The coming Obama implosion

I probably shouldn't call it "coming" - it's already here, and it's not even April yet. For example, Christopher Hitchens takes another hard look at Obama and doesn't like what he sees. In case anyone's wondering if the Obama candidacy is finished or not, see this and this. There's always a certain amount of BS going on with figures at the fringes of any presidential campaign. But the core of this material is published and publicly available. The problem remains, not so much Obama, as the people around him. If the Clinton people are retreads from a moderately successful administration 10 years ago, Obama's people are failed retreads and would-bes from 20, 30, even 40 years ago.

There's not a lot more to say about the angry Pastor Wright. Long-time Obama-watchers were not surprised by the recent flap. Wright, a well-to-do pastor and child of upper-middle-class privilege, even more than Obama himself, is undoubtedly a cult leader captivating hearts and minds with myth-spinning, half-truths, and "hate speech." But take away the race mongering, and you have a successful cult guru not unlike, say, the Maharishi - and not at all like, say, Jim Jones, who took his beliefs far too seriously. After all, Jones committed suicide. Pastor Wright would never, ever do that to himself. Think instead of all those other angry cultists of the New Left and of how privilege has its price: the Chomskys, the Patty Hearsts, the Weather Underground, etc. - all those children of success acting out some weird personal drama and sometimes inflicting it on the rest of us. Mostly, such people need to heed their own advice and start with themselves.

But back to Obama: while not a full-blown cult follower, he is clearly a cult fellow-traveller of many years. The cult beliefs don't at all fit at all his own biography. But joining the cult was a shrewd political move - it allows him to keep one foot in angry identity politics, even if it's personally irrelevant to him, while still selling himself as "post-racial" to credulous white middle-class boobs. If anyone was paying attention, this whole dynamic was brilliantly captured and dissected last year by Shelby Steele.

Unfortunately, the Obama craze will not go away completely until the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. Clinton will almost certainly win it, by a large margin, leaving the Democrats with two candidates: one with a less-than-even but still serious shot at winning in November, and the other with even more limited appeal and his primary vote lead all coming from his home turf, Cook County, Illinois. The question then becomes, how crazy are those Dems? They specialize in self-destruction, and slavery/segregation/race has been their albatross for more than a century and a half: can they shake it?

POSTSCRIPT: For another slant on what's wrong with the Democrats, see here. Hint: it's more or less the same thing that's been wrong with them for a long time.

Mistaken identity

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are running neck-and-neck in the Democratic primaries, but to listen to the media, once you get beyond the horserace aspects of the Presidential elections this year, there's nothing more important than the fact that one candidate is "black" (although it's unclear what that means here) and the other a woman. Those mere facts are supposed to emblematic of something that no one can quite articulate.

There's both more and less here than meets the eye.

Identity politics has little rational basis, although the larger forces that drive identity politics are easy to pick out. While it's supposedly about identity expression, identity politics is really about identity weakness. People with real identities just take them for granted, and their politics is expression of their interests and principles - identity itself plays no direct role. Identity politics is for people who need politicians to mirror back to them something strictly talismanic or symbolic. It asks politicians to boost or create identity, which of course they can't. While identity politics doesn't require it, mixed with the late-welfare-state cult of victimhood, identity politics becomes a powerful expression of resentment. The welfare-regulatory state (including its media wing) encourages victimhood, so naturally we get more of it.

Until the 1960s, the most powerful form of identity politics in American life was the white supremacism of the post-Civil War South, expressed in practical form as the "Jim Crow" system. Unable to take it out on the Federal army or the Union at large, the defeated South took it out instead on the newly-freed and largely defenseless ex-slaves. (The early history of the Ku Klux Klan is testimony to this fundamental fact about the Jim Crow era.) Americans outside the South eventually acquiesced in this system, accepting the proposition that the South was "peculiar" and knew better, anyway - besides being ambivalent about race themselves. Resentment over defeat and despoilation by the North was the prime determinant of Southern politics until the end of World War Two. Even politicians who were conscious of the self-destructive nature of this system (like the young George Wallace) were unable to break with it. Only larger social change, after 1945, could undermine it. The triumph of the civil rights movement, climaxing with the 1964-65 civil rights and voting laws, also marked the end of the South's "different-ness" from the rest of the country. By this point, no one alive was left who remembered the Civil War or Reconstruction, and an end came to the days of Southern refusal to celebrate the Fourth of July (the same day as the fall of Vicksburg in 1863) or Thanksgiving (a New England holiday made national by Lincoln, also in 1863).

