by hilzoy
Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a post about the very light sentence given by Indonesian courts to Abu Bakar Bashir. At least, that’s what it starts out discussing. He then segues into a discussion of Abu Ali, the Virginia student who was accused of plotting to kill the President after being held held in Saudi Arabia for 20 months. About that case, Wretchard writes:
“Presiding judge O’Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard part of treating with these men of the shadows. “I can assure you, you will not suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals’ custody”. Already the victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will hold themselves erect? “
For some reason, it would not have occurred to me to describe assuring a suspect that he would not be tortured in custody as being “halfway to (one’s) knees”, as if stating that federal marshals will follow federal law were some sort of craven concession. But the really offensive part of Wretchard’s post comes later:
“Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea’s potency remains it will find adherents.
The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.
America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.“
So, just to be clear: when America tries to undermine the ideology of radical Islam, it ends up harming only its own. And “sometimes” Wretchard thinks this is a good thing. And why is that? Because he suspects that “the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West.”
In an earlier post, I quoted C.S. Lewis on where hatred leads:
“Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
Wretchard began, as best I can tell, by hating the Islamists who attacked this country on 9/11 and the unspecified “Left” who, in his view, enable and support them. But now his hatred has circled back on itself. At least, that’s the only way I can interpret his saying that it’s a good thing that cracks are spreading through the ideology that supports this country, and that the West he began by defending contains “the foundations of Barad-Dur”. Even if we assume that he only means that we on “the Left” provide those foundations, what he actually says is that he “sometimes” thinks that it’s “fortunate” that America harms the ideological foundations on which it is built, since when our foundations are harmed, Barad-Dur’s are harmed as well. This is madness.
There are other things about this post that are also — I don’t know what word to use other than ‘delusional’*. Is it an “apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders”? Not in the world I live in. We can debate who those defenders are — those on the right might cite the President, for starters, while I might be more likely to point to those who have protested the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the courts who have ruled that the President does not have the right to detain people without charges. But whichever side you take, the idea that ‘the Western ideal can find no public defenders’ is not just false; it’s so false that one has to wonder what planet Wretchard has been living on all this time. Likewise, he says that the madrassa system “has proved too powerful to shut down or even criticize”, in the course of a discussion of Abu Ali, who went to school in Virginia. But obviously the reason Islamic schools have not been shut down isn’t that they’re ‘too powerful’; it’s that pesky little First Amendment. And if Wretchard thinks that no one has criticized madrassas, I have to wonder once again whether he and I inhabit the same universe.
On reflection, I think we probably aren’t. He is trapped in Lewis’ “universe of pure hatred”, fighting enemies only he can see.
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