Islam and Logos

by E Michael Jones

  For nearly two hundred years, Jews have played a disproportionate role as leaders of the modern revolutionary movements in Europe and the West... By carrying the revolution to its conclusion, socialists would usher in a millennium and fulfill the messianic prophecies of the pre-Enlightenment religions that modern ideas had discredited. Through this revolution, the lost unity of mankind would be restored, social harmony would be reestablished, paradise regained. It would be a tikkun olam, a repair of the world.

  Blinded by his Neoconservatism, Reilly fails to see that Islamism is a manifestation of the Jewish revolutionary spirit, and that when Qutb calls Islam “to unite heaven and earth in a single system” he is really calling for the Islamist version of tikkun olam. This may help to explain some of the paradoxes of American foreign policy as well as the intellectual lacunae in Reilly’s otherwise informative book. Ironically, if there is ever a version of Islam that is incompatible with the Logos of the Catholic faith, it is the Islamism of Qutb and followers like Islamic cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the blind sheikh) who exhorted his followers to “Kill them [Americans] wherever you find them.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Uncanny Fulfillment

  The command to kill Americans wherever you find them found its uncanny fulfillment in the murder of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Libya. Hilary Clinton and John McCain have sown dragons’ teeth by supporting the Salafists, a point that Reilly fails to make in his book, which, it must be admitted, was written before the advent of the Arab Spring and the change in American foreign policy from support of secularist puppets like Mubarak to support for Salafist puppets like Morsi. Yet, in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts, it is precisely the Islamist followers of Qutb that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States are backing in the current civil war in Syria.

  Reilly criticizes the notion of perpetual war when it is endorsed by the Islamists but fails to see that that motto was articulated first by Trotsky, and that the most ardent followers of that principle are Jewish Neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, who was a Trotskyite during his days at the Community College of New York, and his son William. The Kristols, pere et fils, were the intellectual architects of the current war in the Middle East. The one irony that Reilly can’t seem to grasp, much less articulate, is that the Neoconservatives, who are the ideological mirror image of the Islamists, put the Islamists in power in both Egypt and Libya, thereby jeopardizing both Israeli and American interests in the region. Nowhere do we find better substantiation of the old saw “politics makes strange bedfellows” than in the incoherent policy of the State Department in the Middle East.

  Trying to make sense of the intellectual shift in the Islamic world away from secularist leaders like Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Muammar Khaddafi, Reilly claims that “Islamism within Islam may be roughly analogous to the development of liberation theology within Christianity. Especially in Latin America, Catholicism was infected with Marxist ideology by way of Christianity’s preferential option for the poor,” but the analogy limps in comparison to the connections between Neoconservatism and Salafism, which Reilly fails to see. Reilly has a difficult time separating his Neoconservative Americanism from his Catholicism, as when he uses “Article 18 of the International Declaration of Human Rights” which “stipulates that every individual has freedom of thought, which includes the freedom to change one’s religion and beliefs” against the Muslims without understanding that no Catholic could subscribe to Article 18 if it meant a repudiation of Baptism. Indeed, the Church has a duty to use coercion to hold a Catholic to his baptismal promises, as she did during the Spanish Inquisition. We can disagree about the application but not the principle. Similarly, Reilly goes on to praise Muhammed Abdelmottaleb al-Houn, “who has the courage to say, ‘If we must choose between human rights and shari’a, then we must prefer human rights.’” The patent absurdity of a statement like this becomes apparent when we transpose it to the Catholicism which Reilly espouses. Does Reilly really believe that if we must choose between “human rights,” like abortion and gay marriage, and the Magisterium, that we must prefer human rights? If this does not apply to the Magisterium, why should it apply to shari’a?

