DAVID SOLWAY
INTERVIEW
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror,
Antisemitism, and Identity. His editorials appear regularly
in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM and
Pajamas Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
A & O: Arts & Opinion readers and others friendly
to the publication have expressed concern that you’re
a racist, that you hate Arabs. Since your reply must be “I’m
not a racist,” why do you think they have come to that
conclusion?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Beats me. My working motto is: "I say what I see,"
and if that means arriving at conclusions that I would have
preferred to avoid, then so be it. But this has nothing to do
with racism of any sort. What nonsense. I believe we are embroiled
in a civilizational war that has been going on for 1400 years,
receding at times, cresting at others. And that we are now in
the process of losing this war, in large part because we are
afraid, as Mary Habak writes in her book of that title, of “knowing
the enemy,” naming the enemy, and taking a principled
stand. The jihadists appear to be right: we are weak, self-indulgent,
unsinewed by political correctness, in thrall to sentimental
and utopian notions, ripe for the plucking. Too many years of
soft living and even softer thinking. Sometimes I imagine we
actually admire the jihadists since they provide us with what
we lack: strength, belief, vitality, asabiyah (group
feeling). As Constantine Cavafy concludes in his great poem
“Waiting for the Barbarians,” “They were,
those people, a kind of solution.” And I remember, too,
something that otherwise disreputable specimen Jean Genet, who
spent some time with the Palestinians living a paramilitary
romance, wrote in his Journal du voleur about this
strange fascination with Islamic violence: we suffer from “la
réalité du suprême bonheur dans le désespoir
. . . on assiste à l’irrémédiable
destruction de [notre] oeuvre et de soi-même.”
A &
O: For some time now, you’ve been practising advocacy
journalism; you are a staunch Zionist and defender of Israel,
you support right wing causes. After 9/11, you recognized that
your allegiance to the left, to Noam Chomsky, was misinformed,
misguided. Why can’t you be wrong again?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Of course I can be wrong again. But consider. Should
I change my mind once more and revert to the assumptions and
opinions and convictions that governed my thinking before 9/11,
and before I wrote The Big Lie, well, I could then,
let’s say, after a couple of years and another 9/11, change
my mind yet once again. And then again, and so on ad infinitum.
Where’s the advantage or consolation in morphing into
a perpetual motion machine? Moreover, what would prevent the
people who have asked this question and who plainly oppose my
arguments 'from changing their minds?' Let’s get real.
I’ve spent the last nine years reading, studying, researching
and reflecting upon the great political and ideological issues
of the day. I’ve assembled a veritable closet-full of
evidentiary material in several languages: documents, transcripts,
records, memoirs, original statements, crucial texts like UN
resolutions, articles from the Beirut Telegraph, the
Jordanian daily Falastin, the London Daily Mail
dating back to 1948 and 1949, literally hundreds and hundreds
of such exemplars. As I said, I’ve even come to some conclusions
that I was personally uncomfortable with. But even if no human
being has a lien on the asymptotic truth, there is such a thing
as credible verisimilitude. One tries to be honest and skeptical
at the same time, but if the evidence one has amassed points
in a certain direction, what can one do but travel along that
road toward whatever destination it may lead? One has to settle
somewhere eventually, making as sure as possible that the ground
is solid. Otherwise, intellectually speaking, one skitters about
like a dandelion ghost. Naturally, one may ultimately decamp
to some other place, but that does not exempt one from maintaining
one’s intellectual residence so long as one is living
there.
A &
O: How is your writing helping to build bridges between the
West and Islam? If not at all, do we assume you not only support
the thesis that there is a clash of civilizations but that the
clash is just and necessary?
DAVID
SOLWAY: I’m not sure how to respond here. Maybe I can
say that I’m not interested in building bridges. I am
no more a peacemonger than I am a warmonger. I simply recognize,
as does Samuel Huntington and many others, that we are under
sustained attack and I worry about my kids and their kids. Narain
Kataria, founder of the Indian Intellectuals Forum, points out
that since 9/11 Muslims have carried out over 15,000 terrorist
attacks and killed more than 75,000 people (Pajamas Media,
May 17, 2010). Radical Islam is an existential threat for the
West. Do you really believe that the defenders at the gates
of Vienna in 1683 were interested in “building bridges”?
I respectfully suggest to you that they were probably far more
interested in surviving. Do people honestly think one could
come to terms and mutual understanding with someone like the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Nazi loyalist and Jew-killer Haj Amin
al-Husseini? Yasser Arafat? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Osama bin Laden?
Build bridges to Hamas? To Hizballah? Some earnest cantilevering
and everything will work out just dandy? What planet do these
people live on? Have they read the founding charters? Have they
weighed the ideas of Sayid Qutb? Have they checked out Maulana
Maudoodi? Have they followed the history of Islamic conquest
from 622, the date of the Medinese hegira, to the present moment?
As Salim Mansur, himself a practising Muslim, writes in Islam’s
Predicament, in the chapter called “How the West
Was Duped”: “Muslims need to become free of totalitarian
Islam and the least the West can do in support is not concede
an inch of its own hard-won freedom in quest of a false peace
with Islamists.”
A
& O: Why do readers accuse you of failing to distinguish
between a small minority of fanatics (terrorists) and the rest
of the Arab world? Do you believe that a mute but majority of
Western Arabs secretly, clandestinely support terrorism and
jihad – the overthrow of the West?
DAVID
SOLWAY: The question you’re really posing is whether what
we call “moderate Islam” represents a stable and
peace-loving majority among the Muslim umma, or community of
believers. Maybe, maybe not. Bangladeshi author of Women
in Islam and former Muslim Abul Kasem does not think so.
“Is there such a thing as moderate Islam?” he asks.
