Progressives Embrace Book Burning

NOTE: What follows is adapted from a personal email sent to ThinkProgress’ Matt Duss in response to an attempt at what amounts to book burning through character assassination and slander.

Mr. Duss:

I have read your most recent posting on my supposed extremism, racism, and what have you. You state at the outset that you wish to continue your “analysis” of the Team B Report on “The Shariah Threat to America” by examining more closely my “extremist” views. In other words, as I pointed out in regard to your first “analysis” of the Team B Report, you apparently view national security “analysis” as an ad hominem exercise. That is to say, the Team B Report was prepared by 19 individuals from different backgrounds, professions and areas of expertise. Your analysis of the Team B Report is to purposefully avoid having to discuss any of the substance of the report by taking quotations from essays I have written to suggest that I have some nefarious agenda.

But, even assuming I, as one of 19 professionals who worked on this report, do in fact have such an agenda, what does that have to say about the substantive material of the report? In order to make your ad hominem attack on me even relevant, you must actually read the report and point out that there are “opinions” contained therein that are either irrational, suspect, or based on false facts. Then, you’d need to have some basis to conclude that those irrational opinions can be attributed to my “agenda,” which you have assumed I must have based upon some purported quotations taken from essays I have written in the past.

In fact, you’ve done no more than the Hamas front group CAIR and other hard-core leftist pundits have done before you – that is, to post snippets of quotations, oftentimes out of context, and sometimes even fabricated, in an effort to complete what you consider a character assassination as an effort to marginalize my work and to frighten others from even reading the Team B Report. It is your version of a book burning.

But you cannot consider yourself either an honest man or a serious thinker. Let’s just run through your “proofs” of my extremism with just the briefest of reproofs.

You begin with my American Thinker book review of Mary Habeck’s Knowing the Enemy. You use a quote to show I have some irrational or extreme view of Islam. Specifically, I write that Islam was born in violence and that for modern reformers to have success in keeping young Muslim men away from the jihad recruiters, Islamic educators and reformers must be able to distance themselves from the early leaders of Islam (Mohammed and especially the Righteous Caliphs and also their lesser successors) precisely because the bellicosity of early Islam is embedded not simply in the culture but in the law.

This of course could be accomplished in many ways, as other religions and cultures have done: through revisionism, rebellion of faith (i.e., Protestantism), or myth. But, the failure to engage the enemy–i.e., those who themselves espouse the enemy threat doctrine by telling us what shariah is–by failing even to acknowledge what the enemy tells us and by mindlessly claiming that shariah can mean anything to anybody, is a formula for defeat. My argument was clear in this book review: because violent jihad is fundamental to shariah as the enemy threat doctrine, we must meet the enemy’s kinetic war with a greater, more effective kinetic response.

Now, the first question that might be asked is whether any of my scholarship and critique in the book review is wrong or lacking intellectual integrity. You don’t address my scholarship at all. Rather, you simply take a few short quotes out of a 7000-word book review as a demonstration of “extremism.” Who is guilty of extremism, Mr. Duss? In fact, this book review was published not only at the American Thinker, a widely read conservative on line journal, but also by the respected Human Events. More, it is actually quoted by the publisher, Yale Press.

A question one might ask of you is: are you challenging the well-documented history and role of jihad in Islam’s founding, its legal doctrine, and in Islam’s growth into the world’s greatest empire? Are you denying the place of jihad in the classic and still extant law of the ulema? If you criticize my work on these grounds, have you bothered to study the work of Prof. M. Khadduri or even the far more obtuse Wael Hallaq, neither of whom would be termed Islam-bashers among their fellow esteemed academia? (See, e.g., Wallaq’s Shariah: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge, 2009) at 324-341, with special emphasis at 328-329.)

Have you read Professor March’s recent study published by Oxford U. Press entitled Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus? In that nearly 300-page study in which he examines shariah to prove his thesis that shariah-observant Muslims can live peaceably (and in a Rawlsian way) civilly in Western liberal society, the very best he can do after some obvious intellectual contortions is to conclude: “The results of this investigation into Islamic foundations for citizenship in non-Muslim states gives us surprisingly strong reasons to be optimistic about the prospects [DY: note these are only “prospects“] for such a doctrine.” (Emphasis added.)

Let me add what Prof March writes just before this admission that he’s at best “optimistic” that maybe sometime in the future Islamic law will justify shariah-adherent Muslims living in the West as patriotic citizens:

This wider justification of accepting a non-Islamic form of rule as legitimate or just is something I hope to study in a future work [DY: meaning it is hardly self evident]. I have thus been very clear from the beginning that a comprehensive doctrine of citizenship in liberal democracies would require a few pieces missing from this study, chiefly an argument for the substantive justness of liberal orders despite their being un-Islamic and a justification of the liberal duty of self-restraint toward the errant, sinning Muslims [DY: he is saying here that liberal democracies are not “just” precisely because they allow individuals to act immorally as long as it is not illegal–a distinction that shariah does NOT make–morality and criminality align in shariah -in theory of course– while they don’t align in man-made secular laws. Governments based in man-made laws recognize that the state must allow some divergence on morality as a form of tolerance]. In addition, some more detailed treatment of the range of Islamic conceptions of the good life and how it can be lived outside Islamic political authority would thicken such a doctrine of citizenship.

