1/6 Is What They Claimed 9/11 Was

 

Confederates under General Jubal Early in Maryland, getting uncomfortably close to the Capitol in 1864. Via Smithsonian.

With regard to that Spencer Ackerman op-ed ("How Sept. 11 Gave Us Jan. 6") that Steve is talking about this morning, I have a narratological take: namely, that Ackerman is right to bring the episodes of 9/11 and 1/6 together, but does it the wrong way when he treats one as the cause and the other as an effect. Rather, they belong to two entirely different stories, in paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic relation (that is, to be compared, not connected), and what we can learn about one from the other is not what Ackerman thinks.

The story of 9/11 is the story that begins in the years from 1979, when the USSR lost its war in Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took the hostages in the US embassy, to 1990, when Saddam Hussein attempted to conquer Kuwait as the USSR hurtled toward dissolution; it's the story of how the American rightwing sought an enemy to replace the Cold War Soviets and discovered it in militant Islam. It was a terrible story, in its ignorance of the diversity and conflict among Muslims and its narcissistic certainty that everything is "about us", but when Osama bin Laden finally succeeded in destroying the World Trade Center in 2001 it seemed, for a while, to be really true.

Twenty-one Years

Updated 5/25

Photo by Manchester Evening News, June 1996.

Just 21 years ago, on June 15 1996, the city of Manchester (which has, like most big cities in the north of England, a very large Irish Catholic population) was rocked by the explosion of an enormous bomb, 1500 kg and the largest bomb ever detonated in Great Britain in peacetime, in a truck parked on Corporation Street. The perpetrators, the Provisional IRA, had sent a warning an hour and a half in advance, allowing the police to evacuate some 75,000 people from the area, and nobody was killed, but 212 people were injured, and you can imagine the chaos and distress in the city as friends and parents and lovers tried to assure themselves of each others' safety, and emergency medical workers sought out the victims—it's a whole story that they were confused by mannequins lying in the street after the blast blew them out of their shopwindows.

In the horrible business of deciding which terrorist attacks are worse than others, you'd have to say this bombing wasn't nearly as bad as last night's attack on the Ariana Grande concert audience at the Manchester Arena, which gave no warnings, aimed specifically at an event where most of the participants were children, and has killed at least 22 people, but it was horrible all the same.

Wingnut Annals: The Persecution and Assassination of Robert Spencer, as Performed by...

Well, Robert Spencer, mostly, because he fortunately survived this despicable and cowardly attack long enough to write it up. You can see his byline at lower left:

It seems Spencer was innocently minding his own business, which is spreading hatred and fear of persons of the Muslim faith (he's the editor of the JihadWatch blog, as I learn from Paul Fontaine at the Reykjavík Grapevine, listed by the SPLC as a purveyor of hate and racism, and has been barred from Britain, in 2013, on the grounds that his presence would be "not conducive to the public good"), in the Grand Hótel of Reykjavík, having wound up his lecture on the threat of jihad, adjourning to a local hostelry with some fellow hatemongers to celebrate his success, when he was accosted by a young man of apparently harmless demeanor, who smiled, claimed to be a huge fan of Spencer and his work, and effusively took his hand and shook it, after which another young man of apparently harmless demeanor approached, looked Spencer directly in the eye, still smiling, and said, "Fuck you."

Is Douthat a better theologian than the Pope? Spoiler: No.

"Mosque in mourning" in St-Étienne-du-Vouvray, Normandy, photo by François Mori/AP, via San Angelo Standard-Time.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, is putting out another request for some magic words; not only does President Obama have to say the words "radical Islamic terrorism" in order to win the war against radical Salafi terrorism, Pope Francis has to refer to the horrible murder of Abbé Jacques Hamel at the end of last month as a "martyrdom" ("The Meaning of a Martyrdom"):

In theory, it should be possible (for a pope, especially!) to plainly call Father Hamel’s death a martyrdom while also rejecting sweeping narratives about Islamic violence or religious war.

"In theory"! What theory is that?

