Islamists as Run-of-the-Mill Socialists

Islamists as run-of-the-mill socialists: or, what I learned at my Oxford Union debate

Jonah Goldberg LAST month, I participated in a debate at the Oxford Union. It was a delightful affair. I stayed in a lovely hotel. The debate was black tie, preceded by a cocktail party and a formal dinner with "freedom fries" on the menu (a nod to the visiting Americans in the last days before the Sarkozy Restoration). The whole place swarmed with comely British lasses in evening dresses and earnest, larval Tony Blairs eagerly calling me "sir." Everything was wonderful, except of course that I was there only because the Oxford Union was questioning whether my country should ever have been born. The proposition that night: "This House regrets the founding of the United States of America."

The other speakers taking my side were Peter Rodman, until recently an assistant secretary of defense, and Matt Frei, BBC's Washington correspondent. Our opponents included two prominent Islamists--Jamal Harwood, the chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, and David Pidcock, head of Britan's Islamic party. The head of the UK Communist party was supposed to debate as well, but he apparently chickened out for fear of losing. The irony of a Communist's being afraid to fight a lost cause seemed lost on just about everyone.

The forces of truth and light won the day. You can read a summary of all that, and a version of my remarks, at NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. But there is an aspect of the debate worth revisiting. One of the most striking things about the Islamists' speeches was that they barely invoked Islam. Both men believe in imposing a worldwide caliphate where apostates would be put to death and Jews and Christians ghettoized. But they kept that stuff on the QT. Instead, Pidcock's indictment of America hinged largely on a string of conspiratorial non-sequiturs: George W. Bush's grandfather funded Hitler, the Napoleonic Code was 95 percent Islamic, and Woodrow Wilson, at the behest of oligarchic overlords, threw away the American Constitution when he created the Federal Reserve.

Harwood's speech was more serious, which makes sense in that Hizb ut-Tahrir is a serious--and dangerous--organization. His chief indictment was that America represents and champions individualism, and individualism is bad. Therefore, America is bad. Q.E.D. He cited America's high suicide rate as evidence of the dangers of runaway individualism. It was a curious metric, given that when Americans commit suicide they at least tend to do it by themselves. Islamists on the other hand like to take a great many people with them. This would seem to be one case where the American way is something to be celebrated.

As the vaporous indictments wafted up to the rafters in the Union's magisterial hall, I detected a familiar odor. Indeed, close inspection made it almost impossible not to draw the conclusion that this was the same nose-curling manure that has been wheelbarrowed into the Oxford Union for a century. Same S**t, Different Day, as the bumper sticker says.

These supposedly daunting Islamists were simply run-of-the-mill socialists. Or Marxists. Or fascists. Or whatever the fashionable name for collectivists is at a given moment. Spend a few minutes on the Islamic party's website and it quickly becomes clear that this is what H. G. Wells called "Gas, Water and School-Board Socialism" with a flattering hijab draped over it. Harwood's indictment seemed interesting because he was a fearsome "extremist." But had it come from an assistant editor at Mother Jones--and it certainly could have--it would have been a complete yawner.

It's a bit like an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is excited to date a woman named "Donna Chang" he met by accident on the phone. He's jazzed because he thinks she's Asian. "I love Chinese women," Jerry says. George Costanza's mother is eager to take marriage counseling from the wise woman of the Orient. But then they find out that Chang is actually short for "Donna Changstein"--of the Long Island, not Shanghai, Changsteins. Jerry complains of "false advertising," and Mrs. Costanza cries, "I'm not taking advice from some girl from Long Island!"

Now I'm not saying Harwood and Pidcock aren't real Muslims, though it's revealing that they're both converts. But perhaps--just perhaps--these guys are like Jerry Seinfeld's dentist who converted to Judaism "for the jokes," and switched to Islam so they could spout indictments of usury and capitalism.

That's not a particularly novel insight. Many scholarly observers have chronicled how jihadism recycles all sorts of European intellectual trash. Osama bin Laden's version of the Crusades seems to have been lifted from a Marxist's salon. His understanding of American politics looks suspiciously cribbed from Michael Moore's op-eds. Sometimes it seems like Middle Eastern anti-Semitism is the result of poor Arab states' buying used Nazi textbooks off Amazon.com. And in Europe, Islamism appears to be this season's radical chic. Olivier Roy writes of Europe's radicalized Muslim youth: "They are 'born-again Muslims.' It's here that they are Islamicized.... Their dispute with the world isn't imported from the Middle East: It is truly modern, aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. In other words, they occupy the same space that the proletarian left had thirty years ago, that Action Directe had twenty years ago.... They exist in a militant reality abandoned by the extreme left, where the young live only to destroy the system ..."

The Islamists can't even come up with their own conspiracy theories. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the only most glaring example of how even their paranoia is secondhand. Al-Qaeda is convinced that the Freemasons are out to get it. The Hamas Charter also warns about the Freemason (and Rotary Club) threat. Meanwhile, I learned from the Islamic party's website that Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's successor as British prime minister, attended the "Super Masonic One World Government Bilderberger Conference held at Baden-Baden" in 1991. I bet he got a great tote bag.