  Reilly goes on to ridicule Hasan Nasrallah’s claim that Hezbollah had “divinely guided missiles” which defeated the Israelis in their ill-fated incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Like Nasrallah, Mahmoud Chalhoub claimed that “Even the Israelis talk about a man all in white [the Mahdi] rid[ing] a white horse, who cut off the hand of one of their soldiers as he was about to launch a missile ... we have missiles guided by God.” Reilly, who is married to a Spaniard, should know that Cortez made similar claims about his conquest of Mexico. Cortez claimed that he saw St. James riding into battle on the side of the Spaniards, and if St. James, also astride a white horse, helped the Spaniards prevail over the Aztecs why shouldn’t the Mahdi guide Hezbollah’s missiles? In making his case against fellow believers, Reilly tries to out secularize the secularists. If it is absurd for a Muslim to say, “When you shot, it was not you who shot, but God,” then it is just absurd for a Catholic to say, “If the Lord does not build the house, then in vain do the workmen labor.” Reilly approves of secular prejudice in making his case against Islam, which would, if applied to Catholicism, completely undo his own position as well.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MEMRI

  Reilly gets in trouble when dealing with contemporary Islam because of his Neoconservative prejudices in general and in particular because of his reliance on the Middle East Media Research Institute (or MEMRI) as a source for his claims about the intellectual climate in the Islamic world. MEMRI purports to be a source of information on the Middle East, but it is nothing more than a front for Zionist propaganda, which scours Arabic newspapers for horror stories but never gets around to translating the racist diatribes of Israeli rabbis. MEMRI’s main ploy involves citing any Arabic use of the word “Jew” as ipso facto proof of anti-Semitism, as in the quote, cited by Reilly: “If you study European history, you will see who was the main power in hoarding money and wealth in the 19th century. In most cases, it was the Jews.” Reilly falls for this ploy completely, without any sense that one respected Catholic source after another made exactly the same claim. To give just two examples, both Civilta Cattolica, the official organ of the Vatican, and Georg Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI’s great uncle, criticized Jews for their business practices in ways that would land them on MEMRI’s hate list.

  Similarly, Reilly, again citing MEMRI as his source, attacks “Iranian Filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh,” as someone who “denies the Holocaust and states: Al-Qaeda and the Mossad carried out 9/11 together,” without any indication of just what Holocaust denial means in this particular instance and why a delict confected by Debbie Lipstadt should be normative for Catholics, or of how many Americans contest the conventional 9/11 narrative as well. If it is our right as Americans to contest the government’s narrative on, say, why Building #7 collapsed, why are we denying this right to Iranians, or ridiculing them when they make use of it? The answer to that question can be found in the Jewish control of discourse, as manifested in MEMRI’s ability to colonize the minds of Neoconservative Catholics like Robert Reilly.

  If Reilly had done his own research into the career of Nader Talebzadeh, he might have discovered that Talebzadeh directed a 20-part film on the life of Jesus Christ, which won praise from the Vatican for attempting to give an Islamic understanding of Christ. But facts like that don’t foster the demonization of Muslims that MEMRI exists to foster in the minds of the easily duped goyim. If there were a United States Media Research Institute in Iran, it would be able to come up with ideas far more absurd than MEMRI factoids like “Birth Control Increase [sic] STDs” or the claim that Jews were responsible for “82 percent of all attempts to corrupt humanity” because they “were responsible for 82 percent of the world’s video clips” upon which Reilly bases his case against contemporary Islam. The Iranian equivalent of MEMRI could
claim, without the faintest hint of exaggeration, that the president of the United States believes that two men have the right to marry each other, the topic of Reilly’s subsequent book, Making Gay OK (2014).