As a matter of fact, I think a theoretical standpoint requires you to say that Abbé Hamel was not a martyr, however much respectful attention you might want his sacrifice and suffering to be given, because it isn't, just like Father Damien or Padre Pio, in line with the classic three-point definition:

Oprea Buffa

Update: Hi MBRU readers! Make yourselves at home!

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Marabout: In the Harem Bath (1889). Via AlonzaKaim.com.

Megan Grace Oprea at The Federalist setting us straight on Orientalism:

Edward Said popularized this term in his 1978 post-colonial work Orientalism. According to many of my colleagues, an orientalist is a person who writes about the Middle East from a “western perspective,” which is when one does not unquestioningly support and affirm Middle Eastern and Islamic culture. This does not mean that westerners are excluded from writing about the Middle East and Islam. A westerner can do so successfully so long as their research is void of criticism. 

Oh, no, dear me, what "colleagues" (at the UT-Austin French department?) told you that? Orientalism does not present itself with a harsh critique but an affectionate smile. Orientalism adores the East, its fragrant and languorous beauty. Orientalism wants to put a harem wall around the whole delicious continent! Orientalists don't criticize the East, for heaven's sake, what for? They're only children, after all, really, though undoubtedly hot-tempered and given to knives and garrotes and poison, and also astonishingly sexy. Orientalists love Orientals the way Donald Trump loves women: he would never say anything unkind about them, unless they did something ugly and disturbed his fantasy about how dreamily acquiescent and mysteriously lovely they are.

Orientalists just think Orientals shouldn't write about anything. Why trouble their lovely, empty little heads? It'll just put frown lines on those sleek complexions.

Anyway, you don't have to worry about anybody calling you an Orientalist, with your record. They'll just call you a racist without the complications.

Don't know much about Islam, but we know what we don't like

Safavid 16th c. miniature from “The Seven Thrones” of Jami, from Mehdi Khansari, Persian Gardens, 1997, via  Electrum Magazine.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, thinks he's spotted an amusing difficulty in the way we opponents of Islamophobia think about "The Islamic Dilemma":

for several reasons — because we don’t understand Islam from the inside, but also because we’re divided about what our civilization stands for and where religious faith fits in — we have a hard time articulating what a “moderate” Muslim would actually believe, or what we expect a modernized Islam to become.

You see the assumptions built in there: "we" don't know anything about it, but we're sure what we'd like doesn't exist, as yet, and is waiting for "us" to tell them how to do it. We say we're sure they're good at heart and then we can't even help them with their theology homework.

Exchange: Locke and Load

The Founder of British Empiricism. Portrait by Sir Godfrey Knellor, 1697, via.

Another day, another comment war. This one at Crooks & Liars involving Dr. Ben Carson's assertion that the religion of Islam is incompatible with the US Constitution and a callow conservative who goes by Alex—sounds like he's about 20, but he uses Forbes Magazine as a source of scholarship on political philosophy, regarding it as "pretty objective", so he might well be 80.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, I guess it depends on what that faith is. If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter. But if it fits within the realm of America and consistent with the constitution, no problem.

CHUCK TODD: So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the constitution?

DR. BEN CARSON: No, I don't, I do not.

CHUCK TODD: So you--

DR. BEN CARSON: I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

CHUCK TODD: And would you ever consider voting for a Muslim for Congress?

DR. BEN CARSON: Congress is a different story, but it depends on who that Muslim is and what their policies are, just as it depends on what anybody else says, you know. (transcript from Real Clear Politics)

Note how assiduously Alex works to turn the his opponents' argument from a complaint on Dr. Carson's ignorance of the Establishment Clause (and the Religious Test clause of Article VI) to a ridiculous gripe about Dr. Carson's right to vote for any asshole he wants to vote for.

Trump gets a little less comical

This may not look quite as strange when there's somebody in it, but I'm not sure. Via.

So, this happened: faced with a fan who denounced President Obama as a "Muslim" and "not even an American", Donald Trump didn't stop him (that's the official narrative—actually it was a lot worse than that, as we'll note below). Was he out of line? Nah, according to all sorts of people, including some of his rivals:

“It’s not my job, it’s not Donald Trump’s job, it’s not anybody’s job to police a question,” former Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum told reporters about Trump’s refusal to correct the man in New Hampshire who called President Barack Obama a Muslim. “The questioner can say whatever he wants, it’s a free country.”

