After Paris and San Bernardino, Islamophobia Is Stronger Than Ever. By Andrew O’Hehir.

Muslim fever goes viral: After Paris and San Bernardino, Islam-bashing is back and bigger than ever. By Andrew O’Hehir. Salon, December 5, 2015.

O’Hehir:

From Trump to Fox News to Bill Maher, the forces of anti-Muslim panic and paranoia are having a glorious year.

There was a deeply unfortunate, if predictable, period of national debate in the middle of the 19th century that was summed up in a memorable New York Times headline from December 1862, just before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation: “What shall we do with the Negro?” Even at the time, a handful of people on the outer fringes of politics understood that it was a fallacious question whose true subject was concealed. Frederick Douglass, for one, repeatedly observed that the central question was less about “the Negro” than about the United States of America and what sort of country it would turn out to be. As white abolitionist Leonard Marsh put it, what his fellow citizens really wanted to know about black people was “How will their freedom affect us?”

White Americans have arguably never gotten past those questions; I keep waiting for somebody on Fox News to revert to the various “colonization” schemes of the 19th century, aka “Send them back to Africa.” (Lincoln himself believed, for most of his political career, that white racism could never be overcome and that African-Americans, once freed from slavery, would be better off somewhere else.) But the question we’re stuck on in 2015 is a different, albeit related one. All day long, on every news site and every cable TV talk show, we get endless iterations of “What shall we do with the Muslim?”

Donald Trump’s campaign was viewed, a few short weeks ago, as having gone into a terminal nosedive. Now Trump has risen to a glorious new apogee, thanks largely to the Paris attacks, the Syrian refugee crisis and most recently the theoretical terrorist links of the San Bernardino shooters. Trump has relentlessly flogged the Republican Party toward the most extreme version of the “Muslim question,” and the most extreme answers. Trump has only halfway retracted his bold suggestions that mosques should be closed down and American Muslims should be compelled to register in a national database; he has refused to retreat from his claims that “thousands of Muslims” in America celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, despite a total absence of evidence. The only reasons he has not proposed that Muslims should wear identifying emblems on their clothing are A) in the age of microchip technology and universal surveillance that really isn’t necessary and B) somebody informed him at some point that that idea has an unsavory history. But, you know – the trains ran on time!

To be a viable Republican candidate at all in 2016, you have to go most of the way toward the Trumpian position of limitless and full-throated paranoia, as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have done. We must seal ourselves off against the hordes of Muslim invaders purely as a matter of survival, and given the sleeper cells no doubt embedded in every American village and town, not to mention the eagerness of Barack Hussein Obama and the entire Democratic Party to surrender the nation to Sharia rule, unlimited (if undisclosed) budget increases for the military-intelligence matrix are the least we can do. But Cruz and Rubio judiciously decline to support 24/7 Muslim-monitoring, or a coast-to-coast re-enactment of Kristallnacht. Because: Small government! We have reached a truly pathetic state when Jeb Bush, the sad clown of the 2016 race, and unreconstructed neocon warmonger Lindsey Graham (the happy clown, I guess) come off like vaguely reasonable human beings.

Justifiable as it is to blame the white-rage contact high of the Republican presidential campaign for our national game of “What shall we do with the Muslim?” the contagion has spread more widely than that. Even before this week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino had any clear link to Islamic extremism – which is not to say the nature of that link is clear now – we heard Sean Hannity darkly murmuring that the suspects did not have “normal-sounding” names. Hannity spouts bigotry and spreads intolerance for a living, to be sure. But even by Fox News standards, that offhand remark revealed complicated layers of assumption and prejudice that I suspect are widely shared by the general public, at least out in Fox-viewing Whitelandia.

Certain names are by definition not “normal,” even in an era when the United States has absorbed all kinds of unpronounceable surnames in Hmong or Kurdish or Bengali, and when there are at least 3 million Muslim citizens. Furthermore, the specific nature of the non-normal name altered the essential character of the crime. If the San Bernardino shootings had been carried out by a white man named John Smith, he would be considered a lone nut even if he were a whacked-out evangelical Christian who thought he was doing the Lord’s work. But if Syed Farook is a crazy Muslim dude who looked at crazy Muslim websites, then he winds up on the front page of the New York Post as a “MUSLIM KILLER” who represents the tip of a deadly iceberg of terror, and cannot possibly be a lone nut.

Fourteen years after George W. Bush assured us that we were not at war with Islam, it has become entirely normal for mainstream politicians and media commentators to suggest that, in effect, we are. Hannity’s Fox colleague Jeanine Pirro, a New York suburbanite who identifies as a moderate Republican, said on Thursday that since Farook and his wife “looked like Muslims” and were seen carrying boxes into their house, the only possible reason the neighbors didn’t call the cops was a desire to avoid being “politically incorrect.” Pirro has been a judge and a district attorney; she is supposed to know the law. Her clear implication is that Muslims, or people who look like Muslims, are not entitled to the same zone of privacy as the rest of us, and are inherently more likely to be carrying boxes full of bomb-making materials than, say, bowling balls or KitchenAid mixers. (I don’t even know what to say about the fact that Pirro is of Lebanese ancestry, and presumably knows that Muslims come in all colors and dress in different ways.)

