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rfmcdonaldIn Monday's National Post, on page A16, there was an open forum for Mohamed Elmasry (national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress) and David Bercuson (direct of the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and vice-president of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute). In this forum, Elmasry and Bercuson debate a single question: "Is America persecuting Islam?"
On the facing page, in the letters area, Venkat N., president of some organization called the Canadian Hindu Congress which doesn't return a single hit on Google, who talks about Islamic rule in India as being firstly uniquely brutal by the standards of imperial rule everywhere and secondly manifest proof of the unique evils of Islam.
I would be really, really happy if the National Post's letters policy didn't leave me with the sneaking suspicion that it was ready to assimilate the very contingent ethnonational conflicts of South Asia to an all-encompassing War Against Islam tm. I would be very happy, but I don't think that I'll be comforted any time soon.
Unfortunately, it seems that the National Post is willing to uncritically present a priori theories of various kinds, implicitly or explicitly asking questions which are structurally biased against, well, reality. Elmasry and Bercuson seem to have contracted the National Post's syndrome. Perhaps--I'm being charitable to both men--it's a product of the bad phrasing of the National Post's question, which starts a debate by creating an image of America (whatever "America" is supposed to mean) as oppressing the world's Muslims. I don't think so, though.
Elmasry, given a role by the Post's editorial staff, accepts it wholeheartedly and says that, yes, America is persecuting Islam. this thesis wholeheartedly. America, he argues, is for no reason whatsoever apart from its hunger from the natural resources contained in Muslim lands and also the sheer thrill of totalitarian imperialist domination of conquered peoples, engaging in a multi-front war against Islam, conquering the most recalcitrant states like Iraq and Afghanistan, and hypocritically calling for the separation of religious belief from state policy in other Islamic countries. There is no suggestion at all in Elmasry's essay that perhaps the United States was legitimately motivated to invade Afghanistan because a) terrorists used that country as a base from which to kill several thousand American civilians and b) that country was governed by an evil and rather totalitarian Islamist regime which richly deserved destruction. There is no realization at all that for all of American Chrisitanity's many flaws, there isn't anything directly comparable to, say, the Algerian Islamists who responded to the 1991 military coup by slaughtering a hundred thousand or so people, including women who refused to accept their rightful subordinate role as the mother of Muslims and villagers who were just in the way, that although American Christianity of all First World Christianities is bizarrely the most vital it hasn't yet produced a popular and all-encompassing totalitarian ideology.
Bercuson naturally enough takes the negative role. No element of United States foreign policy, he argues, is ill-thought. Certainly, nothing the United States has done in recent memory can explain why there are Muslim fighters having it out with American forces in Iraq, or why the United States' reputation is at an all-time low in the Muslim world. The domestic political reasons that pushed the United States into a profoundly flawed occupation of Iraq, for instance, or the worrying strength of an American evangelical Christianity which seems worryingly inclined towards an apocalyptic reading of the Middle Eastern situation, aren't mentioned. Bercuson's article is the more balanced of the two--he makes the important point that there cannot be a black-and-white division between evil Americans and victim Muslims, or vice versa--but it's still annoying to read.
The two men do manage to get some things right. Elmasry does make the important point that it's important to compare Muslim countries now to Western countries a century ago. In 1904, for instance, the United States was a country where less than 40% of the population had the vote, owing to the exclusion of women and racial minorities not only from political life but from most areas of national life, to say nothing of it being (by early 21st century First World standards) dirt poor and rather lacking in social amenities. He also says that it's important for Muslims to relate to non-Muslims in contexts apart from proselytization or demonization, with specific reference to the Canadian situation. Bercuson, for his part, makes the important point that the United States' foreign policy is not governed by an all-encompassing hostility towards Islam and Muslim states. I also like his straightforward statement about the universality of political and civil rights, that Muslims have every much right to expect democratic polities and pluralistic societies as non-Muslims do.
Have you ever read two articles by two separate authors which could be combined to produce a single very strong article? I did yesterday. Even if it's too much to hope for an Elmasry-Bercuson collaborative article, it might not be too much to expect the National Post to stop posing misleading and fundamentally biased questions, forcing broad non-descriptive generalities onto complex situations. My sympathies for the Democrats in the United States might be revealed by my choice of this anecdote, but Edwards was right when he talked about the need for a sensitive approach to world affairs. Broad brushstrokes cover a lot of ground, but the bristles don't penetrate every cranny.
