GUEST POST FROM GOTHAM

Letter From Gotham's Diana Moon was recently accused of advocating genocide against Muslims. Unfairly and incorrectly in my view, and ironically, given where she comes from vis a vis the war (somewhat reluctant hawk on Iraq, largely in favor of using containment to deal with Islamist radicals rather than military confrontation). The genocide accusation came shortly after she had decided to retire from blogging, and was based on comments she had left on another site. I offered her space here to clear her name and explain her position. The post below does both. --bp

Introduction

The following concerns a topic that spilled over into nearly half-a-dozen blogs over a period of several weeks. In the interest of avoiding the tedium of restating what can be learned by reading the source material, click here. Judith Weiss has kindly provided a blow-by-blow account of the relevant links. Note: as you'll see, the issue still hasn't died down.

Main section

I've been charged with a serious thought crime.

It appears that I subscribe to a “dialectic wherein Muslims must be exterminated.” The charge is based upon a comment I placed on Geoff Meltzner's blog in response to this post. Here is the actual comment. The short quote taken by my accuser was part of a longer, much more conditional expression of disappointment at Aziz Poonawalla for levying wild charges against Israel based on zero proof. My comment was essentially an agreement with Geoff, who neatly identifies Aziz's (former) place in the blogosphere econiche as a moderate Muslim. For some reason my accuser decided to take off on me personally, and charge with me deliberately hoping for the death of a billion people--or at least, of being insufficiently sensitive to my genocidal impulses. Aziz, on the other hand, is merely being silly.

Since there are over a billion Muslims in the world, that would make me potentially worse than Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot combined. I'm a dangerous character indeed. Who knew? Maybe the FBI should call off its hunt for Usama Bin Laden and Richard Steve Goldberg and go after me, since whatever mischief they are capable of producing clearly pales in comparison with my program.

Jeepers. Golly gee. And: like, wow.

Strangely enough, I placed the comment on Geoff's blog precisely because I agree with my accuser in one aspect of this imbroglio, which refuses to die, mostly because Poonawalla continues to flog the issue. [Note: Aziz has now morphed from stating that Israel's “WMG” program was a certainty, to saying it was fallacious, to saying it was possible--and equating the possibility of a “WMG” program with the near-certain probability that Israel would then be working on such a program, to saying it has been “killed.” Sorry--I'm unable to link to the exact post. Scroll down to May 1, “blood libel” and read the comments. Perhaps his position has evolved yet again, but as I have better things to do than to keep up with the inner world of Poonawalla, I can't say for sure.]

Most of the other people who have criticized Aziz deny that his religion is in any way factor in the fierceness of their response to Poonawalla's charges. Meryl Yourish and Judith Weiss both have said that they'd have come down just as hard on a Christian or a Buddhist or a Hindu blogger. I can't speak for them. They are telling the truth from their perspective. I can't see into their souls and I'll take their word for it.

But in my case, I admit that part of my response did arise from the fact that this wild charge came from a Muslim. Here's why. Aziz has created a niche in the blogosphere as a moderate and reasonable Muslim. But more than that, he's not a Muslim who just happens to blog. He blogs as a Muslim. From the little that I have read of his blog, it appears that most everything he writes about is specifically from an Islamic perspective.

If he were a Catholic blogger (and not a Catholic who happens to blog) or a Jewish blogger (and not a Jew who happens to blog) or a Hindu blogger (and not a Hindu who happens to blog), his background would be just as relevant to what he writes, and yeah, if a Catholic (or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Jewish) blogger had written something on the level of outrageousness that Aziz did, I'd consider it perfectly reasonable to bring his background into the discussion. [Here's an example. In sharply condeming suicide bombing, Aziz invoked quotations from the Quran but advocated jihad. So, even as Aziz criticizes suicide bombings as an un-Islamic tactic, he subscribes to the essential goal of Islam: jihad. And, no matter how many apologetics one comes up with, jihad is conquering.]

Let me offer an analogy. Like all analogies, it's not an exact fit, but I'll try my best. Let's say that there was a French Catholic blogger, and he blogs from a specifically French Catholic perspective. His religion isn't something he does on Sundays, it's a living faith, one that he thinks would liberate mankind, if only they knew its beauty and redemptive power. His blogging is partly an expression of that faith. The Catholic church in France was intensely anti-Semitic, and because of its cultural primacy in France, that country was the intellectual wellspring of many ideas that were later appropriated by the Nazis. Let's say our French Catholic Royalist blogger was conspicuously moderate, openly disavowed the anti-Semitism of his church, was reasonable and civil, while he blogs from a passionately, intense French Catholic point of view. One day he comes out with a whopper: He says that he believes that while Jews do not customarily kill Christian children and use their blood for baked good, it may be possible that this has happened a time or two.

I'd respond. And part of my response would be predicated on his status as a French Catholic. I would not respond as if my opponent were simply drawing up an entirely personal form of ideation. I would have to put it in a cultural context.