But honestly, how far is the blatant fear-mongering of Pirro and Hannity and Trump – the assumption that Muslims are guilty of terrorism or terrorist sympathies until proven innocent, and the corollary assumption that they cannot really be innocent, because they are Muslims – from the more sensible-sounding, “liberal” species of fear-mongering promulgated by Bill Maher and Sam Harris? Before the blood was dry or the killers had been identified in San Bernardino, Maher was sternly tweeting that we must not compare mass shooters with terrorists because the latter were far more dangerous, for reasons he declined to elucidate.

Those guys are complicated public figures, and their views are not identical, on Islam or anything else. They would hasten to assure us that they know most Muslims are not terrorists, and they steer well clear of Trump’s brand of National Socialism Lite. They don’t want concentration camps, or a national registry. They are practical-minded, hardheaded citizens who see the need for prudence and vigilance in defense of democracy. They are saddened by the fact that their fellow liberals don’t understand the gravity of the danger.

I think we have to take Islamophobic fellow travelers like Maher and Harris (and the late Christopher Hitchens) at their word. They don’t agree with the Muslim-bashing right on most other stuff, and in the old-fashioned American sense of the word, they absolutely qualify as liberals. To be specific, they are Cold War liberals without a Cold War to fight; if this were 1965 instead of 2015, they’d be berating the left for its reluctance to take on the Communist menace in Vietnam instead of facing it in Dubuque and Santa Rosa. They are also Enlightenment liberals who see religion as the great enemy of reason and who see Islam, the youngest and most fervent of the world’s major faiths, as the most dangerous enemy of all.

This verges on an enormous cultural, historical and theological debate that we definitely won’t settle here and now (and most likely won’t settle anywhere, ever). I would say that the New Atheist movement’s understanding of religion in general is ahistorical and reductive, and that its understanding of Islam is even more so. But Sam Harris, at least, is a thoughtful and erudite person who has devoted years of reading and writing to these subjects (which is not a description you could apply to Bill Maher). I can only conclude that Harris genuinely believes in the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis: Islamic radicalism is the Nazism of our time, and since all of Islam has been contaminated by its most extreme forms, the faith as a whole presents an existential threat to the most essential rights and liberties of Western civilization.

I believe that argument rests upon multiply flawed premises, but at least it possesses some intellectual rigor and clarity, whereas the incoherent cavalcade of Republican Muslim-bashers either don’t believe in anything at all (beyond what the Koch brothers tell them to believe) or believe numerous impossible things before breakfast, like the White Queen in “Through the Looking-Glass.” But I’m not sure the outcome is any better. Harris’ passion for Enlightenment values leads him, gravely and reluctantly, to ponder ditching the ones that interfere with waging permanent war against Islam, and drive him toward Ben Carson’s position that a Muslim could only be elected president if he or she effectively stopped being a Muslim.

As I wrote two weeks ago, the hotly debated question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy only becomes answerable if we can figure out what democracy is, and whether we have ever had it or ever will. But the insidious power of the “What shall we do with the Muslim?” moment lies in the fact that ISIS is a specter specifically created to provoke that question, and to scare us into not noticing that the most urgent threats to Western democracy come from within, not without.

It does not help matters, to be sure, when deranged Muslims in France or California decide, for obscure reasons, to ally themselves with the apocalyptic and suicidal fantasies of ISIS or other extremist groups. But I am convinced that those disordered and disaffected people are largely driven by cultural and economic forces in the West, not by a blatantly incoherent ideology that most Muslims despise and reject. As with the 19th-century beliefs that fueled “What shall we do with the Negro?” – people of African descent were seen as depraved savages, liable to run amok and rape white women at the first opportunity – the urge to demonize and scapegoat Muslims as the greatest threat our civilization has ever known has very little to do with the attitudes or behavior of Muslims themselves.

This is not a matter of liberal piety, although I fully expect the hyper-patriots on Twitter to barrage me with semi-literate diatribes about how Democrats and Muslims and terrorists are all pretty much the same thing and must be wiped out. I am neither pious nor a liberal, but more to the point I don’t know any liberals who have said or implied that violent crimes committed by Islamic extremists are excusable or ignorable or a good thing. I don’t think it’s remotely controversial to say that Islam is experiencing an internal schism in which a small group of dangerous fanatics is trying to hijack the entire faith.

There are two things to say about that, which ought to be obvious even to relatively clueless Westerners, but evidently are not. First, this is hardly a new phenomenon in religious history, and parallels can be found in every other major denomination. Second, as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis (no squishy-hearted liberal) observed decades ago, the principal targets and principal victims of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists are the other Muslims they regard as traitors and apostates.

It cannot be said often enough that ISIS has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and goes on doing it every day, without bothering to post the evidence on YouTube. But that’s not the central issue. Beheading Western captives and murdering Parisian clubgoers are good things in themselves, from the ISIS point of view, and entitle their martyrs to eternity in an especially small-minded version of Paradise. (As far as I can tell, the ISIS/al-Qaida heaven resembles a Nevada brothel with no liquor license, on a hot night in 1986.) But for all the rhetorical ranting about a worldwide caliphate or whatever, such actions are best understood as means toward an end.

That end includes convincing as many Muslims as possible to join their moronic jihad and, perhaps more important, convincing as many Westerners as possible that most or all Muslims already support their moronic jihad. Those two goals feed into each other in a hurricane-like spiral of noxious ideology and also, as I argued after the Paris attacks, dovetail perfectly with the goals of the Islamophobic right. The more acts of violence ISIS can inspire in the West, the more Westerners will whip themselves up into anti-Muslim hysteria. The more Western nations wage indiscriminate war in the Islamic world and treat their Muslim residents as alien invaders, the more Muslims in the West become an isolated and disenfranchised group ripe for the nihilism of ISIS. You get the point. Or maybe you don’t, because Muslim fever has spread through our national bloodstream and replaced all thought.

Is Islam a Religion of Peace? Intelligence Squared Debate.

Islam Is a Religion of Peace. Video. Debate moderated by John Donvan. Panelists: Zeba Kahn, Maajid Nawaz, Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Intelligence Squared Debates, October 6, 2010. YouTube. Also here.

What should be done about British Islamic extremists? Video. Panel moderated by Sian Williams. Panelists: Douglas Murray, Myraim Francois-Cerrah, Dame Anne Leslie, Lord Robert Winston, Shiraz Maher. Douglas Murray Archive, August 24, 2014. YouTube. Also here. Originally shown on BBC Sunday Morning Live.

“Nothing to Do with Islam.” By Mona Charen.

“Nothing to Do with Islam.” By Mona Charen. National Review Online, December 4, 2015. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Hillary Clinton’s Denialism Is the Other Extreme of Trump’s Rhetoric on Islam. By Mollie Hemingway. NJBR, November 24, 2015.

Charen:

In the aftermath of Paris and before San Bernardino, Hillary Clinton articulated the forced catechism of the Left: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

What happens when a major political party becomes so wedded to political correctness that it feels constrained to deny reality? Clinton could hardly have chosen a less opportune moment to squeeze her eyes shut about the threat of Islamic extremism — a threat that is glaringly, blazingly obvious.

The first part of what Mrs. Clinton said was true. Islam is not our adversary. There are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and if all of them were violent extremists, we’d have a planet drowning in blood. Most Muslims are peaceful. Beyond that, they practice charity, care for the sick, and encourage good works.

But there is a fever sweeping the Muslim world that has infected a significant minority of Muslims — and because Muslims are so numerous, that minority amounts to hundreds of millions. It began in the 1920s with the Muslim Brotherhood. Its Shiite incarnation has captured the government of Iran. Saudi oil money has facilitated its spread to places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. President Obama, deluded from the get-go that our enemy was not Islamic extremism, but merely “al-Qaeda,” stood by while the Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria morphed into a new entity called ISIS. Obama never saw it coming because he was determined to believe, with Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats, that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.

Isn’t it odd, then, that in Nigeria (70 percent Muslim) and Lebanon (54 percent Muslim) large majorities say they are “very worried” about Islamic extremism in their countries? The presence of Boko Haram in Nigeria and Hezbollah in Lebanon has a way of concentrating the mind. People around the world are worried about Islamic radicalism too. Perhaps they are mindful of 9/11, the Fort Hood shooting (2009), the Boston Marathon bombing (2013), the bombings of trains in Madrid (2004), the three-day siege of hotels and a Jewish center in Mumbai (2008), the bombings of a bus and trains in London (2005), the attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse (2012), the slaughter of students at a Kenya university (2015), the attack on high schoolers in Peshawar, Pakistan (2014), the shootings at a Mali hotel (2015), the stabbings in Israel (2015), the Bali bombings (2002), the Jakarta bombing (2009), and so very many more, to say nothing of the treatment of religious minorities, homosexuals, and women in many Muslim societies.

As for whether Muslims are tolerant — there’s no doubt that some are, but as the 2013 Pew Survey of global attitudes found, 88 percent of Egyptian and 62 percent of Pakistani Muslims favor the death penalty for apostates. “This is also the majority view among Muslims in Malaysia, Jordan and the Palestinian territories.”

We Americans congratulate ourselves for our comparatively superior ability to assimilate Muslim immigrants into our society, and perhaps we deserve the pat on the back. Then again, we have nothing like the numbers of Muslim immigrants Europe does, and the percentages matter. Even among American Muslims, 7 percent told Pew in 2011 that “suicide bombing or other violence against civilians” is “sometimes justified to defend Islam against its enemies.” One percent said “often” and five percent said “rarely.” Eighty-one percent said “never.” Those responses were not very different from the views of Turkish and Indonesian Muslims.

Islam is in the throes of a religious war. The primary victims are other Muslims, but thousands of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others have been bloodied by it as well. “Don’t get on your high horse,” Obama told Christians, referring to the Crusades. Yes, when Christianity was about the age that Islam is now, it too was engulfed in righteous violence. The West is long past it. They’re not. If another civilization had been able to exert influence over Protestants and Catholics in the 1500s and 1600s to quell the violence and encourage the “better angels” of the society, it would have been no bad thing.

As for today, we owe it to ourselves to be alert to the obvious threat that radical Islam poses to the people of the Middle East (primarily), and to the rest of us. Radicalism has had the wind at its back in the Muslim world for nearly a century. It shows no sign of abating just because Mrs. Clinton and company bury their heads in the sand.

It’s Time For Conservatives to Confront Racism. By David Marcus.

It’s Time For Conservatives to Confront Racism. By David Marcus. The Federalist, December 3, 2015.

Marcus:

Too often, people of color find themselves trapped between a Left that exaggerates racism and a Right that pretends it doesn’t exist.

Several American cities and college campuses are experiencing levels of racial strife that haven’t been seen in decades. For myriad reasons, including legitimate complaints about police violence, many black Americans have come to feel disconnected, if not flat-out threatened, by our society. While it is true that progressives have cynically poured gasoline on these fires with outsized rhetoric, it is also true that conservatives have been far too dismissive of these concerns.

Too often, people of color find themselves trapped between a Left that exaggerates racism and a Right that pretends it doesn’t exist. Under these circumstances it is difficult to blame them for choosing the former. Black Americans in particular feel gaslighted by conservatives. They experience racism, they explain it to us, but instead of addressing it we tell them it is marginal, rare, and unimportant if we acknowledge its existence at all.

The result of this conservative ambivalence to racism is that we are ceding an enormous amount of ground in what should be an important and nuanced conversation. It is very much our fault that the only sides of the issue are “white privilege explains everything” and ”white privilege doesn’t exist.” The truth lies in between, in the murky waters of interpersonal relationships where baseless racism still lurks. Casting ourselves as the side that denies racism leaves the Left the entire playing field upon which to castigate the country for its iniquity. Our only response? A tin-eared refusal to accept that we have a problem.

Yes, Racism Still Exists

A few years ago, my wife and I were looking for a new apartment. My wife met with a realtor who had a place that was perfect for us, but wanted to know if I was Arab (I’m not). Turns out the landlord didn’t want to rent to Arabs, who are a growing population in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Because he lived in one of the apartments in the house, this was perfectly legal—but also obviously racist.

On many occasions in New York I have seen cab drivers pass by black men, as Al Rocker recently detailed. Just the other day, while buying a six-pack down the shore I chatted with the clerk about the hapless 76ers. He told me, “They need a white guy, you know, someone with brains.” I cringed and said something like, “I don’t think that’s the problem.”

On social media, conservatives have been quick to quibble with racist Donald Trump supporters, but not quick to address it in our pages. It’s time that we do. The Trump nativists often post horrible anti-Semitic and anti-black cartoons of a kind we thought long gone from discourse. They are not long gone. They are right here with us, and they demand rebuke.

Racism is real. It happens. It’s no good pretending it doesn’t. And it’s no good pretending that police deal with white kids the same way they deal with black kids. Irrational racist bias is still a part of our lives. It’s true that racism has a very different form than it did half a century ago. Our laws have moved towards equality, even to inequality to address historic racism, such as affirmative action. There isn’t much more the state can do to promote racial equality, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing we as Americans can do.

No, Racism Is Not the Driving Force in Our Society

The very real existence of racism in our society does not justify the Left’s contention that racism is everywhere and everything. This argument emerged with the concept that unconscious bias is the most fundamental form that racism takes in our culture. Even though, as shown above, blatant and conscious racism still exists, the Left focuses on supposed unconscious racism because it broadens the field of their agenda.

Most of us reject blatant racism, but for the Left this is not enough. The Left insists that all white people are the complicit beneficiaries of historical racism. To some degree this is true, insofar as everyone is the beneficiary or victim of history, and sometimes both. But in practice this invisible hand of racism theory offers us no practical path towards eliminating racism. We can sit quietly contemplating our advantages all day, we can listen to and accept the testimony of people of color, but it won’t make any difference.

Navel-gazing white people can confess their privilege on Facebook over and over without ever truly confronting the root cause of racism. That cause is and always has been an irrational belief that a person’s skin color defines them in any important way. Addressing that cause is off-limits to the Left because it denies their fundamental belief that people are first and foremost defined by their race. Whites are doomed to oppress whether they want to or not, blacks are doomed to be oppressed no matter what they achieve.

A racial grievance industry worth millions of dollars has grown over the past two decades. Consultants to colleges and businesses preach privilege for a paycheck. Ethnic studies departments focus more on the debilitating nature of oppression than the considerable cultural contributions of every ethnic group.

This fatalistic fantasy of perpetual prejudice is the central theme of the modern Left’s failed anti-racism efforts, because they don’t really think racism can ever be defeated. This is why they never talk about the point at which affirmative action won’t be needed. So ingrained is white supremacy, they argue, that its effects are permanent. And all institutions, be they governments or colleges, must enact permanent policies regarding racial difference.

Anti-Racism Is a Conservative Issue

The Left is happy to go on endlessly promoting policy prescriptions for racism and justifying state control of anything and everything along the way. Conservatives do not have that luxury. Racism undermines conservative ideals of individual responsibility, freedom of speech, and limited government in ways it does not with progressive ideals. The Left believes it can coerce equality on a racist population. Conservatives do not. Conservatism demands that we overcome this problem ourselves.

Implicit in the demand for limited government is a responsibility to treat people fairly. Conservatives are not anarchists. We do not eschew moral norms, we insist upon them. Any concept of conservative morality must contain the duty to treat people as they are, not as symbols or reflections of their racial caste. On that moral principle, we have not been insistent enough. But there are ways for conservatives to tackle this issue, and they hold much more promise than the tired digital privilege theory pamphlets so pervasive on our Internet feeds.

