Co-Opting Jihad

 
Islam may be unique among world religions. It appears to be the only one which admits no tolerance, no 'dialogue', no comparison of texts to see what other Holy Books besides the Quran have to say about our journey here and its possible meaning. But to the Muslim there is no other Holy Book, the Quran is the only one. It exists to be recited, not analyzed, redacted, or personally interpreted. Any other use is apostasy and the consequence is death. Death by Allah.

Islam is a rigorous belief system; not for the faint of heart. For more than a thousand years Moslems has fought and conquered infidel lands, wreaking havoc and death in its application of righteous jihad. Civilizations have fallen before its inexorable power. The prospect of death by the sword has stricken terror into countless hearts, has turned more than one fervent soul toward Mecca.

Now, in our time, Islam sallies forth yet again to deal death and destruction to unbelievers, to follow Mohammed's teaching of Allah's will regarding the annihilation of those outside the Quran's teachings. The fierce followers of Allah bring down tall buildings, blow up children, televise beheadings, hide in mosques and hospitals, and stand belligerently astride the universal commonweal of civil and martial law, slashing the bonds of common agreement among nations.

After WWII, Muslims began to immigrate to infidel Europe in large numbers. Once there, they acclimated without assimilating. The Quran says that where they do not dominate, they must live in Dar al Sulh, a temporarily peaceful behavior and mind-set which allows for interaction with the unbeliever until such time that Islam comes to predominate, at which point the infidels can be dealt with in justice and truth. Muhammed's truce with Mecca is the best examplar of this approach.

When the time is ripe, when Allah wills it, Europe will become Dar al Harb, Islam at war, though again this is but a temporary stopping place along the way to Dar al Islam. This is the final destination, the place where infidels will convert, or become subjects under Islam, or they will die. In the perfect Islamic vision there will be no expulsion since the whole world will be Allah's; there will be no fair field that is not an Islamic field, no unclean place to send unbelievers except to the sword. And thus, finally safe from apostasy and evil, will the world be subject to Allah's will once and for all.

This world view is, obviously, a closed one. Absolutist, terrifying to those who are forced to yield, and impossible to turn aside. Except...

...who would have thought anyone would consider tunneling into the cave instead of out of it? Yet the Muslim Boys in London are doing exactly that. Feral and intransigently criminal, the Muslim Boys appear to be afraid of nothing. And they love Islam. But here's the catch for their 'brother' Muslims: it's Islam on the bruvs' terms, not on Mohammed's.

...what makes them unique is that they are so-called "converts", whose perverted interpretation of Islam is central to their identity as killers and criminals. Their stamping grounds are the estates of south London, where they hole-up in safe houses, living ascetic lives in stark contrast to the " blingbling" lifestyle of other gangs.

The beginning of their story, one of deprivation and neglect with its eventual outcome in prisons for robberies, assaults, murders-all the behaviors of the thrown-away underclass young male in Britain-has become commonplace, as has their introduction to Islam as an alternative "life-style." Their 'conversion' and eventual banding together seems to have begun in the jails where Muslims do so much missionary work. The discipline and rigors of Islam have great appeal for those who have known little of either. Thus, less than two years ago, there emerged a group of "hardcore"

Afro-Caribbean "Muslim converts" {who} began violently "taxing" the south London criminal community. Dressed in long, flowing black leather coats, as in the film The Matrix, and initially dubbed "the Taliban Terrorists", these were exconvicts who had been turned on to Islam in prison, and who began to use the austere discipline of Islam to fashion a criminal network with a "higher" purpose.

Their first targets were other criminals - especially local drug dealers and pimps - who were ordered to pay "protection money". If the dealers refused, they were held at gunpoint, often facing the muzzle of a MAC-10.

In the early days, there were about 25 hardcore members, plus 40 " footsoldiers". They had come out of a gang called the SMS, the South Man Syndicate, and now began to rope in other crews, such as The Brotherhood and the Stockwell Crew, evolving into an umbrella crew called the PDC, Poverty Driven Children. To this day, gang members refer to themselves as PDC, regarding the Muslim Boys as a term used by outsiders.

By January 2004, the gang had managed the unique feat of uniting the bitterly divided south-east black criminal-fraternity against them.

The emnity of other criminals doesn't deter them. Nor does police action. One thing which does anger them-mortally so for their victims-are peers who fail to convert to their way of thinking, or who backslide. They are dealt with summarily and without mercy. Forced conversions are a new twist on an old terror; for the bruvs, it's all a part of loyal family feeling. David Cohen, a journalist from The Evening Standard, reports this conversation with "Winston," a Muslim Boy who agreed to be interviewed:

Here's how gang member Winston describes "conversion". "You got to be Muslim to be in our group," he tells me. "If you not down [cool] with Muslim, we visit your home, maybe strip you naked in front of your f***ing mother, we put a gun in your mouth. We give you three days [to change your mind], then, if you not down with it, we f***ing blow...

The remonstrations of imams that the bruvs are not "true" Muslims fall on the deaf ears of the Poverty Driven Children. For the bruvs, the imams are there to serve, and their functions are simple: open up the mosque when told to do so by the bruvs. When asked about his belief in Islam, Winston's description of his spiritual life at the mosque is to the point

... I ask Winston whether he believes in Islam... he prevaricates. "Sort of," he says. "I converted when I was in prison. I found it relaxing, we got better food. Now we all go to mosque together. If I refuse, they blow [shoot] me, innit. I pray twice a day: before I do crime, and after. I ask Allah for a blessing when I'm out on the street. Afterwards, I apologise to Allah for what I done."

Winston becomes angry when I show him the Brixton mosque's denunciation of his crew as "bogus Muslims", crushing their statement in his fist. "F***ing cheek!" he says. "Mocking us. There be retribution for this!"

Islam is learning a bitter lesson in underclass Britain. It is a lesson the Catholic Church learned in Haiti, when the African population subverted Christain saints to their own native religious needs. Try as they might, the Catholic missionaries never prevailed; voodoo and Catholic saints were intertwined in a complicated but completely Haitian worldview. It worked for the Haitians; it subverted the Church. Now, in Britain, the Poverty Driven Children are re-imagining Islam for their own needs.

