Drones and the concept of the "Just War".

SOME CHRISTIANS seeking moral guidance about drone warfare find enough clear teaching in Jesus’ command to love our enemies and respond to conflict with principled, active nonviolence. [I would really like a Bible quote on that. Does this mean that Christians must never fight back against any attack that they must accept defeat, despoliation and slavery at all times? I don’t remember Jesus saying that back when I went to Sunday school. And what is a tactic of principled, active non-violence? It was very useful on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma Alabama in 1965, to make Americans see the error of their ways in the context of segregation. Not so useful at the lip of the mass grave at Babi Yar in the Ukraine in 1942.] Other Christian traditions, seeking to restrict and limit warfare, have developed principles of “just war,” which deem certain acts of war immoral and illegitimate.

The Principles of Just War

 A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.

A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.

A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.

A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.

The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.

The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.

The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

Targeted killings by drones, which have become key elements of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy, fail the test of morality on a number of grounds:

1. Targeted assassinations outside of legally declared wars violate international law, which prohibits a country from carrying out military attacks in or against the territory of countries with which it is not at war. Drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia violate this prohibition.

We are not at war with Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia as nation states; we are at war with transnational groups (the various iterations of al-Queada for example) that say they represent the Islamic Ummah and make war on us in its name. This Jihad is meant to spread the House of Islam to the entire world, and it is the duty of all Muslims to support it in any way they can, either by fighting or donating money so the jihadis can get on with their work. Thus the transnational aspect of this war is presented by the jihadis and not by us. Since it is impossible for the jihadis to give up the duty to pursue holy war the war has and will continue. As it says in the Holy Koran (9.29): “Oh you believers, fight the unbelievers, namely the People of the Book (the Bible) who do not accept the Resurrection and the Recompense (heaven, hell) in the true way, and do not require stopping what God and his Emissary ordered stopped (the drinking of wine, or the eating of pork); they do not embrace the True Religion, i. e. Islam. Fight until they believe, or force them to pay the jizya (the poll tax levied on all non-Muslim men in lieu of military service) humbly and obediently, not grudgingly, so they contribute to the Islamic budget.”

2. They violate the sovereignty of other countries. The government of Pakistan has repeatedly objected to drone strikes on its territory, calling them a “clear violation of our sovereignty and a violation of international law,” but its concerns have been repeatedly ignored.

The government of Pakistan is truly bi-polar on this question, they allow safe haven to Jihadi groups on their territory so they may take on attacks against India and Afghanistan, and they seemed not to notice OBL in his safe house in Abbottabad for years. They only attack these groups, the “Red Mosque” is a good example, when their own power is under attack.

3. There is little transparency or accountability. CIA drones are remotely controlled, primarily from Air Force bases in the United States, with no clear accountability, and with the targeting sometimes based on dubious intelligence.

The accountability obviously is in the lap of the CIA and the Air Force which commands the drone force and has nothing to do with the physical placement of the pilots, if their command post were at Bagram Airbase how would that differ. As for dubious intelligence how does the author know this and how does she judge the quality of said intelligence. Since the Taliban and the Haqquani Network often tell about the death of a high ranking official in a drone strike maybe the intelligence is not as dubious as our author thinks.

4. They set a dangerous precedent. More than 70 countries now possess drone aircraft. While most of these drones are not armed, that is clearly the next step. The covert use of combat drones by the U.S. and the rapid expansion of the U.S. armed drone program represent escalations into a new kind of arms race.

As opposed to what previous kind of arms race, add to that the 100% of nations possessing fighter aircraft has that condition led to random aerial dogfights?

5. They foster a perpetual state of war. Without the risk to troops on the ground, it becomes too easy to use violent force to respond to conflict. “Force protection” has been one incentive to make war a choice of last resort. The use of unpiloted aircraft eliminates that consideration.

See the first note on a perpetual state of war as defined by the doctrine of jihad in Islam. But this is truly a curious concept; the US is to send an expeditionary force into Waziristan to rout out the Taliban forces rather than killing their leaders, by “remote control”? We sat on our asses throughout the nineties as we were attacked again and again, but since it was overseas we could live with it, 9/11 changed all that. If the author cannot see that drone war is a form of force protection there is little hope for her.