Or as the Trumpster himself put it,

At long last, Pam, have you no—Jeez, what am I thinking?

Joseph Welch addresses Senator McCarthy. Via FilmFanatic.

Just learned from Steven D at the Frogpond that the Da'esh has claimed "responsibility" for the bloody stupidity in Garland, Texas, at the Pamela Geller–sponsored, Geert Wilders–consecrated hatefest and "Cartoon Contest", where a couple of gunsels, at least one of them now reportedly well known to the FBI's counterterrorism operations, tried to shoot up the security outside the event and got themselves killed. I'm glad the guard appears not to have been badly hurt.

Whatever goal the Da'esh thinks it may have attained by this waste of time and its own adherents' lives, whether or not they actually had anything to do with it, or why they'd like to have the "credit", is unclear. It may be that for these conservatives as for our own the important thing is just to keep drawing that line between Them and Us.

Geller, of course, is thrilled, because her whole life at this point is drawing that same line and this is making her look like such a Serious person. Things couldn't have gone more according to plan:

Islamoid?

Map by Braun & Hogenberg of Damascus, the "most noble city by the mountain of the Lebanon, metropolis of all Syria", 1575, via Sanderus,

Scott Shane at the Times is now joining in to the universal trolling of the president for refusing to say that the United States is at war with Islam, though he agrees with the president that the United States is not at war with Islam, a fairly delicate act:

But Mr. Obama’s verbal tactics have become a target for a growing chorus of critics who believe the evasive language is a sign that he is failing to look squarely at the threat from militant Islam. The vague phrasing, they say, projects uncertainty and weakness at a time when extremists claiming to fight for Islam threaten America and its interests around the world.

I cannot understand why this is a thing. Either we are Crusaders at war with Islam, and Osama bin Laden was basically right, or we aren't, and Osama was wrong, and I'd personally prefer the latter. Even Ross Douthat has climbed down from his Crusader attack of last week to offer a more reasonable position, to the effect that the bad things done by members of a particular religion or complex of religions (it seems crazy to insist that "Christianity" or "Islam" are single, coherent systems of faith, given the range of conflicting ideas both sometimes quite cheerfully accommodate) are not the collective responsibility of the entire community, relatively few Westerners are Crusaders and hardly any Muslims are terrorists, and it just doesn't require that kind of a discussion:

Intolerance

Update: Amazingly, Yusor Abu-Salha recorded some audio for the StoryCorps project last spring, a conversation with her third grade teacher, and NPR broadcast it. It's pretty heartbreaking.

Yusor Abu-Salha at her wedding, dancing with her father, via news.com.au.

Is it inappropriate for me to say, as a person who does not believe in the existence of a God, that I unreservedly condemn the murders in Chapel Hill of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, apparently by a person who calls himself an atheist? To say that such an act is incompatible with the principles of nonbelief as I understand them (probably more correctly classified as secular humanism), according to which our lives, from birth to death, are the closest thing we have to something sacred, and which call for

Suis-je Charlie?

For a moment I was afraid this meant he was dead, but of course he was born a long time before 1994.

"Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands," said Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968, or not exactly. He was Jewish himself by birth and German by choice. His parents were German Jews who had fled to France in 1933, and he was born stateless in 1945; after his family moved back to Germany in 1958, already a radical, he opted for German citizenship, specifically to avoid the military service demanded of young French men, but he wound up in France anyway, in 1966, as a sociology student at the working-class university of Nanterre in the northern Paris banlieues.

Airborne elephant watch forward

And this one from Turkey, where as you know the dread Islamists have been in power for ten years now, in the form of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP),  created out of the remnants of the Virtue Party and the Motherland Party. That is, they don't call themselves Islamist (unlike the Virtue element as it was before), but other people are glad to call them

"'Islamic,' 'Islamist,' 'mildly Islamist,' 'Islamic-oriented,' 'Islamic-leaning,' 'Islamic-based' or 'with an Islamic agenda,' and similar language is being used. These characterizations do not reflect the truth, and they sadden us,"

as former education minister Hüseyin Çelik remarked.

