The following is an excerpt from a work in progress, tentatively entitled They’re So Smart Cause We’re So Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century. Each chapter begins with a list of Astoundingly Stupid Statements of the 21st Century that appear in therein. The footnotes are not complete. In particular, Clemens Heni, Schadenfreude: Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/11. The chapter begins with a discussion of the UN Durban conference “against racism” at which Anti-Americanism and Anti-Zionism reached an hysterical peak. I have yet to write that, so I go straight to the discussion of two key responses to 9-11.
Part II, Chapter 4:
9-11:
Fantasies of Peace, Gorging on Schadenfreude
Stupidities featured in this chapter:
“Islam is peace,” President George Bush Sept. 17, 2001
“They did it [9-11], we wanted it.” Jean Baudrillard Nov. 2, 2001
“If we can prevent human suffering and don’t, is that not terrorism?” (Derrida on 9-11)
“True courage is fighting the strongest, and America is the strongest.” French journalist, February 2003
‘As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’ (British Deputy Assistant Minister of Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, 7-7-2005)
“Hezbollah has never been a terrorist organization. I am here, I am here, to glorify the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, and I am here to glorify the resistance leader, Hassan Nasrallah.” George Galloway, London “anti-war Rally,” 2005[1]
“Hezbullah and Hamas are members of the global progressive left… allies in the anti-imperialist struggle.” (Judith Butler, UCBerkeley, Fall 2006, 2010).
“We are Hamas!” London “anti-war” demonstration, 2009
“ISIS is neither a state, nor Islamic” (Obama,
“One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” (Boston Globe)
“Assailants… Attackers… Bombers… Captors… Commandos… Activists…” Various terms other than “terrorist” used to describe the Jihadi attack on a school in Beslan, September 1, 2004
Our editorial policy is that we don’t use emotive words when labeling someone.” (David Schlesinger, Reuters Global Managing Editor, September 2004)
“My goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity,” (David Schlesinger, Reuters Global Managing Editor, September 2004)
Response of POTUS George Bush to 9-11: Islamic Center Washington DC
Of all the extensive archive of responses to 9-11 that deserve inclusion on the list of astoundingly stupid statements of the 21st century, the first two above take pride of place. Let’s begin with the first, stated by the POTUS, George Bush, less than a week after the event, at the Islamic Center in DC. Here is the transcript of his remarks:
Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens. These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: ‘In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.’ The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.
It would be harder to fit more folly into so confined a body of text; indeed, when properly understood, it constitutes a combination of systematic disinformation for infidels and a summons to Jihad for Muslims, all delivered by the leader of the most powerful nation in Dar al Harb, just after a magnificent Jihadi assault on his nation. Given both the content and the wooden delivery, one suspects that this was not written by either George Bush or his regular speech writers, but by a Muslim triumphalist.[6]
Bush assures us:
Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens.
Among the good folks standing next to him was Nihad Awad, a member of CAIR and a vocal supporter of Hamas, and when it came to Israel at least, a fully-committed jihadi (targeting civilians a right of “resistance”). If Ayad Akhtar’s fictional Amir felt a tug of pride at 9-11, what do you think someone who cheers on Palestinian suicide bombing against Israeli children, felt at the sight of the Towers coming down? Did he see them as a civic tragedy?[7] Or payback to the USA for all the indignities its prominence caused triumphalist Muslims?
As for Muslims around the world, the celebrations included not just Palestinians (who threatened news agencies with harm to their journalists in the field if they displayed the footage of their celebrations), but even non-Muslim Arabs, like Lebanese Christians. As Baudrillard’s quote illustrates, 9-11 was a source of unalloyed joy to anti-Americans the world over, a fortiori to anti-American Muslims, no matter what expressions of sympathy came from diplomatic voices. Only the most fantastic, egocentric, reading of reality could believe that Muslims around the world were “as appalled” as Americans. And yet, that is precisely what the Jihadis wanted the kufar to believe, and that is precisely what the POTUS assured us was true.
Which brings us to the second fantasy propounded by Bush in this speech.
These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.
The French intelligentsia has an expression their public figures love to use: “pas d’amalgames” – no lumping. Normally they use this to protect what they consider the “vast majority” of moderate peaceful Muslims who should not be tarred with suspicion that they share the radical beliefs of the Jihadis. But the opposite is more often the case, as here: Bush has made an amalgame of all Muslims, and presented them and their beliefs as mirror images of Western civic religions.
