Kneejerk Imperialists
Karsh, Efraim
BOOKS IN REVIEW to relocation camps now to avoid the unpleasantness of house-to-house searches later on." W HILE SEARCHING for a comprehensive FDR biography to re-familiarize myself with the...
...After the First World War, under the influence of the likes of T.E...
...Well, okay, so those are Democrats, but it is simply undeniable, the editors tell us, that naughty Republicans have been "popularizing name-calling in 30 second sound bites...
...From Mohammed to the present, Karsh traces the ~s~amir ~mperia~ism: A History by Efraim Karsh (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 264 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by Daniel Johnson Muslim dream of empire and discovers a remarkable Daniel Johnson is a writer in London...
...Islam was not a state religion, obliged to co-exist with secular law, as Christian canon law co-existed with Roman jurisprudence, or English common law...
...they are commonly known as conservatives" who have "a hole where their hearts are supposed to be...
...This book, too, is uncompromising, but it has the great merit of refusing to treat Muslims as passive victims, as Edward Said and his followers tend to do...
...To be fair, in the midst of this big glob of crazy there are a few insightful essays from Neal Pollack, Matthew Yglesias, and Eric Zorn...
...No straw men there...
...But his plan to provoke Israel into a pre-emptive war in 1967 resulted in catastrophic defeat, for which he and the other Arab leaders blamed everyone but themselves...
...One cannot but concur with Karsh's conclusion that the Islamist war against the West is "the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire...
...Please, Almond, do not hold back...
...The doctrine of jihad, which entitled Muslims to plunder the infidel, compensated his Arab warrior caste for renouncing violence against the rest of the House of Islam...
...It is going to require rage and activism and perhaps some danger...
...Kneejerk Imperialists C ONFRONTED BY THE THREAT of Islamist terrorism, the West still does not know its enemy...
...It's true...
...Proud to Be Liberal, an essay collection IG Publishing sent along with Derych's tome, seemed as good a place as any to start...
...This failure to take Islamic imperialism seriously has vitiated our understanding of the Muslim world, the history of which has usually been written as a saga of resistance to the West ever since the Crusades...
...The Prophet had no compunction about exterminating the Jews of Medina, after they had refused his overtures and criticized his rudimentary knowledge of the Old Testament...
...Jihad is himself as Like his imperial exemplars, Mohammed saw himself as an absolute ruler, a theocrat who brooked no opposition...
...The "overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds" demonstrates that the history of Islamic imperialism is by no means over...
...But perhaps they are not grinding quickly enough...
...Over time most of the latter became Muslims, to avoid the burdens imposed on infidels, or dhimmi...
...No entrenched oligarchy cedes its power without a struggle...
...Even if the House of Islam won't face up to its own history, those in the firing line would be foolish not to know what they are up against...
...But during the long Ottoman decline, a new Islamic movement arose: pan-Arabism, or what Karsh calls the "Arab imperial dream...
...A S ONE DYNASTY SUCCEEDED another, Islam's theocratic legal code remained constant, providing a permanent religious justification for the imperial imperative...
...Even so, the sobering message of this fine book will be dismissed by many Muslims merely on the pretext that its author is Jewish...
...They are all walking hate crimes, hollow fascists," he rallies back...
...It's not a hole," he revises...
...It's more like an ulcer, a big, fist-shaped ulcer that keeps pumping bile into their bloodstreams...
...Karsh has a combative reputation, having engaged in fierce controversy with Israeli revisionists such as Avi Shlaim...
...He thereby restores some dignity to his subject...
...The critique becomes more expansive in Harvey Wasserman's essay, "Those Who Hate Liberals Hate America," wherein he presents self-evident truths such as, "The real reason right-wingers hate America is because it was born of the Enlightenment," the Bill of Rights was the "ultimate liberal screed," and Alexander Hamilton is more a liberal hero than conservative hero because he "indulged in a Clinton-esque extramarital affair...
...Efraim Karsh's new book is a scholarly, readable, and persuasive attempt to enlighten us before it is too late...
...We are so tired of simplistic sound bites and hurled epithets...
...Like many of his Muslim successors, Saladin sawjihad mainly as a propaganda tool for his empire-building and actually spent far more time fighting other Muslims than Christians...
...y ET, AS KARSH SHOWS, over the last century the Arab tail wagged the Western dog...
...His thesis is simple: we have not paid enough attention to the history and ideology of Islamic imperialism...
...Though in light of this, as I finalize my fall travel plans, I must remember to ask Derych or any other liberal essayist in the know, "Who, exactly, is supposed to report to detention camps...
...The arrival of Zionist settlers in Palestine, following the Balfour Declaration, attracted first the support, then the violent hostility, of the Hashemites...
...It was not the British, French, Soviets, or Americans who set the agenda in the Middle East, but the Arab imperialists, from Nasser to Saddam Hussein, none of whom would accept the presence of Israel, a nonArab state, in a tiny but theologically significant corner of the Arab imperial patrimony...
...Once his dominion over Medina and later Mecca was an absolute ruler, a theocrat who brooked no opposition...
...S s 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
...a duty incumbent upon all adult, free, male Muslims...
...The argument is that phenomena such as pan-Arabism and Islamic fundamentalism are solely defensive responses to European and American imperialism, the latest example of which is the invasion of Iraq...
