embarrass the very name of “religious liberty” and endanger our national security. Anti-Muslim bigots and their public apologists must be vigorously opposed by Americans who recognize the value of a religious voice in the public square and the imperative that all Americans be treated equally under the law, whether they are religious or irreligious, Christian, Muslim, or Jew.
What made Schmitz’s article rather awkward was the fact that many of these sharia alarmists — Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy, and Daniel Pipes, to name only three — are among the most prominent writers for National Review. Predictably, anti-Islam activist Andrew Bostom took to the NRO‘s blog to denounce Schmitz as “willfully uninformed,” although his intervention consisted of a set of standard-issue talking points giving no indication that Bostom had even read the original piece. (As Schmitz noted in his reply, Bostom didn’t seem to notice that some of his talking points had already been rebutted in the piece.) This led Bostom to issue a second, more ill-tempered response in which he accused Schmitz of trafficking in “shallow, non-sequitur argumentation” and being “well marinated in cultural relativism.”
In the meantime, other NRO writers had gotten in on the fracas, with David French — a hawkish Christian Zionist lawyer and leader of the group Evangelicals for Mitt — providing a rambling defense of Bostom, while Ramesh Ponnuru — among the smartest and most prominent conservative pundits — attacked French and defended Schmitz’s original piece.
Why is any of this important? Simply because the controversy provides a hopeful (albeit highly tentative) indication that some on the religious right — and particularly the Catholic right — may be starting to stand up to the Islamophobic hysteria that has taken over much of the conservative movement. Perhaps uncoincidentally, both Schmitz and Ponnuru are Catholic, as is Robert George, the right-wing academic and movement power broker who has similarly called on Christians to “defend religious liberty for Muslims”. Prior to Schmitz’s article, his magazine First Things — which has no formal religious affiliation but has always been primarily Catholic in orientation — recently published another attack on anti-sharia laws by Robert Vischer.
Of course, it is nothing new to see religious Catholics, or the Church itself, take positions far to the left of the American conservative movement on foreign policy or economic issues. But the First Things crowd is notable in that it has always skewed to the right of most American Catholics and cultivated close ties with the conservative movement. Richard John Neuhaus, the magazine’s late founder, went from a left-wing opponent of the Vietnam War and campaigner for civil rights early in his career to a right-wing supporter of the Iraq War and proponent of a “clash of civilizations” between Christendom and Islam by the end of his life. Similarly, Robert George has all but urged fellow Catholics to abandon their (often-left-leaning) views on war or social justice and focus exclusively on issues related to abortion and sexual mores. (Rick Santorum is perhaps the classic example of this combination of conservative Catholic social mores and ultra-hawkish neoconservative foreign policy.)
In recent months, this group has raised an enormous outcry over the alleged violation of religious liberty inherent in the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. I confess that I have always been skeptical about whether their primary concern was really for “religious liberty” in general as opposed to Christian values in particular, and whether they would support the same sweeping conscience exemptions for Muslims that they were espousing for Christians. The current pushback against sharia hysteria on the right doesn’t provide a full answer to these questions — but it is at the very least a hopeful sign that the Catholic right might be willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to defending believers of other faiths.
]]>The first argument states that Israel is a central character in Arab nationalism and that irrational hatred of Israel and Jews has a prominent place in any [...]]]>
The first argument states that Israel is a central character in Arab nationalism and that irrational hatred of Israel and Jews has a prominent place in any Arab government.
On January 31 2010, Andrew Mccarthy offered an example of this talking point in his National Review blog post, “Fear the Muslim Brotherhood,” writing:
The Brotherhood did not suddenly become violent (or “more violent”) during World War II. It was violent from its origins two decades earlier. This fact — along with Egyptian Islamic society’s deep antipathy toward the West and its attraction to the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism — is what gradually beat European powers, especially Britain, into withdrawal.
But with the Middle East in a state of upheaval after Hosni Mubarak’s resignation and what appears to be the approaching end of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign, a more popular talking point has taken over the opinion pages: Hawks seek to deny the destabilizing role that the U.S. has played in supporting authoritarian Arab leaders who have kept peace with Israel.
Two promoters of this theory recently popped up in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Today’s issue of the WSJ offered up an excerpt, in the paper’s “Notable & Quotable” section, of journalist Brendan O’Neill’s writing. O’Neill had written in The Australian, on February 16:
[O]ne of the most striking things about the uprising in Egypt was the lack of pro-Palestine placards. As Egypt-watcher Amr Hamzawy put it, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere there were no signs saying “death to Israel, America and global imperialism” or “together to free Palestine.” Instead, this revolt was about Egyptian people’s own freedom and living conditions.
O’Neill observes that at “the pro-Egypt demonstration in London on Saturday, there was a sea of Palestine placards. ‘Free Palestine,’ they said, and ‘End the Israeli occupation.’” The WSJ’s excerpt ends:
This reveals something important about the Palestine issue. . . . [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time.
While O’Neill’s point may have been more broad, the WSJ editorial board’s decision to narrowly quote him and promote the few sentences he wrote about the “lack of pro-Palestine placards” is telling.
Of course, this analysis overlooks the U.S.’s support for Mubarak as well as the Egyptian government’s maintenance of the Israeli-Egypt peace agreement and assistance in enforcing the siege on Gaza. (See Alex Kane’s excellent dismantling of the “Israel has nothing to do with this” argument.)
Yesterday, the Journal’s European edition published an op-ed on the non-existent role Israel played in the unrest shaking the Middle East.
The Foundation for Defense for Defense of Democracies’ Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote:
Arab freedom has taken precedence over Israel and Palestine—or so says the much-maligned Arab Street, as it topples one tyrant and challenges the next. The conventional wisdom that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the mother of all problems in the region has now been exposed as nothing but a myth. Will Western leaders finally learn?
Ottolenghi uses this argument to belittle the Obama administration for its public endorsements of linkage—the idea, accepted by the upper echelons of the U.S. military, that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help promote U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East.
While it is convenient for Ottolenghi to take up this argument as the Middle East is falling into turmoil, he hasn’t been immune from reverting to the argument that a deep-rooted anti-Semitism is prevalent in the Middle East.
In March, 2010, Ottolenghi wrote on Commentary’s Contentions blog:
A bi-national state is actually more promising than a nation-state […] because it would keep their nationalist dream alive — a dream whereby, as Professor Fouad Ajami once so artfully put it, “there still lurks in the Palestinian and Arab imagination a view, depicted by the Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui, that “on a certain day, everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled.” Arafat knew the power of this redemptive idea. He must have reasoned that it is safer to ride that idea, and that there will always be another day and another offer.”
And in February 2009, he wrote in Haaretz:
[H]istory shows us that Palestinian demands are rooted in a grievance culture of victimhood, not in facts.
Western-allied Middle Eastern countries are under increasing pressure to yield to protesters’ demands for more representative governments and improvements in human rights. It’s convenient for pro-Israel hawks to hide behind the argument that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had nothing to do with this quickly unraveling situation. But, as Ottolenghi’s contradicting op-eds illustrate, any expression of Palestinian solidarity from a newly democratic Arab government will most likely be met with accusations that an irrational hatred of Israel is central to the Arab psyche.
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