What you can’t say about Islamism
Posted by Richard on July 15, 2010
Via The Spittoon, here is the opening of Paul Berman's recent Wall Street Journal column:
In our present Age of the Zipped Lip, you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement:
You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.
You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.
And you are not supposed to mention that, by inducing a variety of journalists and intellectuals to maintain a discreet and respectful silence on these awkward matters, the Islamist preachers and ideologues have succeeded in imposing on the rest of us their own categories of analysis.
Or so I have argued in my recent book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” But am I right? I glance with pleasure at some harsh reviews, convinced that here, in the worst of them, is my best confirmation.
Read the whole thing.
Martin Peretz at The New Republic had some related thoughts:
… there is an epidemic of tolerance–on the liberal campus, at liberal dinner tables, in liberal families, among the liberal "new world" entrepreneurs–for people who hate and often kill liberals (especially liberal Muslims). This tolerance extends to Jew-haters and Jew-killers. In the West, in fact, indulgence of the hatred of Jews among liberals and liberal Jews or Jewish liberals is so rampant that it has taken on a new disguise: the hatred of Zionism and disgust with the State of Israel, perhaps one of the three or four most liberal states in the world.
There's a reason I and others use the term "Islamofascism." Radical Islam and its founders and leading intellectuals, from Qutb and al Banna to the present day, are so deeply and inextricably tied to German fascism, and the evidence of those Nazi roots and their continuing influence today is so overwhelming, that it requires a willful blindness to ignore this evidence.
frank said
I agree with your opinions.