Friedman’s Jihad
Thomas Friedman’s new column reminded me of the line from Casino Royale: “Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go hand in hand.” In the same column in which he complains that Westerners treat Muslims as nothing more than objects and deprive them of agency and responsibility, he urges on the mass slaughter of said Muslims by other Muslims to get them to stop believing “bad things.” In short, he won’t credit them with being morally responsible agents until they embark on a bloody religious war of his design.
Ackerman responds appropriately:
Yes, what problem can’t be solved by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, egged on from the sidelines by a newspaper columnist?
There are many, many problems with urging on a “civil war” among Muslims. I don’t expect Friedman to be careful in his choice of words, but his use of the phrase “civil war” shows how confused he is. A civil war is fought between citizens of the same polity for control of its government. By speaking of a “civil war” within Islam, he unwittingly writes as if he accepts a global Islamic polity as a reality and something over which Muslims of various stripes can fight one another to control. Obviously, such a polity does not and never will exist.
As he did late last month, Friedman is carelessly reproducing pan-Islamist ideas as part of his own effort at looking for red herrings because he doesn’t want to “look inward.” In his case, the red herring is the lack of Muslim outrage. Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities, but Friedman is demanding impassioned reaction from hundreds of millions spread out across four continents in response to events that are mostly abstract and far removed from them. It could be that large numbers of these people appear indifferent or quiescent not because they approve of the atrocities or fear the jihadists who commit them, but simply that they are indifferent to events that occur thousands of miles away in other lands. What we have seen in Iraq and Pakistan is the revulsion local populations come to feel for jihadists who target their people. Unless I miss something, the only way Friedman is going to get the war he wants is for jihadists to become much more numerous and widely distributed throughout Muslim-majority countries so that every Muslim society can be terrorized and then react against the attackers. That would mean a dramatic increase in terrorism worldwide and all of the attendant excesses that various national governments would engage in to combat these threats.
What Friedman is trying to avoid looking at are all those aggressive policies that he has vociferously backed for years that have done so much to sow distrust of the U.S. among Muslims. If jihadists have been making gains, it is partly because we have provided them abundant provocations and attacks to use as fodder for their propaganda. These policies have radicalized entire populations. That is what wars do: they radicalize and intensify political and/or religious beliefs, and they typically empower maximalists and fanatics. As destructive as the conflicts he would wish upon all Muslims would be, the end result could still very well be a larger population of deeply radicalized people, which would be disastrous for the welfare of all these societies and likely damaging to the security of the U.S. and allied nations.
You hit the nail on the head here Daniel. I might add an ivory tower analogy and throw in a little holier than thou reference, but that’s just me. I guess actually thinking through an advocated policy isn’t in fashion these days.
Friedman is an idiot of course, as he shows again here, but your article was unfair to him in a couple minor ways. First of all, “civil war” has been used figuratively by leading political thinkers for quite a while. In context, Friedman makes it clear that he’s talking by analogy to the American civil war (yeah, I know, it wasn’t really a civil war, but that’s what it’s called). So I see no problem with his use of that term.
Second, urging Muslims to embark on a civil war against the “violent, jihadist minority” (Friedman’s words) does not “deprive them of agency and responsibility” (your words). Clearly, it does just the opposite. The “hoist with his own petard” rhetorical trick can be elegant, but here it’s forced.
The suggestion that Muslims are silent about major terrorist attacks in Iraq because they’re “indifferent to events that occur thousands of miles away in other lands” and which “are mostly abstract and far removed from them” is stretching it a bit, don’t you think? Friedman’s own example is the Swiss minaret ban, which quotes someone as saying has been getting all the Muslim attention worldwide. If that’s factually incorrect, there are other examples. Publish a cartoon in a Danish newspaper and see how indifferent they are. Let Israel drop a bomb on a Muslim family and see how indifferent they are. Or to switch to a positive event: fly some planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and see how indifferent they are. Or hypothetically: would Muslims care if the US started targeting civilians in Iraq?
I’m not disagreeing with you on the major point. The idea of a Muslim civil war is insane. Friedman has about one-tenth the ability and insight that you do, but maybe that’s all the more reason to be especially fair to him.
He does seem to literally be calling for a war:
Friedman may have botched the delivery a bit but I think some of the bigger points are unfortunately correct.
Take Civil War, the appropriate analogy is not the USA in 1860 but Central Europe 1618 to 1648 and the 30 years War which was a Civil War within Christiandom firstly between two competing visions of Christianity and secondly the role of the state in such disputes. This is very similar to what has started now and what will continue within the larger Islamic World.
