Where Are the Angry Secular Humanists When You Need Them?


Author: Jeff Breinholt

Date Published: 2008-03-04


Where Are the Angry Secular Humanists When You Need Them?

Jeff Breinholt

 

There is no shortage of people these days who invoke the Cold War to describe a template we should adopt in the greatest national security challenge today. The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, they say. The same will happen with radical Islam, if we can just contain it and show a little patience. Let’s get out if Iraq, they suggest, and let history run its course.  Before long, al Qaeda will peter out and terrorism will be something with which most Muslims will not want to be associated. Once this occurs, and we will be able to deal with terrorism as a small, containable problem we can combat though cops and prosecutors.

 

The latest purveyor of this viewpoint is Philip H. Gordon, a Brookings Institute scholar who has published a thin book, called Winning the Right War (Times Books 2007).  Terrorism, he argues, is not related to the hatred of freedom, as President Bush claims. It is also not inevitable that Muslims despise the U.S. If we just turn down the rhetoric, get out of Iraq, change our cast of characters (and elect a new President) and give the Arab world less reason to dislike us, things will be fine.  Eventually, the Arab World will come to accept liberal democracy as the answer.  “Just as we won the Cold War only when our adversaries essentially gave up the bankrupt ideology, “ Gordon writes, “we will win only win the war against Islamist terrorism when the same thing happens.”

 

So easy, if only it were true. Gordon claims that it is unlikely that the addition of 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq is enough to bring security to Baghdad’s five million citizens. Really? Has he read the newspapers lately, or did is book go to press before these favorable reports? Either way, he seems to be wrong about the efficacy of the Surge. It makes one wonder about his larger argument.

 

Even if Gordon is correct about what Islam stands for – something that Islam experts from Stephen Coughlin to Robert Spencer will not easily acknowledge – I fear he sells our current enemy short. The threat we face now that is a qualitatively different challenge than we faced from the Communists after World War II. If anything, Islamism may be a more formidable enemy, for it can boast of something we never saw when our enemy was the Soviets: it renders our most reliable social critics mysteriously silent. This makes it a threat to our culture, which in some ways is worse than a threat to our existence.  

 

In our battle against radical Islam, exactly where are the secular humanists, who could typically be relied on to lay down markers on what aspects of society are negotiable? Where are the angry feminists and post-Stonewall homosexuals whose outspokenness enriched our lives, because they insisted on being heard and reminded us of the inconvenient truths about the dictates of an enlightened society? These groups brought some much-needed rationality to the social issues of 20th Century America. They clearly have a dog in this fight, since the theory and practice of Islamism is anathema to everything they represent. Nonetheless, the reliable contrarians are oddly silent in the face of an fanatical ideology against which they should be expected to draw a clear line in the sand, which is bewildering since they are usually so willing to (wo)man the barricades in a pinch. These days, they are more likely to be at a brainstorming get-together hosted by Moveon.org to come up with good slogans to defeat that evil Republican ideas industry. Their absence is felt. I miss them. 

 

Of course, not all are AWOL. There’s Bruce Bawer, an openly gay New Yorker who relocated to Europe and published an angry book called While Europe Slept, describing how European-style multiculturalism has created a ticking time bomb in the Muslim enclaves. On the feminist side, there’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Caroline Fourest, a French scholar whose Brother Tariq is a scathing indictment of Tariq Ramadan’s work that was recently translated into English. Bawer and Fourest are veterans of the cultural wars.  Each has published books critical on Christian fundamentalists, which makes their latest writing hardly part of the neoconservatives’ conspiracy. Still, three or four of them do not a movement make.

 

There were some signs of this deadening silence when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got on a roll at his 2007 appearance at Columbia University. He spoke about the value of intellectual activity, and how the scientific process should not be used to kill people. He bemoaned the tendency to eliminate thriving cultures which are the result of thousands of years of interaction, creativity, and artistic activities. He even stepped out of character and referred to the Holocaust as a “fact,” an amazing acknowledgement for him.For these observations, he received warm applause. Seeing the reaction of the audience to what he was saying and an opportunity to press his advantage, he went for more. “In Iran,” he said, “we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon.”

