Talking with an Islamist

28 thoughts on “Talking with an Islamist”

1. The ‘settler extremists’ are not blowing up civillian buses, discos, markets, etc etc
   The way to deal with people who are actively encouraging and facilitating murder of civilians is not to look at root causes and try to understand them, it is to treat them as the criminals that they are.
   To try to ‘understand’ suicide bombings is to encourage them. There are plenty of oppressed people in the world who are not going around killing children, pregnant women and old ladies in cold blood.
   As for the hudna, any suggestion that the ‘hudna’ was anything other than an opportunity for the Islamist groups to regroup for more Jew-killin’ is wilful blindness.
   The concept of hudna is grounded in the treaty of Hudaybiyyah which was a ‘strategic ceasefire’ that enabled Mohammed to regroup in order to destroy the Quraish the moment there was a minor infraction.
   It does not imply a ‘peace treaty’.
   As for your attempt to present the Israeli and Islamist side as being morally equivalent, the Israeli position is not ‘we have to fight so that they won’t defy us’, it is ‘we have to fight to stop them killing our children in cold blood’.
   If the Palestinians laid down their arms tomorrow, there would be no war. If Israel laid down its arms tomorrow, there would be no Israel. The difference is clear.

2. Lewis: “The way to deal with people who are actively encouraging and facilitating murder of civilians is not to look at root causes and try to understand them, it is to treat them as the criminals that they are.”
   So, we should simply apply justice (in what form you would suggest, I wonder) and move on? Once you’ve punished the individuals, do you hope it doesn’t happen again? What an amazing solution! How is it working, Lewis? Without recognition and understanding of the reasons and circumstances (whether real or perceived as real) surrounding violence, the application of justice would prove, in the long run, futile.
   When a child is killed what is the first question the grieving mother asks? -“Why?”
   What motivates individuals to act violently or unlawfully in any form? Understanding, or at least attempting to understand, what causes violence can only improve one’s ability to prevent future violence. An attempt at this would begin a healing process for everyone. And that is the goal, isn’t it? Or is hate, in and of itself, more satisfying?
   Lewis: “There are plenty of oppressed people in the world who are not going around killing children, pregnant women and old ladies in cold blood.”
   True, ‘some oppressed people don’t do this, so why should they?’ But that is neither here nor there. Israel has the resources and therefore a better vantage point to which it could apply more peaceable and productive means towards a resolution, as well as bringing justice to criminals.
   “The most effective way of fighting terrorism… is to not participate in it.”
   -Chomsky

3. Georges
   If your Chomsky quote is intended to summarise your argument, all I can say is that I cannot think of very many situations in which taking a ‘Gandhi’ approach has actually worked.
   Would you seriously have suggested that the way to defeat Nazism or Japanese imperialism would have been by trying to understand them rather than attacking the threat head-on? I believe that Chaimberlain tried that one.
   I am not suggesting a ‘justice and move on’ approach either. However, the Marshall plan only worked once Germany and Japan were comprehensively beaten (and even then it took a while).
   My own feeling about the Palestinian situation is that the only way to defeat Palestinian terrorism is by a similar approach – comprehensively beating them (not just firing the occasional missile into cars/buildings killing a couple of terrorists and a few civillians). Only then can Marshall-style rebuilding take place.
   Sure it is important to understand the mindset of people who want to kill you (in a ‘know your enemy’ type way). However, focussing predominantly on root causes (even if the root causes are legitimate grievances) absolves the terrorists of the responsibility for their actions and encourages similar future actions.
   I read MEMRI, for example, on a regular basis (and suggest you do the same) to get an understanding of the mindset of the Palestinians and Israel’s arab neighbours. Although I acknowledge that the Palestinians are on hard times (largely self-induced), the ‘root cause’ of terrorist attacks seem to be about 20% desperation and 80% aspiration.
   The whole point of Oslo, Sharm e-Sheikh, etc. was Israel’s attempt to improve the lot of the Palestinians. Unfortunately, instead of creating a recognition amongst Palestinians that there would eventually be a State of Israel co-existing alongside a State of Palestine, it reopened the door for Arafat’s ‘phased solution’ for the creation of ‘Greater Palestine’.
   If all Arafat wanted was a State, even on 100% of the ‘West Bank’ and Gaza, Barak would have eventually given that to him. At Taba, Arafat was offered 97.5% of the ‘occupied’ territories. This was rejected without even a counter-offer. Obviously, removing the occupation was not the primary imperative.
   All I can say is that when the IDF came into Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield, they discovered 3.5 tons of explosives, yet there wasn’t a single swing or slide in the town.