The most important contemporary identity politics in American life is the politics of race, although the appeal of race hustling has been fading for the last twenty years; even the mainstream media no longer jump when Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton say something. The most striking thing about Obama is that he's "post-racial." His life is a testimony to the declining importance of race in America in the last generation. OTOH, as a "black" politician, Obama seems to feel he has to play that big Race Politics Wurlitzer, because somehow, he's supposed to. Doesn't pushing those keys and buttons constantly remind everyone of the very thing we're supposed to be overcoming? The Race Politics Wurlitzer has a century-plus legacy, largely destructive, behind it. Wouldn't it be better if Obama just walked away from it? Doesn't he have any other tunes or instruments to play? Of course he does, but as the media inflate his importance beyond his slender national political career as a freshman Senator, playing old familiar tunes on a familiar instrument is tempting - sort of like comfort food.

Hillary Clinton's case is more straightforward. Her political career is built on the man to whom she is married. While she plausibly claims to have feminist beliefs, her career is no exemplar of feminism. The older custom of women occasionally getting into political power by family connections has produced a variety of women leaders - few truly bad ones, and a few (like Britain's two greatest monarchs, Elizabeth I and Victoria) who proved outstanding. Such achievements are real, but they are not feminist. OTOH, figures like Margaret Thatcher are feminist icons, perhaps in spite of themselves. They owe nothing to marriage or relatives.

There's nothing irrational about identity - it just is what it is. But identity politics is inherently irrational, and usually reactionary to boot, no matter how dressed up it is otherwise. It seduces us into a deadend of absurdities and paradoxes.

POSTSCRIPT: Having drafted this posting, I discovered that Christopher Hitchens had a short piece in Friday's Journal about just this topic. It's lucid and sensible, as Hitch typically is.

Chanukah sameach

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah.

Mostly, we tend to think of Chanukah as an obvious and positive holiday. But it's a subtle holiday too, sometimes a little too subtle for some people.

It's the second century BCE, in Judea and Jerusalem, around 167. Since the demise of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, the Judeans (Jews) had lived peacefully and alternating under Alexander's military successors, the Egyptian Ptolomies (who ruled from Alexandria, in Egypt) and the Syrian Seleucids (who ruled from Damascus), dividers of his empire after his death. In that year, a crazy new Syrian Greek ruler named Antiochos IV Epiphanes decided that he was a god and demanded that his subjects worship him. This was a not-unknown expression of mental illness among the Hellenistic rulers, from inbred families, who reigned between Alexander and the arrival of the Romans.* It's not clear if all his subjects complied, but we know of one group who refused.

The Hashmonai'im (Hasmoneans), a Jewish priestly family, revolted against Antiochos and waged a guerrilla war of several years before recapturing Jerusalem and restoring the Temple (chanukat ha-Bayit) that had been defiled by the Greek idols and pig sacrifices earlier forced on the priests. But it's not historically right to overinterpret this moment, although from it have come some hoary myths that never die. It's disturbing to see someone as smart as Christopher Hitchens (a self-styled atheist who is Jewish on his mother's side) repeat them.

