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=> The ‘Muslim insiders’ of the War on Terror

The ‘Muslim insiders’ of the War on Terror
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The ‘Muslim insiders’ of the War on Terror
by Theodore Sayeed on July 20, 2012

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/07/the-muslim-insiders-of-the-war-on-terror.html

If love once lost turns into loathing, it's true as much for ideas as romantic entanglements. The classic model is the young idealist who on the path to revolt strays from the barricades and becomes the night watchman of orthodoxy. Lord Macaulay observed in what is perhaps the most damning book review in the history of beautiful letters that the English poet Robert Southey swung from a zealous Jacobin fevered by the French Revolution to a zealous anti-Jacobin because he ran on zeal more than introspection.

There is a Muslim variation on the theme. A number of Islamic deserters have cropped up in the years since OBL made the marginal faith into a national question. They are former insiders, you understand, and like former communists David Horowitz and Irving Kristol whose baptism into the most hawkish nationalism has the feel of a Pravda caricature, we are supposed to lend credence to their fatwas because they have, in the common parlance, been there, done that. They are authentic.

In touchy political subjects that demand some measure of tact and careful handling, insiders are a useful ideological tool in the armor of the state, and with their highly prized Muslim biography, a number of them have become the brown face of the War on Terror.

The average Muslim renegade who has shed Islam is humane and decent. They wish to have no connection with this obscenity; but the average does not capture headlines. For that you need loud eccentrics with a sharp eye for controversy.

The pioneer of this sport is Ibn Warraq. He began his career before the onset of 9/11 as a rather lone detractor of Islam with some flash of sincerity. If a man wishes to bury the Divine, I will fetch my shovel. But if he was ever motivated by the good of Muslims, he’s long abandoned it for the lower precincts of right-wing polemic. It’s impossible to distinguish his work from the fire breathings and heart burnings of Likudniks.

It’s a long procession of antipathies hinged on the premise that Muslims resent America not because of the millions of them it has laid low by its international policy, but soley because their creed fosters hate against the tender hearted infidel apolitically who labors only for their own welfare.

To make the surly ingrates of Islam better admire the charms of modernity such as freedom of speech and worship, he proposes a referendum on boarding up all mosques in the West till the US-backed Saudi monarchy permits the construction of churches in the kingdom. Brandishing his civil libertarian credentials further still, he says we must outlaw the hijab and stop all Muslim immigration. It is not clear whether he thinks the ban on migration from Islamic states ought to extend to himself or whether he will, for the sake of practicing what he preaches, hop on the next flight back to Pakistan.

But if he is opposed to the Westward flow of Easterners, he is vocal in cheering the influx of Western armies to the Orient. As if to show that apostates can play the executioner's role with the best of the Mecca boys, he says that, in the fashion of the ten year war in Afghanistan and the attack on Libya, we must pursue "regime change" in Iran to counter its threat against the West and its proxy war on Israel through Hizbollah, which one is informed is a "terrorist" outfit:

The fall of the Islamic Republic must be the primary foreign policy goal of all Western States, and when it comes will be the equivalent of the fall of the Soviet Union.
We must bomb the turbans to freedom:

Is Obama seriously leaving open the option of using force, or is it more "let me make it clear" and "I am really serious this time" kind of pusillanimous rhetoric?
If you are disinclined to treat the Horowitz of the world as a reliable authority on socialism just because they had formerly been enchanted by it, you will observe why it is high folly to regard a Muslim turncoat who authors books like Defending The West and Why The West Is The Best as anything but a wartime propagandist. As a textbook case of how not to relate to one’s former community, his story holds much promise, but as political and social commentary, the less he says the more intelligent he appears.

Another specimen of this renegade theme is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She cultivates the posture of a women’s rights activist; very nice that; who could oppose such a worthy cause? But like the politician who claims to uphold family values and is caught mounting the babysitter, Hirsi Ali strives to prevent Muslim women escaping dire straits from seeking asylum in the West.

The womenfolk of Islam, she confides, are here to “outbreed” the white natives in just the manner Glenn Beck (on whose cable show our fair lady is a beloved guest) warns of the Mexican invasion poised to rob America from the gringo. With so many scheming foreigners out to get us, it’s enough to make a patriot grab his rifle and round them up.

For that we may count on the likes of Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant nativist with whom Hirsi Ali worked cosily in the Dutch parliament to shut off the very immigration avenues which gave her a new shot at life. The migrants, one is told censoriously, claim to seek better economic prospects, but these serpentine Mohammedans really come to snatch away your ham and bacon sandwich and make your granny burka up.

Her utterances are nothing to marvel at. When your employer is the neoconservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and your hubby is Niall Ferguson, a man who proudly crows “I’m a fully paid up member of the neo-imperialist gang”, your higher faculties can suffer a hemorrhage. Indeed, one may even begin to push for war against Iran as our humanitarian has taken to of late. We must crush Islam militarily and show those bad Mullahs up, she thuds, with no small relish. Since there is no such physical object called Islam to crush, the reality of this statement is crushing Muslims. And some of these people, I am told, happen to be women.