4. I offered that (incredibly relevant) quote for your consideration, nothing more. I apologize if I offended you by suggesting a course of action so radically different from yours, which looks something like this: “comprehensively beating them (not just firing the occasional missile into cars/buildings killing a couple of terrorists and a few civillians).”
   Non-violence in the region is the goal, yes? The process in achieving peace is very complex, yes? What does that pesky quote suggest, then? Maybe it is that in order for one to stop the cycle of violence, one has to recognize the role they play in it.
   I recall that the original post we are now commenting on/discussing, found Helena remarking on the mirror-like nature of both the Israelis and Palestinians views on using “force against force”. Needless to say, this has proven to be a most unproductive process towards peace.
   This, I think, is an investigation into the complexities on both sides of the Wall. How to create a situation wherein which both parties can begin to understand each other.
   Speaking of Gandhi, here’s another quote for your consideration:
   “Democracy and violence can ill go together. Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side.”

5. Ok… here’s a Gandhi quote for you:
   “If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest
   gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating
   treatment.”
   Well… as it happened, the German Jewish leadership declared that Germany was their Israel and Berlin their Jerusalem, etc. etc. Look how far it got them… Not everything that spouted from Gandhi’s mouth actually works in the real world.
   Sure, I agree with your suggestion that one needs to look at the role that one plays in violence. … but to declare that forceably stopping terrorism is in any way equal to committing terrorism is to confuse the firefighter with the arsonist.
   Sure, the firefighter needs to take care that he or she does not cause unnecessary damage while putting out the fire. However, the primary objective should still be to put out the fire and to stop the arsonist from lighting more.
   The intifada was started because the Palestinians decided that they could achieve more through violence than they could through negotiations. The comprehensive victory would not have been necessary had the Palestinians agreed to sit at the negotiating table, but so long as they choose to believe that blowing up buses is a legitimate option, Israel has no choice but to ensure that the cost (to the supporters) of terrorism significantly outweighs the benefits.

7. Georges
   I think that when you mention terrorism it means something different from my understanding.
   I have no doubt that killing or even arresting Palestinians who are responsible for the attacks on Israeli civillians could be scary, even terrifying for other Palestinians to see. I’m sure that I would be terrified if I saw a Merkava drive through my street or an F-15 fly overhead.
   Perhaps terrorism is too ill-defined a word to use, but unfortunately language has its barriers, and I cannot think of a more appropriate word to describe the deliberate organised killing of civillians with the purpose of intimidation and coercement of a society or government for ideological or political reasons.
   Unless we can agree on what we are actually talking about, we will keep talking cross-purposes.
   Another example of this is the word ‘antisemitism’, which has historically only ever been used to describe Jew hatred and never hatred of semites generally (it was coined by a German antisemite because Judenhass (jew-hatred) seemed too unseemly a word).
   Words such as occidentalism, anti-arabism, Islamophobia, etc. should suffice to cover hatred of muslims or arabs.

8. Do you really believe that the extent of Israeli activities directed at Palestinians is limited to the killing or even(?) arresting of Palestinians *suspected* of attacks on Israeli civilians (and soldiers)? This might be evidence of “selective memory” on your part Lewis.
   Interesting that you use Anti-Semitism as a comparison. I have recently been making queries about the origin of this term.
   Based on my interpretation of a text written by the etymologist at Merriam-Webster (I think the surname is Rader), the following are the determining factors for the maintaining of a definition for Anti-Semitism which currently does not implicate all Semite peoples, but rather, Jews exclusively:
   -Towards the end of the 19th Century, Wilhelm Marr began a weekly newspaper in Berlin with overtly Anti-Jewish tendencies, directed at a growing audience of like-minded people that coined the term,

9. georges
   I’m not quite sure what you are asking me, but if you are suggesting that Israeli soldiers are in any way encouraged to kill civillians then all I can say is show me the proof. The whole point of ‘targeted killings’ is to avoid the approach used in most other countries in comparable situations (for example, Russia in Chechnya) of large-scale bombings.
   As for the term ‘anti-semitism’, Wilhelm Marr coined that one in Hamburg in 1879 in his book “The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism”. Given that his thesis was that Judaism a biological problem that could not be cured by assimilation, he sought to distinguish between ‘old-style’ religious hatred of Jews (eg Jews as Christ-killers) and his variant of hatred. That is what I meant about ‘unseemly’ – he wanted to convey that his hatred was based on ‘science’, not religion. The word ‘anti-semitism’ spread quickly, but its original purpose was really to denote the ‘eugenic’ arguments for hating Jews.
   I am not aware of anyone until very recently who used the term ‘anti-semitism’ to describe the hating of ‘semites’ in the sense you suggest. Part of the reason for this is because of the etymology of the word ‘semitic’.
   The word ‘semitic’ (derived from the name of one of the sons of Noah ‘Shem’ and sometimes referred to as ‘Hamito-semitic’) is a linguistic ter that refers to the many Afro-Asiatic languages (both ancient and modern), including Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Somali, Hausa, Arabic, Assyrian and Ampharic (Ethiopia). If you are interested in reading more, look up books on ‘Grimm’s law’.
   By derivation, a ‘semite’ would be one who speaks a semitic language (which would include most Somalis, Ethiopians, Hebrew-speaking Jews, arabs, etc.). To suggest that ‘anti-semitism’ is a conflation of ‘anti-‘ and ‘semite’ in that sense would render the word otiose (which I suspect is often the intention), as it would denote a hatred of people who speak one of many languages used in Africa and the middle-east. I am not aware that such a language-based hatred exists.
   Given that a significant amount of modern antisemitism springs forth from ‘semitic’ peoples, many Jews take one of two approaches – either using the words ‘Judeophobia’ or ‘Jew-hatred’, or alternatively removing the hyphen to clarify that an antisemite is not ‘anti-‘ all semites.
   However, to suggest that a Jew-hating arab, for example, is not an antisemite is not only anti-semantic, but is usually also antisemitic (to the extent that it attempts to render otiose the word most commonly used to connote hatred of Jews).
   That’s my 2c