On the facing page, in the letters area, Venkat N., president of some organization called the Canadian Hindu Congress which doesn't return a single hit on Google, who talks about Islamic rule in India as being firstly uniquely brutal by the standards of imperial rule everywhere and secondly manifest proof of the unique evils of Islam.
Considering history, the rule of Muslims in India, the all too frequent suicide bombings in Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it would not be a huge leap for one to draw the same conclusion as the National Post [allegedly that the Arab Middle East is 'barbaric'].
I would be really, really happy if the National Post's letters policy didn't leave me with the sneaking suspicion that it was ready to assimilate the very contingent ethnonational conflicts of South Asia to an all-encompassing War Against Islam tm. I would be very happy, but I don't think that I'll be comforted any time soon.
Unfortunately, it seems that the National Post is willing to uncritically present a priori theories of various kinds, implicitly or explicitly asking questions which are structurally biased against, well, reality. Elmasry and Bercuson seem to have contracted the National Post's syndrome. Perhaps--I'm being charitable to both men--it's a product of the bad phrasing of the National Post's question, which starts a debate by creating an image of America (whatever "America" is supposed to mean) as oppressing the world's Muslims. I don't think so, though.
Elmasry, given a role by the Post's editorial staff, accepts it wholeheartedly and says that, yes, America is persecuting Islam. this thesis wholeheartedly. America, he argues, is for no reason whatsoever apart from its hunger from the natural resources contained in Muslim lands and also the sheer thrill of totalitarian imperialist domination of conquered peoples, engaging in a multi-front war against Islam, conquering the most recalcitrant states like Iraq and Afghanistan, and hypocritically calling for the separation of religious belief from state policy in other Islamic countries. There is no suggestion at all in Elmasry's essay that perhaps the United States was legitimately motivated to invade Afghanistan because a) terrorists used that country as a base from which to kill several thousand American civilians and b) that country was governed by an evil and rather totalitarian Islamist regime which richly deserved destruction. There is no realization at all that for all of American Chrisitanity's many flaws, there isn't anything directly comparable to, say, the Algerian Islamists who responded to the 1991 military coup by slaughtering a hundred thousand or so people, including women who refused to accept their rightful subordinate role as the mother of Muslims and villagers who were just in the way, that although American Christianity of all First World Christianities is bizarrely the most vital it hasn't yet produced a popular and all-encompassing totalitarian ideology.
Bercuson naturally enough takes the negative role. No element of United States foreign policy, he argues, is ill-thought. Certainly, nothing the United States has done in recent memory can explain why there are Muslim fighters having it out with American forces in Iraq, or why the United States' reputation is at an all-time low in the Muslim world. The domestic political reasons that pushed the United States into a profoundly flawed occupation of Iraq, for instance, or the worrying strength of an American evangelical Christianity which seems worryingly inclined towards an apocalyptic reading of the Middle Eastern situation, aren't mentioned. Bercuson's article is the more balanced of the two--he makes the important point that there cannot be a black-and-white division between evil Americans and victim Muslims, or vice versa--but it's still annoying to read.
The two men do manage to get some things right. Elmasry does make the important point that it's important to compare Muslim countries now to Western countries a century ago. In 1904, for instance, the United States was a country where less than 40% of the population had the vote, owing to the exclusion of women and racial minorities not only from political life but from most areas of national life, to say nothing of it being (by early 21st century First World standards) dirt poor and rather lacking in social amenities. He also says that it's important for Muslims to relate to non-Muslims in contexts apart from proselytization or demonization, with specific reference to the Canadian situation. Bercuson, for his part, makes the important point that the United States' foreign policy is not governed by an all-encompassing hostility towards Islam and Muslim states. I also like his straightforward statement about the universality of political and civil rights, that Muslims have every much right to expect democratic polities and pluralistic societies as non-Muslims do.
Have you ever read two articles by two separate authors which could be combined to produce a single very strong article? I did yesterday. Even if it's too much to hope for an Elmasry-Bercuson collaborative article, it might not be too much to expect the National Post to stop posing misleading and fundamentally biased questions, forcing broad non-descriptive generalities onto complex situations. My sympathies for the Democrats in the United States might be revealed by my choice of this anecdote, but Edwards was right when he talked about the need for a sensitive approach to world affairs. Broad brushstrokes cover a lot of ground, but the bristles don't penetrate every cranny.