6. They kill innocents. Much is made of the alleged precision of drone strikes. Yet whether through faulty intelligence, mistakes, or a willingness to accept “collateral damage,” hundreds of innocent people, including children, have been killed in drone attacks.

Well that’s a new concept, civilians get killed in wars, who’d have thunk it! If you Google the bombing of Hamburg you will see human shaped piles of ash similar to the entombed of Pompey, in all likely hood they were civilians, raised from their beds at night before they went to the war production factories in the morning. War sucks, but there is no way to make it not suck, and as long as the concept of jihad exists this war will go on as it has for the last 1600 years.

7. They promote the concept of a global battlefield. The decision to define Sept. 11 as a “war on terror” rather than as law enforcement against criminals creates an endless and virtually unrestrained war across national boundaries. In a borderless battlefield, “just war” limits become meaningless and exit strategies impossible.

The Jihadis promote the concept of a global battlefield, if you have a problem with that talk to them, though I don’t advise it if you want to keep our head attached to your body. This has nothing to do with crime, this is an ideological, and may I say a theological fight at the deepest level. Of course just war limits are impossible, jihad makes it so!

8. Drones undermine U.S. security. Some have called them “al Qaeda’s best recruiting tool,” as drone attacks anger targeted populations and are a factor in fostering violent actions against the U.S.

This is the final level of nonsense, targeted populations, and these populations are nowhere near as targeted as the populations of Nazi held Europe during WWII. Muslims have only to give up the doctrine of jihad and we would have no problem with them. Till then the war will go on as it has for the last 1600 years.

Drone warfare—conducted by pilots thousands of miles away, disregarding national borders, unregulated by law, and lacking accountability by transparency or oversight—is a neither just nor moral way for the U.S. to respond to terrorist threats.

Duane Shank is senior policy adviser for Sojourners. A version of this appeared on the God’s Politics blog. Funny, I didn’t know God had a politics outside of Islam.

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Source URL: http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/07/whats-wrong-drones

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[4] http://sojo.net/letter-to-the-editor?post=What%27s%20Wrong%20with%20Drones%3F

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Deposing Morsi Won’t End the Chronic Rejection of Secularism in Egypt

July 6th, 2013 by Andrew Bostom | 

at AndrewBostom.org

What the late P.J. Vatikiotis left for Egypt delusionists of all ilks, past and present, to learn:

The [1923] constitution itself proclaimed Islam as the official religion of the state, inevitably undermining its other provisions relating to the rights of citizens such as freedom of worship or belief, speech, and so forth…Until a secular formula of identity and social cohesiveness is found that is acceptable, the religious or traditional one will dominate the social order. And to this extent the question of religion and state will remain unresolved. But that will require a commitment on the part of the leadership to remove religion from the public realm altogether and relegate it to the realm of private belief. However, as long as it insists on identifying itself with the theoretical unity of the umma, the Islamic community, it will always suffer the consequences of the fusion, real or assumed, between sanctity and power

**

The late, brilliant political scientist, P.J. Vatikiotis (d. 1997),  educated at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and author of many important analyses of Egyptian socio-political history, opened his seminal  1981 study, “Religion and State,” with these words:

“Religion and State” is not a new preoccupation in the study of Egyptian or any other society where the faith of Islam predominates.

Vatikiotis adds that this “difficult and largely unresolved problem”—present since the 7^th century advent of Islam—derived from, and continued to manifest, in Egypt, the

…curious “marriage” between a universal religious truth or message and an otherwise very parochial community that held it and fought for it or in its name 

Three decades later, despite widespread euphoria regarding the mass movement which prompted a military coup deposing Egypt’s first popularly-elected President, Muhammad Morsi, and his coterie of Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, the ancient-cum-modern conundrum elucidated by Vatikiotis, remains tragically unresolved within this Muslim-dominant society. Vatikiotis’ sobering and remarkably compendious 1981 analysis also explodes the instantly manufactured (and popularized) canard that Morsi’s ouster somehow “discredited and marginalized Islamism”—a chimerical Western construct invented to avoid dealing forthrightly with mainstream, traditionalist Islam, and its votaries in Egypt, and beyond.

