People recognize that when we try to communicate with each other, our tools of language and image are almost always inadequate to convey our full meaning, and at the same time, convey multiple meanings that we do not consciously intend. The War on Terror, also known as the War on Isalmofascism, is being shaped by these meta-communications in ways that some of the main players seem not to recognize.
Yesterday, Apollon Zamp guest blogged at Gates of Vienna, and in his post The Reavers' Jihad explicitly compared Islam to the marauders of the Firefly series. The comparison may be an exaggeration, and may be based on a limited view of Islam, however it is a view that the proponents of Jihad have been assiduously advancing and in this our MSM have been complicit. Here is Apollon Zamp's description of Reavers:
For those not familiar with the TV show “Firefly” and its subsequent film production, Serenity, the story line includes a savage breed of beings known as Reavers. Since the Firefly universe is set five hundred years in the future, one might — on a steady diet of Star Trek and other such sci-fi favorites — expect danger to come in the form of alien life. However, danger comes instead in the form of the Beast Within — the savage side of man’s nature that in civilized cultures is held in check by proper social conditioning, an instilled sense of morality, and regulation of the id by the superego.
In “Firefly”, Reavers have lost that conditioning and that regulation. They have lost it to the point of being characterized as non-human. They pierce and tear their own flesh, wear the skins of their victims as clothing, and run their ships without using reactor core containment — meaning that Reavers suffer horrific and grotesque radiation burns and scarring. Reavers sow destruction, terror, torture, and death wherever they go. One of the facets of the show — and the movie to a lesser extent — is that Reavers inspire such terror in people that resistance is not just useless, but impossible — suicide and “mercy killings” are the usual responses to a Reaver attack.
He does a good job of drawing connections between various aspects of Islam and the blood thirsty nihilism of the Reavers. He includes pictures of the Ashura festival, recently completed, which revels, in what seems to be almost an internalization of the martyrdom of Hussein, in self flagellation and blood letting. The martyrdom of Hussein, which took place in 680 AD at Karbala in modern-day Iraq, is the central myth of Shia Islam. The most disturbing image in the post is of a man proudly cutting the head of his toddler aged son. It is gruesome and unsettling to imagine cutting your child's head as an act of devotion; my interest, however, lies not in its religious significance but in its significance as a piece of meta-communication about Islam.
Over the weekend Mark Steyn wrote a typically biting piece for his weekly column that expressed dismay that the Bush administration, and indeed most Western spokesmen, were much too reticent in their description of the enemy. The piece is entertaining, as Steyn always is, but misses something crucial.
Glenn Greenwald is a proud Liberal who is always willing to turn his caustic wit and jaundiced eye on the excesses and errors of Conservatives. In Mark Steyn: Adventures in Idiocy he takes Steyn (along with a host of other Conservative writers) to task for past miscalls and describes Steyn's position in somewhat exaggerated terms:
For Steyn, the problem is simple: our rhetoric is not sufficiently inflammatory and jingoistic. The key to winning the war in Iraq and the overall war on terror is, apparently, to declare ourselves at war with Islam, and to make fun of Muslims.
I might counter that Steyn was arguing for calling a thing by its name, but I think Glenn is onto something quite important here. Where Steyn accuses the Bush administration of soft-peddling the Jihadists in their midst, I believe Bush has done so exactly for the reasons Glenn Greenwald supposes; that is, in order to avoid naming the enemy as Islam. Once the enemy is Islam, rather than the Jihadists or the Islamic fascists or some other limited construction, we have irrevocably entered the Clash of Civilizations that constitutes the Long War many believe we are already in. Glenn proceeds to ask and answer a rhetorical question:
Does Steyn really think that the American people don't know the nature of the enemy we face, that they're unaware that the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were militant Islamists? That's ridiculous. If anything, one of the reasons people have soured on the war in Iraq is because an increasing number of them have realized that Saddam's regime had little, if anything, to do with the enemy that attacked us on 9/11 and that this ill-advised and disastrously-executed war appears to have made the situation infinitely worse.
Here is where I think Glenn misses the point. First of all, the reasons so many Americans have soured on the war is because it hasn't ended yet. When the war was going well, it was supported; when it appears to be bogged down in sectarian violence, support erodes. But even if he is absolutely correct on this and I am absolutely wrong, it is irrelevant. At this point, the outcome in Iraq may well be irrelevant, as well, to the larger war. If everything goes well there, the Long War may be shortened by a week; if it all goes sour, we will leave most of Iraq (probably retaining bases in Free Kurdistan) and prepare for the next 9/11. Unfortunately, the greatest problem for both opponents and proponents of the Iraq theater of the war resides in the current state of our meta-communications about the war.
