gulp. I’ll be on NPR Los Angeles this afternoon, discussing “homegrown terrorism” in the context of Major Hassan, the Pakistani Five, and the Somali youth.
The Talk Islam tag on “muslim american extremism” will be hugely helpful as a reference for me.
UPDATE: Here's the segment at KCRW's website, including links to download the MP3. I was disappointed I didn't get to interact directly with Spencer Ackerman, who I've been a huge fan of ever since his Iraq'd column at TNR during the Bush years. His recent piece arguing that the ObamAdmin overstates the domestic terrorism threat was part of the debate and really worth reading. Also, I really thought Brian Jenkins of RAND Corp did a great job refuting the nonsense from Walid Phares.
{ 14 comments }
Break a leg, Aziz!
(wince)
Nice job, Aziz; but you don’t sound at all like your picture.
Darn it. Is there a transcript or recording anywhere?
I feel more than a little sorry for you and your western co-religionists in this country these days, Aziz. There are clear signs of growing anti-islamic hysteria in the West, including the USA.
There was a time I would have welcomed an anti-Islamic mass movement. Certainly, as a non-Moslem, I could never accept anything approaching shari’a replacing are attaining equal footing with the United States Constitution and our inherited english common law. But I think now that turning this country in the direction of outright xenophobia would bode badly for the body politic of the american people. Once you start that sort of stuff with one group, others inevitably get sucked into the maws of suspicion and hatred.
I am not tuned to broadcast media. So I have no idea what you said on National Public Radio, and I will be satisfied to read a transcript if that is available online. I cannot expect you would be very happy to swallow the natural indignation that must come to people called upon for purposes of incessantly trying convince others about how hard you are trying to be an american. Which must be galling especially for Muslims actually born here.
As I think about these things, I presume that given enough time, Dawoodi Bohra will become some muslim indian version of the fundamentally iranian Ba’hai movement. Who knows? Maybe all of us could live together move amicably if Islam, Christianity and Judaism all were to transmogrify into pale reflections of “gimme that ole’ time religion’.
How are you for Panera’ Bread some day soon when we can get onto Mineral Point Rd without being proceeded by a Bobcat with a big snowplow?
(All the rest of you good folks. Want to experience a real upper midwest winter? Come to this part of Wisconsin when the Alberta clipper heads southwestward.)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Gosh, Arnold, for a guy as old as you are, I’m often surprised by how casually you use words that someone with your perspective should really understand.
There are? “Hysteria”? Where?
What on earth could you mean by “hysteria”? I know you don’t mean what you read in blogs. Where is this mass movement? What is it doing? Is it happening in the United States of some of other planet?
“Hysteria”?
aziz,
I listened to your full six minutes of fame. I’m not good on the subject matter but you clearly demonstrated that the internet and blogs are a very poor communication tool what with only letters to read, duh.
What would I know.
And I agree with Ron.
Ron and McK,
I live a sort of quiet life of ideas based on what I hope are logic and fact. So I tend to view organized religions as separate but mostly similar systems of more or less culturally-controlled hysterias. In general, I think the tendencies of these separate hysterias is to dispute with one another in an active and frequently hostile manner. In short, anathemas, excommunications, jihads and and even mass murder on behalf of pieces of what, to any nonbeliever, has all the appearances of obscure nonsense.
One hundred and ten years ago, the Third Republic of France was torn apart by what later was described as a mass hysteria, regarding a jewish captain of artillery, Alfred Dreyfus, who was railroaded into a steel-barred but open cell in the prison colony offshore of French Guiana in South America. He had been falsely convicted of acting as a spy for the German Empire. The upshot of all this all but tore french society apart for more than a dozen years. And it marked an outpouring of antisemitism unseen in the West of that age, sort of a precursor to what took place in Germany 40 years later.
And I see signs of these kinds of seniments growing in the USA, but this time targeting the Moslem community here. This why I hope Islam in America will become normatized and americanized on a very rapid basis. So that it will no longer stick out like a square peg amid numerous round holes.
All this will prove difficult, I think. Part of the islamic cultures is a social tendency toward combativeness at any sign of hostility toward Moslems anywhere. This is why so many Arabs, Pakistanis and other Moslems heed the siren call of distant terrorist preachers and of various big or small al-Qaidas, and then reverently and fervently fly airliners into the sides of great buildings in New York and Washington DC, or initiate massacres in an army base in the Texas. And now, increasingly, the christian West is gearing up for a counter hysteria.
These trends whose coming I now sense, explain why I have taken a personal interest in a single islamic american medical professional in Madison, Wisconsin. First, I have grown to like him. Second, his particular version of Islam seems to cleave to a path toward a sort of enlightenment that caused official and cultural Christianity in Europe to change its course almost 500 years ago, and in its own way, helped give birth to the freedoms under which this country was founded about 225 years ago. In any case, I don’t want to see him and people like him victimized by the coming of religious war.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sorry, Arnold, but you “see” something that isn’t there. You could start by providing even anecdotal evidence of something that other observers could physically see.