Moreover, across the political, ideological, and cultural spectrum a broad consensus has emerged that Egypt’s dire economic status—exacerbated demonstrably under Morsi’s brief, inept stewardship—was the overriding motivation for the removal of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President, and his administration. Millers and bakers in Egypt, the world’s largest wheat-importing nation, recently warned imported international wheat stocks had “sunk to levels that could reduce the availability of the flour they need to produce bread of an acceptable quality.” One-quarter of Egyptians live below the poverty limit of $1.65 a day, with millions dependent on bread loaves that sell for a state-regulated price of less than 1 U.S. cent per loaf—held constant since 1989, and one-seventh of actual present costs. Egypt’s currency crisis has hindered the Supply Ministry’s ability to make timely payments to the millers, and in April, Morsi failed to secure grain, and a loan from Russia (one of Egypt’s main suppliers of grain) worsening the already dire economic crisis. Egypt’s persistent economic woes have resulted in widespread malnutrition, stunting the growth of 40% of its population, and afflicting the impoverished nation with added healthcare and educational costs, as well as decreased human productivity.

Friday, 7/5/13, alone, in the aftermath of the coup which toppled Morsi, internecine clashes between pro-Morsi and anti-Morsi Egyptian Muslim groups (along with predatory Muslim violence targeting Coptic Christians), killed 46 people, and wounded 1404, according to a local (Al-Hayat) television report. Understandably, such chaotic violence has inspired prevalent sentiments akin to those expressed by Cairene Headwaiter Attef Abdelghalil. Interviewed by Der Spiegel following the coup, Abdelghalil acknowledged that he and most of the staff at perhaps Cairo’s best known teahouse, Café el-Fishawy, had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood due to their perceived honesty and reliability, after 30-years of kleptocratic rule under Mubarak. Now, in the wake of the economic failure wrought by Muslim Brotherhood governance under Morsi, Abdelghalil has no confidence in the “anti-Morsi opposition,” either—or “democracy” itself.

The army should not be in a rush to give up power. Democracy isn’t important at the moment. Only the economy matters. Currently, all we have is chaos. It has to end.

Abdelghalil concluded by arguing that new elections be delayed for 3-years. But Egypt’s interim military caretaker rulers, and their appointed minions, will likely orchestrate a considerably more rapid timetable for drafting a revised Constitution, and holding new Parliamentary and Presidential elections. There seems to be little appetite within the military to govern directly given management errors which occurred during the transitional military rule following Mubarak’s sacking in 2011, till Morsi’s election in 2012. Transitional military rule then was punctuated by abusive custody of civilians, their trial in military courts, worsening crime, and economic stagnation, resulting in public ire directed at the governing generals.

Regardless of the length of transitional military rule, the hopes of some indeterminate—but clearly small—minority of anti-Morsi Egyptians who might favor truly secular rule, remain a pipe dream. General el-Sissi himself, who is overseeing Egypt’s post-Morsi transition, reflects a predominant anti-secular mindset which persists among the Egyptian populace despite the brief, inept experiment in more overtly theocratic Muslim Brotherhood “statecraft.” Robert Springborg, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey  California, recognized for his published expertise on the Egyptian military, notes el-Sissi is a pious Muslim, whose wife is believed to don the full-body covering niqab. According to Springborg, “Islamic ideology penetrates Sisi’s thinking about political and security matters.” Springborg adds, pointedly, that el-Sissi’s devout traditionalist Muslim Weltanschauung—his global “framework,” is the Sharia-supremacist “project.” The Egyptian general hasn't abandoned that endeavor, nor does he wish to see it “destroyed” due to Brotherhood mishandling. El-Sissi, Springborg writes, clings tenaciously to the

…idea that Islam should be a very important consideration in Egyptian national security policy, but this is not the way it’s done…Sissi probably feels to some extent betrayed by Mursi and the Brothers who have mishandled things so badly.

A public gesture consistent with these still prevailing Sharia supremacist sentiments was the demand by Al Azhar Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb, during a televised national address, for release of “prisoners of conscience”—his characterization of several leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, placed under arrest. Clearly, however, the most valid—and irrefragable—evidence of Egypt’s overwhelming, vox populi Sharia supremacist views derives from the published findings of independent polls based on face-to-face interviews with large, population-based samples of Egyptians. These data reveal that 74% of Egyptian Muslims supported making Sharia the official state law of their society; 70% favored Sharia-based mandatory (“hadd”) punishments “like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery”; 80% supported the hadd punishment of stoning for adultery; 88% favored the hadd punishment of execution for “apostasy,” while 67% desired to re-create the transnational Caliphate—whose goal is the universal application of Sharia via bellicose jihad conquests. Lastly, at present, as opposed to a merely “aspirational” goal of Sharia supremacism, female genital mutilation (FGM) is sanctioned by the predominant Shafiite school of Islamic law in Egypt, leading to current rates of this misogynistc barbarity among Egyptian women of 95%.

