Inconvenient truths
Do you get the strong feeling that radical Islam suffers from an irony deficit? I’m not sure what else to call it when Muslims express their outrage over being labeled violent by attacking churches, killing nuns, and warning non-Muslims to convert to Islam “or else.”
In the talk last week that sparked these frank and open reactions, Pope Benedict XVI’s main point was about the reconciliation of theology and science — faith and reason. But he prefaced his remarks by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s critique of the Prophet Mohammed. The pope has since said that the emperor’s characterization of Islam as “spreading the faith through violence” was not his own, but methinks he doth protest too much.
Not every Muslim offended by the pope’s remarks has reacted violently. Many clerics and politicians, with some justification, either simply demanded an apology from the pope or accepted his expressions of regret. But with memories of the blood shed over the Danish cartoons and the ongoing scourge of Islamist terrorism, the West might be forgiven for believing that the pope was on to something. The reports of subsequent violence only confirm that belief.
The controversy seems part of a mini-trend of public figures being condemned for saying things that reasonable people may consider the truth. Truth may be an absolute defense in libel cases, but in the court of public opinion, it has to be weighed against a statement’s intention and effect.
Former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young learned that lesson recently. Young, as a paid spokesman for Wal-Mart, defended the retail giant by saying it provided a much-needed alternative to over-priced “mom-and-pop” stores found in black neighborhoods. “[Y]ou see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables,” said Young. “And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”
Jewish organizations rightly took offense to the remarks, and Young subsequently resigned his position with Wal-Mart.
Writing in the New York Observer, Nicholas von Hoffman defends Young by saying his remarks were largely accurate. “What he said, in effect, was that most of the stores in the ghetto were owned by members of these groups, and that they charged high prices for low quality,” writes von Hoffman. He calls the complaints against Young the “suppression of honest expression.”
Yet even if Young painted an accurate portrait of ethnic divisions in the inner city, he violated a basic tenet of civil discourse: Don’t inject ethnicity into an argument unless you can’t make your point otherwise. A reasonable case can be made that small stores in inner-city neighborhoods must, according to the laws of supply and demand, charge higher prices than big-box suburban outlets. That alone would seem to prove Young’s point, that the Wal-Mart model of volume, volume, volume is a boon to low-wage workers.
But Young chose to single out ethnic groups and changed his from an economic argument to one that could only play to the base instincts of racists and hate-mongers. As they say at Wal-Mart, have a nice day.
Effi Eitam, a leader of the Knesset’s Orthodox Zionist faction, recently violated a second tenet of civil discourse: Don’t propose solutions that are as unrealistic as they are immoral. Eitam recently called on his colleagues “to expel the great majority of the Arabs” from the West Bank and “sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system.” He went on to describe Arab Knesset members as “a fifth column, a league of traitors of the first rank.” Eitam’s remarks echoed the “transfer” policies that got the late Rabbi Meir Kahane banned from the Knesset for racism.
On the other hand, three Arab Knesset members did travel to Damascus recently to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad. And, as the Forward reported, “several Israeli Arab lawmakers also have voiced support for the efforts of Syria and Hezbollah to fight Israel, with one lawmaker praising efforts to abduct Israeli soldiers.” You can see why your average secular Tel Avivi, let alone an arch-nationalist like Eitam, might have been led to some intemperate words.
So is the condemnation of Eitam more “suppression of honest expression”? Perhaps. But the actions of a few misguided lawmakers don’t justify incitement against the hundreds of thousand of Arabs Israel regards as good citizens.
As for his calls for expulsion, the least that can be said is that it gets a much-whispered argument out into the open. The truth in his remarks is that for Israelis disillusioned with the “peace process” and “unilateralism,” expulsion sounds like a plan.
But Eitam’s remarks elide a big truth: namely, that Israel and its people will never countenance a solution that is physically impossible, diplomatically untenable, and morally unbearable. Yes, it might feel good to dream of a “land without people for a people without land.” But Israel can’t live in Effi Eitam’s dreams. In the real world, most Israelis believe they can maintain a democracy that includes its Arab minority and that they cannot maintain a democracy that denies the Palestinians their own state. The longer the Eitams deny that future, Israel’s mainstream argues, the stronger the Islamist racists and hate-mongers become.
Which brings us back to the pope’s remarks. There is no doubt that there is a powerful strain within Islam that seeks to “spread by the sword the faith [Mohammed] preached.” But the West cannot expel or kill every last fanatic, any more than Israel can. The future rests on isolating the extremists and empowering the realists. That's where faith and reason come together.
Comment | | |
All rights reserved