Feel free to provide even ONE example.
One example, very anecdotal, but very worrying to me. A friend, a man I have trusted with my safety and more in the past, a man who I have generally trusted as intrinsically good… and also a man who has studied history and music and art, and who I have generally found to be pretty bright (though often wrong)… and also a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a compulsive CNN addict, a man who sides with the little guy over the corporation in pretty much every circumstance, so he’s middle of the road for the liberal side of the country… a man who opposed the Iraq war and gave credence to almost any accusation against President Bush… confided to me recently that maybe the world would have less trouble today if King Richard had done a more thorough job in the Crusades.
I was flummoxed. If a man like him can hold an opinion like that, what might a less educated man, less basted in the whole CNN-left-multi-culti world view believe?
And yes, I shot him down, and he admitted he had gone too far. But if he can, others can.
One man doesn’t prove a trend. But from this man, this was a very disturbing statement.
It not only doesn’t “prove a trend.” It has nothing to do with “hysteria.” If your friend himself had acted in a hysterical fashion, you could then say “One man doesn’t prove a trend.”
Besides demonstrating a misunderstanding of the Crusades (on a very concrete level) on your friend’s part, the only “trend” this incident could possibly be extrapolated to prove, if we were to allow such proof, would be a trend toward inappropriate expressions of yearning for a different history than the one in which ever happened.
The statement, “If a man like him can hold an opinion like that, what might a less educated man, less basted in the whole CNN-left-multi-culti world view believe?” is not only itself bristling with elitist attitudes about the Great Unwashed, but it constitutes logical leap upon logical leap and even then, leaves us with a scenario in which, God forbid, they might all “believe”… what? That they should start burning mosques? That we should ship ‘em all back? That it’s time for lynchings?
Or “that maybe the world would have less trouble today if King Richard had done a more thorough job in the Crusades”?
I guess I do see some hysteria here, but not the kind Arnold suggested.
As to your response, Arnold, it is as usual premised on your contempt for religion, but is otherwise pretty clear-headed, I’d say. Only it doesn’t in the least bit support your original assertion of imminent anti-Islam hysteria.
Arnold – when i get back from India, there’s a Panera Bread on Mineral Point Road with our name on it!
McK – I appreciate that. a lot.
as far as a trend goes, there has been indeed an increased anti-Islamic trend in this country and theres plenty of data to back that up, not just anecdotes. But neither are we in a full fledged oppressive, second class citizen situation (Israel is closer to that with its Arab population, but also not there)
I think that the advantage muslims in America have which Jews in Europe did not, and which will never, ever lead to the kind of persecution here that they did there, is media, money, and democracy. I am sanguine about the threat and confident of my fellow citizens’ essential goodness. But to keep this where it is, we do need to keep the pressure on and call out this stuff when it arises.
In europe, however, all bets are off. The Swiss example is a telling one – there are no principles, not freedom of speech, not freedom of faith, not freedom of the press, which can not and will not be cast aside in Europe for temporary and hysterical advantage. Since Europe has the bloodiest, most vicious and horrific history of religious persecution of all continents on the planet (including Africa and the Middle East), this shoudl come as no surprise.
I’m flying out of Ohare at 7pm. Will be on and off the net until then. for now, though, I have to self-administer my H1N1 vaccine injection… sigh. i hate this kind of gross stuff.
deadrody asked for even one anecdotal example. I gave him one. If you can’t see hysteria in someone of the left wishing we had experienced a “Final Solution” to “the Muslim problem”, that’s not my problem.
I think Aziz has answered better than I could, demands from certain other commenters that I come up with some sort of proof of rising anti-islamic sentiments in this country, and much more so in Europe.
The problem here, as I see it, is that the moderate islamic community — which probably constitutes most american Moslems — has no means of stopping the silent brooding followed by outright terrorism that afflicts some of their co-religionists. And innocent people are victimized as a result. Not just non-Moslems targeted by the religious killers, but everybody else in the islamic community resident in this country.
All of this is perfectly natural and easily explainable. And given the circumstances of present-day relations of increasingly militant islamic societies with non-islamic cultures around their borders, these trends are all too predictable. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for american Moslems who are just trying to live as our fellow Americans.
And you should all note that I write this notwithstanding the militant form of Zionism which I freely admit that I espouse. To displace a bunch of Arabs whom I have no use for whatsoever, in order to fill up Judea and Samaria with the jewish nation does not mean that I want the Aziz Poonawallas of the USA to be picked on as though they all were ancilleries to the more or less endless middle eastern quarrel between two nations who essentially want the same patch of land and will never ever agree to slice it down the middle. I guess they most have picked that up from the story of King Solomon and the baby from 3000 years ago.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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