It's not true that Jews rejected all that Greek stuff when they defeated the Seleucids, or that their struggle was one of "Hebraism versus Hellenism." The pre-exilic Israelites had already had centuries of sustained, pre-Alexander contact with the Greeks, first from the islands (the Kittim), then later from Asia Minor (the Yavanim).** After Alexander's spreading of urban Greek culture in the late fourth century BCE, Jews had become significantly Hellenized in many ways. In fact, they were Hellenized before, and they were Hellenized after, the 167 revolt. What they were rejecting was religious coercion, as well as reasserting their political independence. The former has had far more and much better impact in the long run than the latter, which just installed the Hasmoneans and later Herod. The Hasmoneans became so Hellenized that they started calling themselves things like Alexander and Jason, which have remained Jewish names ever since. One of the first rabbis listed in the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot has the utterly Greek name of Antigonos, male form of Antigone - as in the daughter of Oedipus and protagonist of the famous play by Sophocles.

And the notion of the Jews, at least that late in antiquity, being "primitive" or "tribal" is preposterous. The Israelites had once been tribal - a thousand years earlier, in the late Bronze Age, when they conquered Canaan. But by the time Alexander arrived in 332 BCE, the Jews had been through tribal federation, centralized monarchy, exile, and the destruction of clan distinctions. By the Roman period, there was little left of tribalism, apart from the caste distinctions of the priests (Levites and Kohanim). By late antiquity, the Jews became predominantly urban, probably the first people in history to be so.

Of course, these Hellenized Jews were observant and didn't participate in the Hellenized pagan religions of the gentile peoples around them. But Greek culture nonetheless permeated everyday life in Alexander's empire (later the eastern Roman Empire). Greek words (like synagogos, sanhedrin or synhedrion, qolar, kan-kan or can, epikomon or dessert, karpas or parsley, kalonymos = kalos nymos or good name, etc.) run to the many thousands in rabbinic Hebrew. We know of many Greek-speaking Jewish authors from that period, although the works of only two - Josephus and Philo - survive more or less intact, mainly because Christians preserved them, for their own reasons.

I am thinking of adding a large naked statue of Zeus to my living room, but that's beside the point :)

It would be silly to deny the influences, in both directions, and the religion of those Hellenized Jews, while different from ours in some respects, in no way contradicted their functioning in a predominantly Greek world, even under later Roman rule. How far they were aware of the Greek high culture is unclear. They knew about Homer and the dramatists; how much they knew about the Greek philosophical schools (the Platonists, the Aristotelians or Peripatetics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans) is less clear. The word Apikoros (Epikoros - Latinized, Epicurus) survives as an epithet for a skeptic or religious scoffer.

Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today comes mainly from Babylonia (Mesopotamia), where Aramaic-speaking Jews lived semi-autonomously under the Zoroastrian Persians. Even there, Hellenistic influences were significant. But those Jews did not have the intimate contact with Greek culture that the Roman-ruled Jews had. The rabbis were impressed most by the beauty and flexibility of the Greek language. Alluding to the Septuagint (the first complete translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, done in the third century BCE), they recalled the blessing† to "beautify Yephet, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem."

The rabbis also had a subtle point to the way they bequeathed Chanukah to us. They deliberately de-emphasized the military and political aspects of the Hasmonean victory, as these proved ephemeral: within a few years, the Hasmoneans had usurped the priesthood and become quite corrupt. It was the religious significance they emphasized instead, as if to say, this is what's really important, the recovery and rededication of the Temple. The military victory was just a means to that end. After the two great Jewish revolts against Rome in the first and second centuries, the rabbis were in no mood to stoke more messianic hopes and military heroics in any case.

Chag sameach!

POSTSCRIPT: Sources?! You want sources, we got sources :)

~ Pseudo-biblical: The Scroll of Antiochus: widely read by Jewish congregations at Chanukah until modern times. It's in Aramaic, which points to composition in Eretz Israel or Babylonia in late antiquity; it is probably based on earlier sources, either Aramaic or Greek. The scroll's nature and provenance have been controversial since it first appeared in the 8th century.

~ Rabbinic: Megillat Ta'anit, a list of days when Jews are supposed to fast and not fast. It's part of the Mishnah, which was originally composed, memorized, and recited orally. Composed in Hebrew some time between the arrival of the Romans in 37 BCE and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, it's also sometimes called Megillat Hashmonai'im and is mostly about matters related to the Hasmoneans.