“For the existence of moderate Islam/Muslims, there must
be a ‘moderate’ Qu’ran, since the life force
of Islam is the Qu’ran.” But the Koran advocates
violence in passage after passage and cannot be safely moderated.
“Introducing innovation in Islam is a serious crime. .
. subject to Islamic punitive measure, which is death.”
For Kasem, the notion of Islamic moderation is a conceptual
and terminological snare. Discounting the actual practitioners
of terror, the majority of Muslims, Kasem explains, amounting
to about 90% of the umma, are Muslims in name only and have
little idea of the Koran, Hadith and shari’a. A smaller
group consists of what he calls “pretend Muslims,”
and a third, even smaller number, who shrink from becoming martyrs
but are sympathetic to the cause of worldwide dominion, comprises
those who embrace “philosophical terrorism.” Thus,
“there is no such true thing as moderate Muslims.”
The real enemy, he concludes, “is not the terrorists.
Rather, it is Islam. As long as the world does not internalize
and comprehend this truth, and as long as wrong, PC policies
are pursued this war will continue and the defeat of the non-believers
is guaranteed.” Anyway, that’s his take on it.
Leslie
S. Lebl of the American Center for Democracy, writing in City
Journal for January 29, 2010, agrees: the basic problem
is “an ideology fundamental to ‘traditional”
or ‘moderate” Islam as much as to its ‘radical
variant’.” Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wishes
to put an end to uncontrolled Islamic immigration into the Netherlands,
agrees and disagrees. At a talk to the Hudson Institute in New
York on September 25, 2008, Wilders said: “Sure, there
are moderate Muslims. But there is no moderate Islam.”
Which is only another way of saying that our callow belief in
the efficacy of “moderation” is what may eventually
do us in. This is the fly in the ointment of Western assuagement
and Islamic special pleading. For moderation, whether virtual
or existent, is not only “moderation,” a subtle
code word for unacknowledged self-deception; it is also a perfect
cover for immoderation as well as its fecund seedbed and its
sustaining medium. What we call “moderate Islam”—assuming
there is such a thing—is only the water in which the sharks
swim and seek their prey. Even astute observers like Middle
East specialist Daniel Pipes, who believes that if radical Islam
is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution, are whistling
in the dark. His conviction that the answer to Islamic jihad
lies in the social reinforcement of the moderate community,
based on the conclusion of the RAND Corporation’s recent
publication Building Moderate Muslim Networks, is really
a non-starter.
For one thing, as long as the Saudi-funded mosques and madrassas
are not shut down and declared illegal, there is little hope
for mounting a successful challenge to the spread of Wahabbi
extremism by encouraging, in the RAND study’s words, “the
emerging transnational network of laicist and secularist individuals,
groups, and movements.” But the issue is even more reticulated.
A house revolt by “moderate Muslims,” be they of
Kasem’s “ignorant” or “pretend”
denominations, would plainly be a step in the right direction
and might do something to reduce the incidence of terrorist
attacks. But terrorism and religious discord will stay with
us, whether overtly, latently or intermittently, so long as
Islam remains literal, unemended and retrograde. So long, that
is, as both its foundational texts and its compliant posture
toward these texts are not reconsidered following the valid
discoveries of ecclesiastical and humanistic scholarship regarding
scriptural origins. Egyptian physician-scholar Tawfik Hamid
insists that without an “alternate approach” to
the Koran, moderation is a dead letter. Presently engaged in
preparing a new and different reading of portions of the Koran,
Hamid clearly believes that such a reformulation is possible
and that behaviour modification may consequently be achieved.
Let’s hope he’s right. But it seems to be a long
shot.
A
& O: Have you ever spent time in a Muslim country? Have
you ever had an Arab friend?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Yes, I have visited Morocco, albeit briefly, and actually
taught a makeshift class in Casablanca, in a public souk, of
all places. And yes, I have Muslim friends, in particular Salim
Mansur and Tarek Fatah. Wonderful guys.
A
& O: How do you answer the accusation that no less than
Arab extremists who want to bring down the West (through violence
and/or stealth), the West would like to overwhelm Islam with
its own form of stealth jihad (culture)? In terms of ambition,
do you acknowledge the symmetry?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Absolutely not. This is just the sort of fancy talk
that we hear mainly in the now unhallowed halls of Academe.
The old colonial days are long over, 'pace' the spirit of Edward
Said, who advanced the meretricious neocolonial argument in
his deeply flawed Orientalism. It occurs to me that
your subscribers might at least want to browse Ibn Warraq’s
magisterial tome Defending the West, in which this
question is addressed and definitively answered. It is also
the best antidote I know to the myriad distortions, misconstruals
and at times downright ignorance we find in Said’s book.
Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing, in which
he also takes on Said and dismisses Orientalism as
“a work of malignant charlatanry,” is a must-read
too. Irwin is among the leading Middle East scholars of our
time. Nouveau philosophe Pascal Bruckner’s La tentation
de l’innocence and La tyrannie de la pénitence
are equally de rigueur. Let’s just get over this “even-handedness”
and “honest broker” and “we’re just
as guilty” stuff, which are only euphemisms for cowardice
and indolence in the face of a determined adversary. I would
also suggest Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints
which is an excellent primer for understanding the future. And
while we’re at it, it might serve as well to meditate
on Fouad Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the
Arabs, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy,
Winston Churchill’s The River War, Brigitte Gabriel’s
Because They Hate, Serge Trifkovic’s The
Sword of the Prophet, Michael Capri’s A Never
Ending War, Salim Mansur’s Islam’s Predicament
and Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism, among
others. Jean-François Revel’s How Democracies
Perish wouldn’t hurt either. You’ll find many
of your answers therein.