In fact, genuine Muslim sources – Qur’an, hadith, Shariah, and commentaries – take positions that directly contradict Bush’s claims. In the more belligerent versions of this triumphalist discourse, not only does the Qur’an and subsequent literature call for violence against kufar, but there is no such thing as an innocent infidel; kufar by definition “are guilty of not believing in God,” literally (and deliberately) concealing the truth of the Prophet’s message.[8] And no one gains more from these obfuscations than the very Jihadis who need cover. As the former Muslim, Mousab Hassan Youssef puts it: “When the leader of the free world says Islam is a religion of peace, he creates a perfect climate for terrorism.”[9]
President Bush then read out a passage from the Qur’an to prove his radically misleading previous statement about the fundamental tenets of the Muslim faith:
The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.” The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.
They represent evil and war, and triumphalist Islam.
So instead of proving the peaceful nature of Islam, the POTUS reads a passage from the Qur’an which says nothing about peace, but rather focuses on the punishment (evil) that “will, eventually, befall those who do evil.” And what evil is this that will be punished? That which triumphalists find unbearable: people who “reject the signs of Allah and making fun of them.” In other words, this passage, selected for the POTUS’ recital, answers the question above about Nihad Awad’s response to 9-11: it was just deserts for American arrogance, or, as the good Reverend Wright put it in a burst of Schadenfreude, “America’s chickens coming home to roost!”
In other words, this verse chosen to prove “Islam is peace” doesn’t do anything of the sort. It doesn’t even come from the Qur’an’s more peaceful (Meccan) verses (like “no coercion in matters of faith”), but from the (Medinan) verses of the sword. It promises that kufar, especially those who make triumphalist Muslims feel ashamed, will eventually get the evil they deserve.
And 9-11 was a harbinger of those wars of revenge and dominion to come. It coincides precisely with the goal of Da’wah as an element of stealth Jihad: insist that Islam is a religion of peace, deny that the violence has anything whatsoever to do with Islam: “exhibit Islam as a religion of peace and compassion.”
So the President of the United States, most powerful nation on earth, embodiment of the success of modernity, hegemon of a post World-War II period of exceptional peace, center of a vigorous culture that, via transportation and communications revolutions, was filling the whole world with its presence, had just responded to a massive, spectacular, staggering attack in its heartland, by giving a speech that systematically misinformed the kufar – his fellow Americans – and waved the flag of Jihad before triumphalist Muslims the world over.
For staggeringly stupid statements that literally inverted both reality and the balance of forces between an open and tolerant society on the one hand (whatever its flaws), and a harsh and oppressive society on the other, this one, written for and delivered by George Bush on September 16, 2001 at the Islamic Center of DC, ranks among the most foolish and damaging. This was a massive cognitive-war victory for Islam and equally damaging loss for the West.
Baudrillard and the Post-Colonial Left’s Marriage of Post-Modern Masochism with Pre-Modern Sadism.
Which brings us to Baudrillard’s response to 9-11.
One would have expected, in response to Bush’s speech, a loud guffaw from academics who knew the history of Islam and its exegeses of Qur’anic passages. Granted, we wanted our leader to calm the waters of vigilante violence against American Muslims, a small minority, who were not guilty of this terrible act. But nonetheless, one would expect our information professionals to explain the triumphalist world-view of those Muslims who did attack us, as well as those who cheered, openly and privately, at such a mighty blow against the kufar, especially against the most powerful and respected kufar, the USA. One would expect, minimally, that American non-believers would be informed by their own information professionals, about Dar al Islam, Dar al Harb, Jihad, and the laws of the dhimma.
