RUTHFULLY YOURS

Interview: What Went Wrong With Bernard Lewis?

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/03/12/interview-what-went-wrong-with-bernard-lewis/

I spent an hour with my colleague, the prolific author [1] Robert Spencer, discussing Bernard Lewis [2], nonagenarian doyen of Islamic Studies. The entire interview, conducted as a segment for Robert’s outstanding weekly series of Jihad Watch programs on the Aramaic Broadcasting Network, is embedded above. Please read the summary assessment of my concerns before watching the interview. A more detailed analysis of Lewis’s analytic pitfalls can be read here [4].

Accrued over a distinguished career of more than six decades of serious scholarship, Bernard Lewis [2] clearly possesses an enormous fund of knowledge regarding certain aspects of classical Islamic civilization, as well as valuable insights on the early evolution of modern Turkey [5] from the dismantled Ottoman Empire. A gifted [2] linguist, non-fiction prose writer, and teacher, Lewis shares his understanding of Muslim societies in both written and oral presentations, with singular economy, eloquence, and wit. Now 96 years old and still active, these are extraordinary attributes for which Lewis richly deserves the accolades [6] lavished upon him.

I began expressing my concerns with the less salutary aspects of Lewis’ scholarship in a lengthy [7] review [8]-essay [9] (for Frontpage) on Bat Ye’or’s seminal book Eurabia—The Euro-Arab Axis [10], published December 31, 2004. Over the intervening years—in the wake of profound US policy failures vis a vis Islamdom at that time, and subsequently, till now—this disquietude has increased considerably. As I demonstrate in my recent book, Sharia Versus Freedom [11], Lewis’s legacy of intellectual and moral confusion has greatly hindered the ability of sincere American policymakers to think clearly about Islam’s living imperial legacy, driven by unreformed and unrepentant mainstream Islamic doctrine. Ongoing highly selective and celebratory presentations of Lewis’s under­standings—(see this [12] for example) —are pathognomonic of the dangerous influence Lewis continues to wield over his uncritical acolytes and supporters.

In Sharia Versus Freedom [11], I review Lewis’s troubling intellectual legacy regarding four critical subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the Sharia on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, sacralized Islamic Jew-hatred, and perhaps most importantly, his inexplicable 180-degree reversal on the notion of “Islamic democracy.” Lewis’ rather bowdlerized analyses are compared to the actual doctrinal formulations of Muslim legists, triumphal Muslim chroniclers celebrating the implementation of these doctrines, and independent Western assessments by Islamologists (several of whom worked with Lewis, directly, as academic colleagues; discussed at length here [4]) which refute his sanitized claims.

Journalist David Warren, writing [13] in March 2006, questioned the advice given President Bush “on the nature of Islam” at that crucial time by not only “the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong,” but most significantly, one eminence grise, in particular: “the profoundly learned” Bernard Lewis. All these advisers, despite their otherwise divergent viewpoints, as Warren noted [13], “assured him (President Bush) that Islam and modernity were potentially compat­ible.” None more vehemently—or with such authority—than the so-called “Last Orientalist [14],” nonagenarian professor Bernard Lewis. Arguably the most striking example of Lewis’s fervor was a lecture [15] he delivered July 16, 2006 (on board the ship Crystal Serenity during a Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles) about the transferability of Western democracy to despotic Muslim societies, such as Iraq. He concluded with the statement, “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.” This stunning claim was published [15] with that concluding remark as the title, “Bring Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us,” and disseminated widely.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/03/07/blasphemy-mucho-how-sharia-kills-free-speech/ [1]Losing free speech via the toxic synergy of mainstream, supremacist Islam, and Western self-loathing *** Al Qaeda’s English language magazine “Inspire [2],” in its latest edition, has expressed the jihad terror organization’s outrage over the “Innocents of Muslims” video trailer, an amateurish production, which merely depicted some of the less salutary aspects [3] of […]

“Some of My Best Friends are Antisemites”: Obama Nominates Hagel “Europe’s leaders—and all leaders—should strongly oppose antisemitism, which poisons public debates over the future of the Middle East.” –President George W. Bush, speaking at Whitehall Palace, London, on November 19, 2003. The most inane (and therefore most frequent) journalistic explanation of Obama’s nomination of “Chuck” […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-america-broken/?print=1 As many observers now fear, the results of the 2012 election spell the end of America as we once knew it. In a sober and detailed analysis [1] of the American malaise, conducted from almost every conceivable angle, FrontPage columnist Matthew Vadum arrives at the conclusion that “strife and unrest will take over America…there […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/resisting-the-obvious/