~ Apocrypha: The two Books of the Maccabees (the nom de guerre of the Hasmoneans), composed in Hebrew and Greek in the late second century BCE. They were rejected for the Jewish canon, but are recognized in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican Bibles as "deuterocanonical"; i.e., not in the Hebrew canon, but added by Christians at a lower level of authority. The first (probably the earlier) is straightforwardly historical, while the second has a stronger pious tinge but tells a more complex story.

There are some later books under the same name, but with much less authenticity and importance.

~ Josephus: The first-century Jewish commander who defected to the Romans during the Jewish war (66-73 CE) and wrote four extant works in Greek, including Antiquities of the Jews and The War of the Jews.

~ Aramaic, Greek, and Latin: These were major languages of the Persian, eastern Roman, and western Roman empires, respectively. Aramaic is a Semitic tongue closely related to Hebrew. Because rabbinic literature was composed mainly in Eretz Israel and Babylonia, it's in a mix of the two Semitic languages. Aramaic is still spoken by a few Christians in Lebanon and Iraq.
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* The Romans themselves had a number of such mentally ill rulers, the most famous being Caligula (ruled 37-41 CE), who also demanded that his subjects worship him as a god. He made the mistake of insulting the Roman Senate by elevating his horse to Senator, and a conspiracy of republican-minded Senators assassinated him.

** There's no distinctive Hebrew word for the Greeks of mainland European Greece, like the Athenians (Attica), the Spartans, or the Thracians. Kitti is cognate to Kition (modern Larnaca), the capital of Cyprus; Yavan (pronounce it Yawan), to Iowon, archaic for Ionia (Asia Minor).

† Genesis 9:27. A Hebrew pun: "beautify" is yaf't, sometimes translated as "enlarge."

Clarification of language

A minor dispute over language has broken out in the blogosphere over the use of the term "Islamofascism." And back in the real world, some objection was raised to "Islamofascism Awareness Week," organized on campuses by David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. At one point, Binah also objected to this term, although on fairly narrow grounds. Christopher Hitchens defends the term here, and I want to register my basic agreement, with some qualifications.

Sometimes such criticism is both patronizing and ignorant. For example, the pathetic and ridiculous Tony Judt has attacked even the use of, not just "Islamofascism," but the term jihad.

Objection here to "Islamofascism" was in connection to the influence European fascism had on secular Arab nationalism earlier in the 20th century. Secular, modernizing dictators like Nasser, Ghaddafi, and Saddam were under the strong spell of Mussolini and Hitler, as were many of the Third World populist demagogues of the postcolonial era. Later, after the late 1950s, they were seduced by Soviet and other types of Marxism. But such secularist, modern ideologies have been in decline since the 1970s and, in the Arab world, were effectively dead by the time Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Hitchens is using "Islamofascism" more as an analogy or parallelism and compares it to clerical fascism, a phenomenon important in Catholic countries from the end of the 19th century until the end of World War Two. Neither created nor approved by the Church, clerical fascism (which is a fair term for someone like Franco) was generally led by more junior and renegade clergy, but mostly by lay Catholics. (Americans should think of Father Coughlin.) Its politics was more strictly reactionary than fascism of the Benito-Adolf type. Insofar as a cross-civilization analogy is possible at all, the shoe fits - on bin Laden, Nasrallah, the Iranian theocracy, et al. The fact that these leaders are often not traditional hierarchs within their religious establishments, but in fact, usurpers and renegades, only reinforces the point.

