The Nuttiness Race--Terry Jones vs Muslims

The Geek is probably not alone in pining after the good old days of the Cold War.  Sure, it was scary, even very scary on rare occasions such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It could even be bloody, the usually well-mannered Cold War did have its moments of heat, usually on the periphery and normally limited in duration.  The US involvement in the Wars of the Vietnamese and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were aberrations, not the norm.

The Cold War was also expensive.  Nuclear weapons and their evermore elaborate delivery systems did not come from the defense department equivalent of the Kindle Store. Nor did the elaborate, manpower extensive "conventional" forces come with a steeply discounted price tag.

Yet, there were a couple of paramount features which serve to distinguish the Cold War from the more recent "clash of civilizations."

First and foremost, the two major belligerents of the Cold War decades were conservative, rational actors.  Even the new kid on the Cold War block, China, was cautious and conservative in its international gambits.  The fact that the champions of both the "Imperialist Camp" and the "Communist Bloc" were cautious and risk averse assured that even the less controllable client states were kept on a short enough leash.  Proxy wars and sponsored pseudo-insurgencies as well as the direct duel between "wars of national liberation" and "counterinsurgency" were kept firmly under the control of the two Great Powers.  Vertical escalation across the nuclear threshold was to be prevented no matter what the short-term cost might be.

Both the Kremlin and the Denizens Inside the Beltway shared the same calculus of rationality.  Neither leadership echelon was even slightly interested in committing suicide.  Thus, no matter how frosty the winds might be, the Soviet Union and the US had a deep coinciding national interest--staying alive.  This coinciding interest provided a firm basis for agreements more or less honored by each side, which served to lower the potential of a globe destroying conflict.  Insults, taunts, and challenges might be hurled with reckless abandon provided only that the missiles stayed safely in their silos.

Conservatism, caution, risk aversion, rationality, a shared common value or two, all were defining and all too often under appreciated features of the Cold War.  Today, those terms cannot be applied with honesty or accuracy to the opponents of the US and other civilized states.  The advocates of violent political Islam as well as their numerous adherents can lay no claim to rationality, to caution, to being averse to risk, to sharing with those in the West an appreciation of life.

This is not to imply that all Westerners, all Americans, are paragons of rationality and the other defining features of the Cold War.  There are plenty of individuals in the US and elsewhere in the West who are quite irrational, given to fits of risky recklessness, and even bereft of a strong desire not to commit suicide.  But, the operative word here is, "individual."

In this context, consider the Reverend Terry Jones of the microscopic but grandly named Dove World Outreach Center in Florida.  The Reverend having backed away from last fall's intended "Burn-a-Koran-Day" following personal appeals from Messrs Obama, Gates, and Petraeus, got on with the incendiary job a few days ago.  Following a "trial" in which the defendant Koran was found guilty of being icky-poo, an associate of Jones lit up the accelerant soaked book.  It burned.  Yawn.

The exercise in controlled combustion was by and large ignored by the American media both conventional and new.  Ditto in Europe.  It was as it deserved to be, a non-event.

The Reverend Mr Jones proved his point.  He demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Reverend Mr Jones was a publicity hungry nut job.  That was it.  Nothing more; nothing less.

But as a direct and ever so easily foreseen consequence, Mr Jones' act proved something else: In mass, Muslims, especially Afghan Muslims, can be even greater, far more destructive, far more lethal nut jobs than the Florida pastor.  Lashed on by the sermons of a trio of clerics, a mob of umpteen thousand Afghan men took to the street in a usually calm town of Mazar-i-Sharif and, finding no Americans conveniently at hand, attacked the UN mission compound killing ten.

The national police made some effort to stop the crowd by firing in the air.  But, this was stopped when the commanders on the scene decided the shots only infuriated the mob making the situation worse.  That appreciation was probably accurate.