Unfortunately for the terrorists in Islam, a new generation of jihadists just upped the ante.

Judeo-Christian Values

 
In my previous post, Naming Ourselves, I posed the question: Who are we? In today's Jewish World Review, Dennis Prager has supplied part of the answer: we are the collective embodiment of our common values. Speaking of Christianity and Judaism, he says:

Both religions are based on the Hebrew Bible, which Judaism and Christianity hold to be divine or divinely inspired. Clearly, then, they will share values...

One way to understand Judeo-Christian values, therefore, is as values that emanate from a Judeo-based Christianity. Christians have always had the choice to reject the Jewish roots of Christianity (which, when done, enabled Christian anti-Semitism), to ignore those roots, or to celebrate and embrace them. American Christians have, more than any other Christian group, opted for the latter.

(...) Judeo-Christian values combine the two religions' strengths - the Jewish emphasis on moral works in this world with the Christian emphasis on keeping G-d at the center of one's values and works.

(...) In sum, despite whatever differences they have, Jews and Christians need each other and Judaism and Christianity need each other. The Judeo-Christian values system has become a uniquely powerful moral force. Among its many achievements is that it is the primary contributor to America's greatness.

Read the whole thing: The case for Judeo-Christian values: Beliefs vs Values.

Naming Ourselves

 
Ever since the 9/11 attacks the center-right blogosphere has resounded with calls to name our enemy: Islamic fascism. The Bush Administration is reluctant to do so, preferring as an opponent the more sanitary “terrorism”. It is not necessarily political correctness at work here; for the indefinite future the United States has to make common cause with regimes in very ardently Islamic countries such as Pakistan and Jordan. To include “Islamic” in the naming of our enemy would make the work of our diplomats that much harder.

But there is no denying that we are in a religious war, and that our enemy is Islamic. The enemy has decided to war on us for religious reasons, because we are infidels. Our enemy is Islamic, even if it is not all of Islam, and our enemy is at war with anyone who does not submit to Allah. He is even at war with those fellow Muslims who reject his narrow Wahabbist brand of Islam.

But who are we? 

If we do not answer this question ourselves, we allow the enemy to define us. We are the infidels, the heathens, the agents of Satan, the tools of the Jews, the spawn of apes and pigs, cowards who wallow in hedonistic filth and prostitution. Our enemy has a very clear idea of his adversary.

But who are we? 

We are not only Americans, we are Britons and Australians and Indians and Czechs. We are not only Christians, we are Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and atheists. We speak many languages, though English seems to be our common tongue.

But who are we? 

We believe in human liberty, in the inherent dignity of each human being. We acknowledge the right of each person to choose his own path in life, as constrained by the equal right of his fellows. We do not believe that being born to a particular race, nationality, or sex confers any special limitations or privileges upon a person.

We treasure the accumulation of the products of the human intellect across all time and cultures, and value the thorough education of our young.

We believe in the sanctity of private property, and acknowledge that the right of the individual to hold and trade his property as he sees fit contributes to the common good. We believe that the various forms of consensual government, in which rulers are chosen by the ruled, are, though imperfect, the best models for a humane polity that have yet been devised.

But who are we? 

We are people who never deliberately inflict torture and death upon innocent civilians. We are people who do not believe that God directs us to behead a helpless victim and record the act on video. We are people who do not blow up a busload of children to make a political point or express a grievance. We are people who do not find in indiscriminate slaughter of fellow humans any kind of political solution.

We are a humane people, one that goes the extra mile to accommodate those with whom we disagree. We are also a people who, when our children are threatened with harm, respond with unprecedented, unquenchable, and tireless ferocity.

But who are we?
 

It's Steam Engine Time

In my most recent post, The Enemy Within, Part III, I explored the ways in which religion and science have parted company, and the resulting emergence of the religion of Orthodox Secularism. In today's Jewish World Review, Cal Thomas takes on the same issue:

Historically, Christians dominated the professions, not solely by force of law, but by the power of their ideas and example... What happened to rob music, philosophy, law and science of such great thoughts and expressions? In part it was preaching that asserted engagement with "the world" would taint the believer and so it was best to separate one's self from its "corrupting" influence. The result has been similar to what happens when a feeding tube is removed from a comatose person. The patient starves to death.

Culture is starving because too many with a worldview that differs from the prevailing one have withdrawn their nurturing influence. It doesn't help when such people are persuaded it is better to criticize institutions and their products, rather than going them one better.

Read the whole thing: Shedding light in dark places.

The Enemy Within, Part III

A Great Reawakening

My last post on this topic left unanswered the question: Do we have adequate weaponry in our spiritual armory to fight this enemy? The enemy possesses a self-righteous zeal born of overweening spiritual self-confidence. Can the West muster the spirituality to counter the mortal evil of its foes?

America is the most religious and spiritual of the advanced Western nations. Although Orthodox Secularism is ascendant in the permanent federal bureaucracy, the media, and academia, average Americans believe in God and attempt to live life accordingly.

Religious belief seems to be good for you: study after study indicates that believers are statistically more likely to be healthy. Suite University reports:

Recently there has been research that shows that those that attend religious services are healthier than those that do not. Observant individuals live longer, suffer less from chronic diseases and recover more rapidly from serious surgery. They also have a more positive attitude toward living.

Given this information, out of self-interest, a rational person would believe in God. But rationality seems to lead people away from religion to the Church of Orthodox Secularism. After all, some of the tenets of the major religions, as revealed in their scriptures, run contrary to modern science and reason.

So reason is not the vehicle for awakening faith; people are converted not by argument, but by experience. St. Paul was not convinced not by the arguments of Jesus' disciples, whom he zealously persecuted, but by being struck blind, knocked off his horse, and later healed miraculously. Elijah convinced witnesses of his authority by calling down fire to consume the holocaust. Prince Gautama thought and travelled and discoursed and discussed, but the light never came to him until he sat down under the bo tree and simply awakened. As Walt Whitman wrote:

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
...Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

Part of the problem is childhood's conflation of God with the image of The-Old-Man-With-A-White-Beard-Sitting-On-A-Throne-In-The-Clouds. An intelligent person will, without even thinking about it, reject the idea of God when it carries with it such atavistic mental baggage. As a child grows up and abandons his belief in Santa Claus, so does the thoughtful person grow up and surrender his childish idea of God. Unfortunately, all too often, our culture leaves him with no coherent replacement.