At a deeper level, all such analogies break down, because we're comparing two different civilizations in crisis, with different histories and different relations between religion and political power. Both claim to represent the Near Eastern monotheistic heritage and both were, in their greatest periods, also strongly influenced by classical Greco-Roman antiquity. But large differences remain. Christianity started as a persecuted minority in the later Roman empire and spread mostly through missions and voluntary conversion. The early Church did fuse with the Roman imperial structure to create what we know today as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Even then, however, "holy war" was not in their vocabulary until the arrival of Islam. (Christians fought wars, but did not think of them as "holy." War was just another bad thing - like sex or money - in a fallen world controlled by Satan.) Jihad has acquired many meanings over the centuries - from a vague notion of defending Muslims or Islam, to "inner struggle" - but its classical meaning is spreading Islam as a religion and Islamic political rule by force.* Christians picked up the idea of holy war from Muslims and from it eventually formulated the Crusades as both an imitation of jihad and a reaction to it.** Christians only abandoned religious coercion after some centuries of religious wars. Most Christian religious violence historically has been directed at other Christians, not at non-Christians. It usually started with attempts to impose a self-styled orthodoxy, often in alliance with a secular ruler who viewed himself as champion of that orthodoxy.

Muhammad, unlike Moses or Jesus, arrived into his promised land, on this Earth, in command of political power and an army. Ideally, spiritual, political, and military leadership in the Islamic world are fused in one person, a caliph or successor to Muhammad. After a few centuries of their own internal conflicts, Muslims found themselves without a single legitimate caliph, but some form of the ideal has remained even until today.

The modern wave of Islamic radicalism started in the 1920s with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. All radical Islamic groups, figures, and ideas today can trace themselves back to that moment. They're not secularizing or modernizing like Mussolini and Hitler. But they represent a crisis of political and religious reaction, as Muslims stand at the threshold of the modern world - a world largely created by their erstwhile rivals, the Christians, with significant pieces contributed by a despised minority, the Jews.† The Muslim Brotherhood and its derivatives, while rejecting the secularizing component of fascism, welcomed its reactionary and antisemitic features. Later on, the Muslim Brotherhood and its derivatives, while opposed to godless communism, were nonetheless strongly influenced by Soviet antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda. People aren't always willing to admit where they pick up things.

With such qualifications in mind, "Islamofascism" is fine - imperfect, but it gets the point across, of violent religious reaction that turns into a brutal tyranny if it acquires power. And the term jihad is not only completely defensible, it and its derivatives are precisely the words Islamic radicals themselves use. There's no reason why everyone else can't.
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* That includes its cognates, such as mujahed, one who struggles or fights. A different word, shaheed, originally the Arabic translation of martyros, Greek for "witness," later acquired the connotation of one who dies in spreading Islam or Islamic rule by force.

** The First Crusade was declared in 1095 by Pope Urban II.

† Although many "Christians" in the West nowadays don't think of themselves that way. Some (like Hitchens) even think of themselves as atheists. But civilizational conflict brings out deeper truths. Even if Hitchens and others like him technically are atheists, they're Christian atheists. Anyone who's spent time in the Middle East will understand: over there, your religion is your nationality - it doesn't matter if you are believing or church-going or not. Many Western people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this fact. Five hundred or a thousand years ago, Western people (all Catholics then, except for a small minority of semi-tolerated Jews) would have understood without even thinking about it.

Charles Maurras, the head of the clerical fascist Action Française before World War II, put it perfectly when he admitted to being an atheist, but added that he was a Catholic atheist.

The falling star of Edward Said

One of the most influential and damaging intellectual trends of the last quarter century - one that still echoes in academic and media culture - was set off in the late 1970s by the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, a superficially serious attack on an entire academic discipline whose history stretches back to late medieval times, with an intellectual pedigree reaching back further to Herodotus. The book simultaneously exhibited shoddy scholarship, execrable writing, and bad faith; while at the same time demonstrating a sharp eye for catching the then-rising academic wave of junk post-humanism: post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism - all later to known to most of us through post-modernism and political correctness.

The consequences have been unrelievedly awful - for academia and general intellectual culture - enthroning a sanctimonious ignorance-cum-PC mythology that rules in certain quarters concerning the Middle East. Based on the undeserved deference paid to him, Said's quackery has been institutionalized in certain universities as "Middle East studies," a PC parody of an older, real academic discipline. The writings of real Arabist and other Middle Eastern scholars against Said - such as those of Bernard Lewis and Martin Kramer - were not enough to stop the spread of the virus.

