On March 29, 2010 Bret Stephens wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal under the title: “Lady Gaga Versus Mideast Peace” and the subtitle: “Are settlements more offensive than pop stars?” in which he responds to an article by Pat Buchanan written in Human Events. I shall let these gentlemen settle their argument among themselves and only comment on a number of assertions made by Stephens, assertions that caught my eyes but not my imagination.
Bret Stephens mentions an Egyptian writer called Sayyid Qutb whom he says: “is widely considered the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda.” And so I ask: When he says widely considered who does he include in the circle of considerers? Are they journalists like him? Or people who are about to join al Qaeda? Or people who have joined al Qaeda already? Or maybe it is the proverbial man in the street? Stephens does not specify but he says that American soldiers are dying in Arab and Muslim lands as a result of Qutb’s writings and not as a result of America’s support for Israel whose actions in occupied Palestine angers the Arabs and the Muslims, as Buchanan seems to suggest. But why is it that Stephens does not specify who the considerers are? Well, the search for an answer to this question is the subject of this essay.
To support his point of view, Stephens picks an essay written by Qutb and analyzes it to highlight the man’s puritanical views and his dislike for some aspects of American culture. He quotes him as saying this: "The American girl … knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it." And Stephens draws this conclusion: “This, then, is the core complaint that the Islamists from Waziristan to Tehran to Gaza have lodged against the West.” Here we are told who the intellectual godchildren of Qutb are but not who makes this assumption besides Bret Stephens himself.
Before we go any further with this, we should stop for a moment, look at what he has done stylistically and marvel. He took one quote from one essay written by one man concerning one country, he made that quote the sum total of that man’s attitude and he attributed the attitude to an entire movement. He then imagined a fictitious relationship between that movement and what he calls the West, not just America which was Qutb’s only concern. And Stephens did all this to say that the people who express their unhappiness with Israel’s behavior have all come under the influence of that one lone essayist. And so I ask: What kind of a debate is Bret Stephens having?
The reality, as we all have come to accept it, is that a debate is a competition between ideas. And when you get into a big debate, you tend to group a number of ideas together thus formulate a hypothesis. In the end, the competition among the debaters comes down to a probability as to which hypothesis is likely to be more correct than any other. Until recently the Jewish organizations and their representatives have been winning the debates because they were able to blacklist and thus silence their potential competitors by calling them anti-Semites. And so the Jews had no one to argue with or to argue against but themselves, and every hypothesis they formulated stood as the gospel truth. This went on until the internet came along and gave all those who had something to say the means to say it, and gave them a leveled playing field on which to play. These people pushed back against the Jewish arguments and, because it takes one truth to demolish a million lies, the Jewish hypotheses were shattered by the millions till the people that used to manufacture them ran out of false arguments to make and out of wobbly hypotheses to stitch into fake narratives.
To be fair to the individual Jewish debaters, it must be said that they come onto the leveled playing field with a handicap as they rely on their Talmudic training to stand against those who come onto the same field with a classical training under their belt. The difference between these two is that the Talmudic teaching says this: If a lie serves your purpose you consider it to be the truth. When the purpose for which you are lying changes, you invent another lie and treat it as the new truth. To most people, you will look like an intellectually dishonest person but you should not feel the shame because to us, you will have fulfilled your most sacred of religious duties. In our eyes, to lie and to cheat for the Jewish causes makes of you someone good enough to be a rabbi and that’s a high honor.
By contrast, the classic teaching says this: Most of the time the truth is made of an infinite number of parts. If you have already taken a position on the subject you’re about to debate, you will tend to choose the parts that support your position and stitch them into a complete narrative. Your opponent will choose the parts that support his or her position and stitch a different narrative. When the debate begins and the two narratives collide, you will each modify your respective positions to narrow the differences till you reach a shared compromise or you agree to disagree. If you remain intellectually honest throughout the debate you will not be embarrassed by a contradiction you make inadvertently because you will be happy to take the error into account and modify your position -- which is the original intent behind the holding of the debate in the first place.
But what happens when a classic debater that may or may not have been blacklisted on a previous occasion meets a Talmudic debater that has had the field to himself and to his kind for decades and thus had the time to plaster the landscape with layers upon layers of lies, fantasies and fabrications? Well, we have an example of that in the column by Bret Stephens where he erects a tower of absurdities that culminates in the saying that one essayist has managed to turn the whole world, including the West, against the Jews, America and the West itself. In this, Bret Stephens lays out the irony of all ironies for all to see and to marvel once again. Hungry to stitch a narrative that argues the existence of a war between Islam and the West, he bumps against another narrative made by his kind which says the following according to Netanyahu who recently spoke at an AIPAC meeting: “…we were subjected to unremitting savagery: the bloodletting of the Middle Ages, the expulsion of the Jews from England, Spain and Portugal, the wholesale slaughter of the Jews of the Ukraine, the pogroms in Russia, culminating in the greatest evil of all the Holocaust … The founding of Israel did not stop the attacks against the Jews.” Lo and behold, the world is lining up against Israel and the Jews, says this narrative, therefore it is lining up on the side of al Qaeda and the side of Sayyid Qutb. When you put all of these notions together, you hear Bret Stephens say that the whole world considers Qutb to be the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda and the godfather of the world. What a marvelous intellectual achievement by Bret Stephens! My dear friends, let us give credit where credit is due and admit that this young man is just about ready to be a rabbi but let us put in the proviso that he be careful not to get caught with his pants down again, pulled by someone of Netanyahu’s caliber.
This may be the answer to the question I posed earlier but it makes of Sayyid Qutb one mighty essayist. Therefore I wonder with green envy if I can grow up and become an essayist. Alas, I have bad news for me and what may be good news for someone out there; I don’t know who. I am a senior which makes me a grownup already and out of time. But I am also of Egyptian origin and I never heard of the man named Sayyid Qutb until last year when the Jewish organizations began to talk about him. I spent seven of my most formative years in Egypt, six of which were spent in private and public schools and one year working full time. I also did part-time work and some volunteering during the summer months. Yet, in all of these years and all the places where I went, I never heard of Sayyid Kutb because the debates that we held at the time concerned the economics of the Aswan dam and its hydroelectric station, the aquifers running under the desert, the reclamation of the land, the industrial policy of the country and so on. And I can assure Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal with absolute authority and infinite sincerity that he is better known to the Arabs and to the Muslims than Sayyid Qutb ever was then or is now. And if this is true of Egypt, it is more so everywhere else on the planet.
So why are the Jewish organizations dredging up that name at this time? The answer is that they ran out of arguments, ran out of hypotheses and ran out of luck. They are scouring the literature looking for something new to say because everything they said before contradicts everything they said before. It is a pathetic situation that ought to end here and now; and the way to achieve this is for everyone to tell these people they must keep quite and listen for a change. In the language of the back alley, they should shut up and sit quietly because they have caused enough damage to the world as it is.
To shut up and sit quietly -- which I ask them to do for at least as long as they have kept the opposition blacklisted and shut out of the debate, including yours truly -- will be good for them because it will prevent them from orchestrating another one of those moments when someone as wicked as their leaders will want to challenge them at their own game and trigger another pogrom or a holocaust. A second good reason for them to shut up and sit quietly is that it will save the lives of the American soldiers who find themselves in harm’s way, fighting most likely for the Jewish causes, far away from home.
I tell these people to stop the bands they have been orchestrating for millennia, feel the shame and they will feel the pain they are causing to the human race. They should then join humanity as equals not as jerks puffed up with hot air and a never ending quest to stand on the shoulder of everyone else. Enough is enough.