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

This discussion did not take place in a vacuum.

Here are the sad and disturbing facts. There are a couple of dozen Islamic polities in which Jew-hatred is a big business. Every species of rage on earth -- political, social, sexual, you name it -- is being processed into a potent brand of paranoid frenzy in the Muslim world. The object of this paranoid ideation is Jews and Israel. It's not a small, negligible feature of otherwise admirable societies. This stuff is big business. It is recycled in mosques, sold in tapes, and taken for granted as truth. And it's not a function of poverty or colonialism, because Muslim immigrants have taken it with them to the places to which they've emigrated in large enough numbers to create communities. I have a friend who was raised a Muslim. He no longer believes, but he occasionally goes to mosque to satisfy the in-laws. He tells me that anti-Semitism and paranoia about Israel are very intense in his own family and “the Jews” are a regular topic of conversation in the mosque.

This paranoid ideation has consequences. It was British Muslims who kidnapped Daniel Pearl, humiliated him, cut up his body and waved his severed head around, and videotaped the proceedings. It is still being sold it as a snuff recruitment video in Islamic countries.

The purveyors of this poison are not isolated nutcases. They are respected imams, clerics, and government officials. So, when a moderate and reasonable Muslim, who blogs from a specifically sectarian viewpoint, comes out with a whopper like this, it makes me wonder. It's not the first time I've witnessed this. I've had several experiences interacting with that moderate and reasonable person that we all want to believe is the silent majority in the Muslim world. And then out comes that whopper. And suddenly, I realize I have been talking to a stranger. And he's not moderate and reasonable at all. He's only been polite. Those are two very different things.

Maybe my accuser can afford to ignore these disturbing facts, but I can't. Perhaps the fact that the Islamic world is heavily infiltrated by Nazi-like propaganda doesn't hit him the same way that it does me. Fair enough. But to charge me with advocating genocide, when all I am saying is that we have to take a good, hard, honest look at the origins of the Islamic faith without fear of violence or threat of violence, how Islam was spread around the world, what its fundamental texts say, how its most prominent interpreters have rendered those fundamental texts, in short, what Muslims actually believe, tells us much more about the interior mental landscape of my accuser than it does about what I said.

There are many responses to recognizing and acknowledging the facts about Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, which fall far short of extermination. I'll leave it to my accuser to think them up. He's got a very active imagination.

Genocide has a specific meaning. For the first time in the history of Islam, it is now in a fair fight against other belief systems. In the past, Islam had the power of political authority. Or it had the power of victimhood. Now in the United States, it is simply a faith like any other, and its beliefs deserve to be scrutinized like any other. If loses adherents because it cannot provide a coherent and fulfilling way of life for its adherents, that's not my problem. I'm not responsible for Islam's survival.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. Islam has declared war on me, as an American, as a Jew, and as a woman. (It is actually that third category that rouses me to action most. The irony of this argument is that I was attacked as a “pro-Israeli partisan” when in fact, that is not a deep part of my identity at all. But I digress.) If Islam were put into practice as its adherents would have it, I wouldn't have the freedom to speak up against my accuser as I do. I won't put up with a system whose fundamental text would advocate treating me like chattel. And it does. No matter what its apologists say.

When one sees that there is a threat to one's way of life and takes up arms against it (moral, psychological, or physical), that is not genocide. It's self-defense. Only someone who is permanently at war with reality could confuse the two.

Coda

Since I wrote the first draft of this post, even more evidence of widespread Muslim fanaticism has come to light. I refer, of course, to the recent suicide bombing in Israel perpetrated by British Muslims--the same group of moderate, middle-class professionals who produced Danny Pearl's killers.

Clearly, something is going on in the community that we've got to take a look at. Farrukh Dhondy wrote an article about the danger Islam poses to Britain for City Journal in the wake of September 11, when it appeared as if the bricklike consistency of polite aversion from the realities of Islam had been forcibly cracked open. But, unlike Humpty Dumpty, all the king's horses have put Humpty together again, and an iron curtain of sugary propriety has been yanked over the discussion.

To our detriment.

Let's not kid ourselves about the seriousness of this latest mutation of Islamic aggression against non-Muslims:

As the police investigations continued, another friend of Sharif pledged that he would also become a suicide bomber, and said that he expected similar attacks in Britain. Shakil Mohammed, 31, who grew up in the same neighbourhood of Derby as Sharif and met him in March, said: “I would volunteer: more and more people will follow him.”
Mohammed and his wife, an Englishwoman who has converted to Islam, have three children. “To be a martyr in our religion is a great honour,” he said. “It's only a matter of time before somebody blows themselves up in this country - that will definitely happen. I'm somebody who really believes in this, but the picture is bigger than me. We are going to make a change.”

Not if I can help it. You can call that genocide. I call it self-defense.