Dangerous Knowledge, an important new book by Robert Irwin, a prominent British historian, literary scholar, and Orientalist himself, marks a turning of the tide against this ascendancy. The book has received almost entirely favorable reviews (see here, here, and here) - a clear sign that the post-modernist lunacy hatched in academia a quarter century ago is abating. Unfortunately, the entrenched legacy remains. Orientalism, Irwin summarizes, "seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations."

Said's doctored autobiography as a Palestinian refugee contributed to this debacle and helped to delegitimize real scholars and real scholarship. (See here for a free summary and here for discussion.) Said's position at Columbia also contributed strongly to the rise of "Middle East studies" there and elsewhere, a critical component of political correctness. That in turn has led to censorship and intimidation of Jewish and other students, abetted by the usual administrator spinelessness. But as always with the Middle East, "radicalism" also weirdly converges with the "realist" establishment (Baker, Carter), lubricated and backed by oil money.

In reality, Said was from an upper-middle class Egyptian Christian family and educated in Egypt and the US. (Further irony: his family, as Christians, were dispossessed and exiled: from Egypt, by Nasser's revolution in the 1950s.) He later became a successful literary critic who, in the 1970s, re-invented himself as an oppressed Third World peasant and then began shoplifting other people's identities. He created a potent academic cult around himself made up of gullible followers who thought, "He must know what he's talking about - he's one of them." His cult represented an historic failure to tell the truth about Islam and the oppression of non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities in the Islamic world.

Instead, he concocted for the Arab world bogus claims of victimhood as a postmodern layer pasted on a deeper and older layer of theocratic and tribal intolerance. Said's influence validated the suffocating and sometimes violent obscurantism that has engulfed the Middle East in the last 30 years. His ideas have been consistently used as they were intended: clubs to intimidate and strangle free thought. Orientalism caricatures many of the great Western scholars of the Near East of the last few centuries - all of whom probably forgot more than Said ever knew - omits critical facts that undermine Said's argument, and shows a sometimes astonishing ignorance of history and even geography. Instead, the book combines the barely-comprehensible agit-prop of late Marxism with the then-new jargon of post-modernism - and in 1978, failed to anticipate the fall of secular nationalism and Marxism and the rise of Islamic radicalism. Said spent the last decade of his life rationalizing his multiple stories, while spreading a fog of misinformation about the Middle East and pursuing a now-familiar dual career of printing xenophobic nativism in Arabic-language publications, then elegantly repackaging this poison for Western audiences.

That makes Christopher Hitchens' favorable review of Dangerous Knowledge all the more remarkable. Hitchens was a friend of Said and wrongly defended him when Said's embroidered tall tales were exposed. Writing this review not too long after Said's death must have been a painful exercise in honesty and bidding adieu to a documented fraud. Hitchens has emerged as a brilliant critic of the modern Middle East, its intolerance and oil money corruption. (See his earlier 2003 retrospective on Orientalism here.) Said posed as an alternative to this pre-9/11 status quo. In fact, he offered an escapist fantasy that appeals to the historical ignorance and passionate self-hatred of Western leftists. To his very great credit, Hitchens has slowly backed away from the moral squalor of the man and his ideas.

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Is there no greater contrast than with Asia? Here was a clash of civilizations that started in the 19th century, when modern Europe encountered then-declining Asian societies and came to influence or control them, then was overlaid with 20th-century ideological conflicts (World War II, Cold War), sometimes mixed in confusing ways, as in Vietnam (confusing to Asians, not just to us). The rebirth of Asian civilizations, under the impact of Western ideas and technology, is complete, after a seventy-year period of wars and violent revolutions. The interaction of the West and Asia since about 1980 has been peaceful, and the exchange between the two is now extensive. While you still hear occasional grinding noises, the "clash" has been converted into a productive symbiosis, with the two maintaining distinct identities even as they borrow from one another. Only a few relics remain from the war-revolution era: North Korea, Burma, and the Chinese Communist Party (in form only, not in content). Even appeals to traditional Chinese concepts of Confucianism play less and less role in Asia.

