"Seriousness" has become the word of the day for the Islamophobic set.
According to some of our more serious hawks, anyone who doesn’t buy that the liberal democracies of the West are engaged in a death-match with hordes of dusky Muslim fanatics is "unserious" about America’s security and can’t be trusted.
It’s the latest in a series of attempts to forestall any meaningful discussion of the causes of violent Islamist ideologies, much less how the United States should respond to them. It locks us into the global "war on terror."
Unfortunately, all too many otherwise sane people seem to accept the terms.
But it’s hard to imagine anything more profoundly unserious than taking a dozen complex conflicts that originated in a dozen countries, stripping them of all historical and political context and lumping them together in an amorphous blob called the "Clash of Civilizations." But that’s exactly what we’re talking about. –Joshua Holland
This piece by Holland is worth reading in its entirety. It’s an attempt to bring some perspective to a far more complex situation than the administration propagandists would ever lead most Americans to believe. If anybody takes these people seriously anymore, it’s more a testament to their ability to scare us and to skillfully manipulate the media than it has to do with the substance of their argument. I use the word ‘argument’ here in the loosests sense; it seems too strong a word to describe what their rhetorical technique. It suggests that they are making some attempt to marshal evidence and to make a case. Rather their technique is simply to obliterate argument by declaring any position other than their own as worthy of being taken seriously.
How is it that these hardliners are so skillful at preempting judgment for the bankruptcy of their worldview by shouting repeatedly that everyone else’s is bankrupt. It’s as if they understand that we’ve not really moved beyond high school when the worst thing that boys could be accused of is being a wimp. The level at which this debate is being conducted is not much more sophisticated than that. The people who buy into this ‘argument’ about Islamofascism are either themselves thinking with fear-soaked brains or they want the rest of us to us to because the more we do, the more we feel the need for their militaristic leadership. America, for God’s sake, get a grip.
Of course blogs like this one or essays like Holland’s don’t change anything. Somebody with leadership stature has to have the courage to risk being perceived as "weak" by stepping up to shout back that this lizard-brained thinking is nuts. They have to reframe the debate so that clear-headed common sense rather than fear is the magnetic north guiding us here. Here’s Holland to close:
That’s why it’s so important to understand that those reactionaries within our own society who are pushing the Clash of Civilizations are mirror-images of the terrorists that inspire their hyperbolic fear; they’re just as xenophobic, just as irrational and, ultimately, are just as great a threat to our security. Both have to be challenged aggressively before they give birth to another, even bloodier generation of culture warriors.
Update: Wolcott’s take: [All this War Party rhetoric] "is an index of the frustration and impotence they’re experiencing at not getting their way. They’re waging rhetorical escalation because de-escalation is the unacknowledged order of the day, and there’s nothing they can do about it." I hope he’s right. Also see Fareed Zakaria‘s take in his Newsweek column entitled "The Year of Living Fearfully." If only being reasonable and well-informed were enough.
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