  Fortunately, Reilly ends his inquiry into the closing of the Muslim mind on an even-handed note that is a welcome relief from the MEMRI agit-prop that disfigures much of his book. Reilly sees an intellectual symmetry in the current geopolitical situation, in which the divorce of reason from faith which has led to the current crisis in the West finds its mirror image in the divorce of faith from reason which has led to the intellectual crisis of Islam. Both have led to catastrophe, but in an inspired moment both could just as easily lead to a mystical convergence, according to which the rejection of the Enlightenment on the part of the West would correspond exactly with the rejection of the Ash’arite anti-Enlightenment on the part of Islam. The main thing blocking this convergence is ideology — in particular, the ideology of Neoconservatism, which supports modernity, in the West and the ideology of Salafism in the Islamic world, which supports all of the voluntarism of western modernity as well. If there is a flaw in Reilly’s book it lies in his inability to see the fundamentally revolutionary character of Neoconservatism and its incompatibility with the classical rationalism of the West and his failure to see that both Salafism and Neoconservatism are manifestations of the Jewish revolutionary spirit that has plagued the West since the chief priests, scribes, and elders mocked Christ on the cross. The answer lies, as Reilly rightly states, in “The recovery of reason, grounded in Logos,” as “the only sentinel of sanity,” a recovery that “is imperative for the East as well as the West.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Nuclear Deal Goes Through

  The successful conclusion of the P5+1 agreement limiting Iran’s capability to produce nuclear weapons in July 2015 was met with one of the largest propaganda barrages ever orchestrated by the Israel Lobby in America. AIPAC announced that it was allocating anywhere between $40 and $150 million to sink the deal. In August New York Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer announced that he was breaking with the Obama Administration and joining the Senate’s Republicans, who were unanimous in opposing the deal. As of August, the number of undecided Democrats was large enough to sink the deal. In a speech at American University, Obama countered by claiming that the choice was between the deal as it was or war. It turned out to be an effective move on Obama’s part because by the time Congress returned from its summer break in September, the tide had turned and the momentum was on the side of the Obama Administration.

  On September 1, the New York Times announced that three New York Democrats had defected to the Obama Camp. One day later, the final nail got hammered into the AIPAC coffin when Barbara Mikulski announced that she was siding with the Obama Administration. At this point the White House had enough votes to override any bill the Republican Congress presented, and opposition collapsed.

  Newsweek claimed that, in taking on the Obama Administration, “AIPAC may have overestimated its influence.” Over the course of its existence, AIPAC had effectively tamed Congress by showing a ruthless willingness to punish any member of Congress who opposed its agenda. In 1984, “All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust [the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Illinois Senator Charles] Percy,” boasted Tom Dine, AIPAC’s executive director at the time. “And the American politicians — those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire — got the message.”

  Charles Percy, Charles Finley, and Cynthia McKinney are just a few of the politicians whose careers ended abruptly when they fell afoul of the Israel Lobby. But the book of that name by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer signaled a change in attitude among the elite members of America’s foreign policy establishment. Israel was increasingly seen as a liability which crippled the State Department’s ability to determine its own foreign policy goals. The intransigence of the Likud Party and Binyamin Netanyahu only made matters worse. Chutzpah is a Jewish virtue which makes effective diplomacy virtually impossible. This leads the Jews to hold onto policy positions long after they have become untenable. And this is precisely what the Jews did under Netanyahu’s leadership. The first mistake was Netanyahu addressing Congress, without the invitation of the president. This turned support for Israel into a partisan issue, which was exactly what the Jews did not want to do. In its postmortem report on AIPAC’s defeat, Haaretz claimed:

  The more partisan the opposition to it becomes, the more Democrats rally behind Obama in response. This is a huge problem for AIPAC. For years, the organization has worked to ensure that both Democrats and Republicans provide the Israeli government unquestioning support. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by embracing Mitt Romney in 2012, colluding with Republicans to organize a speech to Congress behind Obama’s back this spring and making Ron Dermer, a former GOP operative, his top representative in Washington, has made AIPAC’s work harder.

  AIPAC had overplayed its hand. By throwing its lot in with the Neocon Republicans it had lost all leverage with the Democrats. Netanyahu showed up on Capitol Hill uninvited in a gesture that was breathtaking in its daring (or recklessness) by insulting a sitting president without the backing of the Jewish community in America. Even Abe Foxman warned Netanyahu not to go ahead. J Street, the new Israel Lobby, had thrown its support behind the Obama Administration. Todd Gitlin wrote an article showing that the majority of America’s Jews, unlike the Jewish organizations which purported to represent them, supported the nuclear deal with Iran. According to J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, “The illusion that there’s some form of wall-to-wall unity and unanimity on these issues in the Jewish political community has probably been put to rest by this fight.”