Note this last sentence. After nearly 300 pages, the good professor was unable to adequately develop even an academically based shariah conception of the “good life” as “lived outside Islamic political authority.”

Your next proof of my “extremism” is that I criticize President Bush’s “nation building” doctrine “among a ruthless people who believe in a murderous creed falsely labeled a ‘religion of peace.‘” (Also from my American Thinker book review.) You added the emphasis. But the point I make there is one made by both sides of the political spectrum, but in slightly varying, albeit stark terms. Do you suppose the creed of the Taliban is peaceful and the Taliban themselves are advocates of a religion of peace? What about Khomeini’s Shi’ism which exercises substantial influence in Iraq or the al Qaeda aligned groups of Sunni Iraqis? Are these groups not ruthless? What of the Hamas in Gaza? Or, the mujahideen of Pakistan? Or, the shariah-adherents of Sudan and Somalia? Are they bastions of peaceful teachings and practices? No one argues that all or even most Muslims are ruthless or violent, but that is not the critical test of whether a society has a sufficient number of ruthless and violent people to destroy any effort at civilizing the society.

You might be taking the Bush side in the nation-building argument but the fact that I have articulated the stark argument against it is hardly extreme.You next post the SANE Mission Statement. That is relevant you say because SANE is an organization I founded and still direct. You highlight two particular sections. The first reads that SANE is “dedicated to the rejection of democracy and party rule and a return to a constitutional republic.”

Is that to you an extreme statement? Have you not read the Federalist Papers or taken a rudimentary college course in political theory? Do you not suppose that our form of government was a rejection of what was later to be developed in Europe? Our form of government, at least as set out in our Constitution, is not democracy in any Athenian or parliamentary sense nor is it party-rule as in the parliamentary systems adopted in the main on the Continent. Do you not understand the differences between our system of a constitutional republic with the separation of powers (not present in the typical parliamentary system) dominated by two parties historically and the multi-party parliamentary system developed in other Western democracies? You highlight this sentence in order to leave your reader with the impression given by other idiot leftists, such as Richard Silverstein, that I reject “democracy” in the sense that I reject representative government and advocate some form of “fascism.” This is asinine and anyone who has followed my work at even a distance knows it to be so. How can one be for the Constitution in a “return to a constitutional republic” and reject representative government?

The next quote you highlight from the SANE Mission Statement is “So you can know at the start that liberalism (and this includes libertarianism) and Islam are in our sights.” What are you suggesting here? That any critique of Islam (or for that matter Judaism and Christianity) is somehow off-limits? Why? Has criticism of Islam become a taboo subject that only “extremists” will be guilty of violating?

Presumably, this is your way of saying that I would target for criticism even peaceful pietistic forms of Islam as opposed to the institutionally dominant and violent shariah-based Islam. But, given the literally hundreds of thousands of words I have written to the contrary, this impression you attempt to leave by purposefully distorting what I have written is patent for what it is: intellectual prostitution to a cause.

For example, you located enough of my work via Google that one would have thought you could have located the article located here, which states explicitly: “American Muslims who fully reject traditional Shari’a as an all encompassing binding law and political ideology and seek to pray and raise their families peacefully and as fully committed Americans deserve that chance like all Americans.” I have made the same point in countless publications including in my law review article on shariah-compliant finance. The threat is not from Muslims simply or Islam as practiced by any number of peaceable Muslims but rather from the institutionally dominant form driven by shariah’s classic texts and tenets.

Moreover, before you assert that I have some agenda against Muslims qua Muslims, are you aware of my quite public role in representing pro bono Muslim reformers in their efforts to escape from the tyranny in their home countries and to seek refuge in the West? Are you aware of my pro bono efforts in representing African American Muslims suing Hamas front groups like CAIR for fraud? Apparently, your research runs only skin deep and it happens to be the thin-skin of leftists looking to attack someone they do not know or wish to bother to know even though the subject of the attack has a 27-year public history as a litigator and expert on public policy issues.

You next quote is from a legislative proposal SANE published to begin the public discussion that classical shariah fits the definition of criminal sedition. In this legislative proposal, the criminal doctrine was clearly defined in exactly the way seditious conspiracy is defined in the federal criminal code. In other words, we did not propose criminalizing the peaceful Islam you seem to wish to highlight but the violent, shariah adherent form. You link in your piece to a Daily Kos version of our work but you fail to read our actual proposal which never outlawed Islam or Muslims but rather clearly defined the criminal doctrine to be violent shariah and those Muslims who advocate the violent destruction of this country. The Blind Sheikh and others have been convicted essentially for the same crime of seditious conspiracy in recent times.