The first step is mostly symbolic. It is simply to accept the racism that exists in our society and to call it an important problem. On its own, this admission will do nothing. But it will lay the groundwork for positive approaches and assure people of color that conservatives are not blind to their concerns.

A second and vital step is for conservatives to start developing a competing anti-racism agenda. The focus of this agenda should be the irrational nature of racism, not its immorality. It should harken back to the outdated but much more successful color-blind model, which demands we treat people as individuals, not as representatives of a demographic. Our think tanks and foundations should develop curriculum around this ideal and demand equal access in education. We must demand that diversity and race in culture be treated as a conversation, not a lecture.

A third step is to re-engage with urban politics. Robert Tracinski in these pages and Kevin Williamson at National Review Online (among others) have written about how conservatives must regain a foothold in cities. These appeals dovetail directly with anti-racism. The dismal decline of American cities under perpetual Democratic control exacerbates racism enormously. It creates the conditions of crime and poverty that turn fear into racial bias.

The predicted demographic demise of the Republican Party has so far turned out to be hokum. Outreach to minorities no longer seems so essential to survival of conservative politics. But opposing and ending racism is not about political survival. It’s about creating the level playing field upon which conservatives believe everyone can succeed. It’s about reestablishing an abiding faith in the principles of democracy and the free market. Too many Americans, particularly Americans of color, have abandoned this faith.

Ours will not be an anti-racism of coercion, confession, and castigation. It will be an anti-racism of hope and an abiding belief in the dignity of man. For too long we have chosen to ignore racism. We have done so at our own peril, and that peril has been delivered upon us. It’s time to strike back. It’s time to defeat racism. And we are the only ones who can do it.

Syed Farooq Is an American. By Steven Salaita.

Syed Farooq is an American: Let’s stop the Muslim vs. Christian debate and take a look at ourselves. By Stephen Salaita. Salon, December 3, 2015. Also at AlterNet.

Salaita:

Dear Compatriots:

I address you in a moment of collective stress, with another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino, California, dominating the news.  Guessing the identity of shooters—black or white, Christian or Muslim, man or woman (though masculinity is almost guaranteed)—has become a vicious social media ritual.  Too many people seem to believe we can discern motivation by ethnicity, or that ethnicity alone determines what type of terror can rightly be deemed terrorism.

It was with much sadness that I witnessed your gleeful reaction when police named Syed Farooq, a devout Muslim, as one of the suspects.  You seem to be under the impression that a Muslim shooter absolves the United States of brutality, forgetting that Farooq is also an American.  This worldview allows you to embrace mythologies that exonerate you of political violence.

But we must acknowledge Farooq’s nationality, because his terrible deed does not arise from an unknowable foreign culture, but from one endemic to the United States.  You can exempt yourself from Farooq’s actions only if you are willing to exclude minorities from your national identity.  Many of you are happy to do that, but it’s an intellectually lazy choice.

It is why I greet you as a compatriot.  The greeting might make you uncomfortable because I am Arab, but I am also American.  Being American requires no special ethnic, religious, or ideological character, even though our nationality contains implicit demands.  One of those demands is to not be Arab or Muslim.

Enough about technicalities, though.  I don’t approach you to be pedantic or to beg for your acceptance, nor do I have any interest in situating mass murder into hierarchies of tolerability.  I merely ask you to consider why those hierarchies exist and why it’s so easy to name state violence as necessary or desirable.  There’s a connection between the supposed deviance of Farooq’s shooting and your endless, adamant justification of U.S. bloodletting throughout the world.

To put it plainly:  thinking about violent behavior as something innately foreign is a terrific rationale for delivering violence to foreign places.  It forces you to hate people and demands your loyalty to institutions designed to contravene your interests.

I think you’ve been hoodwinked by politicians and luminaries into hating Arabs and Muslims.  This hatred is bad for Arabs and Muslims, of course, but it also does you little good. It might make you feel better about your place in the American racial hierarchy.  It might alleviate your majoritarian anxieties.  It might reaffirm the superiority of your faith.  It might make patriotism easier to accept.

It doesn’t, however, help you better understand this world and it certainly won’t keep food on your table.  In fact, it deprives everybody of intellectual and economic sustenance.

The attitudes you possess—that Arabs are beholden to violent culture, that Islam singularly produces religious evil, that Syrian refugees threaten American safety, that the Middle East and South Asia are places of mystical barbarity—have existed since before 9/11, but they seem to have a particular resonance in the current presidential election.

It’s become remarkably disturbing, to be honest.  It reminds me a bit too much of the rhetoric preceding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  I don’t select the analogy at random: more than one eminent conservative has suggested interning Muslims. Liberal beacon Wesley Clark did, too, when he spoke approvingly of interment and proposed it as a remedy for the “disloyal.”

Every day I hear another demagogue inflaming your outrage, urging you to maintain an acutely resentful psychology.  Ben Carson, often described as judicious and presidential, recently proclaimed that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” a flagrant constitutional violation and a vulgar bit of pointless scapegoating.

Last week, Donald Trump repeated the canard that Arabs in New Jersey celebrated as the Twin Towers collapsed, claiming that he witnessed “a heavy Arab population that were cheering as the buildings came down.”  Trump implies that all Arabs supported 9/11.  None, therefore, is trustworthy.  There is no reason to make this sort of comment other than to manipulate our desire for safety and thereby create a pretext for unthinkable possibilities.