  The Obama Administration had broken the back of AIPAC, which no longer had a stranglehold on American foreign policy. Haaretz tried to explain why AIPAC, long considered the most powerful lobby in Washington, had failed. Mikulski implied that if the Congress torpedoed the deal, the Europeans who were cosigners of the deal would bolt and lift the sanctions against Iran unilaterally:

  Some have suggested we reject this deal and impose unilateral sanctions to force Iran back to the table. But maintaining or stepping up sanctions will only work if the sanction coalition holds together. It’s unclear if the European Union, Russia, China, India and others would continue sanctions if Congress rejects this deal. At best, sanctions would be porous, or limited to unilateral sanctions by the U.S.

  What no one wanted to mention was the intellectual bankruptcy of those who opposed the deal. There was no Logos in the position which AIPAC took. It was simply a question of money talking, Jew money had spoken out in opposition to the agreement and it was up to the scribes who fed at the Jew money trough to come up with reasons why the rest of us should support them.

  In its daily newsletter, the Heritage Foundation weighed in on the losing side of the debate in mid-August by claiming that the P5+1 deal would promote terrorism. Changing horses in midstream, Josh Siegel claimed that nuclear weapons weren’t the real issue. After confecting a bogus narrative about Iran and nuclear weapons, the scribes in the pay of the Israel Lobby suddenly changed their story and claimed that the real threat was that Iran is now buying AK-47s. “It doesn’t cost that much to buy a lot of RPGs and AK-47s and to pad the coffers of groups of 5,000 fighters here and 10,000 there,” said Michael O’Hanlon, the director of research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. According to Max Abrahms, a Northeastern University professor and terrorism analyst, the United States is unlikely to be affected by Iran’s aggression, but Israel faces a different reality. “A country such as Iran would never threaten the homeland even if it develops a nuclear weapon,” Abrahms said. “But the threat matrix is a lot more complicated in Israel. Essentially Obama is saying, look, Iran isn’t so dangerous, it helps us in the war on terror. Israel is banging its head and saying, don’t forget Iran is the leading sponsor of terrorism.” As an examp
le of “terrorism,” Siegel presents us with a picture of an August 14 rally celebrating the ninth anniversary of the end of Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel. The fact that Hezbollah stopped Israeli tanks five hundred yards into Lebanon in 2006 was not something that was going to make people like Binyamin Netanyahu happy, but who in his right mind would call blowing up the tanks of an aggressor “terrorism,” or an example of “Iran’s aggression in the Middle East”? With arguments like this, it is not surprising that opposition to the P5+1 deal found no traction in Congress.

  In their rush to get their front hooves into the Jew money trough, Catholic Neoconservatives revealed that they were every bit as intellectually bankrupt as the conservatives they emulated at places like the Heritage Foundation. Crisis, once known as Catholicism in Crisis, is a good case in point. It was created by Neoconservative foundations to undercut the pastoral on nuclear weapons which the American Catholic bishops had written in the early 1980s. Crisis claimed to be a Catholic magazine, when in fact it was an organ of the Republican Party, created to keep Catholics pulling the Republican lever faithfully in election after election. Editor Deal Hudson was fairly successful in turning out the Catholic vote until someone revealed that he had been dismissed from his professor’s job at Fordham for seducing one of his students. Needless to say, lots of handwringing followed, all of which we could have been spared if Deal had been wearing the Catholic version of the NASCAR uniform. The fact that someone, probably from his own organization, outed Hudson as a seducer, pales in comparison to the dishonesty that the magazine itself had shown over the years by pretending to be Catholic.

  On August 15, 2015, as part of the $150 million propaganda deal which AIPAC launched to torpedo the P5+1 nuclear deal, Crisis published an article entitled “Faith-based Negotiations with Faith-based Fanatics,” which attacked the Vatican for supporting the Iranian nuclear agreement: