Posted on 05/28/2005 7:26:57 PM PDT by saquin
David Selbourne’s book warning western nations they underestimate the threat of extremist Islam failed to find a British publisher. America has taken it up and the arguments are causing a stir, says Sarah Baxter
When David Selbourne flew into America recently, he had good reason to feel he had arrived in the land of the free. His new book, The Losing Battle with Islam, was featured at New York’s Book Expo, the US publishing industry’s trade fair last week, after it failed to find a British publisher.
One glance at the title and it is easy to see why. The Losing Battle With Islam is a blistering critique of the West’s response to Muslim militancy. Publishers in London were far too “pusillanimous” and “PC” to take it on, says Selbourne indignantly. But in America, a nation with greater “intellectual vigour”, Prometheus Books stepped into the breach and it will be published in September.
The manuscript has already been circulating in intellectual circles in “samizdat” form and it may yet find a British publisher now the Americans are leading the way. But the big brush-off is a prime example of Selbourne’s thesis that westerners are displaying a misplaced and muddle-headed sensitivity to Muslim feelings that is not always reciprocated.
I caught up with him in Washington, where he was meeting think-tankers, policy makers and opinion-formers. “It’s a relief to talk to people who are engaged in this matter,” he sighed. “This is the front line of what matters in the world.” He feels the non-Muslim world is ignoring at its peril the challenge posed by a resurgent Islam.
Controversy comes naturally to Selbourne, a veteran of ideological and cultural wars. He used to teach at Ruskin College, Oxford, the trade union college, and was assumed to be a man of the left until he began writing about the breakdown of civil society and morality in essays and books such as The Principle of Duty.
He is wary of libertarianism and the cult of the individual and considers Milton Friedman, apostle of the free market, to be the “evil genius of our age”. With such views, he was always going to be at odds with the Thatcherite right. Yet his arguments against loosening the bonds of family and community led him to be labelled a reactionary sell-out by the post-Sixties left.
Selbourne’s holiday home in Italy became his refuge and, eventually, his permanent base: “I needed a cordon sanitaire between me and the seething world of competitive English intellectuals.” From there he remains engaged in the war of ideas in the English-speaking world, eagerly scanning British and American newspapers and magazines on the internet and fighting every ideological battle as if the barbarians were at his gate.
“I consider myself to be highly progressive,” he says with a touch of indignation and weariness. “I consider it highly progressive to be against fascism and there are elements of Islamic society which are fascist. People are cowed, and it has to be resisted.”
In Italy last week, in an attack on free speech, the veteran polemicist Oriana Fallaci, author of the bestselling The Rage and the Pride, a diatribe against the West’s alleged cultural surrender to Islamists, was ordered by a judge to face trial on charges of defaming Islam, a sign of the ferocity of the ideological warfare now under way.
With his white beard and gentle voice, Selbourne has the mild manner of a don. He considers himself to be a dispassionate, highly sensible voice of reason but he also has the intellectual force of a flame-thrower. In his new book he scorns some Muslims for “taking liberties” with Britain — supporting attacks on the West by Islamists while expecting that their own “civic and other entitlements will be met in full”.
But much of his criticism is reserved for the West, which is only too eager to flagellate itself for its alleged shortcomings while rushing to understand its opponents’ point of view (the Newsweek imbroglio over the alleged desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay detention base, a story it later withdrew, is just the latest example). Even in America, “the political class has lost confidence in itself”, he complains.
The American imperium, Selbourne argues, “is in a state of confusion”. Its time will pass, just as Rome, Byzantium and the British Empire fell away. The West is losing the battle against Islam for the “same reason the British lost the American colonies. They had insufficient forces, their counsels were divided, and they underestimated their opponents”.
Selbourne dates the reawakening of the Islamic world to the Suez crisis and the outbreak of Arab nationalism in the 1950s. He has been studying the phenomenon and building up an archive of material stretching back for decades.
In the 1980s he travelled to Afghanistan — then the training ground for Islamic militancy—– and a decade later visited Kosovo, where he saw that the viciousness of Serbian racism had met its match in the spiritual confidence of Muslims.
When some British Muslim leaders backed Ayatollah Khomeini’s chilling fatwa against Salman Rushdie and an Islamic conference in Bradford endorsed Iraq’s call for a “holy war against western forces” in 1990, Selbourne sensed that these were not one-off aberrations but signs of a profound cultural shift.