In much of my recent work — books and articles — I have addressed the issue of antisemitism in the contemporary world. That the beast is once again slouching, not only towards Bethlehem as in the Yeats poem [1], but toward Oslo, Paris, London, Stockholm, Malmo, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Washington, Toronto, Sydney, Caracas, Brussels, Amsterdam, and many other cities and regions around the globe, should come as no surprise. From biblical times to the present moment, in their own homeland or “scattered among the peoples,” [2] Jews have never been safe. This is precisely what distinguishes the Jewish people from the rest of humanity, the specific nature of their “chosenness.” Wherever they may find themselves they are always at risk, whether actively or potentially, targeted for slander, exclusion, or extinction.

In developing this argument in such books as The Big Lie [3] (2007) and Hear, O Israel! [4] (2009), I have been condemned by a number of my critics, who accuse me of exaggeration, self-pity, or a sort of obsolescence, as if my gaze were fixed on the past at the expense of a more amenable or complex present. The fact that many of these detractors are themselves Jewish is only to be expected, for Jews have a long history of wilfully ignoring the signs and rejecting the self-evident. It is not only the JINOs (Jews in Name Only), the “non-Jewish Jews” flagged by Isaac Deutscher, or the apikorsim (“wicked sons” of Jewish public life) enamored of their enemies who are blind to the historical fatwa against them. It is also those whom I refer to as the “good Jews” and whom author and Sun Media columnist Ezra Levant calls the “official Jews” [5] — that is, a significant number of Jewish communicants, as well as their secular counterparts — who refuse to read the writing on the wall even when it is in their own language, inscribed in block letters, and blazoned on every street corner.

These Jewish critics — I have in mind people like Richard Just, editor of The New Republic, éminence grise Clifford Orwin of the Hoover Institution, and Canadian poet Harold Heft, among others who share their inveterate myopia — assailed my analysis as, variously, hyper-inflated, unfair to Islam, scare-mongering, one-dimensional, and so on, as if I refused to align my perspective with the mores of the enlightened and democratic West.

But the enlightened and democratic West is no longer what it very intermittently was — or rather, it is certainly not what it presents itself as being. The legacy media, academia, the political class, and an alarming proportion of the public have made common cause with the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaign of the growing Islamic hegemony in the realms of ideology and practice. This is especially true of Europe whose Jewish population is increasingly under threat. As French philosopher Guy Milliere observes in his new manuscript Dissident: Why Europe Is Dead and What It Means for America and the World (not yet published), “Almost everywhere in Europe, it is now dangerous for a practicing Jew to wear a yarmulke,” a development that he regards as a visible and repellant symptom “of a wider and more disquieting decay.” There is no doubt, he continues, “that there is something rotten in today’s Europe.”

What to Say to the Totalitarian Left on 9/11/11  Posted By Phyllis Chesler http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/what-to-say-to-the-totalitarian-left-on-91111/?print=1 I recently heard from a Canadian school psychologist who lives in Toronto and who has dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. He was “dismayed,” outraged, saddened, and puzzled, and wanted me to explain to him how a feminist academic could have “hijacked a feminist […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1887/Post-Qaddafi-Libya-The-Triumph-of-Bulgarian-Nurses-Affair-Cabal.aspx Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the man who twice upheld death sentences in the Bulgarian nurses show trial and is poised to lead post-Qaddafi Libya. But don’t worry: The State Department says he’s a refomer. —While making a correction in my column regarding Libyan “rebel” front man Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former Qaddafi justice minister who now […]

Subj: New exclusive video : Using ramadan, Muslims pray in Vercingétorix street (Paris 14th district) ! AND BTW NIDRA POLLER WRITES FROM FRANCE: I think it is worth mentioning that Vercingetorix is the Gaulois hero who led a  courageous though doomed defense of Gaul against Julius Caesar. Though he was ultimately defeated, the French honor […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9368/pub_detail.asp The video below was aired on CBN news. It is a shocking account of how a Parisian store-keeper, a non-Muslim, has been threatened and intimidated by Muslims to make her close her shop. She refuses, but she has had acid thrown at her, she has been raped and attacked on numerous occasions. < France […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9368/pub_detail.asp Muslims Creating No-Go Areas in Europe Will this happen in America?   s The video below was aired on CBN news. It is a shocking account of how a Parisian store-keeper, a non-Muslim, has been threatened and intimidated by Muslims to make her close her shop. She refuses, but she has had acid thrown […]