Lets take the idea of the global umma, or mulism community. Is it real or ficticious? While I think it is quite true that local politics drive what does and does not go on whithin individual countries with majority muslim populations, an idea of the global community of muslims has always had a place within these local political narratives. What is different now is that modern telecommunications technology is making this rhetorical imagined community much more concrete. Concrete enough to launch multi state riots against Danish consulates when asked to. So if it is conrete enough to focus concern and animus outside the borders of Islam why can’t it focus on outrages within the borders of Islam; my answer is that it is politically harder and more controversial to do so why annoy your viewership; give em some good old rotten kaffirs to look at and everybody is happy. Is America any better at looking at its own problems, again no, but it still doesn’t make it a benign development.
What is the appropriate non-muslim response to this growing confrontation within Islam? Should we pick a side? Should we get involved militarily? Here I think you are on firm ground when you call for the least amount of military involvement possible from the West in these conflicts. Arms merchants will always sell guns to make money but advisers and direct military interventions are a good way to get involved in something that you have no idea how it will end or to whose benefit (ie AfPak Iraq)
So to sum up, yes stay out of the hornets nest but the civil war is real.
He says that we treat them like objects, and then he insists that they must do what pleases him to be taken seriously as moral agents. He complains that we infantilize Muslims around the world, but he talks about them as though they are moral idiots. Greenwald had a great point that it is ludicrous for Friedman to complain about infantilizing Muslims when he likened Afghanistan to a special needs baby not very long ago.
Friedman isn’t being figurative when he calls for a civil war. Yes, I know people use civil war inaccurately all the time to talk about intra-party rifts and other internecine conflicts that aren’t really civil wars, but Friedman seems to think that there is some sort of identifiable Islamic Union that needs to kill hundreds of thousands of people to eliminate those who believe the wrong things. He compares competing tendencies inside a world religion to a conflict between two opposing American polities, and he does this to simplify it into a problem that can be resolved by sufficiently devastating war.
What people pay attention to and get angry about has a lot to do with what their political leaders and media tell them they should pay attention to and be angry about. Outrage and blaming outsiders are reliable ways to boost ratings and win support. Self-criticism or criticism of one’s fellows typically appeals to smaller audiences. The constituency for this kind of critique is never very large, and it is probably even smaller in Muslim communities that have grown up with a picture of the world in which Muslims are more often under attack than they are attacking. That doesn’t make that picture accurate, but it is similar to the mentality that says that every American intervention is benevolent. We see the same defensiveness, the same instinct to insist that one’s fellow citizens or co-religionists have not really done much wrong that we normally see among Westerners when there are attacks on our countries. There is a small army of Western writers who specialize in complaining about “blaming the victim” or “blaming America first” whenever someone tries to understand why an attack has happened. This is probably what many Muslims think Friedman et al. are trying to do every time they call for more Muslim outrage against jihadism.
So I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of these events are distant and abstract for most Muslims. If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Muslims living in India and in southeast Asia, you’re aware that such terrorist attacks happen but for the most part they do not have much to do with you. Unless it was constantly brought to your attention, it would not preoccupy you in the way that Friedman is demanding.
as they say on another blog in reference to friedman, ‘i read these idiots so you don’t have to’. i thank you, mr larison, for your selfless service. friedman is indeed an idiot of the first water. friedman commenting on foreign affairs this century reminds me of the old baseball advertisement with bob euchre yelling, ‘he missed the call’, from his seat deep in the outfield.
“Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities”
How many moslem like Mahathir Mohammad who pity and sorry over many youth palestinian commit sucide bomber? just two, he and I …. okay I meant just few …
Why moslem willing commit suicide bomberman?
- poor moslem: because they have no good future. by jihad at least they make a try to change western domination and hope their grand child will have good future, if the bomber mission accomplised
- educated moslem (like UK Moslem bomberman): because they see no way to make poor moslem live better, free from western IMF WB domination.
Rich moslem like khadafu, king saud clan just care about their familiy …
“Islam needs the same civil war.”
FYI, Indonesians run civil war at 1950-jo and 1960. Between islamic state clan (Darul Islam) lead by Sekar Maridjan Kartosoewir VS Republic Clan lead by Soekarno… Both Sekar and Soekarno are frieds, at least they know each other at Sarekat Islam Party, the first political party in colonization era.
Why since 2000 many suicide bomber happen at Indonesia? It is globalization era, boderless community. Many moslem from indonesia can easily join holy war at afghanistan, philipina now iraq … and back to indonesia equipped with bomber skils and start new holy war…. this is the second civil war, the guerillas episode.