[lit-ideas] Re: Fukuyama, Arabists and French Multiculturalists
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 07:41:40 -0700 (PDT)
--- Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Whenever like now, my note must be to correct
> misapprehensions or
> misconstructions, I hesitate to write it, especially
> if I sense the motive
> behind the note to which I am responding to be
> hostile;
*Personally hostile ? Oh come on, Lawrence, you
haven't really received a hostile reply from yet,
except once in the olden days when I mistook you to be
someone else and so did (that time indeed) misread
your comments.
>
>
> An "Arabist" is one who has embraced the Arab nation
> to which he has been
> diplomatically assigned. He identifies with it,
> takes up its causes, and
> chooses its side. Arabists often took the side of
> their Arab nation against
> the U.S. This is not what is wanted in a diplomat,
> and the U.S. began
> shifting people about in an attempt to overcome this
> malady. The downside
> of such attempts, as Kaplan explains, is that the
> U.S. lost some expertise,
> but the gain in loyalty was a desirable trade-off.
> Martin Kramer's thesis
> in Ivory Towers of Sand, the Failure of Middle
> Eastern Studies in America is
> that the Title VI expenditures have not resulted in
> expert advice about the
> Middle East but instead have produced Arabist
> responses.
*If your point was about diplomatic appointments, so
be it (bow). Most countries have incompetent diplomats
so it wouldn't fair to castigate the US alone for
this.
He didn't used
> that diplomatic term as I recall, but that is the
> effect. The experts
> called upon by the government under Title VI were
> hostile to the U.S.,
> unresponsive, and any advice was likely to favor
> Arab countries. Thus, it
> is good that "Bernard Lewis, Martin Kramer, Daniel
> Pipes and others" are not
> Arabists.
*Well, would you say that "the expert advise" received
from the likes of Kramer and Pipes worked ? Oh right,
I forgot, the things are great in Iraq and
Afhganistan, and so on.
(snip)
>
> You ask "the point of my roll call"? As I indicated
> in previous notes about
> Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads" I criticized
> Fukuyama for accepting
> the arguments of the French experts Olivier Roy and
> Gilles Kepel who are at
> least nodding toward French multiculturalism in that
> they take a "soft view"
> of the Islamist threat. They see the threat
> emanating from a few
> "Jihadists." If they are right then we in the U.S.
> are over-reacting, and
> this is what Fukuyama concludes. However the "roll
> call" as you call it is
> a list of some of the authors I have read who take a
> very different view,
> who see Fukuyama's Jihadists as being the activist
> element of Islamic
> Fundamentalism which is sweeping the Middle East.
> With all of Fukuyama's
> other interests I doubt that he has had time to read
> many of the authors I
> listed.
*Perhaps so, but then the credentials of the authors
whom you read are susepct on several grounds.
He lists only the two, Roy and Kepel, and
> he does not respond to
> the idea that we are at war with Islamic
> Fundamentalism, aka Islamism, and
> not just a few Jihadists.
*I don't want to get into this debate again. "We are
at war with" is a misleading phrase. If you project
yourself as being in war against any stripe of
political Islam, then you will be, soon enough. But
not all Islamists want to be in war with you. In
general I think that crusades, i.e. ideological wars,
are a bad thing. You are entitled to disagree and
maintain that, if there any people in the world who
hold ideas you dislike, you have the right and duty to
go to war against them until Armagedon.
O.K.
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