Not at all. On the contrary, both academics and journalists, strove mightily to promote Bush’s speech. Indeed almost a decade later, when Jihad was even stronger than in 2001/1422, the NYT ran an op-ed by Samuel Freedman, praising Bush for one of the few good things he had said as POTUS.[10] Even a conservative like E.J. Dionne could write fondly of this “remarkable speech” in which Bush “stood up for the right of American Muslim when doing so was essential.[11] And everywhere, from the school curricula to the non-reciprocal dialogue groups, to the strictures of Homeland Security intelligence, one finds the affects of this bizarre assertion that Islam means peace and nothing else. Any violence involved? Can’t be Islam. ‘As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’[12]
Not long thereafter, Americans twice elected to office a POTUS that took Bush still further, arguing that Islam is by definition a peaceful religion and that any violence coming from Muslims has nothing to do with Islam and its teachings, and to say so, is to insult the vast majority of moderate Muslims. Anyone talking about various aspects of Muslim triumphalism – Islamism, sharia, jihad, wala-wa-bara – was automatically relegated to the margins of the public sphere, Islamophobes bent on making things worse. Thus, well into the teens, when I speak to audiences, whether public, academic, even members of Homeland Security, most people still don’t know what Dar al Islam and the other key triumphalist terms mean. What more could the Da’wa’ist hope for than kufar who disinform their own about the enemy they face?
Whence this critical, possibly fatal ignorance about an enemy that has openly declared war on our society? There are many answers, most involving some acknowledgment of fear of offending triumphalist Muslims. Here, I’d like to examine one which illustrates less the push of the Jihadis that the pull of a peculiar Western folly that, ironically, works to the extensive benefit of the Jihadi assault on the West.
The day after 9-11, all around the Western world, the shock was palpable, and the sympathy for the victim – the US, 3000 Americans who died, some of them Muslims – was widespread, at least in diplomatic circles. Expressions of condolence and sympathy poured in, even from Iran, even from Yassir Arafat. The notoriously anti-American Le Monde began the later tradition of #WeAre[fill in blank for terror victim] with an editorial entitled, “today, we are all Americans.” In it, in addition to the obligatory digs at the US for giving birth to this devil (Bin Laden), the editorial noted that
any attempt to justify this attack as some kind of war on behalf of the poor third world was to credit the authors of this murderous madness with “good intentions” or of some project where they must avenge oppressed peoples against their unique oppressor, America. It would permit them to claim the mantle of “poverty” – an offense, an injury to genuinely impoverished people the world over! What a monstrous hypocrisy. None of those who contributed to this operation can pretend to want a the good of humanity. They do not want a better, more just world. They just want to erase ours from the map.
Clear. Empirically accurate and morally acute. Most decidedly not stupidly pro-Jihad.
And yet, 12 days later, the same Le Monde ran a piece by Jean Baudrillard, a major sociologist and philosopher (two French terms for critical theorists at the cutting edge of academic discourse), in which he articulated precisely the sentiments the editors had dismissed as “monstrous hypocrisy” only days before.
Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed [sic]; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is [this superpower, the USA] that has, through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination that — unknowingly — inhabits us all.
That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, – this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.
Here the moral clarity of the editors becomes a monstrous hypocrisy of Schadenfreude at America’s suffering, dressed up as a universal sense of offense at the hegemon.[13] At the same time, precisely as Le Monde’s editors had just warned against, Baudrillard glorified the freedom-fighting Jihadis who struck a mortal [sic] blow at the suffocating American hegemon.
It takes a special kind of “malignant desire,” to use Baudrillard’s own term, for someone to be so struck with envy and resentment at the success of another, in this case a historical, civilizational ally in the creation of democratic societies, that they rejoice in that other’s suffering. To cheer the blow to the “hegemon” even when that “other” has been, at least where the self (in this case the French) is concerned, far more beneficent than any earlier hegemon (including France) toward weaker nations or peoples over whom it had a massive military advantage, bespeaks really poor character. It’s the kind of mauvaise foi that Sartre claimed made him nauseous.
But to do so when the force that struck the blow against one’s civilizational ally seeks a cruel, suffocating, genuinely malevolent, hegemony over both that envied hegemon as well as progressives like Baudrillard, leaps over the bounds of bad character into the realm of self-destructive folly. It’s harder to get more foolish than to attack your friends and allies and side with your enemy. And yet that is precisely what Baudrillard did.