This phenomenon is exacerbated by the reliance of established religion on scripture. Even without being fundamentalist, even without requiring that the believer accept every word in the Bible as literal truth, established religion, by working through scripture, tends to channel thought into a mindset that is two millennia out of date. This is a conundrum which cannot be easily solved, since abandoning scripture would leave only individual revelation to guide the believer, producing a Faith of All Against All.

And yet there was a time before scripture. Whatever the eternal verities might be, they were there before the first Hebrew scribe borrowed glyphs from the Phoenicians and recorded their experience of the Word of Yahweh; these verities will still be true æons from now when the sun gutters out. Though the scripture itself is likely to be fallible and flawed, since it was written down by fallible and flawed humans, nonetheless, the underlying verities remain.

Perhaps it is this freezing of belief in scripture that has stilled the voice of revelation within the human heart. In the last six centuries our conception of what it means to be human in the created Cosmos has changed so drastically that the received wisdom of the Holy Books can hardly speak to us about the nature of the universe.

But suppose, just suppose, a new revelation could somehow come into the world, the world as it exists now at the dawn of the 21^st century. Imagine a revelation that could speak to the whole of interconnected humanity, one that could withstand the scrutiny of modern science. What form would this awakening take?

Intuition tells us that it would have to be experienced as a fulfillment and extension of some, if not all, of the existing major religions, in the same way that many Jews of the first century could adopt Christianity as a fulfillment of their faith, or that Hindus of the sixth century B.C. could become followers of the Buddha. It would have to available to the whole world, and not just a single tribe, province, or region. It would have to encompass all that modern science accepts as true; after all, the Bible included all the science of its time. A new awakening would address the sensibilities of intelligent secularists, their understanding of what is important, of what is right and wrong, and of the place of human intelligence in the larger scheme of things.

Above all, it would be true. People do not adopt fervent religious beliefs because they are logical, or because they know them to be in their own interests; they come to them because they are completely, unequivocally, and obviously true.

Everyone has a religious belief, whether he is aware of it or not. Every person has a faith of some sort, a set of premises about the nature of reality and his position in it. An absolute atheist has absolute faith in the non-existence of God; minimally, an indifferent secularist believes that the world existed before him and will continue after him, and he believes in a reality beyond the bounds of his senses.

Imagine a colorblind man who says, "I don't believe in this 'blue' you're always talking about. Sure, there are different wavelengths of light, but there's no such thing as 'blue'". How could he be refuted? There is no way to prove him wrong, but the truth of "blue" does exist; I know that it exists, because I have experienced it as "blue".

Mathematics begins with assumptions -- including both postulates and theorems based on previous proofs -- and performs operations on them using a set of shared rules, proving new theorems. Thus, a mathematician starts by defining his terms. Rather than prove the existence of God, we will define Him:

1. Given that I exist, and
2. that other entities exist besides me, and
3. that there are sets of entities in this cosmos which are larger than I am, then
4. God is defined as the largest of all such sets, one which includes all the elements of all the others.

The necessity of proving the existence of God is therefore obviated, and theological mathematicians can then spend centuries deducing His other attributes.

In fact, as a corollary to Gödel's Theorem, the existence of God cannot be proved, nor can God be understood. A complete description or proof of a consistent and coherent system cannot exist within that system. Our mathematics and logic tell us that belief in the existence of God must remain an act of faith.

Not everyone has to be struck blind on the road to Damascus in order to come to faith in God. God exists for me because He is immanent in every moment and every particle of the world around me; I wake every morning to His photons passing through the windows of my eyes, and every night I pillow my head on His darkness to enter the underside of His conscious cosmos. No argument can dissuade me from this knowledge, and nothing can take it away from me.

To quote Whitman again,

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

The world that reveals itself to our senses and our understanding is the process of God unfolding. According to the Bhagavad Gita:

Brahman is the ritual,
Brahman is the offering,
Brahman is the one who offers to the fire that is Brahman.
When one sees Brahman in every action,
That person will find Brahman.

When we in the West awaken to the process, we will find our place in it, and our place is the struggle against an evil manifested in the world. It is, to quote President Bush, "the calling of our time".

Returning Phone Calls

 
The community of unaccredited journalists has entered into the lists once more to do battle with the off-hand treason of a 'credentialed' member of the MSM.

This time it is no light-weight anchor reading someone else's fabrications on the air. Instead the blogosphere finds itself arrayed against the Chief News Executive of CNN, Eason Jordan, who has his own claim to make re: the perfidy of the US military.

This time the setting was the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a panel discussion entitled --with delicious irony -- "Will Democracy Survive the Media." Here, Mr. Jordan

asserted more than once that he knew of twelve journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted.

When pressed to substantiate these claims, Mr. Jordan "seemed to back pedal quickly," even though his assertions were backed up by other members of the audience.

The allegation may be the beginning of a firestorm: this was a public forum and the debate, growing more heated, was also being taped. Even now it is likely being shown on TV across the Middle East. That's bad news for the US, which must attempt to refute his remarks. As the WEF blogger notes, such claims "make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park." However, the outcome may be weighted in the favor of truth since there were present at the panel discussion these men: the panel moderator, David Gergen of Harvard, and U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, a member of the panel; in the audience was US Senator Christopher Dodd.

All three observed Mr. Jordan's " wavering" when confronted on his statements, but they also saw the "passion" in his assertions and the vocal agreement from other members of the audience. More on that in a moment.

Who remembers "The News We Kept to Ourselves"? In this narrative, written in 2004 and printed in the New York Times, Mr. Jordan recounted disturbing stories about the routine torture and sometimes gruesome deaths of his employees. These people suffered because they were CNN employees, under suspicion by Saddam Hussein and his security forces. Mr. Jordan had a decade of memories from his dozen or more visits to pre-war Iraq.