A &
O: In the madrassas (Islamic religious schools), you’ve
expressed concern that the young are being indoctrinated to
hate the West. In the West, the young learn to hate Arabs in
movies that depict them as terrorists. In your view, what system
is most successful in inculcating hate, winning the war of words
and images?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Naturally, there are crazies of all stripes out there
producing a blogjam of babble and balderdash directed at everybody
under the sun, but you can’t be alluding to these idiots.
I know of very few serious sites, venues, movies and so on that
are dedicated to inculcating hatred of Islam. In The Big
Lie and in some of my other writings, I offer long shopping
lists of Hollywood and, yes, Israeli films that do just the
opposite. And I mean long. The pro-Islamic (and pro-liberal-left)
drift of the Tinseltown illusion factory is remarkable, spectacularly
so, for its blatant one-sidedness. One would scarcely know that
airliners have been brought down, buildings destroyed and people
blown up by Muslim terrorists if one lived in a movie theater,
as I suspect many do. The same is true of TV. To take only one
recent example among a multitude, look at Comedy Central’s
South Park which will scrub an image of Mohammed dressed in
a bear costume for fear of reprisals but will feature a website
game called I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack with a character named
Jew Producer and a robot, the Intelligent Smart Robot Animation
Eraser Lady, an acrostic for Israel, who is an expert assassin.
The same bad faith and abject cravenness exists in the publishing
racket, Yale University Press, for example, having recently
published a book about the Danish cartoon episode 'without the
cartoons.' The same is true by and large of the education system,
except perhaps in Quebec, thank the Lord. You’ve heard
of UC San Diego student Jumanah Imad Albahri who, when asked
by David Horowitz when he spoke there recently whether she would
be for or against the liquidation of the Jews, replied “For
it.” She has not been reprimanded or censured. As historian
Jonah Goldberg comments in the Los Angeles Times for
May 18, “and there are many like her.” Jew-hatred
is bon ton on campus and elicits either silence or
tacit approval from university administrators. Muslims almost
always get a free pass. Even the American military bends over
backwards not to offend Muslims. Major Hasan kills eleven soldiers
and wounds another thirty at Fort Hood and General Casey worries
about an anti-Muslim backlash and the damage that might be done
to that sacred cow, “diversity.” Unbelievable. It
will be fascinating to see if the giant mosque two blocks from
Ground Zero, now in the planning stage, actually gets built.
But really, what are you talking about? With a few desultory
exceptions here and there, pro-Islamic suasion is a booming
industry in the West, just as anti-Western propaganda and hatred
proliferates all over the Islamic world.
A &
O: We all want peace. You want peace. Your journalism is the
expression of that desire and yet you stand accused of authoring
hatefests. Why aren’t they getting it? Why are your critics
refusing the peacemaker that you are?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Maybe because I’m not a dreamy sentimentalist
or a Yoomi-type poet or Babbalanja who belong in Melville’s
Mardi. The fact is, in many troubled and incendiary
circumstances, peace now means war later, and a far more destructive
war than would otherwise have been the case. Let’s call
it, à la Ludlum, The Chamberlain Supremacy. You know
the old Latin saying of Publius Vegetius Renatus, Si vis
paca, para bellum—If you want peace, prepare for
war. And sometimes this means rigorous profiling and launching
pre-emptive strikes, that is, if you don’t want to go
up with the shopping mall, if you don’t want your wife
in a flaming airplane or your kids reduced to body parts. Peace
comes to the strong and the courageous, but it avoids the weak
and the self-deluded.
A &
O: In one of your editorials, you argued that the US would do
well if Sarah Palin were to ascend to the Presidency. Is that
a personal view or a public demonstration of your solidarity
with right wing causes?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Sarah is among the most interesting and galvanizing
figures on the American political scene, but you’d never
know it from the legacy media that have embarked upon a savage
vendetta against her. With a little more prepping, she’d
make a decent president. She has flaws, Lord knows, perhaps
the most conspicuous of which is that she lacks a certain gravitas.
But she’s learning. She’s honest, down to earth,
and has by and large the right instincts. Many media figures
and bloviating pundits castigate her for being ignorant, but
she’s far more knowledgeable than, say, Obama, who thinks
there is such a thing as the Austrian language, counted 57 states
and postulated a 58th, refers to an American corpsman as a “corpseman,”
and got his Islamic history wrong in his Cairo speech by a trifling
matter of several hundred years, among a plethora of gaffes
and embarrassments. Joe Biden thinks that FDR addressed the
American people on television during the Depression. Judging
by his May 6 speech to the European Parliament, Biden believes
that it possesses law-making powers, which it patently does
not. His howlers have become legendary. It’s Obama and
Biden who are the premier ignoramuses.
And,
by the way, I don’t wear a political badge. Whatever people
might say, I never think of myself as right-wing or neocon or
whatever. There are many conservative or right-wing writers
and politicos I wouldn’t have the time of day for, Ron
Paul for example, or Charlie Crist, or Pat Buchanan. I slammed
Glenn Beck for his nasty innuendos concerning Geert Wilders.
Look, I come to my positions independently and if they happen
to coincide with a designated movement, that’s nothing
more than chance or serendipity at work. People can say what
they like or throw a conceptual mesh over me like awkward retiarii
or type me as one thing or another, but I don’t go for
tats.
A &
O: Respond to the accusation that advocacy journalism is infra
dig, that someone of your exceptional gifts as both analyst
and writer should be serving the truth, wherever it falls.
DAVID
SOLWAY: I don’t know about exceptional gifts and all.
I’m not being falsely modest here. I just work hard, try
to be scrupulous, do my homework and perform my due diligence.
And as I said twice before, if I eventually come to a conclusion
that appears, after assiduous research and analysis, to be valid
but which I’d rather not have disinterred or stumbled
upon, then I stick with it no matter how vexing it may be to
me. Also, I don’t see myself as engaging in advocacy journalism.