Is it too difficult to recognize the many problems of a discourse that relies so heavily on demonization to generate support?  The demagogue can enact violence only when his audience refuses to recognize the violent nature of demagoguery.

Politicians love nothing more than a frightened, uninformed citizenry.  It’s how they convince us to cosign our dispossession.  People who discern gray areas and have the ability to reason through propaganda are their most undesirable clients.  The United States cannot be a functional democracy if we make ourselves so compliant.

Believe it or not, Arabs and Muslims (and other minorities) are not the source of your problems.  Turn to the politicians who promise you an uncomplicated world for a better target of your anger.

I know you’re ready to counter with “terrorism,” but the term is largely a bromide in the American political vocabulary.  It’s useless to debate which groups commit more violence.  No week passes that we don’t hear of another white supremacist plot to murder South Asians, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics or African Americans.  The U.S. and its allies generate extraordinary destruction in the regions of the world said to be uniquely barbaric.  Police kill with impunity. Our president orders death by remote control.  Everybody suffers but the people who oversee this horror.

Displays of spectacular cruelty pervade the United States, but you embrace any opportunity to disavow them as an exotic problem.  And still more people will be killed today—many by those for whom you voted and to whom you pay taxes.

We should work to better understand how the elite apportion discourses of violence into categories of good and evil, civilized and savage, rational and unreasonable.  Who creates these binaries?  Who suffers their finality?  Who profits from their endurance?

Let’s explore these questions together.  We’ll surely be surprised by what we learn through the simple act of listening.  Before we do, though, I ask you to remember that I am proudly Arab but legally American, and I refuse to entertain the possibility that either category invalidates the other.

More Evidence That ISIS Fails the Reality Test. By Walter Russell Mead.

More Evidence that ISIS Fails the Reality Test. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 2, 2015.

Mead:

ISIS’s attempt to build a state is faltering under the strain of both external attacks and internal failings as its ideology collides with reality. The New York Times reports:

Some fighters have taken pay cuts, while others have quit and slipped away. Important services have been failing because of poor maintenance. And as its smuggling and oil businesses have faltered, the Islamic State has fallen back on ever-increasing taxes and tolls imposed on its squeezed citizens.[..] 

Stories abound of the Islamic State putting loyal members in positions they are not qualified for. The head of medical services in one town is a former construction worker, residents said. The boss at an oil field was a date merchant, according to a former employee. 

In Raqqa, the National Hospital featured in a propaganda video about health services in the caliphate is all but closed because so many doctors have fled, according to an aid worker with relatives in the city.[..] 

Also driving people out is an onerous tax system carried out in the name of zakat, or Islamic alms. The jihadists collect, among other taxes, a yearly share of every harvest and herd of livestock, and make shopkeepers pay a share of their inventory. 

ISIS is selling a dream, as we’ve written before. But everyday life grinds away at the fantasy world ISIS wants to live in.

Nothing kills an ideology like success. This is what happened to Communism: the Marxist-Leninists had 70 years and half the world’s population as a laboratory. They produced misery, oppression, poverty, pollution and corruption. The fantasy of a utopian Communist world could not survive reality.

The caliphate crazies claimed that a “pure Islamic state” with a real, live caliph and strict sharia law would bring victory and prestige to Islam and good governance to its inhabitants. In fact, ISIS has damaged Islam more than its worst enemies could hope, wrecked the lives of millions, and created a gangster state that mistreats and exploits its residents.

The failure of ISIS as a state means more trouble for the rest of us, at least in the short- to medium-term. To keep the fantasy alive, the brain-sick fanatics and true believers are likely to try more Paris style massacres and acts of spectacular terror. But the ideology that undergirds ISIS isn’t just bad in the sense of evil. It is bad in the sense that it does not provide a framework that can organize the life and work of a community on a productive and enduring basis.

Even more than was the case for Communism, failure is baked into the ISIS cake. That doesn’t mean we can sit and wait serenely for the forces of history to destroy it; Stalin and Mao between them after all managed to murder something like 100 million people before the forces of history kicked in, and the Soviet Union managed to drag the world to the precipice of nuclear war before it imploded. So the intrinsic shortcomings of jihadi ideology doesn’t justify a passive policy. But the wrong-headed ideas at the core of this nonsense should give us hope: real victory over this nasty perversion of religion is not just possible; it is likely. 

Athens vs Jerusalem. By Shlomo Riskin.

A guard walks past statues of wounded Amazones, made between 400 and 350 BCE, at the National Archeological Museum in Athens. (photo credit:REUTERS).

Athens vs Jerusalem. By Shlomo Riskin. Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2015.

Riskin:

A significant distinction between the Greek and Hebrew cultures reverberates to this day.

Contemporary Western culture is fundamentally the product of two great ancient civilizations: Greco-Roman and Hebrew (or Judeo-Christian, as it is generally described).

More than two millennia ago (in 165 BCE), the Hasmonean-Judeans won a military victory against the Syrian Hellenists, granting Judea the opportunity to reclaim and cleanse our Second Holy Temple and develop the Second Commonwealth largely independent of the heirs of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic conquest of the “fertile crescent.”