And when we examine which response the French favored, between the moral clarity and empirical groundedness of the initial reaction of Le Monde’s editors, on the one hand, and the compulsive, self-destructive “moralizing” Schadenfreude of Baudrillard, on the other, French culture shifted decisively against the US. Nidra Poller, in the US when it happened, returned to Paris a week later only to find that one could cut the anti-Americanism (like the anti-Zionism that began the previous year), with a knife. By 2003, it had reached astonishing heights.[14]
Nor was this limited to France. European discourse was thick with Schadenfreude, fueled by widely believed conspiracy theories about how George Bush and the US government had planned and executed the attack to justify a war against Islam. This hostility to the US in the name of peace and justice became emblematic of both European elites and of the movement that called itself the “global progressive left.” For them, American hegemony, the dominance of an (ironically termed) “Eurocentric” world view, became the great foe of freedom and justice. The post-colonial paradigm, articulated at great length by Hardt and Negri in their book Empire (2000/1421), dominated public discourse. In this reading of global history, Western imperialism in its global capitalist form is the worst, most intrusive force ever, and the US, the most stifling of hegemons.[15]
This post-colonial, anti-American discourse pervaded much of the reaction to 9-11. Alongside Baudrillard, on the same pages of Le Monde, Jacques Derrida, the father of post-modern deconstruction, co-indicted the West as terrorists with the moral equivalence between Bin Laden’s attack, and the West’s failure to use its technology to stop disease and hunger. “If we can prevent human suffering and don’t, is that not terrorism?” (Derrida on 9-11)
Noam Chomsky took this logic still further. America is not as bad as the 9-11 Jihadis, but worse.
The terrorist attacks [of 9-11] were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, the bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the U.S. blocked an inquiry at the U.N. and no one cares to pursue it).
Chomsky himself estimated over tens of thousands of deaths (based on a calculus of who died from lack of medication that the factory would have produced, since only one person actually died in the bombing).[16] Despite what it looks like (and Bin Laden certainly saw it that way), Chomsky insisted that this accusation of Americans wantonly killing tens of thousands of Muslims did not justify Bin Laden’s attack. Nevertheless, Chomsky does the work of the triumphalists in shifting moral reproach from the Jihadis to their victims.
Footnotes
[1] Nick Cohen, What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way (HarperCollins Publishers, 2015). Kindle Edition, 4220-4221.
[2] Durban, the Demopath’s Delight, and the cult of the Martyr “Le petit Mohamed”
[3] NGO Declaration, Durban, September 3, 2001, ¶425; http://www.i-p-o.org/racism-ngo-decl.htm.
[4] David Matas, “Durban Conference: Civil Society Smashes Up,” December 31, 2002 http://www.zionism-israel.com/issues/Durban_anti_semitism.html
[5] Gerald Steinberg, “The Centrality of Human Rights NGOs in the Durban Strategy,” NGO Monitor, July 11, 2006; http://www.ngo-monitor.org/the_centrality_of_ngos_in_the_durban_strategy/.
[6] Composers of Bush speech.
[7] Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced: A Play (New York: Little Brown, 2013).
[8] See the remarkable exchange between Steven Sackur and Amjem Choudhary, when the latter explains this point to the former; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maHSOB2RFm4.
[9] Speech to Jerusalem Post conference, NYC, May 23, 2016; http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/the-son-of-a-top-hamas-leader-just-said-something-that-will-completely-shock-you/ at 07:28.
[10] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/us/on-religion-six-days-after-9-11-another-anniversary-worth-honoring.html.
[11] E.J. Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism–From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (Simon and Schuster, 2016), p. 199.
[12] British Deputy Assistant Minister of Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, 7-7-2005. Londonistan, p. **.
[13] For the German response, see Clemens Heni, Schadenfreude: Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/11 (Edition Critique, 2011).
[14] A host of books on anti-Americanism came out in the early aughts, especially in France: Jean-Francois Revel, L’obsession anti-americaine (Paris: Plon, 2002); Philippe Roger, L’ennemi americain: Geealogie de l’antiamericanisme francais (Paris: Seuil, 2002); Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Ian Dee, 2004); André Markovitz, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Carol Gould, Don’t Tread on Me: Anti-Americanism Abroad (New York: Encounter Books, 2009).
[15] Hardt and Negri, Empire (2000); reviewed by Zizek in April of 2001, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/have-michael-hardt-and-antonio-negri-rewritten-the-communist-manifesto-for-the-twenty-first-century/.
[16] Here he cites estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch. https://chomsky.info/20020116/. For a discussion of Chomsky’s dishonesty in this particular example, see Christopher Hitchens, “A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky,” in Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Nation Books, 2004), pp. 421-29.
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