Moreover, the SANE proposal and the explanation for it is up at the SANE homepage, fully accessible to the public. Yet again, you wish to leave the impression that I would simply outlaw all peaceful pietistic versions of Islam and criminalize all Muslims and further that I have hidden my intentions behind SANE’s membership wall. The facts demonstrate your failure to achieve even a minimal level of intellectual integrity.

Finally, you fault me for harshly criticizing the radical Left Jewish contingent in the West. I plead guilty. As an actual practicing Jew, I have my whole life contended with the fact that the Left’s most radical leaders are overwhelmingly represented by Jews. Alinsky and Chomsky come to mind, to name but a few of recent vintage. And, of course, the well known pattern in the U.S. that finds Jews overwhelmingly voting for leftist politicians and supporting their causes. While you might, as a radical leftist/progressive, embrace those causes, you can hardly deny the fact of the influence of the Jews among you.

But, you write that I “dislike” liberal Jews. This is a manifestation of your immaturity. I don’t dislike fellow Jews (or for that matter, non-Jews) simply because I disagree with them. I don’t in fact dislike “liberal Jews.” I might disagree with them, but “dislike” is a childish term in this context.

Now, I have responded to you. I did not before because you had not staked out a position. Now that you have, as pathetic as it might be, I have. Let’s see if you post it in its entirety.

Update: I realize that I left off your reference to an essay I wrote engaging the issue of race in modern discourse. In your reference, you quote from a prefatory statement I make about the fact that if you even dare to speak about the race issue with any analytical rigor, you are accused of being a racist. I noted in that statement that “one cannot engage in a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights.” But what you fail to say is that I don’t say these are my views; simply, that they may or may not be rational views based upon available facts and that even taking these positions leaves one vulnerable to the race-card.

For example, if Islam is what more than 50% of Muslims in a variety of Muslim nations claim it is–an al Qaeda-like strict shariah–then it would most certainly be an evil religion. If Islam is what the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia claim it to be, would it not be evil–at least in the eyes of Western women?

The reference to blacks and murder in New York specifically linked to an article I had written (and published in the American Thinker here) which analyzed a New York Times story which addressed the Department of Justice statistics that show that blacks in New York are grossly overrepresented among the City’s murderers. Indeed, I point out that the victims in these cases are most likely to be fellow blacks. Would one be irrational to conclude that blacks are more likely to murder (more “murderous”) than non-blacks? To suggest otherwise is to argue that the statistics reported by the DOJ and relied upon by the New York Times are inaccurate.

Moreover, no where in the article do I even begin to suggest that these statistics are explained by skin color or race more broadly, and indeed the article leaves open the why because statistics themselves could never tell us that.

Finally, there are any number of serious legal scholars who would argue that an illegal immigrant is not deserving of the rights granted citizens. The statement “no rights” was clearly not meant literally, but rather in the context of legal residency or citizenship, since a literal interpretation would be an absurdity.

Finally, you quote this paragraph of the racism essay, itself more than 4000 words long, as follows:

There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we ‘know’ it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?

Your point is, as you note in your blog entry, that I “dislike” blacks and women. Let’s assume further that your point is that I am a bigot and a misogynist. The problem once again is that the portion you quote, and it is clear in context as well, is a question. It is not a position. And, it is a point of serious consideration among scholars as well.

That is, if you are going to take the position that our Founding Fathers, men to whom we have erected monuments in our nation’s capital, withheld the most cherished and fundamental liberty in a free society (the right to participate in representative government via the vote) to entire subsets of our population, you must be prepared to answer, Why?

Now, you might simply respond as follows: they did so because they were evil bigoted and chauvinistic men. If so, you still have not answered why they did not recognize the chasm between “democracy” theory and the constitutional order actually employed? Were they also political buffoons? Were they so oblivious to the obvious contradiction? If so, why do we hold them in such high esteem? And, how do we even justify the existence of this nation, which was built on the destruction of indigenous peoples and subsequently developed through the denial of the right to vote to so many?

Now, we know your answer and the answer of your fellow progressive travelers. Your pat answer: America was founded upon evil and in evil. That is why you wish to radically change the country and why you worship “progress” as in Time or History as transcendent. But I was not writing to you and your ilk. Your positions are well known. I was writing to otherwise patriotic Americans who nearly worship our Founding Fathers and founding as heroic and our nation as a great advance for mankind. (This would be the position to which I would most closely associate.) This group must be forced to confront this issue head on. It was to this group that I asked the question. In my world, analysis and penetrating questions are the sine qua non of the quest for knowledge.

You, however, take the question out of context to make it a pathetic statement of bigotry as if I were proposing to roll back the franchise to a pre-Civil War state. Again, this is argument by caricature. You can get away with this on a blog written for other progressives where no one is prepared to actually think for themselves and ask you the questions I have raised here. But in the world of policy, where real lives are affected by real decisions with real impact, this is a dangerous if not fatal approach.