One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

The reader of these haunting events is sure the account will end in a flash of outrage. CNN's chief news executive will tell us how he shouts "Basta!" and removes his new organization from Iraq. Except he never does. Under the cover of his need for "access" Mr. Jordan's CNN stayed on in Iraq until being summarily booted by Saddam Hussein in October 2002. In a CNN story about the expulsion Mr. Jordan proclaimed that "CNN will not compromise its journalistic principles in exchange for CNN access to any country." This new-found Olympian integrity seems to have been generated by Saddam; it did not extend to preventing the torture and deaths of his Iraqi employees in the previous decade. They appear to have been expendable --in fact,were expended. Aa small price to pay for exclusive American 'access' to Baghdad for ten years or more. As the New Sisyphus points out

CNN's continued presence continued to put Iraqis at risk, a risk CNN was self-evidently complicit in. CNN could have reported all these stories and refused to collaborate with a terrorist regime, but instead it chose to remain and to repeat, daily, the sordid lies so familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to lie in a totalitarian regime.

Nothing wrong here. Reports of terror are so many American lies. The people here love Saddam. During the entire run-up to the Iraq war, the nation's leading news network had evidence of the kind of cruelty and torture President Bush accused the Iraqi regime of ("Axis of Evil," what a moron!) and chose to do and say absolutely nothing. This from a network that would go on to hype the criminal activities of a few renegade soldiers at Abu Ghraib as the Worst War Crime of All Time.

Every time a person watched a CNN report on Iraq up til April 2003, that person was being lied to. Every time you watch a report on CNN about Syria, North Korea, Iran or Zimbabwe, you have to know that this is an organization that has proved itself "ready to do business" with murderous regimes in order to file those reports.

WEF calls on Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd, witnesses to Mr. Jordan's perfidy, to

clear up this mess, use your power and authority as elected leaders and make transparent what really happened. You must do this to respect the 12 journalists killed and let the world know how and why. Here is another challenge, and this one is for CNN...What the hell happened?

And New Sisyphus says he

called Mr. Jordan's Atlanta office to "ask him what the hell he was thinking when he was covering up human rights abuses for access, and more, what was he thinking when he took to the pages of the NY Times to admit it.

What indeed, Mr. Jordan? And why did you find it tolerable that Iraqis suffered and died so that you could have access to Baghdad and report a tyrant's lies? By what moral authority do you have standing to accuse the US military in a public forum of "targeting" journalists? You, sir, stand accused by a number of thoughtful people of targeting both the truth and common human decency.

You did not return New Sisyphus' phone call. Perhaps you will do so if the American Congress calls for an appointment.

See you in Committee.

Craven Calumny at CNN

 
At the risk of adding our voices to an already crowded chorus, we protest a CNN executive's repeated portrayal of US soldiers as murderers and torturers of journalists. According to the WEF blog,

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

...Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group).

It turns out that this was not the first time that Mr. Jordan has slandered the American military; last November he accused the military of torturing journalists:

"Actions speak louder than words. The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the US military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by US forces," Mr Jordan told an audience of news executives at the News Xchange conference in Portugal.

Coming from the man who admitted that CNN censored itself in its coverage of Saddam's Iraq in order to maintain its access in Baghdad, this is adding insult to injury.

Like many Americans who spend a lot of time abroad (and especially among Europeans), Mr. Jordan seems to have become accustomed to badmouthing his country with little fear of any consequences. But this time is different.

Hugh Hewitt is right: it is time for CNN to come clean and either present its evidence for these charges, or repudiate Eason Jordan's claims and fire him.

Columbia Joins the Umma

 
By the process of tracing a series of links through the labyrinth of cyberspace a whole universe of meaning may emerge.

First,from a Horsefeathers post, MADRASSA ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, the reader clicks on a letter to the editor from an alumnus to the Columbia Spectator, a letter in which he decries the University community's "silence... in response to a statement about Israelis made by MEALAC professor Hamid Dabashi" in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

The letter writer's excerpt is interesting enough to merit a closer look at the original document. From the Spectator, via a short ride on Google, the traveler arrives at the offending article. The Spectator letter writer had indeed been appropriately "disgusted." What follows here is a particularly malign excerpt from Dabashi's windy (thirty seven verbose pages) account of his journey in Palestine in July, 2004. After a visit of several days, during which time he reports in detail about the numerous "teenage" Israeli military he encounters, Mr. -- sorry, Dr. -- Dabashi is at the point of leaving. He's at the airport, where security is heavy and searches are thorough. Why do you suppose the Israelis are so meticulous about security? This question never crosses the good Professor's mind.

I sat on the edge of the counter and awaited my fate. I looked around me. The place had an uncanny similarity to an airport, but the garrison was a fully fortified barrack, with its battalion of security forces treating all the transient inmates with equal banality. It was not just coloured Muslims (note: Dr. Dabashi is Iranian. No darker than any of the other people there. Check out his picture on Electronic Intifada) like me that they treated like hazardous chemicals. It was everyone. "One," as in our quintessential humanity, melted in this fearful furnace into a nullity beyond human recognition. What they call "Israel" is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their "soul." What the Israelis are doing to Palestinians has a mirror reflection on their own soul -- sullied, vacated, exiled, now occupied by a military machinery no longer plugged to any electrical outlet. It is not just the Palestinian land that they have occupied; their own soul is an occupied territory, occupied by a mechanical force geared on self-destruction. They are on automatic piloting. This is they. No one is controlling anything. Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can perpetrate what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds.

I sat there frightened -- frightened not by any specific danger, not by the massive machinery of death and destruction that surrounded me in that checkpoint and beyond that checkpoint into every nook and cranny of the occupied Palestine I visited, not by any specific machinegun hanging from a thin neck, frightened by the miasmatic mutation of human soul into a subterranean mixture of vile and violence that preempts a human being from the simplicity of a human touch, of a human look, of a human voice. Where did humanity end in this colonial settlement and machinery begin? Is this the reason why Israel as a collectivity is so indifferent to what the rest of the world thinks of it? Is Ariel Sharon accidental or integral to these people? They were not subjecting just me to this sub-human behaviour. They were indiscriminate to names, passports, identities, nationalities. All humans to them were not just potential but actual bombs, with different timing devices set to trigger their explosion at varied, but certain, intervals. How can a people live with such fear without becoming fear incarnate? Not a single sound of laughter, not a single sight of a leisurely walk, no one crying for a departing loved one, no one joyous at the arrival of a friend, no human rush to catch a flight, no two strangers exchanging flirtatious glances. Before I had left New York I had just watched Orson Welles' adaptation of Kafka's "Trial" (1962) -- and I felt I was in the midst of that nightmarish labyrinth of deceased shadows and sinuous insanity. I lifted my right hand and touched my left elbow, while looking at myself doing so. I was dead cold.

Never fear. After a thorough examination of his person and personal effects, Dr. Dabashi makes his flight in time. In fact, they held the plane for him, though he doesn't seem pleased about it. His flight is marred by the presence of so many other passengers around me... talking relentlessly, almost all at the same time, to my tired ears and nauseous headache in an indecipherable combination of Brooklyn English and relentless Hebrew.

It's difficult to say if Dr. Dabashi's anti-Semitism is his most telling trait or if it is his narcissism. In these thirty-seven pages the first person appears in some form almost five hundred times. Except when he is excoriating the Israelis, Dr. Dabashi's reality is almost totally self-referential. In fact, his self-absorption might be of clinical interest to a curious psychiatrist.

Then there is his purple, roiling prose with its profusion of metaphors. In just this snippet, we have airport as garrison, fearful furnaces that "melts the human soul into a nullity," and "military machinery" that is "unplugged" yet dangerous. And all these frightened, freighted metaphors are on "automatic piloting"(sic). Well, that gives you the idea.

The good professor is badly in need of two things: a psychiatrist and an editor. It's hard to say which he needs more.

You decide. Read the whole thing.

Another visit with Dr. Dabashi is obviously in order. Stay tuned.

New Anti-Semitism in Russia?

DEBKAfile has the following note this morning:

Some 500 Russian nationalists including 19 parliamentarians demand ban on Jewish groups. They declare Jews are anti-Christian and anti-human and hatred of them is justified. Their fierce published diatribe recalls old Anti-Semitic symbols including blood libel.

This is disturbing news. I haven't been able to find any other information on this story; if anyone knows more, please get in touch.

Update

More information at AP and the BBC (hat tip -- OJ).

Life After Feminism?

 
This is a response to questions raised by commenter "truepeers" in my previous post, Utopian and Parochial -- Why Western Feminism Won't Do.

¤ ...the blogosphere is a reflection of our desperate cries to speak truth and live again with honour.

Yes, the blogosphere is a virtual community born from the failure of "real" communities to meet the need for authentic connection -- that is, a connection shorn of the surreal demands of political correctness.

¤ ...can you imagine men and women interacting in future in ways that will not further reduce men to undignified shrews.

Do you mean that the interaction as it is now emasculates men? It turns men and women into adversaries. Or rather, being based on scarcity beliefs, men and women scramble for perceived shortages in the public sphere.

¤ How can the phallic be self-sacrificing in productive ways, and not be reduced to participation in some PC blackmail in order to get, well, laid, or otherwise reproductively used?

It is damnably difficult to be authentic in the face of the demand for "correctness" -- to maintain one's sense of true self and not die of loneliness. In this, we are like every other generation, only the outward gestures have been changed and made more lethal(a young man I know hasn't been able to ask girls out for coffee after class without being reminded that she's not ready for a relationship. Drinking coffee is a relationship??). But your notion of "productive self-sacrifice" is illuminating. That is what both men and women do in order to bring forth the next crop...

¤ There has always been a code of silence in feminism on the question of how women treat women.

Indeed. It's confusing for women, too. The betrayals and back-stabbing and humiliations are as rampant in the halls of feminism as ever they were in the cells of The Party. The secrecy of these misdemeanors makes them fester all the more. Individual women are left wondering what is wrong with me rather than what is wrong with the feminist worldview, the feminist utopian faith that any group of like-minded women will, of its very nature be egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Right. But this kind of posturing is patently silly, and the reason many women are vehement in their "I'm not a feminist..." declarations.

¤ How are we to raise the young girls in our families? Feminism, old and new school, combines to promise them everything, while not necessarily offering the corresponding reality checks.

There you have it. The utopian promise and the trivial prize. Feminism, mostly middle-class with lots of leisure time, looked at life in the public square as men had fashioned it and decided that this was the worthy goal. They designed a utopia based on what they claimed to despise. Theies is a copy-cat universe, not a different one. The ludicruous feminist "Bring Your Daughter to Work Day" is the outcome of such stultified thinking, so pathetic it makes one look away in embarrassment for those who buy into this.

And don't forget,girls need fathers every bit as much as boys do. Strong fathers produce strength in their children.In The Way The World Works, Jude Wanniski dubs the Democrats and the Republicans as, respectively, the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party. The Dem/Moms want all the kids to be happy and enjoy the fruits of entitlement. Maternal love flows to the neediest of her children and she is adept at making the stronger ones "play fair" with the less-fortunate in the family. The Republican/Daddy Party wants his kids strong and competent; to him their security lies in strength and stamina. The dispiriting studies of single-parent families, of the effects of divorce, of the pernicious sequelæ of problems of aggression, anomie and suicidal gestures in many latch-key children, are telling. Families have been sold a bill of goods concerning the ability or even need to "have it all." How narcissistic is that?

¤ If language and religion began as a male-dominated institution, as I'm sure they did...

Pooh. Language is partly in-born and partly socialization. It has a window of opportunity, just like vision does (and hearing to a lesser extent). The rare cases of feral children who are discovered after the language window closes are never able to move beyond simple words and gestures -- to the heartbreak of those who work with them and hope for them.

In some cultures there are male words and female words and gender taboos are firmly in place. Our culture displays this in the greater freedom it grants men to use either profane or publicly taboo words with impunity. Might this "greater language freedom" be a male prerogative in most societies? At any rate, creoles can arise spontaneously among children of diverse languages. An example is what happened in the Hawaiian Islands: thrown together by the vicissitudes of economics -- e.g., the Portuguese, English, Japanese, Chinese, etc. families who came to there in search of work -- the children quickly created a patois to which the adults had no access. Born of necessity, it worked.

BTW, early on Christianity had many feminine images/ikons in its spiritual life. The church as Sophia, the Holy Spirit as a feminine spirit,etc. The early gatherings of Christians were in the homes of women who had converted to this new idea.

¤ ...the need for young men to engage the frontier between the language-bound community and the outside world of warring enemies and nature.

Well, that's what the Boy Scouts are for. Seriously. And the attempt to harm this group by the pernicious ACLU won't kill it by any means; a working group cannot be legislated or adjudicated out of existence. To the contrary, such attempts just make the Boy Scouts stronger. Having in the last few years shepherded a young man through his Eagle Scout project (he chose to do an oral history of the remaining WWII vets in his community)one could see that the male strength and demands made on this group of boys was changing how they viewed themselves and others. Despite attempts to marginalize the Boy Scouts they flourish. A healthy Red State phenomenon, one which includes a good number of Hispanic and African American children. Black and white may attend separate churches but their Scouts meet in integrated groups.

¤ ...there is some truth in the idea that conservatives "welcome" the terrorist threat...

"Welcome" as in "apprehend and appreciate" that the terrorists' outrages are born of impotence and envy? Cain and Abel all over again. The ongoing insane and narcissistic insistence that we play nice is a Blue State, Mommy idea. These people infest the State Department. They are the ones who hold candlelight vigils as a way to express their solidarity with those who would kill them. They read everything through the prism of innocent victimhood. They pronounce "forgiveness" of atrocities without consulting the victims. Their demand to remain bystanders at their own funerals beggars belief.

¤ But if men have it bad in this respect, arguably women can have it even worse.

No, we're all in this together. But Freud was right: biology is destiny. Would that the feminists could accept this fact of difference, rather than attempt to silence whomever would put it forth for debate. There will be a post on this in the near future.

¤ The feminists may be taking over the humanities in the universities but if you were to send your young women to them, wouldn't that be like giving them a prolonged initiation into a tribe with no reality checks, self-righteously reproducing the utopian dogma of the sisterhood?

Agreed. But that's why I tiptoe away from people who send their children to these ghettoes. The gulf between our realities is so wide that no bridge is wide enough to span it. At some point, argument is a waste of resources.

¤ So how do we raise our young boys and girls to be worthy of each other in a world in which they are not simply consumers for the nanny state...?

You'll be sorry you asked.

• First thing to do is get rid of TV. Keep a VCR/DVD player and monitor on hand for worthy movies, of which there are many. The good films go almost immediately to DVD anyway.
• Second, refuse to purchase name brand things without a good reason. "Everybody has one" is not a good enough reason.
• Third, question any acquisition you make -- all those gimmicks you didn't know you needed until you saw them. Unless you work in emergency medicine, cell phones fall into that category.
• Four, live below your means. But don't tell anyone.
• Five, give to charity unfailingly, not just in the heat of the latest disaster.
• Six, do some kind of community work and make sure the children do also.
• Seven, make sure your children are as musically and aesthetically and spiritually literate as they are with language.
• Eight, make sure they learn another language with enough depth to compare it to their own.
• Nine, spend time with them: listen, observe, respond, let them laugh at you. Read humor stories to them. Develop any silliness genes they might have.
• Ten, and maybe most important for their safety, teach them to say "no" by permitting them to refuse you when it's not a crucial matter. Believe it or not, a little one who can say "no" to Dad is a safer child, one who can refuse what strangers want because their critical faculties have been developed in their interactions with you.
  
  

The Ten Commandments of Parenting, as handed down from the mountain by Dymphna.

The Power and the Glory of Islamic Women

Part Three: Utopian and Parochial
Why Western Feminism Won't Do

A commenter on Belmont Club, Michael McCanles, says:

...feminists have destroyed the willingness of males in the chattering classes to talk seriously about the military as anything other than a manifestation of the fact that all males are bloodthirsty rapists, and if women had their way there would be no more wars.

Mr. McCanles is sadly correct. The feminist world-view, which includes an over-the-top hatred of men and of all things male, is malignantly deviant from reality. In what has become the commonplace Alice-in-the-Looking-Glass metaphysic of American feminism, "masculine" does not mean assertive or strong, or capable. In their lexicon, masculine equals evil. And not just bad, either; men are also stupid, inept, and lost without a woman to somehow alchemize their base nature. Further, with women leading the way to utopia there would be an end to war because women are essentially peaceful and choose to work cooperatively rather than arrange themselves in a patriarchal hierarchy. Those who believe that women aren't as aggressive as men obviously haven't spent time in an all-female workplace. A totally feminine environment is rife with in-fighting, betrayals and vying for power , made all the more vicious for the lack of men to leaven the mix.

The men of the chattering classes (one way to recognize this group is the fact that, no matter how old they are, they still know their SAT scores) have scuttled their integrity in order to belong to the "in" group. Currently, the In Group is composed of those who consider victimology life's highest calling. The driving force behind their work is enshrinement of the victims of whichever demonized Oppressor is being dunked in tar at the moment. Take your pick of the victim roles which allow you to rail against the unfairness of men: Native American? Good. Differently-abled? Very good. Female? Yes! Native American female and handicapped? Ah, the summum bonum! Notice that this highest good has nothing to do with achievement and everything to do with railing against life's inherent unfairness.

It has become a waste of time to ask how we got here. Using the analogy of rescue work -- say digging victims out of the rubble left behind by the tsunami -- what has become critical to fixing this cultural mess is saving those we can and mourning those we can't. Even in metaphysics there is triage.