At one time, the Bush administration worked very hard to differentiate Islam from radical Islam. The working proposition for most Americans was that the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were militant Islamists, a fringe element high-jacking the Religion of Peace for their own nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, that belief has been seriously eroded, not only by the actions of the Jihadists, but by the actions of the entire Muslim world, aided and abetted, unwittingly, by the MSM proponents of peace, tolerance, and the joys of multi-culturism. Just think of the images that have been shown to us of Islam in the last weeks and months:
Suicide bombers, blowing up women and children indiscriminately;
Masked men decapitating helpless captives;
Violent crowds burning cars in Paris;
Muslims as torture-murderers of Jews;
More violent crowds protesting against cartoons;
Learned Imams issuing Fatwas against cartoonists;
Leading Islamic sages demanding death to Apostates;
Death to Homosexuals;
Genocide of black Africans;
The list is endless and there in lies the problem that Glenn Greenwald and Mark Steyn are both trying to address and missing. As well, it is not just the media; every time a prominent Western politician assures us, in the wake of yet another Islamist atrocity, that Islam is a Religion of Peace and the terrorists do not represent true Islam, they convey the message that Shakespeare understood so well: They doth protest too much. Inevitably, the message becomes: Atrocity ... Islam. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; it is how our minds work and how meta-communication works. It is an inherent and emergent property of the flow of data.
The crucial point is that the enemy is being named; Islam itself, with the connivance of the MSM, Islamists, Moderate Muslims, Statesmen, and Politicians world wide, is allowing itself to be named as the enemy of civilization.
The Democrats, for short term political gain and out of ignorance of the significance, created a panic over the Dubai Ports Deal, which reinforced the meta-communication that it is Islam which is the enemy, not Radical Islam (or more specifically political Islam.)
Dinocrat has an excellent and nuanced piece taking off from the same Steyn article:
The truth is: there are almost no members of the ruling elites of the West that think sharia is anything other than a brutal, intolerant system of government, totalitarian in its ideological demands, and totally worthless as a means of organizing men towards modernity and prosperity. The truth also is: almost none of the elites say so publicly.
Dinocrat recognizes the problem in naming the enemy:
And hence everyone knows inside, but is perhaps not quite willing to think about clearly: there will be no end to this war until: (a) there is a Reformation in Islam so that Koranic instructions to spread sharia can be interpreted metaphorically; (b) somehow Islamic governments stop taking sharia seriously for whatever reason; (c) those who preach sharia in the West are seen as talking politics, not religion, and are forbidden to do so; (d) an energy alternative makes oil obsolete and returns those Arab and Muslim countries once more to poverty and irrelevance; (e) there is a hot war over Israel or oil or some other issue which kills a lot of people and destroys those countries whose culture has given them no technology and inferior military doctrine; or (f) an emasculated West capitulates to the fervor and zeal of the Islamic missionaries in its midst and the effectiveness of strategic terror. There are other imaginable ends as well.
Every day that the leaders of the West refuse to engage in discussing the awfulness of sharia as government, and why it is a bad idea for the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds alike, is another day that the West makes more likely the lone outcome of (f) defeat above. This really isn’t that complicated; even Churchill understood this, way back when.
I would add a (g) option; the West will increasingly do what the Israelis, Spanish, Indians, and others are doing, and put up walls to keep the Reavers out; it is only a temporary solution and will only work until the Reavers get their hands on WMD, at which point option (h) will become obligatory, which is the end of Islamic societies as functioning entities; however, until push comes to shove, the tendency of most people will remain to temporize. The alternatives are simply too frightening to readily contemplate.
I do not think the leaders of the West are ready to admit and accept the implications of what Dinocrat is saying. At the same time, the Western public, from their TV's and newspapers, are having their impressions of Islam formed from the melange of meta-communications they are barraged with on a daily basis. The Long War is being driven increasingly by a dynamic which none of the participants can control or even adequately conceptualize. It bodes poorly for rational solutions when this kind of dynamic takes primacy.
The equation of Islam with Reavers strengthens with every new atrocity lovingly captured by the lenses of al Jazeera and broadcast around the world and our world's margin of error declines with each new horror.
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