Hugh Fitzgerald: In An Age of Terror, What Is The Responsibility of Glenn K. Beaton? (Part Three)
All that said, the data does suggest that today’s backward Muslim countries tend to be more violent. But I submit that the reason is that they are backward, not that they are Muslim. When Christian Europe was a backward society in the Middle Ages conducting pogroms against the Jews, the Muslims in the Middle East were leaders in mathematics.
But why are “today’s backward Muslim countries” both “more violent” and more “backward”? Surely the violence of Muslim societies must be attributed to the Qur’an, with its exaltation of violence ‘’in the path of Allah,” and to the hadith, too, where Muhammad, the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct, is seen as a military leader and warlord, engaged in one military campaign after another, participating in the killing of 600-900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, and dividing the loot (property, women) seized from the tribes he vanquished. Violence is central to Islam. And why does Beaton not address the question as to why Muslim countries today are more “backward”? Could one reason for that backwardness be the hatred of bid’a, or innovation, because societies based on Islam are deemed to already be perfect? If Muslims start introducing innovations in ways of doing things, clerics fear, this might lead to a questioning of beliefs, of Islam itself, and that cannot be allowed.
When Beaton writes that “Christian Europe was a backward society in the Middle Ages conducting pogroms against the Jews,” he both exaggerates the anti-Jewish violence in Western Christendom (it was not all pogroms and blood libels) and ignores the attacks — pogroms — on Jews by Muslims. In Granada in 1066, the entire Jewish population of 4,000 was killed in two days, and there were repeated eruptions of violence against Jews in other Arab lands including Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and in Morocco under the Almohades.
Here’s the strongest point offered in response to my Facebook post. Peaceful Muslims are often reticent in condemning violence and extremists who engage in it. Many Muslim organizations did condemn 9/11 and other terrorism, and for that they deserve credit. But too often, they fall silent or issue an equivocal criticism.
If, as Beaton has claimed, far less than one-tenth of 1% of the world’s Muslims have been involved in terrorism, how is it that the “peaceful Muslims” who make up more than 99.9% of the Muslims are “reticent” — that is, afraid — to condemn “violence and extremists”? How can the many be so afraid of the very few? Beaton doesn’t explain.
How many Muslim organizations condemned 9/11? There were many in the West and elsewhere. There were also many examples of Muslims, especially in Gaza and the West Bank, handing out candy to passersby to celebrate the great achievement of Al-Qaeda. In other Arab countries, there was celebration in the air. Only in one Muslim country, Iran, were there noticeable expressions of sympathy from the public. And in the years since, with the dozens of major terror attacks in Europe and in America carried out by Muslims, many Muslim organizations have remained silent. This Beaton gets right: “too often, they fall silent or issue an equivocal criticism.”
For example, a newly elected Muslim congresswoman whom America rescued from violence and starvation in Somalia, and who seems to think that the problem in Washington is that too many legislators owe “allegiance” to the Jews, recently referenced 9/11. The words she chose were “some people did something.”That offends me. What happened on 9/11 was not just that “some people did something.”
Okay, good, there are limits to what Beaton will stomach, and Ilhan Omar’s “some people did something” — a remark which will undoubtedly enter a future edition of Bartlett’s Quotations — is intolerable.
What happened was that psychopathic Muslims in a perversion of their religion murdered thousands of innocent men, women and children in the bloodiest attack on American soil since the Civil War.
How does Glenn K. Beaton know that the Muslims who since 9/11 have engaged in more than 35,000 terror attack are “psychopathic”? Or that what they did was a “perversion” of their religion? Would he be willing to look at the evidence, in the Qur’an and hadith, that such people are merely following the dictates of Islamic texts and are not “psychopathic”? Is he aware of how many of those terrorists have quoted Qur’anic verses to justify their attacks? He could not possibly have read the 109 verses in the Qur’an that command Muslims to wage violent Jihad, to “fight” and to “kill” the Unbelievers, to “smite at their necks,” to “strike terror in their hearts”? But had he read them, he would also have had to admit that the terrorists were not engaged in a “perversion of their religion,” but were dutifully fulfilling its texts and teachings.
What does Beaton make of this verse:
“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them..” (8:12)
Or this one:
“We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because they joined others in worship with Allah, for which He had sent no authority; their abode will be the Fire and how evil is the abode of the Zalimun [the Disbelievers].” (3:151)
And can Beaton possibly be unaware that Muhammad himself, in a famous hadith that needs to be endlessly quoted,, claimed that “I have been made victorious through terror”?
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