Taking Islam Seriously

The story about how Eric Holder, America's Attorney General, refused to name radical Islam as a culprit for the three recent attacks on the US has been rocketing around the Internet. (I first came across it via Powerline, where they've got the video and a transcript). Holder was at a House hearing, Rep. Lamar Smith asked him if radical Islam might be relevant to what's going on, and Holder refused to entertain the possibility until the congressman essentially put the words in his mouth.

The part I found most interesting was how Holder tried to explain that it's not Islam it's a false interpretation of it. Which of course begs the question: How does he know? You can't be the Attorney General unless you're an intelligent and educated person, of that I have no doubt, but in order to be able to make the statement Holder was trying to make you'd have to have a particular sort of education. You'd have to know Arabic, for starters, and have spent lots of time learning about Islam, either by living it or by studying its books or - preferably - both. None of which Holder has ever done.

Had he wished to say that Islam is many things and radical Islam is but one of them, that would have been fine. But to preach about what it isn't, and what's a false interpretation of it?

The reluctance, not to say refusal, of some people to accept that ideology can be a prime motivator of actions is not new; it has been around for generations, perhaps even longer; it predates the current radicalization of Islam. It was the same with Nazism ("they can't really mean what they say about the Jews, or the Slavs, or any of that stuff"), and undoubtedly many others. A serious analysis of this phenomenon would likely start with an examination of a frame of mind, not the particular historical context. Not the kind of thing a blog is likely to be able to do.

In the meantime, it's comforting to know that some people take the ideology very seriously.

SMUGGLERS complain that Egypt hampers three things imported through the blockade-busting tunnels that supply Gaza: weapons, dishwashers (their timers can double as detonators), and books. Of the three, the last may be the most regulated. One smuggler complained that the Egyptian authorities confiscated a delivery of 10,000 books, the bulk of them a classical commentary on the Koran. In the eyes of the impounders, the people of Gaza, who are governed by the Islamists of Hamas, are quite Islamic enough already.

It's a sad state of affairs, however, when the rather nasty Egyptian police (who are mostly Muslims) understand the world considerably better than a powerful and important American official who's job it is to know better.