ZGram - 11/15/2001 - "...but is it good for the Jews?" - Part V

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 15, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is the conclusion of the five-part ZGram gleaned from an essay by
Stephen Steinlight on how the Jewish Diaspara community is expected to be
negatively impacted by rampant, partly illegal immigation in America.

It is certainly one of the most telling documents depicting the
undercurrents of fear and anxiety the American Jewish leadership feels that
power and even safety are slipping from Jewish communities, largely because
of the presence of Muslims in the neighborhood who may not bear them well.

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   Also deeply troubling is the fact that the Islamist movement finds
critical support in the United States through a series of   organizations
such as the American Muslim Alliance, the Muslim Public Affairs Council,
the Council on America-Islamic   Relations, the Islamic Circle of North
America, and the American Muslim Council. These groups front as
anti-discrimination   organizations supposedly concerned principally with
protecting the rights and sensitivities of Muslims and Muslim   immigrants.
Their main agenda, however, is to exert ideological control over the
American Muslim community and to prevent   its acculturation and
assimilation. (It should be pointed out that while the plurality of
American Muslims hail from the   subcontinent - India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh - the leadership of these organizations tends to be Middle
Eastern, often  Palestinian or fellow travelers involved in the Palestinian
struggle against Israel.)

   These organizations function as advocates, recruiters, fundraisers, and
lobbyists on behalf of Islamist causes abroad, in recent   times especially
on behalf of their ilk in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Balkans, Central
Asia, and in the ceaseless struggle to   destroy Israel.   It is their
extremism that creates the very negative stereotypes of Muslims they decry
and accuse others of   foisting upon them.  Their venom in response to
outside queries and criticism, continual raising of the red herring of
Islamophobia, orchestration of fatwas by foreign mullahs against
independent Muslim thinkers (the case of the scholar Khalid   Dur=E1n is a
recent example), and their militant international agenda stereotype Muslims
as violent, intolerant, and repressive.

   That Jewish groups should remain stout defenders of an uncritical
immigration and visa policy that allows for the open-ended   entry of
Muslim fundamentalists to the United States and then provides government
agencies no means of keeping track of   them is self-defeating to the point
of being suicidal. (It should be pointed out that many of the suspects
recently arrested in   association with the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon entered the United States from Saudi Arabia with
legal visas.)

   It must also be pointed out, regrettably, that to date, few American
Muslims have come forward to challenge the self-proclaimed   leadership
role of these organizations, and there is thus no way to ascertain how
representative these groups genuinely are. It   must be admitted it is not
easy to oppose them in the tight and often repressive world of immigrant
communities, where   economic survival is often achieved at the cost of
political conformity, but change is beginning, although the new forces are
at   present no more than embryonic. Still, anti-Islamist Muslims are
increasingly seeking and finding each other (the web is   proving an
excellent meeting place) and anti-Islamist organizations of Muslim
independents and freethinkers are just beginning   to spring up. But theirs
is a long road, and they have only begun their work. It is also to be hoped
that sometime in the future,   the more pluralistic and spiritually open
Muslim Sufi religious community, represented in hundreds of mosques across
the   United States, will find the courage to break openly with the current
self-appointed leadership in the Muslim community.

   At the risk of being labeled the fool who rushes in where angels fear to
tread, it must also be acknowledged that classic Islam   itself, the
traditional faith - and not the hideous political ideologies derived from
it - is itself not unproblematic in its   attitudes towards Jews,
Christians, and other non-Muslims. The religious education of traditional,
non-Islamist Muslims -   literalism in Koranic exegesis, theological
straightjackets imposed on scriptual interpretation, the study of text
without context,   and the virtual absence of intellectual self-critique -
is filled with anti-Jewish teaching as well as a theology of contempt for
the followers of other faiths. It is the case that fellow monotheists have
been historically accorded at least official second-class   status (an
advance over the treatment accorded others, such as Hindus, Buddhists, or
Bahais, for example). But this condition is   far removed from anything
resembling authentic mutual respect and recognition of the equality of
religious claims or   commensurate spiritual authenticity.

   Powerful strains of religious triumphalism and religious supercessionism
are central tenets of Islam. Such dangerous spiritual   arrogance has been
abandoned by many Christian denominations, largely as a product of Vatican
II and years of interfaith   dialogue and soul-searching encounter.
Christian believers, from Roman Catholics to members of such liberal
Protestant   denominations as the Congregationalists and the United Church
of Christ, have for example, adopted the view that God's   covenantal
relationship with the Jewish people remains unbroken and that the advent of
Christianity neither erased nor   cancelled it. (In the United States, the
Southern Baptist Convention forms a sad exception to this changed
perspective, as do the   traditional attitudes of several Orthodox
Christian national churches.) No parallel spiritual generosity exists in
Islam. While   Muslims are prepared to offer the passing genuflection to
Jesus or prominent figures in the Hebrew bible, the tone is one of
enormous condescension. Muslim friends reared in traditional Islam in such
countries as Pakistan and Bangladesh tell me it is   impossible for a
Muslim who remains in the mainstream of his religious background not to be
an anti-Semite.

   On a more hopeful note, it is not impossible that Islam itself, as well
as its attitude toward Judaism, will undergo a profound   change in
America. In the United States, many religions have become more open,
tolerant, and pluralistic - but the process   will take time, it will be
hampered by the continuing pull of homeland politics and culture, and it
will require the emancipation   of the Muslim community from its
traditional leadership. At this point, the kind of radical reformation
required with regard to   Koranic interpretation makes any advocate of such
a change an apostate, a marked man. Similarly, any advocate of Islam's
spiritual equality with Christianity and Judaism, as opposed to
superiority, would be seen as a heretic whose blood should be   shed.

