What's Right - Arab-Americans and Islamic fundamentalism

National Review, Dec 23, 2002 by David Frum

Deadly Dangerous

"At some times I feel like a member of the Jewish community in Germany in the latter stages of the Weimar Republic." -- Ibrahim Hooper, Council on American-Islamic Relations, quoted in the Washington Post, November 30, 2002

You have to give CAIR's Mr. Hooper credit: The man certainly knows how to turn a phrase. "Turn" is the operative word. On the very same weekend that the newspapers of the world reported that Muslim extremists fired on an Israeli passenger jet in order to murder the 261 people aboard -- and that other Muslim extremists detonated suicide bombs at an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya, killing thirteen -- Mr. Hooper frets that it is the United States that is going Nazi. That is some reversal of reality.

The year since September 11 has put American tolerance to an extreme test -- and Americans have passed with honors and gold stars. In all of 2001, the most stressful and frightening year since 1962, there were 554 victims of anti-Islamic offenses in the U.S., according to the annual report on hate crimes released by the FBI in the last week of November. That's obviously 554 too many. On the other hand, it is only half as many as the number of victims of anti-Jewish offenses: 1,196. And unlike hate crimes against homosexuals, 665 of which inflicted violence on their victims, more than 80 percent of the anti-Islamic offenses in 2001 involved only vandalism or threats.

On the extremely rare occasions that anti-Muslim violence does occur, it is swiftly and severely punished. In 2001, there were three murders in the United States motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice. The man who committed the first murder was insane; the killer responsible for the next two has been sentenced to death by a Texas jury.

The dark night of oppression has clearly not yet descended on the United States. So why Mr. Hooper's mood of foreboding? Why does a man whose own group has co-sponsored rallies at which Jews are compared to apes suddenly feel this remarkable affinity for them?

As Hooper himself told the Washington Post, what alarms him now are not the decreasingly common attacks on Muslims as individuals, but the increasingly common criticisms he hears of Islam as a religion and a culture.

Some of these statements have indeed been intemperate. When Franklin Graham called Islam an "evil" religion, I found myself recalling the words of James: "Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." Who would deny that many millions of people have been inspired to good and holy acts by the words of the Koran and the teachings of Mohammad?

On the other hand, criticism -- even strident and unjust criticism -- is something that most organized religions in our democratic society have learned to tolerate. Most -- but not all. Compare two recent cases, one famous, one not.

Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen is an international intellectual celebrity. His first book, which blamed German society and culture for the Holocaust, was a bestseller here and in Germany too. His second one, A Moral Reckoning, argues that the Roman Catholic Church -- not just the Pope, but the entire hierarchy and the ancient doctrines -- should be regarded as complicit in the century's greatest crime.

Strong stuff, and it has been strongly resented by many Catholics. Yet so far as I know, no Catholic has tried to kill Goldhagen -- the very idea would be ridiculous. When he lectures at universities, nobody shouts him down. Nobody tries to intimidate his publishers into discontinuing his work.

Now consider the story of Bat Ye'or. The week before Goldhagen's book hit the racks, Ye'or came to Washington, D.C., to lecture at Georgetown University. Like Goldhagen's, her work concerns the maltreatment of religious minorities by a dominant religious group. But the dominant religion she studies is Islam, and the minorities whose stories she tells are the dhimmi: Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians under Muslim rule.

Hers is a deadly dangerous subject. From Pakistan to Britain, from Nigeria to France, writers who express skepticism about the teachings or record of Islam risk violent death. Bat Ye'or is a very great scholar: original, authoritative, lucid. But she must publish under a pseudonym: Bat Ye'or, "daughter of the Nile" -- for she was born in Egypt and driven into exile by anti-Semitic persecution in the 1950s. Her native language is French, but her French publisher timidly let her book go out of print, despite scholarly accolades and strong sales. When she spoke at Georgetown, irate Muslim students shouted her down, unreprimanded by their university, and the same thing happened to her at the University of London and at Brown.

I spoke to Ye'or recently by telephone, and mentioned the difference between the reception of her work and that of scholars like Goldhagen. "You can speak about Christian anti-Semitism," she said, "just as my Christian friends can speak to me about Jewish anti-Christian attitudes. It is a totally different attitude from the dhimmi system, where free speech is not tolerated."