Vatikiotis lucidly chronicled Egypt’s 150-year experience (through 1981) of failed experiments with secularization imposed by forceful despots, beginning in the 1820's with Muhammad Ali (and including his equally “vigorous” grandson, Khedive Ismail). The process reached its apogee with the adoption of a constitutional parliamentary system in 1923. However, as Vatikiotis observes, the “very small group” attempting to impose this “borrowed secularism” never tried to resolve the contradiction between their adopted foreign ideology and “the native religious tradition.” Worse still, a more fundamental defect in the process emerged, which, unresolved ever since, continues to plague Egyptian society, engendering sectarian violence against the non-Muslim minority Christian (primarily Coptic) population, and bloody internecine conflicts between members of Egypt’s dominant Muslim majority.

Neither authority nor the source of law, despite all the state-promulgated and decreed legislation, was clearly divorced from its ultimate divine source and sanction. The constitution itself proclaimed Islam as the official religion of the state, inevitably undermining its other provisions relating to the rights of citizens such as freedom of worship or belief, speech, and so forth. Thus, such a provision was fundamentally contrary to the conception of a secular state because under the constitution the latter still sought and recognized a legitimacy based on divine sanction. The transcendent reference for authority and political power remained partly divine and not purely secular. The uniformity of individual citizen rights therefore remained unattainable.…[T]he more fundamental problem of the relation between religion and state remained unresolved. It was put in abeyance only to return to plague the Egyptian body politic. A concept of citizenship based on a clearly secular idea of identity for the individual and the society did not materialize, and the alienation of both from the state persisted.

Vatikiotis added, rather presciently 30-years ago, considering the dissolution of Egypt’s recently approved Constitution (a more overtly Sharia supremacist document than its now “halcyon” 1923 antecedent), which accompanied President Morsi’s removal from power:

The absence of a constitution or its precarious state is a measure of the difficulties. As long as Egypt has no political order that is clearly based on a secular consensus, it will remain afflicted by religious and communal antagonisms. Depending on the ability of the state to satisfy the economic and other needs of its public, these antagonisms, though usually muted or subterranean, will surface periodically. Until a secular formula of identity and social cohesiveness is found that is acceptable, the religious or traditional one will dominate the social order. And to this extent the question of religion and state will remain unresolved. But that will require a commitment on the part of the leadership to remove religion from the public realm altogether and relegate it to the realm of private belief. However, as long as it insists on identifying itself with the theoretical unity of the umma, the Islamic community, it will always suffer the consequences of the fusion, real or assumed, between sanctity and power…[T]he Egyptian state, more than any of its [Arab Muslim] neighbors, has over the last 150 years tried to control, loosen, manipulate, and exploit the relation between religion and politics. But it has done that at the expense of a clear, unequivocal option for a secular polity.

A native Arabic-speaking Middle Easterner, educated in Egypt, and sympathetic to the country’s chronic predicament, Vatikiotis nevertheless proffered a concluding unapologetic argument about the roots of Egypt’s inability to emerge as a freedom-embracing, tolerant, pluralistic society. Uninformed delusionists of all ilks—including, notably, former President George W. Bush, as gauged by these remarks, recorded July 2, 2013—would be wise to heed Vatikiotis’ words:

It may be of course, that a secular political order is the peculiar, nay singular, product of a particular political culture, the ethical, philosophical, and moral basis which lay in ancient Greek science and rationalism and Roman law and humanism, rediscovered and developed further by the Renaissance, and the institutional basis of which lay in European feudalism in the Middle Ages. Yet its final consecration occurred with a specific philosophical and institutional commitment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. None of these foundations seems to exist in Muslim societies, including the Egyptian. Their antecedents rejected classical rationalism and humanism, and their more recent precursors simply superimposed a veneer of secularism on the state in an emulative way.