So how do they display their dread Islamic credentials? Are they banning alcohol?* Forcing women into purdah?

I'm not saying they're not oppressed, but they're not exactly veiled...

Chopping some of those thieves' hands off? Not exactly. Apparently [jump]

*Are you kidding? Turkey exported $68.4 million in beer alone in 2010—40% of it to Islam-ridden Iraq!

Airborne elephant watch

Google fetched this from someplace unsafe-looking called wn.com. Apologies for not crediting anybody. Forellenhof is the name of any number of hotels where Deutsch wird gesprochen and I suppose you can order trout—Forelle—from the Gasthof menu.

Yes, it's time to think once again about one of those news stories Thomas Friedman would not be able to imagine even in his most fevered vegetably-induced trance state: another prankish pachyderm sighted among the clouds, this time back in Tunisia, where they say elephant-gliding first got its start.

You can ignore the Times's Friedmanesque headline—"Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion", like Religion, weighing in at 500 pounds, in this corner, and in the other, fresh from a championship bout in little Myanmar, you get the picture—and go straight to the story.

It turns out that the democracy and the religion are mostly struggling "ach! in einer Brust", in the same breast, and not really struggling, either, because they're actually fairly comfortable with it, that is a majority of Tunisians so far think of themselves as both little-d democrats and big-M Muslims at the same time and fail (of course they're not smoking whatever Tom is) to see any contradiction. Almost like Baptists, or somebody.

Not that everybody is entirely on board. There are your liberals, as usual, the ones who won the revolution but lost the election; and there are your Salafis, the ones who think that elections are not from God; and they tease each other a lot. The liberals are not listening to me, which is not that much of a surprise, and they're more worried about movie censorship than about breakfast for people who don't know where they're finding lunch, and if they want to start winning elections, they need to think about those priorities; and the Salafis are in my humble etc. kind of creepy. And somebody is really going to get hurt, I'm afraid. But most people won't, and things in general are going to keep chugging along. Try to enjoy it!

 

Airborne elephant watch

Alas, the Times and the BBC both headline their Egypt election stories with the announcement that "Islamists" have won.  Once again, that's just not exactly what happened, which is what you read in Al Jazeera or Voice of America: The Muslim Brotherhood–linked Freedom and Justice Party is the winner, with 47% of the seats in the People's Assembly, a "sweeping victory" but not a majority; their Islamist rivals Al-Nur finished second, with 29% of the seats, and the liberal Al-Wafd third, with about 7%—enough to enable them to form a majority coalition with the MB, if that's how things work out, which is no less likely than some kind of "Islamic front".

Reconstruction from the late 16th century of an automaton by Heron of Alexandria (10-70 C.E.), a mathematician of uncertain ethnicity who invented the steam engine. From here. When Hercules whacks the dragon on the head, the dragon shoots water in the hero's face.

Just say Noah

The previous post on the subject of homophobia--the pathological fear of gay cooties that might infect an otherwise sober-living person at any time--got me to thinking back on the subject of an earlier post concerning that strange version of Islamophobia in which the victim imagines that he or she is being somehow swallowed or enveloped by a foreign legal system, the so-called Sharia.

The trope of mental illness works here, too, as explanation for that sense of the code as not a code but something hideously physical, like a wave of slime lapping at your feet and then climbing, climbing, sort of itching and stinging and approaching your ankles, and you want to scream but.... Etc.

The nightmare quality, in which you can't be sure you won't find yourself suddenly in a Baghdad public square, strapped into a suicide vest whose detonation is under someone else's control, and it's all because of something Obama did, is why it is a waste of time to sit down and tell people that they don't have to worry. Nightmare is what it is all about, and it is not subject to rational discussion.

In the meantime, though, I have run across some evidence that it is possible for our country to be secretly taken over by a religious legal code, and that it may have happened already--in 1991! And by something a lot more haimish than Sharia, too...[see below the jump]

Image (mis)appropriated from Yeshuist Rabbi Matt of Seattle, who may not appreciate Levitical levity. The dysperspective is probably just Photoshop, but doesn't it have a haunting Caligari quality?