Anti-Anti-Islamism

Lee Smith writing on the thinking behind inviting Yusuf Islam of the slay Salman Rusdie persuasion as step towards restoring sanity.

While there are a few on the American left, especially in the academy, who maintain that Islamism delivers a valuable critique of Western imperialism, or is a social movement defending the oppressed, this is a minority position. Anti-anti-Islamism is something else: a belief that American opponents of Islamism have cooked up a Muslim scare for their own political benefit, just as anti-Communists once concocted a Red scare.

“The most obvious similarity is that both originate in a denial of the threat,” says Norman Podhoretz, a veteran of both ideological conflicts. “The anti-anti-Communists consistently accused the anti-Communists of exaggerating the Soviet threat from outside and the threat of subversion from within. Anti-anti-Islamists make the same accusations against those who take the Islamist threat seriously. Either we are part of an assault on civil liberties, which we are indifferent to, or we are eager to go to war.”

“The anti-anti-Islamists are extremely parochial,” says Paul Berman, one of liberalism’s few outspoken opponents of Islamism. “These are people who can’t get beyond Republicans and Democrats. It’s about the enemy of my enemy, and ‘my enemy’ for them is the GOP.”

Anti-anti-Islamism is an instrument used to attack Republicans and conservatives, and while no one yet has been tapped to play the role of Joe McCarthy, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s obsession with keeping sharia, or Islamic law, out of the United States may well do more harm than good. The pressing issue in America’s wars is not that American Muslims might want to get married or buried or pass on their estate according to Muslim traditions, but that we have real Islamist enemies like Iran trying to kill our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supporters of terrorism who live inside our borders and want to shoot us or blow things up.

These are not paranoid fantasies, even as anti-anti-Islamists, like their anti-anti-Communist forebears, pretend otherwise. “The idea is that we have nothing to fear from them except our own overreaction,” says Joshua Muravchik, onetime national chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League and now a fellow at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies. What is true of Iran and terrorism today was true a quarter-century ago. Back then, says Muravchik, “they thought, ‘if only we wouldn’t scare Russians, they wouldn’t behave so badly.’ The anti-anti-Communists believed that the Cold War was as much our fault as theirs.”

It's the strange parochialism that Berman finds that strikes me. As though these folks plain don't get out much.