A Few Questions about Right and Wrong…

By The Paperboy June 7, 2013 at The Palookaville Press

A few questions friends…

If the reality of God is a cheat and we are essentially molecules in motion and dancing to our own directionless DNA, then how does a morality gain credence: not just one that suits my own whims, but one that has the intrinsic authority for humans to set their ethical compass by?

In the shadow of the above worldview, how does one move from a non-moral beginning through an amoral process and arrive at a moral reasoning that all should respect?

What is the origin of inalienable rights and do these rights differ from statutory human constructs of normative political convention?

If there is no ontological Archimedean point such as an unshadowed God, then are not all things fundamentally permitted, with the only difference being how many people one can get to assent to one’s vision of the Good?

How does a strictly materialist conception of Man address Evil and how do we ultimately know Good since to possess any universality that would preclude a sense of duty, these antipodes must be emanations of a transcendent moral law—and an unchanging moral law infers an unchanging Legislator?

If we then dispense with this Divine Legislator and His attendant Moral Law, does not the causal chain and the entire edifice dissolve upon contact—–leaving us with naked Human Will and nothing more—Self-Creating Man as the arbiter of all things?

If we are fundamentally honest with ourselves, we must admit that moral values that are derived wholly upon what we arrogantly believe as based in Human Rationalism, must indeed rest precariously on the shifting sands of arbitrary cultural expedience—–a navigational star that is in fact a meteorite.

                                                                       The Professor

Of Moderates and Mu’tazilites: How Islam Wins

Posted By David Solway On June 24, 2013 @ 12:00 am on PJMedia

In an important article ^[1] for FrontPage Magazine, “recovered” Muslim Bosch Fawstin acknowledges that “Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t. But,” he continues, “that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad…they give the enemy cover..indifferen[t] about the evil being committed in the name of their religion…prov[ing] in their silence and inaction against jihad that they are not on our side either.” Whether they know it or not, or whether they are merely indifferent to the activities of the “radical” wing of the religion they profess, or whether some — a very few — are doctrinally committed to the reinterpretation of the canonical literature, “moderates” in their adherence to traditional dogma or even in their obliviousness to the axioms of Islamic orthodoxy are the sine qua non for the perpetuation of Islam as understood and pursued by those who would subjugate the liberal West to their totalitarian creed. And the latter’s understanding of the faith is correct, as David Hayden methodically shows in his masterful Muhammad and the Birth of Islamic Supremacism ^[2], a must-read for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Islam is jihad. There is nothing moderate about it.

We might say, metaphorically, that “moderate” Muslims resemble the innocent and unwitting carriers of a deadly virus. They have not deliberately caused the epidemic of Jihaditis from which millions of their fellows suffer, but they allow it to spread unchecked if they do not recognize the affliction and seek appropriate treatment. For Islam itself is the pretext and warrant for both overt violence against and covert subversion of Western cultural and institutional life, and there is no Islam without the sustaining habitat provided by the moderates. It is in this sense that moderation is complicit with extremism, the former supplying the empirical ground in which the latter can take root. The one is dependent on the other for its viability, substance, and effect. Put plainly, there is no jihadi violence (al-Qaeda, etc.) or internal sabotage (Muslim Brotherhood) without Islam, and there is no Islam without the enveloping milieu afforded by the vast community of believers, nominal or otherwise. “The nature of the problem,” writes British lawyer Gavin Boby, who directs the Law and Freedom Foundation ^[3], “may be doctrine rather than people, but the harsh fact is that doctrines are sustained by people” (personal communication). The logic is unassailable; regrettably, “moderate” Muslims are impervious to it.

There is a temptation to regard “moderate” Muslims of a special stamp — namely those whom Fawstin calls the “very rare Muslim[s] who help us against Jihad” — as contemporary Mu’tazilites and heroes of a reforming faith, who see themselves as allies of the democratic West. The Mu’tazilites were the eighth-and-ninth century sect thought to have struggled for the primacy of reason, freedom of the will, and the value of the individual, and their legacy has been revived by certain Islamic philosophers.  The Iranian scholarly dissident Abdolkarim Soroush ^[4], for example, who has been called the Martin Luther of Islam, describes himself ^[5] as a “Neo-Mu’tazilite,” stressing that “the rationality of their school is extremely valuable” and can “bring new gains [in] using tradition and…extricating ourselves from tradition.”

However, Andy Bostom, erudite scholar of Islam and respected friend, has taken issue with this characterization. The Mu’tazilites, for all their relatively advanced thinking, were a truly nasty bunch and acted as a mihna or an Islamic inquisition against their opponents. Citing the doyen of Islamic studies Ignaz Goldziher, Bostom writes “the Mu’tazilites’ own orthodoxy was accompanied by fanatical intolerance” and “advocated jihad in all realms where their doctrine was not ascendant” (Sharia versus Freedom ^[6], Chapter 30, “Mutazilite Fantasies,” pp. 383-389). 

[I am at present working my way, and it is work, through Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Through the use of Christian, Zoroastrian and Muslim sources he chronicles a many century expansion of the caliphate, an unrelenting period of conquest, pillage, rape, and slave taking. No, not easy reading indeed; though those who think life under the aegis of the Koran was an improvement should take this in large doses.]

It is tempting to see the minim of Islamic reformers as the Mu’tazilites of our time. But Bostom’s research reminds us that in the history of Islam, even the so-called enlightened reformers were zealous and bloody-minded — a fact that we should keep in mind in our search for Muslim confederates today. Perhaps more to the point, such “enlightened” Muslims, even if they are, or appear, comparatively benign and staunch votaries of reason, are acting against their own religion, repudiating aspects of the faith they find troubling or unacceptable yet nonetheless maintaining its larger dimensions intact. They do not speak for authentic Islam but, gored on the horn of a unicorn, they lobby for a figment of the same name that does not and cannot exist. As Fawstin writes, “Islam — not any alleged deviant form of it — means misogyny, censorship, anti-Semitism, homophobia, wife-beatings, beheadings, honor killings, pedophilia/child marriages, murdering infidels, etc.”  Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, concurs ^[7], at least in part, listing such “characteristically Muslim crimes” as gruesome murders, honor killings, female genital mutilation and slave holding as “among Islam’s contributions to the lands of immigration.”

Clearly, Islam is not a “religion of peace.”  And those who subscribe to this belief are living in a Ruritanian ^[8] fantasy. Indeed, some of our modern “Mu’tazilites” — or those whom we may be tempted to regard as such — are effectively working against the usages and traditions of the countries in which they have been lionized. I think in particular of the immensely popular Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic lamprey attached to the body of Western culture and economic life. As I commented in a 2010 article ^[9] for PJ Media, Ramadan, in books like Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, ^[10] “coquettishly advances toward his goal of disarming resistance via the rhetoric of ethical harmony and doctrinal alignment between the various faith communities. He even goes so far as to refer to Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, Averroes, and Ibn Khaldun as ‘European Muslim thinkers … who … confidently [accepted] their European identity’ —  a proposition as staggering as it is absurd. A cursory perusal of Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, ^[11] a kind of Islam for Dhimmis, would quickly torpedo Ramadan’s strange notion of cultural, religious, and jurisprudential consonance.” Other, far more honorable Mu’tazilites like Salim Mansur and Zuhdi Jasser reject outright the sinuous blandishments of Ramadan and his kind, for which they are to be lauded. The trouble is, they have their hearts in the right place and their heads in the clouds. By insisting on their interpretation or re-interpretation of the faith, they reinforce the politico-theological structure in which the barbarians continue to operate and flourish.

The “moderates,” of course, possess their complement of fellow travelers:  leftists, the “progressivist” intelligentsia, interfaith addicts among leaders of Jewish and Christian communities and organizations, a liberal public massively ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history, a politically correct police force, and the parasitic and invertebrate political administrations of practically every Western nation. This is dhimmitude writ large. As Mark Steyn remarks ^[12] of the crowd of bystanders passively filming the butchered carcass of drummer Lee Rigby ^[13] and his ranting Muslim killer in a London street, they are “content to be bystanders in their own fate.” So the “moderates” are not entirely to blame. But if Daniel Pipes, who should know better, is sober in his conviction ^[14]that “radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution,” then the solution is nothing more than a chimera, an intellectual will o’ the wisp, and the battle will eventually be lost. The only effect the moderates and the Mu’tazilites will have is to ensure the inevitable outcome. Fawstin is far more realistic than Pipes when he cautions that “you can’t make a violent religion like Islam non-violent by argument, only by greater retaliatory force against state sponsors of jihad terrorism.” Nor can we make it non-violent by assenting to and underwriting the myth that genuinely observant Muslims are part of some hypothetical Western consensus; the real purpose of this practice is to gratify our self-conception as tolerant and open-minded champions of the multicultural crucible.

