This recent posting about Paul Berman's alleged 'persuasiveness' prompted a painful memory -- the time I spent struggling though Berman's Terror and Liberalism back in 2003 so I could write this review. I wanted to engage with Berman to sharpen my own thinking, but I found his writing simply awful: Leon Wieseltier's pretention without any of Wieseltier's undeniable style and occasional insight.
I argued that Berman's greatest error, once you stagger through his pretention, is that he grossly exaggerated the strength of Islamic extremism. I pointed out:
"In the Middle East, the great mass of people have rejected violent Islamism and the attacks on civilians. Berman says he has “greatly relied” on Gilles Kepel, the French authority on Islamism (who is one of his pitiful handful of sources). But he utterly disregards the conclusion of Kepel’s masterwork, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Kepel sums up decades of firsthand experience: 'In spite of what many commentators contended in its immediate aftermath, the attack on the United States was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation, and decline of the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength and irrepressible might.'
I continued:
"What is remarkable about the Middle East is the rejection of indiscriminate violence. A key event took place on November 17, 1997, in Egypt, whose 71 million people form the largest Arab state. A small band, apparently attached to the Islamic Group, attacked tourists in the courtyard of the Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor, killing 62 people. Widespread revulsion among the Egyptian public forced the Group to declare a cease-fire, and tourism has long since revived."
Even after seven more years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I stand by this statement, although the minority of violent jihadists across the region has surely increased in size.
If you asked Berman how he wrote this book, I suspect he would say that he:
Looked calmly at reality,
Courageously saw what soft-hearted liberals missed, and
Issued a stern intellectual warning about the entire region.
I would argue that in fact he, mostly unconsciously:
Looked emotionally at Israel, and
Recognized that the exaggerated Islamo-fascism argument would help Israel's defense, so he
Looked for evidence to support his argument.
Paul Berman is one of a number of otherwise liberal thinkers whose progressivism evaporates when it comes to Israel. Two other great examples are “just war” theorist Michael Walzer (for whom just war has come to mean genocide against the Arab peoples) and Michael Ignatieff.
Edward Said recalled that the genuinely great thinker (as opposed to Walzer, Ignatieff or Berman) — Isaiah Berlin — also shut down completely when the topics of Israel and its atrocities were raised.
There is an explanation for this — one of many (but I think this one is the most plausible). These noted and otherwise good thinkers are racists. Hardly a first. Many outstanding individuals have been inconsistent, and Berman is far from outstanding. He is merely good (which is good enough).
The most famous example I can think of in recent years is H. L. Mencken, whose personal, private writings revealed a streak of racist thought when they were released decades after his death.
Frankly, the saints are the only people who are entirely free of inconsistent thinking peppered with some bigotry. The good people (unlike Berman) are the ones who recognize their own flaws — like Mencken — and work publicly to address them.
Berman, Walzer, Ignatieff and a small army of others have instead worked to make virtues of their racism by dressing it up in pseudo-scholarship.
Berman et al are cowards. They couldn’t bear to train their blurry, mediocre lens inward. Even a half-hearted attempt at objectivity would leave them scared witless. Instead they project their grotesqueness onto others.
That all sounds exactly right to me.
Oh, and a well written review of Berman by James North. Puts the work of dunces like Podhoretz and Peretz to shame.
I don’t recall how much of Berman’s work emphasized the size of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, which James North dismisses as small enough to be contained by police action rather than war. But regarding the virulence of the founders of the movement Berman was right on target.
WJ: Thanks for your comment on my post. As I said in my 2003 review, Berman argues that the Islamic world was characterized by “mass political movements” that are “drunk on the idea of slaughter.” Later, he added that “. . . in large parts of the world, a mass movement of radical Islamists had arisen, devoted to mad hatreds and conspiracy theories. . .”
A threat this large would certainly demand a ‘global war on terror’ instead of intelligent police action.
I mostly don’t agree with you about the founders of Islamic fundamentalism. Hassan al-Banna, who started the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, is perfectly understandable as man who fused anti-colonialism with religion; the Brotherhood today has evolved into a mass movement, probably the largest in Egypt, which maintains nonviolence despite ferocious repression by the Mubarak regime. One-quarter of all Arabs are Egyptian.
You are right that Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian ideologue whose influence grew in the 1960s before Nasser executed him, could certainly be described as ‘virulent,’ and is revered by Al-Quaeda. (One irritating feature of Berman’s book is that he implies that he somehow intellectually discovered Qutb, even though Mideast specialists had studied and written about the man and his impact for years.)
The nonviolent Muslim Brothers are still much more influential within Egypt than Qutb’s followers, even though the United States and Britain fell right into Bin Laden’s trap by invading Iraq, (an invasion that Berman was for before he was against). Of course, that could eventually change.
I want to close by saying I’m sure I’m not alone in appreciating your thoughtful and open-minded comments on this site.
Who’s killed more innocent people in the past decade, WJ? Islamic Fundamentalists, or the Israeli and US militaries?