I mean this sincerely. There are serious things going on in
the world today that must be addressed, confronted, understood,
and such a locust swarm of lies and fabrications and fables
blackening the skies above us and almost choking the very air
we breathe that principled resistance is utterly necessary.
I truly believe that the existence of our civilization is at
stake and that, mutatis mutandis, we have come to resemble
the citizens of Augustine’s city of Hippo whom Lewis Mumford
writes about in The City in History. They were too
busy attending the games in the local Forum to defend themselves
against the Vandals at the walls, with the inevitable result
that the city was razed and these distracted citizens put to
the sword.
A &
O: You are very concerned with Jew-hatred from within and without
the community. Among your Arab readers, do you feel your writing
is attenuating or inflaming that hatred?
DAVID
SOLWAY: No idea. Don’t care either, since I’m not
writing to Muslims but to the legions of pusillanimous Westerners
in the hope that a few of them might actually start thinking
and reading for a change. The problem is, as Ralph Peters says
in Endless War, that we feel threatened by history,
which is why “serious historical instruction has been
stripped from our schools.” The predicament starts there.
A &
O: The devout Arab prays five times a day, we don’t pray
at all, and we chalk up the difference by labeling him as a
fanatic. Why should our world view prevail?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Frankly, I suspect that our world view will not prevail,
that the game is up, and that it’s only a matter of time.
Coner Cruise O’Brien in On the Eve of the Millennium
gives Western Civ another 200 years. Well, as the burghers say
in Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamlin, “Come,
take fifty.” They’re referring to ducats but the
phrase seems calendrically appropriate. And fifty years may
be too generous an assessment. A columnist writing in the Saudi
newspaper Al-Riyadh takes comfort in the thought that
“France won’t be around much longer, since it will
have a Muslim majority by 2050” (see FrontPage Magazine,
July 23, 2009). The same fate awaits many other European countries.
Come, take forty. Maybe thirty. I’ve just read a transcript
of Paul Eidelberg’s report, delivered under the excellent
title of “Chronological Smugness” for Israel National
Radio on May 17, which deals succinctly with the major dilemma
of our epoch. “The secular democratic state,” he
says, “is where chronological smugness flourishes. Ignorant
or indifferent to the great minds of the past, the leaders of
the secular democratic state are retreating before barbarians
who have hijacked monotheism to their cause.” They pray
five times a day. We genuflect ten times a day. We bow with
Obama.
However
one looks at the situation, whatever symbol or metaphor one
uses to clarify our dilemma, one remains with a sinking feeling.
The story of Noah’s Ark is no longer relevant for our
times except as a children’s fable. For the Ark has been
replaced in our consciousness, as it has in our collective destiny,
by another emblematic vessel. The Titanic is foundering. Captain,
crew and passengers have together conspired to set course directly
for the iceberg while irrationally refusing to admit its existence.
The ship of state, having been transformed into a ship of fools,
may not be able to be saved, hauled into port and retrofitted.
Nevertheless, our only recourse is to keep pumping in the hope
of deferring the epilogue for as long as possible. Better a
longer time afloat than a shorter time. As the Talmud says,
“It is not upon you to finish the task, but neither are
you free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:21).
One thinks, too, of the motto of William of Orange: “Hope
is not a prerequisite in order to undertake, nor is success
a prerequisite for perseverance.” And that is why I keep
writing, to put off the naufrage for as long as possible.
Writing is bailing. But you’re on the money. On the whole,
we don’t have the stamina, devotion, conviction, assurance,
and sacrificial energy of our civilizational competitor. We
are the Eloi. We are those rabbits in Watership Down
being snatched one by one for the farmer’s supper table
and making up romantic stories to disguise the sordid truth.
A
& O: If your crystal ball were to tell you that Arab culture
will prevail over all other world cultures upon granting gender
equality to Arab women (the effect of freeing up billions of
I.Q. points), would you grant it? If not, why not?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Not. Because it isn’t only a matter of gender
equality, but of shari’a, the summons to kill the infidel,
the amputation punishments, the vast multitude of nano-laws
controlling practically every aspect of ordinary behaviour,
the antisemitism, the firmans dictating conversion into and
out of the faith. Have you read the Koran, the Hadith, the Sunnah?
If you have, you know precisely why I would not “grant”
it.
A &
O: In a recent column,
you accuse Tariq Ramadan of being disingenuous,
of disguising his fundamentalist, anti-West agenda. Couldn’t
Israel be accused of the same: pretending to want peace but
deciding its short and long-term interests are best served by
occupation -- code for unlimited, unrestricted access to Gaza
that would evaporate under the 2-state solution?
DAVID
SOLWAY: That sounds just like Naomi Klein. Come now, what do
you mean by “occupation”? Gaza is an autonomous
statelet that receives thousands of tons of supplies, materials,
medicines and running electrical power from Israel, except when
the crossings are closed owing to sniper and mortar fire and
the Ashkelon generator is under attack. Just last week, another
14,000 tons of fuel, baby food, cooking gas, fruits, vegetables,
poultry, fish, dairy products, sugar, medicines and medical
equipment, clothing, shoes and even animal feed were transferred
into the Strip. At the same time, 781 medical patients crossed
into Israel. And there would have been no “blockade”
of ports if Hamas had not excavated more smuggling tunnels to
import weaponry or received boatloads of arms or started lobbing
rockets into Israel almost immediately after the withdrawal
from Gaza, thereby declaring a state of war. Why allow an avowed
enemy to acquire the means of war or supplement his existing
arsenal? Can people not see this? Are they blind? Peace is in
Israel’s interests and that is exactly what it was hoping
for when it disengaged from Gaza and left its greenhouses intact,
to assist Gaza in becoming a viable economic and self-sustaining
entity. Instead, the greenhouses were demolished by Hamas and
since that fateful moment thousands of rockets have exploded
on Israeli soil. And why, if Israel had been rewarded with the
peace it sought after disengagement, would it have needed “unlimited,
unrestricted access” to Gaza? What for? And why, for that
matter, was a fellow Muslim nation, Egypt, which obviously has
far more in common with Gaza than does Israel, not cited by
the Press and the busybody NGOs for refusing to provision the
Gazans—until it saw the light and began erecting a 30-foot
steel barrier at the border? As for the West Bank, according
to international jurisprudence flowing from the San Remo Conference
of 1920—which is still invariant law—and the unpleasant
fact of Arab invasions, these territories are not “occupied”
but “disputed.” Moreover, Israel’s presence
in the West Bank amounts to 6% of the total territory, and as
Abbas and his cohorts well know, should the Israelis pull out
entirely, dismantle all the checkpoints and refrain from beagling
for terrorists, the West Bank would fall to Hamas in short order.