...The man who came closest in modern times to embodying Arab imperialism was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the hero of Suez...
...Instead, we have tended to interpret Islam and its imperialist imperative as purely symbolic...
...Mohammed set the Arabs on course to supplant the two great empires of the Middle East, the Byzantine and the Persian, and the caliphs of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties who succeeded him took over many of the imperial ambitions and traditions of the conquered peoples...
...Karsh identifies Faisal, who was briefly king of Syria and later of Iraq, as the man who already in the 1920s tried to further his imperial designs by expanding the local dispute between Arabs and Jews in Palestine into a pan-Arab-Jewish conflict...
...Take, for instance, the following so-not30-second-sound-bite from Steve Almond's essay: "The best impulses of this country, the most generous and tolerant impulses-the adult impulseshave been overrun by a pack of mean children...
...Karsh utterly rejects the notion that Muslim potentates have merely reacted to external forces, Western or otherwise...
...There is every reason to believe that these consolidated, however, Mohammed began to conceive his umma, the community of the faithful, on the universal model of the ancient imperium, with Medina as its capital and all infidels to be converted, enslaved, or at least subordinated...
...Because there was no division of authority between church and state, Islamic theocracy could not be other than imperial and absolutist: there was no possibility of a Muslim Magna Carta...
...Tim Johnson calling out the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party" or Howard Dean comparing Katherine Harris to Stalin...
...The 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW humanity and magnanimity at which Christendom marveled did not prevent this Kurdish sultan from declaring that, after defeating the Crusaders at Hattin, he would "cross the sea.., to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah...
...The fact is, however, that the greatest experts on the Islamic world, from Ignaz Goldziher to Bernard Lewis, have very often been Jewish...
...The so-called Young Turks completed the self-immolation of a state that would have collapsed much sooner if European powers had not propped it up with the Crimean War...
...ing ("George War Bush") in her approach to Bush's liberal education funding policies ("leave no child behind means de-fund public schools and fill our jails to overwhelming with adolescent youngsters...
...One of the right's most effective strategies in the current age of the media has been turning 'liberal' into a dirty word, akin to 'anti-American,' 'Communist,' or even 'Nazi,'" Elizabeth Clementson and Robert Lasner insist in their introduction, perhaps referring to A1 Gore's "Digital Brownshirts" diss or South Dakota Sen...
...W HILE SEARCHING for a comprehensive FDR biography to re-familiarize myself with the nastiness of American citizens in stateside detention camps, I decided I may as well take a little peek-a-boo at some of these formidable liberal arguments...
...Islam embodied the supreme law and hence also the state...
...Like his imperial exemplars, Mohammed saw Islamist leaders mean exactly what they say...
...The conventional wisdom is that, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, Britain and France imposed artificial borders based on their own colonial or economic interests...
...Constantly reevaluating and challenging his own assumptions, Almond is brave enough to change course mid-essay...
...Karsh shows how false this narrative really is, by depicting the history of Islam as one imperial adventure after another, beginning with the "warrior Prophet" himself...
...SEPTEMgER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 BOOKS IN REVIEW consistency of language and purpose...
...The philosophical underpinnings of such arguments are so strong one can almost hear the groaning of conservative prejudices beneath them, strained to the breaking point as gears in conservative heads grind leftward...
...It requires them to strive to overcome the "House of War," as the non-Islamic world is known...
...Yet few experts have taken such declarations by modern Islamists at face value...
...Justifying the attacks of 9/11, Osama bin Laden echoed the Prophet's farewell address to his followers in 632: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah.'" In his letter to President Bush earlier this year, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited the American people to embrace Islam...
...The Koran's hateful depictions of the Jews as treacherous and deceitful, which have been used to justify modern Islamic antiSemitism, are the legacy of this primordial act of religious persecution...
...In their turn, later invaders such as the Turks, Mongols, and Tatars were converted and absorbed...
...Initially, Karsh argues, Mohammed established a tribal religion, designed to differentiate the Quraish Arab clan based in Mecca from other monotheists--Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian...
...The Ottoman Turks ruled "the last great Islamic empire" for several centuries, combining in one imperial office the religious and temporal roles of caliph and sultan...
...Karsh shows the consequence of this well in the ease of Islam's most celebrated warrior, Saladin...
...This is going to require more than love and hope and good intentions," Almond writes...
...The Prophet had no compunction about exterminating the Jews of Medina...
...But these are but small islands of left ideas in a sea ofA1 Sharpton-esque bons mot& such as Mark Green's casting of"the Party of CEOs versus the Party for Children" or cartoonist Jen Sorensen's four panels depicting a (literally) firebreathing conservative ("Chairman of the Archaic Values Coalition") attacking along-sufferingwonkish Democratic congressman named Dan Doormat or Blanche Wiesen Cook's refreshing lack of name call"One of the right's most effective strategies in the current age of the media has been turning 'liberal' into a dirty word...
...Lawrence, European powers were again persuaded to sponsor the imperial ambitions of a Muslim dynasty: this time the Hashemites, who competed for the thrones of Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq...
...AntiZionism provided the unifying ideology that the fissiparous Arabs needed...
Vol. 39 • September 2006 • No. 7