The awful irony and failure of American feminism lies in its parochial and utopian nature. Women all over the world suffer grievously at the hands of the more powerful. Just how important is the notion of glass ceilings or hiring quotas or sexual "harassment" when your fellow women are sold into slavery, endure clitoridectomies, rape, and finally merciful death, thus being spared the mourning they would be forced to do, having witnessed the brutal death of their children? And while this is going on, we teach our girls how to be aggrieved.

This elitist version of what it means to be female has done our culture great harm, both here in our institutional life and abroad. Here our boys are pilloried for being proto-men, our girls are given vapid, trivial and cruel aphorisms to which they are supposed to aspire. "Girls rule" is not a message to live by.

Meanwhile, in the opposite and equal reaction coming to your screen via Al-Jazeera, girls die. Other cultures see our ever-increasingly dissatisfied women and, politely or brutally, decline to go there.

The Enemy Within, Part II

No-God is on Our Side

My previous post ended with an unanswered question: can this battle against the enemy within be fought without a religious regeneration in our own culture?

It is difficult to discuss religion under Secular Orthodoxy, since it discourages the idea of God. Observant Christians and Jews are relegated to the same essential status as theosophists -- that is, they are people who have forsaken science for superstition. What is obscured by this false dichotomy is the fact that the secular worldview derives its belief system from the heritage of Christian Europe (and thus also the Jews). One may remove the theological philosophy behind it, but Western concepts of right and wrong, of the universe and man's place in it, have not yet diverged significantly from what they were in a time when almost everyone believed in God.

The fact remains that we are in the midst of religious war, whether we want to be or not, or whether we even know it. Our enemies have decided that this is a war of faith, so it is a religious war that we must fight. If nothing else, the atheist fights to preserve his right to believe in No-God.

This may make a secular person uneasy -- after all, bible-thumping Baptists and Islamist zealots are two sides of the same coin, are they not? Yet there is a difference: fervent Christians have accepted their coexistence with other faiths in America for over two centuries. Can anyone believe that Muslims would reciprocate if the Jihad were to realize its fondest dream?

After all, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons, atheists, and even Wiccans can make common cause in this fight, since Islam does not distinguish one of them from another, and would exterminate all of them if they do not bend the knee to Allah. This unfortunate fact is what distinguishes Islam (at least in its most virulent strain) from the rest of the religions. One can point to the historic intolerance and brutality of Christianity, but that was 500 years ago. Islam, for whatever reasons, has remained trapped in a medieval mindset.

The ultimate question, which cannot yet be answered, is whether a devoutly secular society can muster the spiritual resources to fight a religious war. Secular culture is, after all, spiritually enervated, and our tolerant society has allowed a popular culture to emerge which is unprecedented (at least since the late Roman Empire) in its decadence, degradation, and materialism. When Osama bin Laden points his finger at this cesspool, he touches a responsive chord in those of us who are opposed to him and yet recognize that something is indeed wrong.

The Islamists propose a spiritual solution to a spiritual problem. Their religion is full of righteous zeal, and yet it will release unparallelled evil into the world if allowed to spread.

Once again, the question remains: Do we have adequate weaponry in our spiritual armory to fight this enemy?

The Enemy Within, Part I

The Little Wicked Wicket Gate

During the weeks following the events of September 11th, 2001, the lines of the following poem by Edwin Muir ran repeatedly through my mind:

The Castle All through that summer at ease we lay, And daily from the turret wall We watched the mowers in the hay And the enemy half a mile away -- They seemed no threat to us at all. For what, we thought, had we to fear With our arms and provender, load on load, Our towering battlements, tier on tier, And friendly allies drawing near On every leafy summer road? Our gates were strong, our walls were thick, So smooth and high, no man could win A foothold there, no clever trick Could take us, have us dead or quick. Only a bird could have got in. What could they offer us for bait? Our captain was brave and we were true... There was a little private gate, A little wicked wicket gate. The wizened warder let them through. Oh then our maze of tunneled stone Grew thin and treacherous as air. The cause was lost without a groan, The famous citadel overthrown, And all its secret galleries bare. How can this shameful tale be told? I will maintain until my death We could do nothing, being sold; Our only enemy was gold, And we had no arms to fight it with.

We had indeed been at ease that summer, with our arms and provender (and aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines) protecting us from our enemies, the ones who seemed no threat to us at all. But a bird did get in, and the famous citadel was overthrown...

To make the analogy complete, what would stand in for our only enemy, gold? The easy answer is "black gold"; that is, we allowed our security to breached by the Visa Express program -- arranged for the benefit of Saudi Arabia -- that admitted a number of the 9/11 hijackers into the United States. However, there were larger issues at work, ones that made us vulnerable in 2001 and keep us vulnerable today.

An aggressive spiritual force is working its way through American culture, one which might be called Orthodox Secularism. Though it lacks any belief in a Supreme Being, it otherwise has all the characteristics of a religion, and it is regnant in academia, the media, and large swathes of the "permanent government". It manifests itself in well-known ways, such as the demand for the removal of religious symbols from the public square, or the promotion of abortion-on-demand, but there are other, more subtle, ways in which it affects the conduct of our defense against the Great Islamic Jihad.

Three general areas of this new religion are worth pursuing:

1. The Theology of Doubt

Orthodox Secularism requires that adherents subscribe to radical doubt. We must doubt that our culture is superior to any other, that there are any moral absolutes, that the free market is a way to create wealth, etc. Not all propositions are open to doubt -- otherwise the system would de-construct itself, like Postmodernism -- but the major cultural pillars of the West are all questioned.

This is a legacy of Communism, a credit to the proficiency of the KGB. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union poured enormous clandestine amounts of money into the left-leaning and radical organizations of the West, in addition to feeding them propaganda and disinformation designed to discredit the principles and institutions of the Free World. Communism is gone, but its legacy lives on in our weakened institutions, which continue to peddle the same old nihilistic themes.

This makes the West constitutionally reluctant to take on our Islamofascist enemies, to name them for what they are and counter them in the realm of ideas.

2. Race Trumps Everything

As many politicians (especially Republican ones) know, it is impossible to say certain things in public about race. Statements are constrained by the shibboleths of the age of Orthodox Secularism, with many thoughts on the subject now considered doubleplus ungood, at least for white people.