A &
O: Your criticism of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein et al
is that they are relentless in their negative criticism of Israel,
when it’s impossible for one side to be always right and
the other side always wrong. As an Israel defender, couldn’t
you be accused of the same, of refusing to criticize Israel
even when you privately believe criticism is warranted?
DAVID
SOLWAY: My dear editor, I would be grateful if you would advise
A & O’s readers, or at least those from whom
you have culled these questions, to consult some of the chapters
of my recently published book, Hear, O Israel! I believe
the criticisms of Israel they will find there, of many of its
politicos and the policies they have adopted, as well as of
the Israeli media, are pretty well as withering as it gets.
And these criticisms are not private but unabashedly public,
though I assume a different standpoint from the shameful prevarications
of Chomsky and Klein et al, whom I have also deconstructed.
A &
O: An Israeli religious organization funded and disseminated
the production of "Third Jihad" in the election year
of 2008, to "educate" Americans to the "secret
agenda" of Islam. If a similar project were funded by a
Saudi religious organization it would considered anti-Semitic
hate speech. Is there a double standard?
DAVID
SOLWAY: This project, intended to sabotage the West and deligitimatize
Israel, is already funded, mainly by Saudi Arabian petrodollars,
and it is ubiquitous. No “if” about it. It is everywhere,
in the universities, the Middle East departments, the publishing
trade, the mosques, the NGOs, the United Nations, the media,
you name it. Why, even Fox News has partially surrendered, now
that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has bought NewsCorp stock. So
let’s not get heated about some puny Israeli organization
with the approximate influence of a gnat.
A &
O: You often quote (cherry pick) from the Koran, where it incites
hatred against Jews. Since most religions are either explicitly
or implicitly exclusionary, in the spirit of fairness (objective
journalism), shouldn’t you make mention of The Torah,
where it commands its followers to commit 'genocide' on the
Amalek (Arabian tribe). 1 Samuel: 15:2-2 “Thus
says the Lord of hosts, I will punish Amalek for what he did
to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he
was coming up from Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and utterly
destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death
both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and
donkey,” (1 Samuel 15:2-3).
http://www.malkadrucker.com/amalek.html
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/beliefs/Issues/War_and_Peace/Combat_and_Conflict/Types_of_War/Genocide.shtml
DAVID
SOLWAY: The only thing I cherry-pick is cherries. Textually,
I read what is there on the page, and on page after page, for
that matter. But you are right to bring up Amalek. This is an
issue that has troubled Jewish scholars for centuries and many
have tried to reinterpret, macerate or contextualize the divine
command, with what success I can’t say. I regret that
it forms part of the Hebrew scripture. At the same time, let
me point out the following. The Amalek passage constitutes a
miniscule portion of the Torah and almost nobody acts upon it,
except the occasional stray madman. By contrast, the summons
to violence against the kaffir in the Koran is epidemic and
will be found in surah after surah after surah. The Medinese
portion of the Koran prescribes rather definitively against
the non-believer, the infidel and the heretic. Its proscriptions
cannot easily be relaxed or rescinded, just as the history of
the dromocracies of Islam cannot be scraped away and written
over, a palimpsest of readerly good intentions or ostensible
scholarly impartiality. Moreover, we are not dealing with a
lone cretin here and there but with whole maniples of killers
who emerge from the training camps scattered across the Islamic
world, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, ready to brutalize
and maim and murder, righteous, dedicated and self-justified
by their holy texts. Neither Christianity nor Judaism, with
the exception of numerically minor sectarian groupings, exacts
such total adherence from its communicants. So really now, where
is the comparison? People who insist upon it are like those
talking heads in the American media and like Democratic party
stalwarts who are convinced, or pretend to be, that the real
threat to America comes not from Islamic terrorism, from those
who fly planes into towers, shoot unarmed soldiers and try to
detonate Times Square, but from those apparently dastardly and
obviously teeming hordes of Christian fundamentalists with knives
between their teeth nefariously planning to devastate and subvert
the nation. The sheer bad faith and congenital imbecility here
is not only unconscionable, but almost beyond conceiving. It
is also profoundly disingenuous.
A &
O: You loath the madrassas for inculcating hatred of Jews and
Israel. Why aren’t you critical of Jewish institutions
that teach that Amalek is any Arab or Muslim?
DAVID
SOLWAY: I am. But would you be so kind as to name all those
institutions and specify their numbers? What is their proportion
vis à vis the madrassas? Will you count the apples and
oranges and then make a comparison? Forget the cherries, though.
A &
O: Just as most of the world’s Arabs are negatively disposed
towards Jews, most Westerners are negatively disposed towards
Arabs and Islam. Situate your journalism in this unfortunate
paradigm. Would you expect a Westerner, reading you as you would
like to be read, to be relieved of his prejudice as a first
effect of your opinion pieces?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Reflecting on this question, I confess I’m at
a total loss. Most of the people I know and know of are quite
favourably disposed toward Muslims. So are the mainstream Press
and the TV networks. The CBC is very keen on Little Mosque.