This is all encouraging for two reasons. First, once you realize that many of these people are simply Muslim Changsteins who adopt Islam as multicultural armor to protect themselves from ridicule, it becomes easier to criticize them. They aren't radical, inscrutable, and exotic "Others"; they're Fabian socialist losers who speak Arabic. I've long believed that our most underutilized "soft power" weapon against jihadism is mockery. We're afraid to use it because we need to maintain a deadly serious attitude toward the enemy while not seeming to make fun of our moderate Muslim allies. And, yes, we're also afraid of ginning up another Danish-cartoon rebellion. I understand the calculation. But we could still use a few more jokes about how Mohamed Atta was afraid a girl might touch his man-panties. And if they protest, make fun of them for that too.

Indeed, even the fact that Islamists are on the side of mass murder has its reassurances. Conservatives have long argued that socialism is oppressive and tyrannical by its very nature. Not all socialists are totalitarians, of course. But all totalitarians must be socialists. So when we see that Islamists have nothing to offer but the thin, recycled gruel of yesteryear, it confirms we're on the right side of history. I mean even the Communist knew that junk has no resale value.

I don’t think you can really say that islamists are socialist per se. Some arab countries have very low income tax and against the minimum wage.

It is true that islamists in the west are good buddies with the secular left

I suggest that people check out Michael Aflaq, mentor to Saddam Hussein. He was educated at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France where he embraced the Naziism. After the university, Aflag returned home to Syria to found the Baath Party. From the beginning he sought to drive western imperialism from Arab lands. He spread anti capitalist, socialism mixed with Arab nationalism.

I suggest that people check out Michael Aflaq, mentor to Saddam Hussein. He was educated at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France where he embraced Naziism. He even pushed for Arabs to ally themselves with Hitler during World War II. After the university, Aflag returned home to Syria to found the Baath Party. From the begining he sought to drive western imperialism from Arab lands. He spread anti capitalist, socialism mixed with Arab nationalism. His influence is very much a part of the Middle East thinking today.

I don’t think you can really say that islamists are socialist per se

This is a hot topic in the muslim world, most of the feeling by religious clerics (aka the experts or folks who know their own religion best) claim that capitalism and free markets are not compatable with islam.

They aren't saying socialism is islamic (thought by default, you have limited choices), but free markets and capitalism are not acceptable in Islam.

Kind of like, "this is not allowed" but we aren't saying that is either.

Some arab countries have very low income tax and against the minimum wage.

This is an interesting article. I think the author may be correct, for if you shift your perspective to a more eastern viewpoint, the souls are property of the village. This in not about minimum wage and income tax, it is about serfs and their service to the Mullah. Feudalism is after all the roots of socialism and elitism. The Mullah certainly are elitists and their feudal system may simply be foundational socialism.

After all what is socialism vs Islam? Both systems view the individual as property of the state, both systems have a ruling elite and espouse a doctrine of the individuals worth not being as an individual but as their worth to the collective, one the state, the other the village.

Incredible! The more I think about it, the more this writers words ring true. This may explain why the left sides so much with the mad Mullahs, for they see their cousins in the Jihadi and can relate to them more than free men.

A lot of the problem in tracing philosophical identifiers is that most folk try to artificially impose a nonexistant purist concept on either or both parties in the mix.

The “philosophies of the germans” was all the rage during the 1930s and 40s in the arab/muslim elitist circles. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, much of the mid east had crawled deeply in bed with the Soviets.

Since ‘67, the Soviets had made it their official policy to provide any and all possible support to arab/muslim terror organizations and nearly all the old school terror leaders got their training and a whopping lot of political indoctrination in Soviet training camps.

The Muslim Brotherhood and such ilk grew up while feeding as much on european idiocies as they did on the islamic.

There is also the reality that those who’s assignment it is to talk the west into assisting the arab/muslim world in defeating the west are very well versed in all the usual socialist/fascist/pomo degeneracies since that is the target audience.

Our enemies have long traditions of interaction. Some times hostile, sometimes not but now they’re all finding themselves comfortable under the same political/philosophical tent until their primary enemy is defeated.

Islamists met with Hitler and mustered some number of battalions to help out the Nazis.

We might take to calling radical Muslims Nazis and their leftist supporters Nazi sympathizers and see what shakes out. Could be fun.

First, once you realize that many of these people are simply Muslim Changsteins who adopt Islam as multicultural armor to protect themselves from ridicule, it becomes easier to criticize them. They aren't radical, inscrutable, and exotic "Others"; they're Fabian socialist losers who speak Arabic. I've long believed that our most underutilized "soft power" weapon against jihadism is mockery.

I've long believed in the power of mockery against the insanity of jihadism. The problem is, however, those with the most powerful wielders of the tools of mockery -- the members of the MSM -- are the most afraid to use them. You don't get much more cowardly than the Western Main Stream Media... with isolated and, perhaps now expired, exceptions like Denmark.

Sorry about that.

One must be a member of National Review online to get the article there, but I found it elsewhere and am supplying the link:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_9_59/ai_n19311321

This is a pretty good site for research, btw...

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