“Reality-concealing rhetoric and our response to terrorism”

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS on September 11 provoked, immediately afterward, an assertion of civilizational identity and solidarity. A small group of criminals and fanatics did not pose a mortal threat to the most powerful and wealthy societies in history. Still, the collective affirmations of certain Western freedoms and privileges—“we must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion,” Rushdie wrote—seemed a natural emotional reflex at the time. Susan Sontag seemed tactless to many in speaking of the “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric” of “confidence-building and grief management” that resembled the “unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress.” She was attacked for insisting, “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”

Fourteen years after September 11, the reality-concealing rhetoric of Westernism participates in a race to extremes with its ideological twin, in an escalated dialectic of bombing from the air and slaughter on the ground. It grows more aggressive in proportion to the spread of the non-West’s chaos to the West, and also blends faster into a white supremacist hatred of immigrants, refugees, and Muslims (and, often, those who just “look” Muslim). Even more menacingly, it postpones the moment of self-reckoning and course-correction among Euro-American elites who seem to have led us, a century after the First World War, into another uncontrollable and extensive conflagration.

Among the more polished examples of their intellectual rearguardism last week was a piece in the Financial Times by the paper’s foreign-affairs columnist, Philip Stephens, titled “Paris attacks must shake Europe’s complacency. The idea that the west should shoulder blame rests on a corrosive moral relativism.”

It should be said that the Financial Times, the preferred newspaper of the Anglo-American intelligentsia as well as Davos Man and his epigones, keeps a fastidious distance, editorially, from the foam-at-the-mouth bellicosity of its direct competitor, the Wall Street Journal (whose op-ed pages often seem to be elaborating on its owner’s demented tweets). Stephens may not have the intellectual authority of Serge Halimi or Ian Buruma—columnists of wide learning and curiosity who push successfully against the constraints of routine punditry. His stock-in-trade is the technocratic wisdom dispensed at think tanks, foundations, and wonkfests. Back last month from attending a security shindig in Delhi—while Hindu mobs roused by Narendra Modi’s government went on a homicidal rampage—Stephens informed his readers that “Mr. Modi’s India is shaping up as a nation set on remaking Asia’s balance of power.” Experts in international relations, one of the fungible intellectual industries credentialed during the cold war, inhabit by professional necessity a cloud-cuckoo land of fantasy and speculation. Indeed, Stephens seems to float through the same exalted echo chambers in Washington, London, Brussels, Beijing, and Delhi as Thomas Friedman. But Stephens’s somberly elegant prose is wholly untouched by the buffoonery of his New York Timescounterpart, or the loutishness of Britain’s pushy mid-Atlanticists, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson. His response to the Paris killings disturbs because its self-exculpating Westernism increasingly passes, after a decade and more of universal carnage, for serious introspection among the best and the brightest.

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/growing-stupid-together/

posted by f. sheikh

Within hours of the attacks in Paris, the familiar ritual began: the calls for Muslims to denounce ISIS rolled in, as they inevitably do after a terrorist attack by a group claiming to act in the name of Islam.

This is a common occurrence, and Muslims — myself included — are tired of it. We’re tired of being held responsible for the atrocities committed by individuals whose actions and beliefs are abhorrent to us and completely at odds with our values and our understanding of our religion. We’re also tired of people acting as if we haven’t already condemned ISIS, al-Qaeda, and terrorism over and over and over, loudly, publicly,“unreservedly,” and in great detail.

It just starts to get old after a while.

Which is why when people on social media began echoing politicians in the UK who demanded that Muslims denounce ISIS, one British Muslim teenager decided he’d had just about enough of that nonsense, and posted this on his Facebook page:

His post went viral. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King even retweeted his post once itmade its way to Twitter. So did a member of the European parliament:

I got in touch with Kash over Facebook to ask what motived him to write that post. Kash — who consistently addressed me as “Miss Williams” — told me:

It wasnt the views or opinions of politicians that made me respond but the views of the general public

when fridays terror attacks happened which were extremely unfortunate there were only 2 opinions on my twitter time line

the first was of people demanding an apology for what happened which was met by either muslims apologising for the acts that occured or the other view, which was my view of muslims asking why we should apologise as ISIS has nothing to do with Islam?

This isn’t the first time Muslims have used social media to express irritation at being told to “do more” to counter extremist ideology and to apologize for the actions of strangers who have perverted our beliefs and who actually kill way more Muslims than they do any other group. The Twitter hashtag #MuslimApologies went viral a while back (with some unanticipated consequences for yours truly), with Muslims using the hashtag to point out the absurdity of being asked to apologize for things well beyond our control. Some were serious, emphasizing the various contributions Islam has made to the world:

Click link below for full article;

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/21/9770948/muslims-condemn-isis-reaction

posted by f. sheikh