Much has been written about the clash of ideology separating Jerusalem from Athens. Nineteenth-century German poet-philosopher Heinrich Heine suggested that for the Greeks beauty was truth whereas for the Hebrews truth was beauty, and late-20th-century philosopher William Barrett maintained that while the Greeks idealized philosophic speculation and theoretical meditation, the Hebrews emphasized moral and ethical conduct in daily human behavior as being the highest good.

Allow me to suggest a more significant distinction between the Greek and Hebrew cultures, one which reverberates to this very day. The answer to the Greek Riddle of the Sphinx “Who walks on four in the morning, on two in the afternoon and on three in the evening?” is Man, who crawls about as a baby, stands upright as an adult and has need of a cane in old age. C.M. Bowra, the great interpreter of the wisdom of Hellas, suggests that indeed Man is the answer, not only to the Riddle of the Sphinx but to every question worth asking. Pythagoras taught that “Man is the measure of all things”; for the famed sculptor Praxiteles, the human form was the most perfect of all forms (and therefore for the ancient Greeks circumcision was a heinous crime because it maimed the perfect human body); and the chorus of Sophocles’s Antigone iterates and reiterates, “Many are the awesome-awful (Hebrew nora, nora’ot) phenomena, but none more awesome-awful than man.”

Hence the gods on Mount Olympus were formed in the image of man, endowed with human and mostly physical characteristics: Zeus was the most powerful, unpitying and terrible; Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty and pleasure; Hermes was the god of speed. The gods were created in the image of humans, warring and jealous human-like beings, idealizing their most physical and even animalistic traits.

JUDAISM IS the very antithesis of this. Human beings are created in the image of God, duty bound to walk in God’s ways and to emulate His Divine characteristics of love, compassion, patience, loving-kindness and truth. “Just as the Holy One Blessed be He is called compassionate, so must you be compassionate, just as He grants His grace freely, so must you grant grace freely....”

(Maimonides, Book of Commandments, Positive Command 8). These characteristics are not physical but rather spiritual; characteristics of the soul.

I would submit that from the pre-Sophists of the Hellenistic era until the post-Modernists of today, there are only two fundamental ideologies of the human being: Is he a complex animal, the most fit species to survive because he was the most powerful (sometimes as a result of superior intelligence leading to knockout weaponry) and to the victor belong the spoils, or is he rather a child of the Divine created in the Divine Image, inalienably free, inviolate and inviolable and Right will eventually triumph over Might, in a perfect world under the Kingship of the Divine? Greek-Sparta-Rome taught the former, touting war as the ideal because war tests the mettle of the man, separates the strong from the weak, the brave from the cowardly; “arma virumque cano,” “of arms and virility do I sing,” calls out the Aeneid. And this view spawned Babylon, Persia, Rome, Aryan-Nazism, Stalinist (and Putinist) Communism and extremist Islam – father of ISIS.

Abraham taught the latter, “commanding his children and his household after him to observe the way of the Lord, to do compassionate righteousness and moral justice, chosen by God to become a great nation to bring blessing to all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:2, 3, 18:18-19).

Abraham’s seed, and all of those who accept the teaching of the God whom Abraham, the father of a multitude of nations, discovered, are to be God’s witnesses, priest-teachers to all of humanity, promulgating a world of peace and human redemption, a world in which the strong will not take it as their right to destroy and inherit the weak but will rather take responsibility for the weak and teach them how to become strong.

HENCE, FROM time immemorial great wars have been fought between those who believe in power and those who believe in morality. Nietzsche even taught that those who believe in morality place limits upon, and severely threaten, those who believe in power, which may well explain the anti-Semitism suffered by Jews throughout human history.

It is not correct to link together the three major world religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – as being monotheistic, and thus against the rule of Power.

That is true of Judaism, which believes that God created humankind in His Image, and God created everyone equally free to believe in whatever he may wish to believe as long as it does not imply bringing undue suffering to any innocent human being. That is true of contemporary Christianity, post-Nostra Aetate, but it is not true of jihadist Islam, preaching a holy war of domination and subjugation and even extinction of any people who do not believe in Islam’s right to dominate.

Abraham did not merely discover monotheism; he discovered ethical monotheism, a God demanding compassionate righteousness and moral justice.

Anyone who believes in one deity, who urges terrorist jihad, is a mono-satanist, not a mono-theist, having transformed our loving God into a hating Satan.

Textbooks, propaganda machinery and armaments in the hands of these mono-satanists must be extirpated if the free world is to survive.

And so the truest distinction between Judaism and Hellenism lies in the question as to who is really the measure of all things, the ultimate decisor of human conflict: powerful man or ethical God? From this perspective we may also gain deeper understanding of the ideological argument between Joseph and his brothers, an enmity born not only from jealousy and sibling rivalry.

You will remember the grand dream of our forefather Jacob, truly the national vision of Israel, a ladder uniting heaven and earth, spirituality and materialism, with God above the ladder charging Israel’s eternal seed to fill the earth with the blessing of compassionate righteousness and moral justice (Gen. 28:13-15).

HOW DIFFERENT are the dreams of Joseph, newly appointed heir-apparent to the birthright, just having received the tunic of many colors from his father: the sheaves of grain of the brothers all bowing down to the sheaf of Joseph; the sun, moon and 11 stars all bowing down to Joseph! Joseph, not God, is at the center of his dream. No wonder the brothers are ready to banish him from their family and mission.

Subsequently Joseph, as a result of his exile and peregrinations, comes to realize that it is indeed God who is at the helm as final guide and arbiter. When he stands before Pharaoh to interpret his dream, he clearly states, “It has nothing to do with me; it is God who will respond to bring peace to Pharaoh”; and even earlier in his Egyptian experience, Joseph finds the moral strength to resist the seduction of Potiphar’s wife because he could not “sin before God” (Gen. 39:9). It is hardly coincidental that these biblical readings always fall out in the period of Hanukka.

Hanukka sameah.

A Seal Bearing the Name of King Hezekiah of Judah Found in Jerusalem. By Ilan Ben Zion.

Impression of a seal bearing the words “Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz king of Judah” and showing a winged sun and ankhs, Assyrian and Egyptian symbols of power and life. Credit: Ouria Tadmor.

Seal bearing name of Judean king found in Jerusalem. By Ilan Ben Zion. The Times of Israel, December 2, 2015.

Settlement and Demography in Seventh-Century Judah and the Extent and Intensity of Sennacherib’s Campaign. By Avraham Faust. Palestine Exploration Quarterly, Vol. 140, No. 3 (November 2008).

Also see articles at: Haaretz, The Atlantic, Hebrew University, The Key to David’s City, Jerusalem Post, Daily Mail, CNN, Elder of Ziyon (cartoon), Bible History Daily.

Ben Zion:

Impression with “Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz, king of Judah,” unearthed next to Temple Mount, is decorated with Egyptian motifs.

Archaeologists deciphered a seal impression bearing the name of the 8th century BCE biblical King Hezekiah recently found during excavations next to the Old City of Jerusalem, the Hebrew University announced Wednesday.

The bulla, a stamp seal impression, was one of dozens found in recent years in a royal building in the Ophel, excavation leader Dr. Eilat Mazar said at a press conference held at the Mount Scopus campus, and bears the name “Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz, king of Judah,” an 8th century Judean ruler.

Mazar called the artifact “the closest as ever that we can get to something that was most likely held by King Hezekiah himself.” She said that the bulla “strengthens what we know already from the Bible about [Hezekiah].”

The bulla in question used to seal a papyrus scroll and an impression of the fibers was preserved on the inverse, Mazar said, suggesting the seal once enclosed a document signed by the king himself.

Hezekiah ruled the kingdom of Judah from around 715 and 686 BCE. During his reign the kingdom was invaded by the ascendant Assyrian Empire and the capital, Jerusalem, was besieged by the army of King Sennacherib. The Book of Kings II 18:5 says of Hezekiah that “after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among them that were before him.” He’s also mentioned in the annals of Sennacherib.

The Sennacherib Prism in the Israel Museum. “As to Hezekiah, the Judahite, 
he did not submit to my yoke. . . . Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, 
like a bird in a cage.” Hanay, Wikipedia.

According to the biblical narrative, Hezekiah ordered the excavation of a water channel to bring water from the Siloam Spring into the city and foil the siege. That tunnel was discovered in the 19th century and an inscription found inside it gives an account of its construction.

The minuscule, centimeter-long artifact is decorated with Egyptian-style motifs — a winged sun disk and an ankh, symbol of life. Iconography of this sort had already been appropriated by Judean leaders and appear on other contemporary seals across the ancient Near East.

“The Egyptian motifs were spread over the second millennium BCE all over the region” and no longer bore their original significance, Mazar explained. Ancient Judeans employed the sun disk to denote the Almighty, and its bowed wings may connote Hezekiah’s expression that “my power is thanks to God’s protection,” she said.

“It was nothing like what it meant to the Egyptians,” she said.

The bulla was found during excavations in 2009 but its significance was initially overlooked by researchers. Only this year did Hebrew University archaeologist Reut Ben Arieh decipher the inscription on the seal impression and determine its significance.

An initial study of the seal read the bottom register as the name “Melkiyahu,” but once she noticed tiny punctuation marks in the middle, separating the letters into the words “king” and “Judah,” Ben Arieh told The Times of Israel, “immediately we understood” that it read “king of Judea.”

Other seals bearing the name of King Hezekiah are on the antiquities market, but “none is from an archaeological excavation, and that makes all the difference,” Mazar said. The discovery of this new seal in the archaeological context supports the other artifacts’ authenticity, however.

The Ophel is part of the ancient city of Jerusalem situated immediately south of the flashpoint Temple Mount, the site of two Jewish temples in antiquity. It is the holiest site to Jews and the third holiest site to Muslims.

The excavations were a collaborative effort by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Hebrew University.

Excavations at the site are contentious for taking place in East Jerusalem. Nonetheless, they have unearthed some of the earliest known artifacts in the city, dating as far back as the 12th and 11th centuries BCE. According to Mazar, these include evidence supporting the historicity of the biblical kings David and Solomon, founders of the Judean dynasty.

Two years ago, Mazar announced the discovery of a massive gold medallion and a trove of gold pieces found at the base of the Temple Mount dating to the early 7th century CE. The trove included 36 gold Byzantine coins, gold bracelets, earrings, a silver ingot, a gold-plated hexagonal prism and the large golden medallion embossed with Jewish motifs. It’s currently on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Mazar, a third-generation Israeli archaeologist, has overseen the excavations of the Ophel and Jerusalem’s City of David, the lower slope of the Temple Mount.