Perhaps my favourite plier of the trade though is the flamboyant Irshad Manji. A charmer by all accounts. But have a peek between the covers of her book, The Trouble With Islam Today, and what do you find? We learn that Arabs are the chief impediment to a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Israelis are the pinnacle of reason and moderation, a sentiment rehashed in her chummy CNN appearance with the Zionist Shmuley Boteach. And do you know why the World Trade Centre attacks occurred reader? Because the Arab hijackers, says she, were desperate to get laid and too scatterbrained to swing by a brothel. Suicide bombing has no relation to politics or conflict she writes, but is borne of the needy Arab man’s craving to bed heavenly nymphos.

And of course, there is no such thing as American imperialism because don’t you know that Muslims enjoy sending the fruit of their loins to America? And don’t let her catch you mouthing "Israeli Apartheid" within earshot: It is a Muslim invention because how can there be apartheid in the occupied territories when Arab politicians sit in the Knesset. And is it not proof enough that Westerners are morally superior to Muslims that both Israel and Pakistan were founded as independent states within a year apart and yet the former is a roaring democratic success and the latter a cleric infested backwater?

To the history buffs eager to trip our lass up, don’t bring up Reagan’s Cold War military aid to the Islamist strongman Zia Ul-Haq who did his level best to disembowel Pakistani secularism by incorporating Shariah into the legal system and establishing fundamentalist madrassas that have impeded the onward march of liberty and progress set rolling by its democratic secular founder Jinnah in a cynical move to dismember socialist movements across the frontiers of Asia; history is for losers.

The gaping omissions in fact and logic that mark the book from end to end are not too surprising given her preferred authorities on Islam is the Iraq war supporter Bernard Lewis who, when not lavishing confetti on Zionism, distinguishes himself by denying the Armenian genocide in tandem with official Israeli policy for which he was convicted by a French court, and the Muslim reviler Bat Ye’or known for churning out tomes presaging the looming Islamic takeover of Europe soon to be renamed “Eurabia”, with the clandestine aid of European statesmen full of white guilt. Instead of placing an urgent call to the bereft lunatic asylum from which Batty escaped, Manji describes the conspiracy theorist honorifically as an “Egyptian-born European scholar”.

Our writer likes to strike the pose of the Muslim dissident intrepidly facing down the clerical gang; to one like I who's gone further and departed Islam altogether, I am less than staggered by her intellectual prowess; but unlike the truly brave work of Muslim feminists such as the former Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya, booted out for exposing the warlordism and corruption of Karzai’s administration, who takes majestic and habitual personal risks to oppose the lethal trio of Uncle Sam’s occupation, the fundamentalist warlords he brought to power, and the Taliban, Manji takes to the airwaves only to defend the war effort in unison with Hirsi Ali.

When you grace the studios of Fox News, for which our heroine is the resident Muslim philosopher, it is wise to know for whom to curtsy.

As you may have gathered by now, these Muslim insiders are little different in tone and texture from the outsiders we commonly know as neocons and chauvinists. The only difference being they enjoy the linguistic perk of commencing their public address with “As an ex-Muslim, I think ..."

And almost invariably what these spinners of polemical fantasy think, to use a much disputed verb, just happens to align perfectly with the imperial needs of the Oval Office. Historically, the value of the iconoclast and the nonconformist has been to render novel and thoughtful insights into the afflictions of society that remain obscured; these media personalities only ever rekindle the most ancient European typecasts of the primitive Islamic savage in pressing need of Jane Austen’s tableside manners.

The heretical tradition is a noble one. Many disaffected minds have left our understanding deepened. What lends them plausibility however is not just their desertion, but the quality of information they have to relay and its consistency with our own perceptions of the true. There is a reason we invent separate moral categories for the disgruntled former employee and the public spirited whistleblower. Nothing is more unsightly than embittered intimates. Of such a bent are these recanted Muslims.

And a few others who confuse the unglamorous job of the reformer to work alongside insular racial minorities for progressive change with that of a media celebrity in rightwing circles which, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali's free market ideology, seek to cut public services to empower women and the vulnerable.

Yet I don’t come just to cry down the synaptically defective. I wish to sing up the good in my fellows too. As surely as there are nonconformist Jewish writers like Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz who play the renegado to Zionism without dubbing all of Judaism in sinister colours, there are many ex-Muslims who won’t try to sell you foolish wars in the name of fighting Islamo-Nazo-Commo-Homo-Fascism.

And in this connection I present for your reading pleasure the fine political activist and novelist Tariq Ali as well as the professor of political science, As'ad AbuKhalil, who maintains the stimulating blog The Angry Arab, two dissenter minds of the better tradition which lays siege to the orthodoxies of both East and West.

About Theodore Sayeed
Theodore Sayeed lives and works in London. Later this year he begins graduate study in biology. He may be reached at: Teddysayeed@gmail.com



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