The American networks and even the White House are constantly
seeing psychologically disturbed, usually white individuals
planting bombs who almost always turn out in the course of time
to be Muslim extremists, but one would never have imagined it,
no? Muslim radicals are honoured guests in England and some
are even knighted. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader
of the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, who has approved of suicide
bombing and has promulgated fatwas requiring Muslims to conquer
America and Europe, has been feted in England and elsewhere.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams accepts shari’a.
Tony Blair’s Britain bent over backward to gratify its
Islamic community, knighting the dubious Iqbal Sacranie (who
declared that death was perhaps too easy for Salman Rushdie),
appointing the well-known “Islamist” Nazir Ahmed
to the House of Lords and raising Manzila Uddin (who soft-pedals
Islamic extremism and claims that Muslims “have been brutalised
by their experiences with the police and this war on terror”)
to the peerage, funding Islamic schools, empowering Muslim councils
and re-writing through its Foreign Office the phrase “war
on terror” as “shared values” as a means to
counter terrorists—probably giving Obama the idea to follow
suit. The Bush administration appointed Talal Eid, an imam with
close ties to the Saudi-controlled Muslim World League and a
proponent of shari’a courts, to the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom. Former President of Iran, Muhammad
Khatami, known for the imprisoning and torture of those opposed
to his regime, was honoured by Harvard University where he delivered
a lecture on the topic of—wait for it—“Ethics
of Tolerance in the Age of Violence.” Iran’s current
President and genocidal advocate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was invited
by Columbia University to grace its speaker’s platform—as
historian Deborah Lipstadt commented on her blog for September
21, 2007, “The people at Columbia...have minds that are
so open their brains fell out.” Noah Feldman, a Harvard
law professor and author of The Fall and Rise of the Islamic
State, contributes a long article to the New York Times
(March 16, 2008) defending Islamism and depicting shari’a
as a legal/divine instrument able to “structure a constitutional
state subject to the rule of law.” The Liberal party in
Canada caters to Muslim voting blocs and the NDP boasts Muslim
members. Muslim organizations like CAIR and the ISN are doing
very well, thank you. Tariq Ramadan is a culture hero, lionized
by all and sundry. And this is only the tiny little itty-bitty
tip of the sand dune. The so-called backlash is more like a
tender caress. So please forgive me if I say that I don’t
understand where this question is coming from.
A &
O: Besides refusing (so far) to take out Iran’s nuclear
capability, what, if anything, has Israel done in the past couple
of years that you would have done differently?
DAVID
SOLWAY: Lots of things. Israel has failed miserably to carry
out an effective hasbara program, that is, public diplomacy,
the circulation of information, pro-Israel activism. It is the
Palestinians that have won the day here with the clever use
of what Derrida called “black mythology,” in other
words, disinformation, historical falsifications and outright
lies, the kind you see animating those scandalous, campus-sponsored
“Israel Apartheid Weeks.” I would have invested
enormous resources in a hasbara campaign, not only
to apprise people of Israel’s historical and indisputable
legal claims to the Holy Land, but to ferret out the motives
and biographical facts of its enemies, including Jewish antisemites
and anti-Zionists. Take for instance Richard Goldstone, the
author of the infamous UN report on Operation Cast Lead accusing
Israel of crimes it did not commit while effectively exculpating
Hamas for crimes it did. Why did it take so long to discover
who Goldstone really is or was and to disseminate the facts?
Why did Israeli intelligence have to wait for Alan Dershowitz
and others to discover the truth about Goldstone’s apartheid
past as a white South African hanging judge, sentencing 28 South
African blacks to death and others to various forms of torture?
Why is it not being brought to the attention of the world’s
chanceries? Israel should put me in charge of hasbara.
Also,
I would move to loosen and dilute the American connection. Israel
receives approximately $3 billion in American aid annually,
but most of this is funneled right back into the American defence
industry in the form of purchases and contracts, helping to
create American jobs while at the same time starving the potential
of the Israeli defence network and drying up Israeli jobs. Israel
has the technical know-how and the means to build its own fighter
jets—just as Canada was able to produce the Arrow, the
most sophisticated fighter plane of its time, before Diefenbaker
scrapped the project. American pressure?
In
addition, I would be far more agonistic. I wouldn’t have
waited for 5,000 rockets to target Israeli civilians in Sderot
and in other Gaza belt communities over the years. I would not
have opted for the practice of, let’s call it, Olmerta.
I would have initiated an armed response after the first rocket
fell. What would you do if your city block were on the daily
receiving end of mortar rounds and kassams and katyushas? Send
medicines, power and food to the gunners, as the Israelis foolishly
did and still do? Would you have said with Jeremiah’s
cynics “peace, peace, when there is no peace” or
boarded Cat Stevens’ peace train? Told your children not
to play in the streets when they hear an incoming and then go
insouciantly about your business? Or would you take the necessary
action? I’d like a straightforward answer.
A &
O: A nuclear bomb hasn’t been used since 1945, but you’re
convinced Iran intends to nuke Israel, which, in your view,
justifies a pre-emptive strike. Since politicians often don’t
mean what they say, or what is said is intended for local consumption,
how can you be so certain Iran means it, knowing full well there
will be deadly, regime altering, consequences? Or, why doesn’t
the promise of MAD (mutually assured destruction) -- which,
as a deterrent, has worked until now -- apply in the case of
Iran?
