Idealism Without Illusion

Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, once said that Palestine-Israel conflict was so intractable precisely because it is not a conflict between right and wrong, but rather a conflict between two rights. (The Israeli novelist Amos Oz added that, sometimes, it is a conflict between two wrongs.)

What does that mean for the international community gathered in New York to consider the Palestinians bid for recognition as the 194th state?

“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart,” wrote the novelist Victor Hugo. That pretty much sums up Israel’s current predicament.

President Shimon Peres spoke for the county’s heart in April, back when the Arab Spring was, to use Rilke’s zestful words, “blooming most recklessly” and everyone marvelled at that “unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” Peres was elated:

A great revolt has been initiated by young people and women, to gain freedom, bread and hope. Israel is watching with great expectation. … Those reactionary forces, that would hijack their countries back down the path of radicalism, are also the enemies of peace with Israel. That is why we hope our neighbors will choose to join the family of democratic nations.

It was a question of which kind of radical loser would get the decent people of Norway first.

For a while it seemed it would be the AQ type. Only last year, the scholars Thomas Hegghammer and Dominic Tierney asked in the Atlantic, “Why Does Al-Qaeda Have a Problem With Norway?” The pair reported on a suspected AQ cell rolled up in Oslo in July 2010 that had been plotting chemical attacks. In 2006, the AQ theoretician and preacher Abu Yahya al-Libi called on Muslims to attack Norway. “Send rivers of blood down their streets ... hone your swords and shake the ground beneath their feet.”

Thirty-five years ago this week, German leftists Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann hijacked Air France Flight 139 along with their comrades Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Jayel Naji al-Arjam. They demanded the release of Palestinian and Baader-Meinhof terrorists, flew the plane to Entebbe in Uganda, separated the Jews from the non-Jews, and prepared to execute them.

I am not a regular reader of Lesbilicous, “the web’s tastiest lesbian magazine,” but I was drawn to this headline: “Poll reveals Muslim support for gay rights.”

European societies need a leitkultur to defeat radicalization and violent extremism. The Muslim democrat and scholar Bassam Tibi first introduced this idea of a “leading culture” in Europa ohne Identität? in 1998. Multicultural European societies needed some glue if they were not to fragment, he argued. They needed a core culture built on the values of “modernity, democracy, secularism, the Enlightenment, human rights, and civil society.” However, the concept was soon turned into a political football by opportunistic German parties playing to their bases. Tibi declared the debate a failure and retreated.

For three reasons, we Europeans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, should try again.

Here is a fact that might surprise you. In 2009 a Gallup poll found 77 percent of British Muslims identified “very strongly” or “extremely strongly” with Britain, a higher percentage than the British public as a whole (at 50 percent).

Here is another. In 2010 a group of British Muslim women in partnership with the Armed Forces Muslim Association (AFMA) attended a memorial event. They were responding to a miniscule group of Islamists that had, by disrupting the now-traditional parade of soldier’s coffins through the town of Wootton Bassett, dominated the national news.

As Kalsoom Bashir put it, “Other organizations—that represent nobody—have tried to hijack the message from UK Muslim communities. We are here to claim it back.” She added, “There was a strong feeling of disgust in the Muslim communities that anyone would try to exploit the grief of families at Wootton Bassett.”

The European reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden prompts a question: Why do so many of us refuse to take our own side in a fight? Why was it that, as Douglas Murray acidly observed, “when the worst enemy of the West was dead, Europeans failed to display any emotion above a truculent annoyance at the manner of his passing”?

One reason for our (historically unprecedented) failure to stand shoulder to shoulder with ourselves is that we do not believe we are engaged in a war (the 9/10 syndrome). Another is that we do not believe the action we take to defend ourselves is just. For the academic-media complex in the West, the very idea of a just war against terror is a logical contradiction.