Thus, the fact that virtually all acts of terror perpetrated since the Twin Towers fell were committed by Muslims, most of them from the Middle East and South Asia, is well-known to just about everybody. But if mentioned publicly it immediately throws the speaker open to charges of racism, and it cannot under any circumstances be used to track down terrorists or to prevent another horrific attack.

If one steps back from the scene to regard the situation, it can hardly be viewed as anything short of mass insanity.

Race trumps border security, preventing us from stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, a flow which may well conceal al Qaeda members. Race trumps any attempt to track the terrorists down once they are in the United States. Race trumps airport screening, leaving us with only random searches; in other words, avoiding giving offense to people with our "racism" is more important than preventing the deaths of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of innocent people.

The internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War is used as the model of "racist" behavior to avoid. But, as Michelle Malkin has demonstrated, the internment decision was a reasonable one to make in wartime, given the fact that a large network of Japanese spies was known to be in place in the United States. It is only with the luxury of hindsight, and through the lens of political correctness, that this can be seen as racism.

It is racism if we seek to profile potential terrorists by their nationality or appearance. It is racism if we draw attention to their repugnant religious beliefs. It is racist to expect immigrants to assimilate to American culture and adopt American values. Any attempt to combat the Islamofascists within our own society simply reveals our inherent racism.

3. Toxic Tolerance

A liberal democratic country like ours is an open society, which requires that its citizens be tolerant of those who differ in their appearance and customs. Tolerance becomes toxic when it demands an acceptance of behaviors which run counter to the basic rules of liberal democracy and undermine its very existence.

If radical Islam demands our tolerance and respect, then we must abide by its tenets and institute an intolerant and illiberal polity. In the name of multiculturalism, Canada has officially sanctioned sharia. But, when applied, sharia will impose legal principles, such as restrictions on the weight of women's testimony, which violate Canada's own legal principles and constitutional norms. Problems like this cannot be wished away in an attempt at multicultural harmony; the tolerance of intolerant cultural institutions generates irreconcilable conflicts.

If the West were not defending itself against the Great Islamic Jihad, such issues might remain interesting intellectual puzzles, suitable for reasoned academic debate. But in the context of a post-9/11 world, they are a recipe for cultural suicide.

Throw open the doors! Welcome all who wish to enter, even those who strive to slit our throats!

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   

Orthodox Secularism is a spiritual force, drawing on the same wellsprings as religion but without acknowledging religion. This suggests the question: what is the religious analogue to the collective doubt, self-hatred, and impulse to self-destruction as outlined above?

One word: Sin.

Orthodox Secularism does not include evil in its theological structure, and it does not admit the existence of sin. But our human nature cannot be denied, and human beings are inherently aware of their sinfulness, consciously or not. Environmentalists rely on this: in their dogma, humans are inherently destructive of the environment, and sin against Mother Nature.

The feeling of sinfulness can lead a religious person to confession and absolution, or it can be projected onto others. Since Secularism denies sin, only the latter course is open -- sins are committed by corporations, Republicans, America, the West, or even humanity itself.

This unconscious and unacknowledged sense of sinfulness generates the tenets of Orthodox Secularism and breeds a reluctance to act against the evil forces which threaten us. It is the wizened warder who has let them through.

A larger question remains: can this battle against the enemy within be fought without a religious regeneration in our own culture? Does liberal humanism provide enough spiritual might to counter the Great Islamic Jihad?

If not, then we have no arms to fight it with.

The Power and the Glory of Islamic Women

Part Two: Silence in America

In an earlier post, Gates of Vienna addressed the problems facing the women of Baghdad as they attempt to earn their college degrees. We waited to hear the outpouring of concern when reports of their abuse -- acid-in-the-face, kidnapping and rape, etc. -- surfaced in the MSM. Where there should have been a massive outpouring of support, there was only silence.

Where were the demonstrations to publicize the plight of women under Islam? How can thousands of women, in sisterly collegiality, converge on Washington D.C. to oppose the mythical repression of their abortion rights and fail to mention the all-too-real murderous captivity of their Muslim sisters?

American feminism is becoming a joke, especially to the younger generation, who see it as irrelevant to their lives:

"For women today, feminism is often perceived as dreary. As elitist, academic, Victorian, whiny, and passé...calling themselves girlie feminists, lipstick feminists, or sometimes just Third Wavers, they [the younger generation] have taken to flaunting the very femininity that Feminists had scolded would lead men to objectify them."

Such an attitude angers The Old Feminists who see themselves as pioneers. Because of their hard slog, they say, women today have a depth and breadth of equality they wouldn't have otherwise.

The Old Ones cannot see much past the mirror of their own reflection. Nor can they move beyond the walls of their Feminist Studies, a cloister which does not allow its postulants to deviate far from the received wisdom, the collective orthodoxy of patriarchal obstacles to freedom, an orthodoxy which increasingly is believed only by the inmates and their immediate superiors.

In other words, with their silence re Islam's treatment of women (among other acts of omission) modern feminism has brought about its own irrelevance. Having missed the boat -- actually, having failed even to appear on the wharf when the boat sailed -- American mainstream feminism is doomed gradually to disappear as the 1970's 'pioneers' age and shuffle off this mortal coil. None too soon, say those who follow.

Who among the young and idealistic cares to continue to batter the dead horse of abortion choice? Roe v. Wade is thirty years old; it's not going anywhere. However, the insistence that the extremism of partial birth abortion is a legitimate "choice" turns away young women who might otherwise join the fray.

Who among today's college students has not noticed that women now outnumber men in academia? Except for the cloistered postulants of Feminist Studies, who reads Carol Gilligan's discredited work?

Who among these young women are willing to sacrifice their children on the altar of women's autonomy? Today's young women remember their own painful latch-key childhoods. They are in no hurry to inflict that history on their own progeny.

Today's regnant feminism will eventually be replaced by the new generation of women with a form that more clearly meets the needs of these young women. Meanwhile, the banner protesting the abuse of women in Islam is going to be carried by others. The Old Guard has let its chance go by.