“History didn’t begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001,” he says. By chance, he was driving to Cambridge, Massachusetts when the attacks occurred and was impressed by the unity, dignity and restraint of Americans. But that consensus soon dissolved as attacks on President George Bush escalated.
In Selbourne’s view Americans are at a loss to understand why they are so hated, so they are turning their fire on their leader. “When you like yourself well enough, it is very hard to hear that anti-Americanism is rife in the world, so he’s made a scapegoat. Americans don’t want to be tarred with his brush.”
As for the Europeans: “They’re anti-American because of fear of Islam, which is being projected as Bush-phobia. People are very frightened by Islam’s strength and they need to blame somebody for it.”
The worst of it is that people in the West are so willing to suspend their judgment about Muslim extremists, including clerics who issue bloodcurdling anti-semitic remarks or denunciations of women’s emancipation and homosexuality, while vilifying Bush as a liar.
If, like Selbourne, you take the long view, there is not much point in hating the Americans or their president. “The odium for Bush is clouding people’s judgment,” he says. “It’s not Bush’s fault that Islam is advancing. It is being propelled by its own organic power.”
He is pessimistic about the outcome of this religious and cultural war. “We’re up against a terrific foe. The United States and the non-Muslim world are in a desperate predicament. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t take them on.”
In Iraq, he fears the situation is becoming hopeless and that Bush is chasing an “illusion about the democratisation of the Islamic world”.
“You know what’s happening. The United States is trying to groom democratic liberal figures in the Muslim world and I fear it will lead to the same end as President Diem in Vietnam.” (Diem, America’s placeman, was killed by his own generals in 1963 after he was overthrown in a military coup.) The irony is that history may well be on Islam’s side with or without violent tactics. “I don’t think there’s any need for Islamists to be killing and terrorising people — even though such behaviour is sanctioned in the Koran, no matter what people say,” Selbourne says. “Islam is advancing willy nilly as a moral force, whether you like that moral force or not.”
For Selbourne, the fragmentation of western society has left it intensely vulnerable to a challenge of this nature. “We used to have an animating idea,” he points out. “It used to be a belief in civil society and community. We’re dismantling the social order in which Muslims so firmly believe in their own society.”
Islam is a religion on the rise, winning converts among the poor and needy, from Africa and Indonesia to inmates of American jails. “It’s the politics of the underdog, the marginalised. If it’s the socialism of our time, with an ethic that appeals to the oppressed, it will have the same force.”
We must not forget, he warns, that it is also “the last faith” in the Abrahamic trinity of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. “It’s a very powerful argument because it believes it has superseded the other faiths. It’s clear that the non-Muslim world lacks the moral energy which Muslims are justifiably proud of.”
In other words, if we lose the battle, forget Bush, we have only ourselves to blame.
It sounds as if he's rather confused. But he's right about one thing. Leftists should hate Islam for its fascist principles. The problem is that they hate America so much it blinds them. Maybe this will wake a few leftists up.
Nice article, thank you for posting this.
And the same brutal results - 100s of millions slaughtered...
Moralism re-defined by a blood-thirsty cult? I don't think so.
wow. Thanks for posting this article.
Doesn't sound good , does it? Scairy part that Iraq may implode, except that maybe the Iraqis will really embrace freedom. Good points about Islam having a society structure and "moral" simplicity and family structure..albeit oppressive and feudalistic. And we do have an issue in the west with a relativism and destruction of the family that is not strengthening our cultures.
Some interesting thoughts but fairly sour. BTW Selbournem, how come it's "President Diem" but only "Bush?
This is, according to some historians, precisely how Christianity spread like wildfire, with devastating consequences for the Roman Empire.
I got a better idea. Let's just turn the whole bleeping region into a sheet of glass. Or at least threaten to.
Comparing these sub-human scum with our Founding Fathers is obscene.
I believe he's comparing the "sub-human scum" to the British (King George). The British lost to the Colonies because "They [the British] had insufficient forces, their counsels were divided, and they underestimated their opponents".
You are never losin the war against Islam as long as you have "Boomers" in the sea.
Bump!
But during the period of this spreading, it was a non-violent movement -- nothing like the Religion of Murder, known as Islam.
Freemarketeers/freetraders on the right, militant secularists on the left, both groups work in tandem chipping at the roots of Christian civilisation.
They create a vacuum, ready to be filled from outside.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Thought you'd like to read this.
Boomers as in people, or Boomers as in torpedoes?
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