    In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, there have
been countless exhortations from public figures   ranging from President
Bush to religious leaders, political figures, and police officials not to
scapegoat all American Muslims   and to protect them from reprisals. Of
course such exhortations are timely and necessary. But far more
questionable have been   the continual references by politicians, clergy,
and the self-proclaimed "people of good will" to "our common religious
heritage," and the repetition, ad nauseum, of the mantra that "true Islam"
does not practice or preach violence and hatred.   As any one even vaguely
acquainted with the Koran knows, numerous Surahs preach hatred and violence
and call for ruthless   war against unbelievers in the name of Allah. This
is not a distortion of Islam; this is the language of its most sacred text.
And   it is but a short step from classic Islamic supremacism and
supercessionism to hatred, a short step from the belief that one's   own
faith possesses absolute truth to the readiness to inflict violence, even
death, on those who chose to stand outside it. For   American Muslims, this
should be a time of profound soul-searching, a time to re-evaluate the
fundamentals of the faith in light   of where they have tragically led the
faithful. But one sees scant sign this is taking place. To the contrary, we
are continually   reassured by Muslim Jihadist supporters (who recently
have cleverly toned down their strident websites) that Islam is a religion
of peace and told by (mostly) well-meaning and ill-informed Christian
partners in dialogue with Islam that we must not   confuse Islamism with
Islam. Authentic believers in and practitioners of inter-religious dialogue
must now come forward and   with rare courage and painstaking honesty call
for a radical reformation of Islam's moral vision of the "other," while
Muslims, religious leaders, and ordinary folk alike, must confront the
spiritual arrogance that deforms their faith and begets   violence.

   The Jewish community's role in confronting the rise of Islam in America
is (at least) fivefold. We must (1) seek to expose the   real nature of our
Islamist enemies, (2) attempt to support the emerging free thinkers within
the Muslim community, and (3)   work assiduously against Islamist political
agendas, even as we seek (4) to reduce prejudice against Muslim immigrants.
But,   again, (5) we should be seeking reductions in the number of
immigrants from Islamist societies given their enormous antipathy   to
Israel, Jews, America, and the West in general. And we should be especially
vigilant in opposing the admission of those   Islamists seeking asylum from
political repression in countries where secularist governments in such
places as Egypt, Jordan,   Turkey, Uzbekistan, etc. are struggling against
attempts to overthrow them by Islamist religious fanatics. It is nothing
less than   monstrous that the planners of the first bombing of the World
Trade Center and the would-be perpetrators of other terrorist   acts often
entered this country with refugee status.

   Does all this mean we should turn our backs on our longstanding
commitment in favor of generous legal immigration or   become pessimistic
about America's ability to socialize the fresh crop of newcomers into
acceptance of American norms and   values? Does this mean that we favor one
ethnic/racial configuration of American citizenry over another? The answer
to both is   a resounding no. What it does mean, however, is that our
support needs to be more qualified, more nuanced, and that we   should
recognize that immigration that is unprecedented in its scale and unceasing
intensity is neither good for immigrants nor   good for the United States.
The experience of the immigrant under present circumstances is often
disastrous and American   social cohesion and notions of economic justice
are seriously challenged. We should bring the numbers down to more
manageable levels, do far more to integrate immigrants into mainstream
American life, and inculcate the values of American   civil society in
immigrant communities. As Jews we also have special concerns regarding the
rising Muslim presence,   particularly the ascent of Islamism, and we
should be unashamed in pursuing our interests.

   The Ultimate Conundrum

   Finally, I confess that I suspect that MTV, for better of for worse,
will prove more powerful with young Muslim immigrants   than the mullahs,
and that the remarkable material and cultural attractiveness of American
life will cause the new immigrants to   follow (mostly) in the footsteps of
their predecessors. Free of Old World constraints, most new arrivals will
in time choose   individual freedom over subservience to outworn forms and
will opt for the rights of individual conscience over traditional   sources
of religious and political authority.

   But the process will be more difficult, and internal and external
resistance to the socialization of the new immigrants is and will   remain
far stronger than in the past. While we are right to remain hopeful in the
long run, we should also be profoundly   concerned about life in the short-
and mid-term. It is reasonable to be generally optimistic that all will
come right in the end, but   we must acknowledge that this outcome is
hardly a certainty. We have even noted that some "cutting edge" thinkers no
longer   accept that assimilation represents a desirable goal or that
loyalty to one's country constitutes a positive virtue. That leaves
plenty of room for doubt, far too much regarding a matter of such great
moment, and certainly enough to cause us to consider   major modifications
in our immigration policy now. Conservative risk-assessment suggests, nay,
it demands that we rethink   major components of our current open-ended
approach to immigration, and that we do so before we will have become
complicit, through action or inaction, in a fait accompli that may have
dire implications for Jews and for America.

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    Dr. Stephen Steinlight was for more than five years Director of
National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish   Committee. For
the past two and a half years he has been a Senior Fellow at AJC. He is
co-editor of the forthcoming   Fractious Nation: Race, Class and Culture in
America at the End of the Twentieth Century (UC-Berkeley   Press), and he
has recently been appointed editor of South Asia: In Review.The views
expressed in this essay do not   reflect the current policy position of AJC
with regard to immigration.

[END]

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(Source:  http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/back1301.html )

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Thought for the Day:

"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."

-  George Orwell=20