10. I am not aware of anyone until very recently who used the term ‘anti-semitism’ to describe the hating of ‘semites’ in the sense you suggest. Part of the reason for this is because of the etymology of the word ‘semitic’.
    Another part of the reason is that the term “semite” in “anti-Semitism” is used not in its ethnographic sense but in its late-19th-century European sense. At the time Marr and other early anti-Semites were writing, “Semite” and “Hebrew” were common euphemisms for “Jew,” which was considered an unacceptable term in polite society. I doubt that it ever occurred to Marr, or to any of the other self-described anti-Semitic organizations of the 1880s, that “Semite” might connote a linguistic category, especially since there were few if any Arabs living in Germany at that point.
    The term “anti-Semitism” (or “antisemitism” if you will) may be an anachronism, but it has never meant anything other than hatred of Jews – and, since words acquire meaning through usage, it now has meaning independent of its component parts. Non-Jewish Semites will just have to grin and bear it the same way that Armenians do whenever “Caucasian” is used to mean “generic white” or Pennsylvanians of German (Deutsche) ancestry do when they are called the “Pennsylvania Dutch.”

11. Interesting comments from both Lewis and Jonathan… thank you.
    Does this mean, though, that the head of etymology at Merriam-Webster is incorrect then? Whatever the case, I’m satisfied.
    Another one to add to the list you started Jonathon would be Afro-Americans or African-Americans… as this seems to only include Americans originating from sub-Saharan Africa, or “black” Africans. Another term that seems to exclude Arabs. Curious.

12. Another one to add to the list you started Jonathon would be Afro-Americans or African-Americans… as this seems to only include Americans originating from sub-Saharan Africa, or “black” Africans. Another term that seems to exclude Arabs. Curious.
    What’s even more curious is that it often excludes first-generation African immigrants who are not the descendants of slaves.
    “Ashkenazic Jew” is yet another misnomer – “Ashkenaz” means Germany, but most Jews who call themselves Ashkenazic are of eastern European ancestry.

13. Lewis:
    The ‘settler extremists’ are not blowing up civillian buses, discos, markets, etc etc
    
    The name Baruch Goldstein mean anything to you, Lewis? That was on Purim exactly ten years ago that he gunned down 29 palestinian worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron… And who is that rabbi who till this day writes elegies for what Goldstein did?
    And Goldstein was far, far, from being the only terrorist from the extremist Jewish community. It is all quite heinous and unacceptable, whoever does it.
    As for the hudna, any suggestion that the ‘hudna’ was anything other than an opportunity for the Islamist groups to regroup for more Jew-killin’ is wilful blindness.
    Lewis, if you ever read any sources on Palestinian/Arab culture other than your beloved “MEMRI” you would know that the word “hudna” simply means a truce or ceasefire. When I covered the civil war in Lebanon, for example, there was very frequent discussion of ceasefires. Every single one went by the name of “hudna”, and no-one felt the need to go into Hadithic exegesis and provide conspiracy-type theories as to what was going on.
    No-one ever claimed that the hudna of 2003 was a peace treaty. It was a ceasefire, and the time it was in place could have been used to re-start peace talks– if Messrs. Bush and Sharon had had any interest in doing that. Which tragically, they didn’t seem to.
    To try to ‘understand’ suicide bombings is to encourage them.
    This is the most hilarious piece of reasoning I’ve seen in a long time. Let’s say we are all against malaria. If we seek to “understand” its causes, the means through which it spreads, etc, does that mean we “encourage” malaria?
    But then again, how on earth can we combat malaria effectively unless we can understand these things?
    … And as for “MEMRI”, I think I’ll maybe devote a whole new post to the claim that anyone would consider that reading MEMRI provides an “understanding of the mindset of the Palestinians and Israel’s arab neighbours.” What a sad little admission of your own limitations you made there, Lewis.