The lethal rage was accompanied by all the usual signs of Muslim disaffection--cries of "Death to---" and "Down with---."  And, the action in the street was joined by more official acts.  Elected parliamentarians in Afghanistan have demanded that the US government prosecute Mr Jones without delay and with the utmost of severity.  In less time than it takes the average copy of the Koran to burn, mobs assembled in cities far removed from Mazar-i-Sharif making the same denunciations and demands.  From Kandahar to Kabul and finally to Islamabad, the mobs were out in force.  Without exception the "angry young men" (to use a favorite MSM term) called for swift, condign punishment of the "blasphemer."

One angry man after another patiently explained to the assorted Western reporters that the burning of the Koran by Jones constituted an insult to all Muslims which could only be offset by spilling the man's blood.  To the Muslim making the explanation the matter was straight forward, it was a matter of duty.  Specifically the duty every Muslim has to punish any and all insults to his faith, its sacred writings, and its prophet.

Duty.  That is the key word.  It is the word and concept which underpins the deadly outbreak in Mazar-i-Sharif

The notion of duty is powerful in the West.  It is part and parcel of the institutions which define the US.  But, in the West, in the US, duty arises from the rights with which all are endowed.  Rights demand an equivalent duty.  The concept of rights and duties with the first preceding the second is so universal in the West that it even fully penetrated the Soviet Union providing an essential component of the shared values which allowed agreement even in the darkest days of very real global competition.

The Muslims in Mazar-i-Sharif were acting on a concept of universal duty without modification by rights.  The same applies to those Muslims who strap on suicide vests or those who stone women or those who lop off the body parts of purported thieves.  Duty is all in Islam.  All must bow in abject submission to the duties imposed upon them by the divinity which created all.

The focus on duty, the obligation of the Muslim to perform each and every duty with the perfect submission of the ideal slave assures there can be no meaningful discussion of rights between Westerners and Muslims.  There can be no understanding on the part of the Muslim bound up in a universe of universal duties that the Reverend Jones has a right to be a nut job.  That the Reverend has a right to communicate his views regarding the moral worth of the Koran by burning it.  That the US government has neither the right nor the duty to punish Terry Jones for exercising his rights of inflammatory communication.

The advocates of violent political Islam (and its non-violent cousin) as well as their adherents have a calculus of rationality.  It is based on duty, a spacious understanding of duty which places all under extraordinary obligations.  This calculus of rationality is totally antipodal to the Western one which is predicated on rights.

There is no point of coincidence between the Muslim ideal of duty and the Western one of rights.  There can be only conflict.  Not even the realty that Western ideas of rights demand mediation by companion duties alters this dismal intellectual conflict.  There is no capacious concept of rights extant in Islamic societies generally.  Within the social groups most affected by political Islam there is only one right which obtains to any and all people.  That is the right to be a dutiful slave of the deity.

Once an individual has exercised this one "right," there exists only a universe of duties.  Importantly, the duty owed by the submissive slave of the deity is announced not by the deity but by a cleric.  When the cleric states it is the duty of the believer to force the US to prosecute Mr Jones, then it is both lawful and required for the believer to run amok at the utterly innocent UN compound.  When the cleric states it is the duty of the believer to stone an adulteress, the submissive slave of the deity must pick up a rock and throw it with homicidal intent.

The roster of duties is literally without end.  The number of clerics who are willing to tell the crowd where duty resides is almost as limitless.  So, the potential for conflict extends into the future as far as one cares to look.

Unlike the good old days of the Cold War, today's "Clash of Civilizations" is absolute and typically irrational.  The opposition of duty defined as totalistically as is done by some Muslims with the Western concept of individual rights is total and absolute.  As the duties imposed by Islam are those of the slave obedient to the master and the master's driver are without limit, they cannot be inherently limited to the universe of the rational.

So, join with the Geek in yearning for the days of the Cold War--at least the motives and goals of the opponents were rational and understandable.  And, so they could be opposed with consistency and effectiveness.  The good old days?  You betcha!