Surviving the depredations of an expansionist and aggressive adversary is not like baking a cake and inviting everyone to share in the confection, including our enemies. Bostom concludes his above-cited chapter with a timely admonition from French historian Louis Bertrand, which needs our full attention: “The times are too serious for us to engage any longer in the antics of dilettantism and played-out impressionism.” We are in a war and must seriously set about finding a way to win it. In the last analysis, we will need to give up the delusion that Muslim “moderates” and an elite vanguard of presumably Mu’tazilite paladins will do the job for us.

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Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/moderates-and-mutazilites/

URLs in this post:

[1] article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bosch-fawstin/my-name-is-bosch-and-im-a-recovered-muslim/

[2] Muhammad and the Birth of Islamic Supremacism: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1937668975/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1937668975&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

[3] Law and Freedom Foundation: http://gatesofvienna.net/topical/law-and-freedom-foundation/

[4] Abdolkarim Soroush: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdolkarim_Soroush

[5] describes himself: http://www.drsoroush.com/English/Interviews/E-INT-Neo-Mutazilite_July2008.html

[6] Sharia versus Freedom: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616146664/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1616146664&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

[7] concurs: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/05/muslim-acts-of-beheading-in-the-west

[8] Ruritanian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruritanian_romance

[9] article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/tariq-ramadan-a-viper-in-our-midst-thanks-to-hillary-clinton/?singlepage=true

[10] Western Muslims and the Future of Islam,: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00556DXY4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00556DXY4&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

[11] The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895260131/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0895260131&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

[12] remarks: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/islam-509955-london-british.html

[13] Lee Rigby: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333812/Queen-visits-Lee-Rigbys-barracks-coroner-hears-soldier-identified-dental-records.html

[14] conviction: http://loganswarning.com/2013/05/18/daniel-pipes-has-his-back-up-against-the-wall-admits-logans-warning-is-correct/

Bill Millin, piper at the D-Day landings, died on August 17th, aged 88

From the Aug 26th 2010 edition of The Economist

ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina's skirt.

But Mr. Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn't), then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots' great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the Somme, who had called the kilted pipers “Ladies from Hell”. And it raised the hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Mr. Millin played on June 5th, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was standing on the bowsprit just about keeping his balance above the waves getting rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes even to himself.

His playing had been planned as part of the operation. On commando training near Fort William he had struck up a friendship with Lord Lovat, the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Mr. Millin was short, with a broad cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family's return in 1925 from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He had asked Mr. Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military arrangement. The War Office in London now forbade pipers to play in battle, but Mr. Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest invasion in history”, Lovat wanted pipes to lead the way.

He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr. Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr. Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan' Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr. Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”

Three times therefore he walked up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his feet from mortar fire and the dead bodies rolling in the surf, against his legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes from the rifle of a sniper about 100 yards ahead, noticing only after a minute or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.

He took them across two bridges, one (later renamed the Pegasus Bridge) ringing and banging as shrapnel hit the metal sides, one merely with railings which bullets whistled through: “the longest bridge I ever piped across.” Those two crossings marked their successful rendezvous with the troops who had preceded them. All the way, he learned later, German snipers had had him in their sights but, out of pity for this madman, had not fired. That was their story. Mr. Millin himself knew he wasn't going to die. Piping was too enjoyable, as he had discovered in the Boys' Brigade band and all through his short army career. And piping protected him.

The Nut-Brown Maiden

The pipes themselves were less lucky, injured by shrapnel as he dived into a ditch. He could still play them, but four days later they took a direct hit on the chanter and the drone when he had laid them down in the grass, and that was that. The last tune they had piped on D-Day was “The Nut-Brown Maiden”, played for a small red-haired French girl who, with her folks cowering behind her, had asked him for music as he passed their farm.

He gave the pipes later to the museum at the Pegasus Bridge, which he often revisited, and sometimes piped across, during his long and quiet post-war career as a mental nurse at Dawlish in Devon. On one such visit, in full Highland rig with his pipes in his arms, he was approached by a smartly dressed woman of a certain age, with faded red hair, who planted a joyous kiss of remembrance on his cheek.