also have a sense of humour. I certainly think it is funny.
Christian Michel sees Israel’s problems as rooted not in geography but in what it is.
It has been said that Israel is ‘a state in the wrong place’.
But Israel’s problem is not that it is a state in the wrong place (where else should it be?), it is that it is a State. Because it was artificially established from the outside, its sovereignty is questioned inside (as is the case by minorities of so many states set up by their colonial powers, notably in Africa and the ex-Soviet Union).
But Israel’s problems only anticipate those to be faced sooner or later by Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, to name a few in Europe. A modern State, all the more so if it claims to be democratic, is viable only when it rules a totally homogenous, uniform, undifferentiated population. Yet, whether we like it or not, populations will get more and more differentiated, by fortune, by education, by new ethnic awareness, by culture. States will either have to level down differences through brutal ethnic cleansing and economic intervention, with the risk of stifling innovation and prosperity, let alone human rights; or withdraw.
In my childhood liberal Christian environment, Jews were regarded as the “chosen people”, our “elders in the faith”. When anarchist issues became of interest, Jews appeared to me as the obvious model of a God-given historically proven example that human beings’ social identity is not attached to a land, it is not dependent on some bureaucracy conferring citizenships. We can live collectively without these artificial constructs. Jews managed to do it despite persecutions for 2000 years.
This constant and admirable refusal to be assimilated and reduced to the single dimension of a subject attached to a land and a state is a root of anti-semitism. It is not the ‘deicidal people’ that Hitler hated, but the ‘wandering’ one. Hitler’s fight, his ‘Kampf’, was not so much against Jews as such, as against cosmopolitanism. The Communist was an enemy (the name USSR with no reference to a land was a statement of the internationalist nature of communism at the time), the Capitalist was another one, so were the landless Gypsies and Jews. It is no coincidence, of course, that Jews were so heavily represented in both capitalist and communist elites.
An extraordinary paradox of our time, then, is that Israel is established just when the world is discovering the absurdity of social organizations based on the junction of a territory, a people and a government (ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer). Inherited from the French Revolution, the dogma that all three had to go together led to the Versailles Treaty and its disastrous consequences. It is still causing today ethnic cleansing through forced assimilation, deportation or elimination.
The creation of a State of Israel after the Holocaust might have seemed a good idea to some. Jews wanted a country of their own where they would be safe and not dependent on the goodwill of alien governments. It turns out that Jews are safe everywhere except in Israel, and Israel survives only thanks to the goodwill of a few alien governments.
Sacred texts, whether the Bible or the Koran, are metaphors. The universe was not created in 6 days and the Promised Land is not 20,000 sq. km between Eilat and the Golan. Land belongs legitimately to individuals only, not States, and the only Promise to look for is that it will remain your property to enjoy until you give it away, sell it or die. It matters little then that neighbours are Palestinian and Jews, provided they respect property rights. And provided they don’t need to get control of a government, either because no government exists, or it is powerless anyway to redistribute their wealth, subsidize their business, educate their children, run their police, ban what they will eat or drink, dictate how they should dress and when they should fast and close their shops… compare Palestine before the State of Israel and today.
That is the lesson Jews had been teaching us throughout History, how to remain yourself among others. They have discharged themselves of this mission with terrible consequences. Maybe that torch has passed on to Libertarians.
Christian Michel also writes on liberalia.com, one of Europe’s leading libertarian websites. All texts available in English and French.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