DAVID
SOLWAY: As Thomas Sowell remarked in a recent interview, “If
terrorists with nuclear weapons don’t focus your mind,
nothing will.” We should remember that apart from North
Korea, Iran is the only country in the world that has actually
threatened to use nuclear weapons. It has made very clear its
intention to eliminate Israel by nuclear holocaust. We should
not be under any illusion regarding the sanity of the Iranian
leadership, whether we are thinking of its council of infallible
mullahs or its political and military commissariat.
If
Ahmadinejad prevails, the Twelfth Imam, who brings a new “world
order” in fire and brimstone, may not remain in occultation
for much longer. According to the Iranian newspaper Kargozaran,
Cabinet Secretary Majid Doostali has explained that “just
as Imam Zaman’s occultation had a prelude and a main period,
his return too has a prelude and a main period,” and that
Ahmadinejad’s administration “was the prelude to
the return.” According to Rooz Online Iran, the
president of the Islamic Management Scientific Society at the
Qom Seminary School, one Hojjatoleslam Sammameddin Ghavani,
has even proposed the establishment of a “ ‘Ministry
of Waiting’ to facilitate the arrival of the Hidden Imam.
Ahmadinejad has announced that the Imam Zaman would emerge from
occultation within two years—the period of waiting.”
Skeptical
westerners who would pass this off as merely a quaint belief
not to be taken seriously should think again. In Radical
Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, historian
Emmanuel Sivan warns of precisely this menace in his discussion
of Shi’a belief and thought, its vision of an “ideal,
legitimate state to be instituted by its leader,” the
Hidden Imam. Over the course of history, he writes, a “minority
of Shi’ites, quite substantial and dangerous at times,
would move from pessimistic idealism to an optimistic brand
of the same approach—the imam’s arrival is imminent,
God’s kingdom is bound to be brought upon earth by this
messiah (mahdi), and one should help precipitate its descent
by armed revolt.” Ahmadinejad’s intention appears
to be to accelerate the Mahdi’s arrival by initiating
an act of apocalyptic violence. According to many reports, Ahmadinejad
has even widened a boulevard in Tehran to welcome the Mahdi
on his return (Newsweek, The Elephant Bar, InvestigateMagazine,
etc.).
In
a December 7, 2009 interview with Al-Arabiya TV, Ahmadinejad
effectively reasserted his conviction, blaming the United States
for blocking the return of the Mahdi. “We have documented
proof that they believe that a descendant of the prophet of
Islam will rise in these parts and he will dry the roots of
all injustice in the world,” he said. To blithely assume
that Ahmadinejad does not intend to act on his words is sheer,
self-destructive madness. As Louis René Beres, author
of Force, Order and Justice and a respected consultant
on nuclear terror, writes, “Tehran's new nuclear status
could coincide with an unshakable leadership belief in the Shi'ite
apocalypse. Here, Israel would face . . . a ‘suicide state.’
”
On
September 12, 2008, the Daily Telegraph reported that
Iran had transferred sufficient quantities of uranium from its
conversion facility at Isfahan to make up to six atom bombs.
As Ronen Bergman in his shocking 2008 book The Secret War
with Iran makes utterly clear, quoting Pakistani nuclear
scientist Iftikhar Khan Chaudry who was privy to the Pakistan-Iran
nuclear partnership, “It is also apparent that Iran intends
to utilize a nuclear weapon—in the future when a nuclear
weapon would be operational—against the State of Israel.”
The discovery of the secret nuclear installation, called Fordo,
excavated into a mountain near the city of Qom reinforces Bergman’s
revelations.
From
the perspective of Frank Gaffney, former U.S. assistant secretary
of defense for International Security Policy, not only Israel
but all of us are at risk: the Iranian regime “is convinced,
according to its theology, that bringing back the twelfth Imam,
the Mahdi, the messiah figure, is their highest purpose, and
in order to do that, according to their religious beliefs, something
very much like the apocalypse needs to take place. It seems
to me the height of folly to think you’ll be able to dissuade
them from pursuing that end, perhaps by starting a nuclear war.”
He goes on: “If we think we can deter mullahs who are
committed to an apocalyptic, messianic program, we’re
kidding ourselves.” Nor should we ignore the fact that
Iran continues to advance its missile technology. According
to Reza Kahlili, a former CIA agent who infiltrated the Revolutionary
Guards and has just released his memoir A Time To Betray,
Iran is perfecting a new delivery system, the R-27, which brings
almost all of Europe and much of Asia within its range. As if
this were not a sobering enough thought, a report by the U.S.
Department of Defense tabled in Congress on April 19, 2010 warns
that Iranian ICBMs may reach American shores by 2015.
And
think about this. Iran may soon be capable of launching from
a nondescript vessel in the Pacific an undetectable high-altitude
EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack over American soil. Should
this ever happen, the social and economic cratering would be
tectonic. Indeed, the damage to the nation’s electrical
grid following an EMP assault would be catastrophic and the
cascading effect on major infrastructures would result in the
destruction or critical impairment of the financial system,
the communications network, distribution of food and water,
medical care, trade and production and, of course, military
defence. Even Democrats, professional socialists, media appeasers
and left-wing ideologues would find their pensions and investments
reduced to nil, which would at least represent a form of ironic
justice. William Forstchen’s One Second After
gives an accurate account of what the aftermath of such an attack
would be like.
This is not mere fear-mongering. William R. Graham, reporting
from his post as chairman of the Congressional Commission to
Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic
Pulse Attack, testified that Iran has already conducted EMP
missile tests from frigates in the Caspian Sea. Additionally,
Graham draws attention to Iranian military writings that “explicitly
discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely harm the United
States” (WorldNetDaily, July 10, 2008). And Iran
could get away with it since it is almost impossible to identify
the national address of what is essentially an anonymous attack.
Russia too, for example, has EMP technology.
