Here now an article about Tony Judt (higly respected quoted touted) , British historian at a debate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and a Dutch fellow I'd like to know more about named Fritz Bolkestein who is wide awake.
Judt manages to raise the question that intelligence may not be a survival mutation. Tony Judt for those new readers has hit these pages before in his defense of the Walt and Mearsheimer claims that jews in america are engaged in an organized conspiracy to control congress (page 19 of the paper), control the executive (ditto) and manupulate the media (page 21) for Israel's benefit and to our detriment. Mr. Judt is Jewish I have read. If that matters at all. So is Noam Chomsky.
Hirsi Ali argued that what Muslim leaders in Holland wanted was even more in the way of subsidies for self-segregation. Describing herself as a "universalist," she said she opposed "tolerance for the intolerant."Up until that point the discussion was, with the partial exception of Heinje's hat tip to Bolkestein, unexceptional. It was what those who follow these matters expected to hear. But then came Tony Judt, no so much a defender of Islam as someone who was anti-anti-Islamist.
As Judt saw it, in discussing the difficulties of Muslim immigrants adjusting to the Netherlands, "Islam was not the issue." A bemused Bolkestein later replied that if Islam isn't the issue, why was there such a violent reaction to the Danish cartoons? There are, he noted, 100,000 Hindus living in and around The Hague, but they hadn't insisted on imposing their values on the larger society.
Judt, far more critical of those critiquing Islamism than of Islamism itself, accused Hirsi Ali of being an "enlightenment fundamentalist" whose dogmatism easily slid into "xenophobia." "Universalism and integration," Judt asserted, are at odds. Hirsi Ali flicked away his comments as a search for "red herrings." And Bolkestein later noted that the responses to the criticism of Islam are usually reproaches, not arguments. Then, turning to Judt, he asked, "give me the reasons why Islam is not inferior?" He got no answer.
2 comments:
An exceptionally depressing aspect of this is that Judt's book, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 is a good expose of French intellectual cowardice in the face of Stalinism after World War II. Reading the book was part of my awakening about the tendency of intellectuals to support outright evil in dishonest ways. & here Judt recreates this tendency with respect to Islam. Judt should be asked how he sees his defense of Islam as any different than Sartre's defense of Stalin's show trials. In fact, I'm going to find his email address and do it myself.
How do people get to Judt's point of illogic? Judaism doesn't even have the verses that encourage--wrongly encourage, but still encourage--moral masochism among Christians. ("Turn the other check" et cetera) Yet Jews seem to have a greater tendency towards moral masochism than Christians. In fact, I just get moral masochism at all. It's just too foreign to my way of thinking. I can imagine myself a street person using the change he begs for alcohol instead of food, before I can imagine myself willingly kneeling before an enemy. I look to Machiavelli and Nietzsche for guidance on moral matters, though I suspect Nietzsche may have been too influence by the moral masochistic strain of Christian thought.
Demosthenes,
I didn't know about Judt's book. Man, that does make his defense (even if by default) of Islamists even harder to understand.
On the subject of Nietzsche, the other day I was thinking about Nietzsche's moral flexibility. He believed that the strong human makes up his own code of values by starting with what he has been given and, as he put it, "rapping on the idols" to see if they are hollow. Additionally, he seemed to believe that what would work in one circumstance, will not always work in all circumstances, so the process of rapping on the idols is an ongoing process.
Now, specifically what brought this up in my mind was that I was thinking about how the Christian church sometimes displays the same kind of process. It is true that the New Testament preaches a kind of almost absolute Pacifism. However, at the same time, it tells us to be responsible for "the least of these." This can mean anything from feeding a homeless person, to the defense of one's way of life for the sake of one's children.
The process by which we come to determine that it is a time for war is a process of rapping on the idol of Pacifism.
We are told not to have any god's before God. We are not to make an idol of a graven image, nor are we to make an idol of a political philosophy. Pacifism, however, has become an idol for many. Thank God, the Christian church has not completely bowed down to that idol.
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