 

All-righty, then. Of course, he’s right. Gays in a world run by Muslims do not exist for long. They have some very unique treatments reserved for them that would make the abuses of Abu Ghraib look like a fireside chat at Brigham Young University. Radical Islam is, to homosexuals, nothing if not an existential threat, which should make it a problem for anyone who believes that individuals have a right to live irrespective of their sexual preferences. The Iranian leader had no reason to know that what he said about gays at Columbia would be less than a winning line, since so few have complained about the issue.

 

So perhaps it can be said al Qaeda has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams when its leaders sat down to plan the slaughter of 3,000 innocent people. If their goal with the 9/11 attacks was to make Americans look inward and understand our complicity in the “rape” of the Arab world (represented by the presence of U.S. military personnel in parts of the globe where the presence of infidels is prohibited), here’s what they have achieved: 

 

We have a body politic that seems to be hoping that their own country loses a war, all because it might represent a finger in the eye of a President who, they claimed, lied to the people about why the invasion was necessary. We have one of America’s most elite colleges admitting the former Taliban spokesman as a student, even while it insists on the right to exclude U.S. military recruiters from campus because of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” We have supporters of Israel’s right to exist being characterized as “Nazis” by those whose anti-Semitism comes as naturally as breathing. We have a Muslim advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense who meets with Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and carries such clout that he is able to bounce from the Pentagon a well-respected briefer who refused to tone down his assessment on the threat of radical Islam. On top of all this, al Qaeda has sidelined people steeped in the tradition of Oscar Wilde and Betty Freidan, rendering them oddly speechless. This makes radical Islam a far more potent force than Jerry Falwell or Anita Bryant, each of whom commanded enough adherents for them to be characterized as hegemonic. Even if many American Jews were sucked into the promises of Communism, they still called a spade a spade when talking about the plight of Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union.

 

This leads me to something I hope will start to be accepted, since it seems so obvious: counterterrorism and human rights go hand-in-hand. People who impose their religious will on others through violence are enemies of the civilized world, and it does not matter whether they represent an existential threat to the American society. Gone are the days when we could allow dictators, despots and fanatics a wide swath if they happened to be fighting something we thought was dangerous, or if they were sufficiently remote from American shores. There is nothing inconsistent with being enthusiastic about human rights and supporting the current American cause.

 

This realization pulls Philip Gordon’s prescriptions up short. During the Cold War, when intellectuals like George Kennan argued for a strategy of containment of Communists rather than confrontation, they had to answer the charge that their suggestions would condemn those who lived under tyranny behind the Iron Curtain.  Is this not true of containment applied to Islamists?  Millions of people live in places run under Shari’ah law. Surely they are entitled to our concern and support, as long as Americans care about the fate of people they have never met but still happen to live on the same planet as we do, at the same time. In this sense, the question is not whether political Islam succeeds at imposing its backward view of society on Americans in our homeland. The fact that it has taken hold anywhere in the world is relevant. That’s one of the legacies of 1994 Rwanda, which I think spawned the expression (and a common lawn sign around the liberal suburbs of Boston): “Not on Our Watch.” We want to avoid feeling so dirty again. This urgency makes the strategy of containment towards Islamism insufficient, and the near silence of feminists and gays so maddening.

 

A smart young lawyer named Brooke Goldstein, who is affiliated with the Middle East Forum, has picked up with the idea, and she is peddling the hardly radical notion that Palestinian families who send their kids on Hamas suicide missions should be treated as human rights violators, because their kids are not of age and capable of consent. She made a documentary film about this problem, which won a U.N. Film Festival Award. The problem is that Goldstein’s message resonates so well with people on the right. If only that didn’t matter to people who fancy themselves humanitarians. 

 

For gays and feminists in their struggle for dignity, it did not matter that there were times during their activity when Americans were led by a Democrat president, which might have led them to ease up a little on the throttle in the interests of having the less-bad party maintain power. Didn’t happen – their causes were far too urgent. That is no less true today, when there are plenty of women and homosexuals struggling in the Muslim world. Their pain does not recognize American partisan battles.  Is it not about time that their natural supporters here start speaking up?

 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Department of Justice.

# # #

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jeff Breinholt is a Senior Fellow and Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (www.strategycenter.net.)  Jeff blogs on the Counterterrorism Blog. 

read full author bio here


If you are a reporter or producer who is interested in receiving more information about this writer or this article, please email your request to pr@familysecuritymatters.org.

Note -- The opinions expressed in this columfn are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of The Family Security Foundation, Inc.




Click here to support Family Security Matters