14. Jonathan,
    The term “anti-Semitism” (or “antisemitism” if you will) may be an anachronism, but it has never meant anything other than hatred of Jews – and, since words acquire meaning through usage, it now has meaning independent of its component parts.
    
    I’m afraid your major piece of evidence here is not borne out by the facts. I know a number of people who use the term anti-semitism to mean the kind of race-hatred that is directed against Jews or Arabs, and who specify “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” if that is indeed what they mean.
    You are quite correct, however, saying that words acquire their meaning through usage. One key aspect of that, however, is that usage alters over time– and so, therefore, must our understanding of what it is that words mean.
    Since I have a bifurcated British/American cultural background, I have encountered the results of many such changes: the difference in the ways that words like “biscuit”, “pudding”, “rubber”, etc have come to be construed on each side of the Atlantic. (Who was it who said that the Brits and the Americans are two nations divided only by their common language?)
    One particularly significant difference in construal is the difference in the way the term “racism” is construed in British-English and American-English. Americans, most likely because of their vexed experience (to say the least) with the enslavement of black people in the past, construe the term “race” almost entirely along the lines of skin color. But speakers of British-English construe it much more widely. When I grew up there, we would have said that the French constitute a separate “race”; or the Germans, or Dutch, or Portuguese…. For Americans, however, those distinctions are not understood as being distinctions of race– so in order to describe that difference, Americans introduced the whole concept of “ethnicity”.
    It’s not that one construal or the other is right. It is just that they are different. Hence, efforts to seek clarification of what someone actually means when they use a term are always helpful, since it is quite possible that they actually mean something very different than what you think. And this is particularly important in inter-cultural communications.

15. ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

16. I know a number of people who use the term anti-semitism to mean the kind of race-hatred that is directed against Jews or Arabs, and who specify “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” if that is indeed what they mean.
    In almost all cases where I have seen this, it has been a latter-day redefinition of the word, often (although not always) for political purposes. Most times, it is accompanied by a denial of Arab anti-Semitism on the ground that they are also Semites, or by a claim that “the Jews are the real anti-Semites” because they hate Arabs. It is also sometimes accompanied by a denial that Jews are Semites in the first place – i.e., that they are “European interlopers” and the Arabs are the “real Semites.” The net intended effect is to deprive Jews of the power and historical associations of the word “anti-Semitism” and force them to use a sterile neologism instead.
    I’m not accusing your friends of this – they may be motivated purely by ethnographic correctness – but they (and you) should realize that any redefinition of “anti-Semitism” will be interpreted this way and seen as highly offensive by many Jews. Helena, even Azmi Bishara’s against you on this.
    Also, I disagree that there is no “right” usage of words. The “right” usage is the usage that has become common in the context in which it is being used, unless a good reason exists to change that usage, and then the burden of proof is on the proponent of the change. Here, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the word “anti-Semitism” is used to mean hatred of Jews – the very fact that your acquaintances have to explain their alternative usage is proof of this.

17. Also, I disagree that there is no “right” usage of words. The “right” usage is the usage that has become common in the context in which it is being used, unless a good reason exists to change that usage, and then the burden of proof is on the proponent of the change.
    Another observation: Suppose I were to argue (as some Israeli right-wingers do) that the Palestinian Arabs are not a “real” ethnic group because most of them are descended from 20th-century immigrants, and to say (as some also do) that Israeli Jews are the only “real” Palestinians because they have a greater historical connection to Mandatory Palestine. Suppose further that I were to castigate everyone who said bad things about Israeli Jews, right up to and including Arafat, as an “anti-Palestinian bigot.” Would you accept this as an alternative usage of the term “Palestinian,” or would you call me on it?
    For that matter, suppose I were to use the words “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Zionism” interchangeably on the ground that, because Israel is a Jewish state, any opposition to it is ipso facto anti-Jewish. There are people who use the term “anti-Semitism” that way – more, I would guess, than use it to mean “hatred of Arabs and/or Jews.” Hell, I’d even have the Merriam-Webster dictionary to back me up. Would you accept that as a valid alternative usage, or would you call me on it?
    I hope you’d call me on both usages.
    Obviously I have no right to dictate to you what words you should use and how you should use them. If you want to use “anti-Semitic” to refer to hatred of both Arabs and Jews, it is your privilege to use it that way and to defend your usage with any arguments you can muster. Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to point out that this usage is often political (see here for an example of same), is offensive to many of those you want to reach and tends to obfuscate rather than communicate.

18. [In] mourning, it is better to err on the side of grief than on the side of formality.

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