The Middle East is obviously different, in a politically very incorrect and devastating way. As someone famous once said, Asia solves more problems than it creates, while the Middle East creates more problems than it solves.* The Middle East no longer forms an important civilization. Take away its oil money, and you have a region as backwards as and poorer than Africa. (For example, the Arab world publishes fewer new Arabic books a year than does Israel, its supposed mortal enemy; it has produced fewer translations in four centuries than Western countries publish from Arabic in a year.) Its powerful mix of tribalism and religious intolerance is what makes the place so intractable, unlike Asia. Lewis' classic essay on the "roots of Muslim rage," published in 1990, still hits the mark.

In place of a public culture based on facts and realistic history, the Middle East is dominated by a phantasmagoria of imaginary dream palaces. Not a civilization either, it is rather the collapsed ruin of one, like one of those decayed grands maisons you see at the edge of an old town. It doesn't produce much beyond oil and, technically, doesn't even produce that. In place of the unraveling foreign policy paradigms of realism and liberal internationalism, neoconservatism has had its day in the sun recently and been given the chance to tackle the issue. There are many things wrong with neoconservatism (that's a whole other discussion), but here I want to zero in on one thing: the false idea that the Middle East is "ripe" for constructive and quasi-Western political change. (Even Lewis, as smart as they come and not a neoconservative, has bought into it.) There's no evidence for this; all the evidence is opposite and virtually screams "No!" The Middle East has been moving away from European-inspired paradigms (liberal democracy, nationalism, fascism, communism) for more than a generation and shows few signs of turning in a different direction.

The decline of the Arab nation-state and secular Arab nationalism has created a void that radical pan-Islam is trying to fill. No factor has contributed so powerfully to the strength of radical Islam than the feeling that it has no serious opponents in the Muslim world. It opposes the existing, largely illegitimate state structure of the modern Middle East, but at the same time, derives major support from those states, such Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

Lacking much introspection or self-examination, hatred in the Islamic world has classically been directed outwards. (The violence directed at apostate, deviant, and lapsed Muslims is a more recent phenomenon.) The broad features of the spread of Islam - conquest, forced conversion, triumphalism combined with a contemptuous rejection of the pre-Islamic past - continue to shape the Islamic world, including its complete unity of the political, military, and spiritual. The contrast with Christianity could not be more complete - its division of spiritual and worldly, its emphasis on inward examination and change, its absorption of the classical and Hebrew past by Christianizing instead of simply rejecting it, its religious violence largely directed inwards, Christian against Christian.

Of course, Mohamed wasn't thinking about these issues in the seventh century. By all evidence, he was seeking to unite disparate Arabian tribes into a super-tribal religious "nation" (the `umma). But he only partially succeeded. The tribal mentality remains - Islam carried it within itself wherever it went by Arab conquest - and conflicts profoundly with the demands and possibilities of civilization. Historically, within a few centuries of their initial conquests, the Arabs demonstrated their inability to rule themselves, and political leadership in the Islamic world passed over to non-Arabs: the Berbers, the Turks, the Persians, the Indians, and others. The intellectual and economic achievements of classical Arabic civilization depended heavily on the presence of the tolerated (dhimmi) Christians and Jews; as they converted under the pressure of economic and legal discrimination, Arabic civilization began its long decline (see Bostom's Legacy of Jihad).

See now why leftists and Islamists hook up with each other? The haters unite with the self-haters - perfect fit! This is a reminder that the real "Other" here is the West itself, in relation to an isolated and incurious Middle East enraged by its own decline and marginalization. For an introduction to this way of looking at things, see Buruma and Margalit's disturbing but insightful Occidentalism.
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* That would be Paul Wolfowitz, in better days, some time in the 1980s.