Of
course, there are many observers and commentators who believe
that Iran has a natural right to nuclear development—see,
for example, Max Rodenbeck writing in The New York Review
of Books, Harvard professor Patrice Higonnet’s Attendant
Cruelties, John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Juan Cole
of the University of Michigan speaking on MSNBC, Slavoj Zizek,
now Director of the Birbeck Institute at the University of London,
who argues in an article for the webzine In These Times,
entitled “Give Iranian Nukes a Chance,” that Iran
has a right to nuclear defence against “the global hegemony
of the United States,” and innumerable others.
These
pundits contend that it is time to stop hitting on Iran. They
argue as well that a strike against Iran’s nuclear installations
would result in far more damage than allowing Iran to proceed
toward nuclear capability. George Friedman, lead writer at Stratfor
Global Intelligence, cautions that a military strike against
Iran would be counterproductive, blocking the Strait of Hormuz
and sending oil prices through the roof—in the current
economic downturn, an especially unpleasant scenario. He suggests
the alternative of an alliance between the U.S. and Iran to
contain Sunni insurgence, along the lines of FDR’s compact
with Stalin to oppose Nazi Germany and Nixon’s entente
with China to counterbalance the Soviet Union.
What
Friedman leaves out of his geopolitical equation is the manifestly
irrational, theocratic nature of the Iranian regime. Nuts as
Stalin and Mao may have been, they were still rational actors
on the international stage; the same cannot be said for Ahmadinejad
and his boss, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Reza Kahlili assures us
that Khamenei “has private prayers with the Mahdi. It’s
all crazy talk but they take it seriously.” This is why,
regarding Iran, MAD is a fool’s paradise. This is also
why the strategy of actually containing Iran, whether through
a buildup of regional alliances or the construction of a missile
shield, is fundamentally unsound. It would neither mitigate
the anti-Western shift in the regional balance of power nor
prevent Iran from arming its proxies with nuclear devices. Besides,
just how effective is a missile shield?
The refusal to act with vigor and determination, even if that
means targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities via precision
air strikes, will lead to an irreversible situation in which
we will all be the losers. There is no talking cure possible;
the dialogue process is plainly ineffectual as it putters along
the mottled tarmac of international diplomacy, taking us nowhere.
And as for the much-vaunted sanctions, assuming they are ever
applied, they will be about as useful, to quote Irving Layton,
as “tits on a bull.”
The
inescapable fact is that if Iran gets its way, the world will
be a far worse place than it is at present. Regrettably, what
we have here is a lose-lose situation. But the choice that confronts
us is: which option is least worst. I believe the answer is
clear.
A &
O: For most of your professional life (1970-2006) you were a
literary critic, poet, teacher and author of some 25 books.
And now (since 2006) you rather suddenly find yourself on the
front lines of journalism. If each represents a way of caring
for, engaging (être engagé) with the world, do
you regard your literary life as a necessary preparation for
the more meaningful life you are living now? Is politics, political
journalism the higher calling?
David
Solway: You know, I’ve never made preferential distinctions
between the various categories of writing. I mean, even though
poetry is my first and last love, I don’t set it in some
kind of structural hierarchy. I was always happy or at least
felt I wasn’t wasting my time so long as I was 'writing':
poetry, prose, songs; literary criticism, educational theory,
travel; essays, letters to the editor, op-eds, even fiction
(for which I have little talent—I withdrew the one novel
I’ve written, which had been accepted for publication,
on the strength of my wife’s generally infallible advice).
I don’t consider what I’m doing now “political
journalism,” though it obviously falls objectively into
that niche. It’s more like a cry in the urban wilderness
and an attempt to address the most pivotal questions of the
age, before which poetry, for example, is utterly helpless.
Poetry has no audience, really, except other poets—most
of them politically clueless and unteachable anyway—and
an attendant coterie of belletrists and dilettantes. Poetry
won’t take me where I have to go now. I need to try and
reach out to as many minds as possible since I truly believe
we no longer have the leisure to preoccupy ourselves with ancillary
issues. Not that we can’t do or write other things, but
rather it’s a question of concentration and the proper
use of one’s intellectual resources in the midst of a
world-historical conflict. I don’t feel as if I have a
choice in the matter. The issue is pressing, what David Horowitz
calls the “unholy alliance” between the political
Left and radical Islam must be fought tooth and nail. This is
no joke.
The
Left has always been enamoured of grand historical schemes and
demagogic models of social and political salvation, making common
cause first with the dictatorship of the proletariat and now,
from all appearances, with the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate.
Evidence for this entente, this betrothal, was provided by Cairo’s
Al Ahram Weekly [early May, 2007] which commented approvingly
on the close relations between “the anti-global left and
Muslims,” congratulating the Left for “finally overcoming
its traditional resistance to the cultural conservatism of Islam”
and concluding that “likewise Muslims are reaching out
to the left.” The ad-hoc collaboration between the international
Left and the Islamic Right, or Islamofascism, is the Monadnock
in today’s political peneplain, as we witness the rise
of yet another form of the politics of fascism.
There’s
nothing much I can do about this quandary except scribble away,
for what it’s worth, which means, at least for the time
being, that I must abandon my first and last love. But what
I do now is not really political journalism, it’s cultural
engagement. It’s not a “higher calling.” In
the world as we find it today, it’s simply a more necessary
calling.
____________________________
In conclusion, I’ve done my best to answer these questions
as candidly as possible. But if you’ll permit me to say,
I sense that many of A & O’s readers need
to put some hard questions to themselves, and the sooner the
better.
For
reader feedback click HERE.
By
David Solway:
A
Culture of Losers
Political
Correctness and the Sunset of American Power
Talking
Back to Talkbackers
Letting
Iran Go Nuclear
Robespierre
& Co.
The
Reign of Mediacracy
Into
the Heart of the United Nations
The
Big Lie
As
You Like It
Confronting
Islam
Unveiling
the Terrorist Mind
