Politics and the Arabic Language

Musing a bit further on this article, particularly this section:

Next, our counterterror adviser evokes the perverse logic behind the administration’s recent decision to censor words offensive to Muslims (which I closely explored in this PJM article):

Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.

Inasmuch as he is correct in the first clause of that sentence — “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community” — he greatly errs in the latter clause, by projecting his own notions of what constitutes “holy,” “legitimate,” and “innocent” onto Islam. In Islam, such terms are often antithetical to the Judeo-Christian/Western understanding. Indeed, the institution of jihad, according to every authoritative Muslim book on Islamic jurisprudence, is nothing less than offensive warfare to spread Sharia law, a cause seen as both “legitimate” and “holy” in Islam. As for “innocence,” by simply being a non-Muslim infidel, one is already guilty in Islam. Brennan understands the definition of jihad; he just has no clue of its application. So he is left fumbling about with a square peg that simply refuses to pass through a round hole.

Until the recent "troubles" it wasn't just Islamic jurisprudence that properly understood what the term Jihad meant; it was universally understood throughout not just Islam but all cultures that had contact with Islam to mean warfare, specifically directed at non-Muslims or those declared heretics and thus deemed to be un-Islamic.

In recent times Muslim spokesmen working in conjunction with the usual suspects of PoMo intellectuals/pseudo-scholars and progressives have attempted to re-define the term. But one needs only to pick up any book from the previous era that even tangentially touches on the subject to see the term used in its proper historic meaning. As a student of ByzantinoRoman history I know this full well. Thus Ibrahim is actually wrong when he says, almost reflecting the thinking of Edward Said, that his "dual Middle-East/Western background gives me the advantage to understand both the Islamicate and American mindsets equally." Previous generations of Westerners also understood the term Jihad properly. The ethnocentric projection Ibrahim rightly condemns is actually a post-modern and multiculturalist phenomenon, and thus a rather recent innovation. This might seem like a minor quibble, but it's critical to our understanding of the problems we face.

It would be more proper to say that the word "Crusade" has transformed from its original meaning than it is to say "Jihad" has. After all, we have such things as "crusades for peace" and "The Billy Graham Crusade," neither of which involve mobilizing armies to recover¹ lands from Islam by military means. Jihad has never ceased to mean what it means, however, up through the mobilization of Arabs to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets and down through the present, though we are asked to believe otherwise. But we are told we cannot use the word "Crusade" because it is inflamatory, while also being instructed to re-conceive our understanding of calls for Jihad. This is a form of mental manipulation inflicted upon us not by our enemies, but by ourselves - or at any rate one wing of our own civilization.

And of course many young people, knowing little, having come of age in this era of degenerate pseudo-scholarship, educated by the instructors they have been educated, sincerely believe Jihad does not mean what it means. This is one means of intellectually disarming us, and leading people into accepting the received wisdom of progressivism on the sources and causes of this conflict, rather than connecting it to history. It helps open them to the conclusions of a Said or a Fisk or even their slightly-less-radical imitators: That we are to blame.

Redfining terms by those with an ideological axe to grind is almost invariably aimed at controling the thinking of others.

¹Yes, recover: Crusades, aweful as many Crusaders behaved, were launched as counter-attacks. To call any but the 4th aggressive is akin to calling D-Day agressive. But, in this degenerate age, that history, however bad it was even told "straight," has been corrupted for ideological ends.

Depictions of Mohammed

While I see no good reason to deliberately insult people's beliefs simply for the sake of insulting them, there are pre-eminent reasons to stand up for our own belief, and to take a stand against threats of violence, against attempted intimidation, even by a minority within a community. Indeed, that is all the more reason to not be silent: We cannot let a violent minority of any faith or community determine the terms of debate, and effectively hijack it and become its de facto spokesmen.

It is simply not true that depictions of Mohammed have not been allowed in Islam, as the above pictures demonstrate.

If we do nothing, and if moderate, reasonable Moslems do nothing, then our mental image of Mohammed must become this:

As it already is for many people.

In any case, here is my Mohammed for the day:

Tom Friedman: "Slavery is Freedom. Freedom is Slavery"

While quotting Joe Romm (scroll) as some sort of impartial observer, Tom Friedman calls for a One-Party State while claiming to desire the opposite:

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.”

So an opposition party that dissagrees with and opposes makes for a "one-party democracy". Oddly, hundreds of years of Anglosphere parliamentary tradition might suggest otherwise, but who are they to disagree with the enlightened majesty of Tom Friedman? Burke, Palmerston, Gladstone, morons!

Hillary once said "we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration", but since the election the entire Progressive movement has been modifying that to mean "as long as it's a Republican Administration". Disagreeing with, debating, a Progressive one is being "divisisive". As Obama himself keeps reminding us, the time for talk - for debate - is over. So who is really advocating a one-party state here?

No one should be surprised that Friedman is in favor of the Permanent Party of Government. What he wants is a two-party one-party state, where politics will be separated from public policy, and no one will get in the way of implementing the vision.

Note the disingenuity Friedman must display in the column, sending reams of information down the memory hole, in order to construct his straw man thesis. One that will be lapped up and repeated by progressives everywhere.

Friedman of course thinks he is clever here. He relies upon cleverness masquerading as insight. One day he woke up and decided it would make a clever column to claim America is a one-party state because the opposition party opposes, and only by going along with the Permanent Party of Government, and ceasing to resist it in any way, can it escape this opprobrium. Then he designed a column around the clever double-phrase (Friedman loves such), introducing only what supported the turn-of-phrase and eliding over anything that might contradict it. With public intellectuals like these, who needs simpletons?

We live in an Orwellian kultursmog. Perhaps Friedman thinks that if we adopt Chinese methods of dealing with political opposition, then we will escape the trap of being a "one party democracy".

See also here:

Rarely, however, has he been quite so clear about the directness of the connections he sees between his preferred set of substantive outcomes; his contempt for American democratic processes that have, despite all, managed to hang in there for, I don't know, a few times the length of time between the Cultural Revolution and today; and his schoolgirl crush on autocratic elites because they are able to impose from above.

Let me just say for the record that this is a monstrous column. When faced with American public defection from elite-preferred outcomes on certain policy issues that involve many difficult tradeoffs of the kind that democracies, with much jostling and argument, are supposed to work out among many different groups, Friedman extols the example of ... China's political system, because it's both enlightened and autocratic? Who among us knew?

and here:

Thomas Friedman, golden boy of the NYT op-ed page, is writing love-letters to dictatorships because they have the foresight to invest in electric batteries and waterless toilets or something.

This is the argument for an "economic dictatorship" pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It's the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives.

and one more:

The next time anyone tries to tell you that Thomas L. Friedman is a serious thinker, or a tribune for global democracy, or even a good columnist, or basically someone who isn't worth sending on the next slow boat to Shanghai, please refer him to this despicable column

Just to be even more dumfounding, Friedman wonders in the column why Republicans aren't gung ho for unrestricted immigration, because they're supposed to be in the pockets of big business and all.

Friedman seems to want desperately to confirm that Moldbug is right about Progressivism:

The whole point of electing Democrats is to allow the permanent government to do its thing. When you vote for a Democrat, you are saying: I am tired of politics. I am loyal to the permanent government and trust in its prudent guidance