James Glassman’s article on June 10, 2008 in the Wall Street Journal tells the story of a boy who was called upon to do a man’s job. The boy is James Glassman himself and the job is that of winning the war of ideas.
Glassman says he can accomplish the task to which he was assigned by taking two approaches. The first will be to encourage Muslims to spread the denunciation of violence far and wide. The second will be to divert potential recruits from becoming terrorists.
And how will he go about putting these two approaches into effect? Well, he will piggyback on the fact that: "There is an emerging global network of families of Islamic victims of terrorist attacks…" And he will build networks such as mothers against violence, soccer enthusiasts, young entrepreneurs and Islamic democrats. Wow, dear reader, if you did not think this boy was brilliant like a star in the heavens, here is your proof.
Glassman does better than that when he rails against Iran and predicts that future suicide bombers will be sustained by people like the leadership of Iran. And he hints that young Iranians are such a proud and sophisticated bunch, they will stop listening to their elders and leaders and will follow him to the gates of America’s Nirvana. Of course he does not explain how this bunch got to be proud and sophisticated without the elders knowing about it but then he doesn’t have to because he believes he is talking to a bunch of nincompoops – which he may well be.
Finally, the boy Glassman predicts assertively that the use of violence to achieve political, religious or social objectives will no longer be considered acceptable, the efforts to radicalize and recruit new members will no longer be successful and the perpetrators of violent extremism will be condemned and isolated, all because of his efforts. Is this boy a saint or what!
With a plan like this, you want to ask why it is that Glassman is not recognized as the God of all geniuses. Well, he is not recognized because he is not a genius, much less a God. He is a waste of time and he will stand in the way of someone who may be more qualified from stepping forward and being appointed to the position – whatever the position is supposed to be.
Let me tell you about an experience I had with the North American culture which I feel is at play here. Long ago, I was a student and I lived on campus. The dormitory of the college had a common room where we, the students went to get away from books, watch television, listen to music or just meditate.
Most of the time we did not talk to each other in the common room, let alone argue about which record to play, what television channel to watch or discuss anything heavy like politics or religion. But there was one memorable exception to this rule, one exception that remains seared in my memory to this day.
President Nixon of the United States had gone to China, and for the first time we had a live television broadcast beamed to North America from Asia. I went to the common room to watch the event and saw two other students who had gone there for the same reason. Surprisingly, they were arguing about politics.
I understood right away that one student was from Taiwan. He appreciated free market capitalism and thus criticized the American President for going to Communist China, an act he feared signaled the end of Taiwan’s independence. He appeared to be a bright young man who knew Chinese history and Mao Tse Tung’s ideology like the palm of his hand. He had a good command of the English language and seemed to know American history well enough to render the other student nervous.
The other student was an American who dodged the draft and came to Canada to avoid being sent to Vietnam. He had developed Maoist leanings, no doubt as a way to protest his condition, and he admitted he never studied China but said he read a few things about the country. In fact, he displayed little knowledge about China and less about Mao Tse Tung to whom he attributed ideals out of his own fantasy. He praised those ideals no end, something that astonished the student from Taiwan and made him cringe at times.
What astonished me and made me cringe all the time was that the American stole facts and ideas he just heard from the Taiwanese, spun them to suit his point of view and threw them back at his unsuspecting interlocutor, making himself sound more knowledgeable than he really was.
This situation was odd by the fact that it represented a reversal of the positions you would expect to see from those individuals. As a spectacle, it was interesting to watch because of the oddity but there was something else going on. It is that the American student condescended to the Chinese as he tried to force on him views regarding China and Mao Tse Tung. But like a professor lecturing to a Chinese peasant, the American peppered his language with expressions like: "Concentrate on what I’m saying and you’ll understand better - Make the effort and you’ll see what I mean - It’s really not hard to grasp this."
It was riveting to watch and I could have taken a few more hours of this. Alas the encounter came to an abrupt end when all eyes turned to the television screen as the ceremony to receive the American President began to unfold half a world away. Fast forward three decades or so and witness the Americans tell the Arabs in a condescending manner how to govern themselves. And watch the boy Glassman tell them how to live their lives.
These guys are trying to tell daddy how to make babies but the Arabs who have been around for at least 7000 years have heard it before from the many babies who came along with a big mouth and a small brain, and then drowned in their own bath water. Or if they didn’t, they were thrown out with it.
Glassman is telling the Arabs to form groups of soccer moms but no basketball yet, groups of mothers against violence but not against drunk driving yet, groups of Islamic democrats but no republicans yet, and groups of young entrepreneurs but the hell with the older bunch that is monopolizing the oil trade and making the thing so expensive.
In short, Glassman does not want the Arabs to become like Americans, yet he has nothing to offer but the ephemeral American fads of the day when all that these people want is for America to get the hell out of their faces.
The Arabs and the other foreigners who express their dislike of America sense the idiotic approaches that the Americans take these days. But the foreigners do not express themselves clearly enough to make the Americans see themselves the way that the others see them. And it is for this reason that I bring the mirror to the Americans in the hope that they will see themselves the way they appear when they jump into the lead and tell everyone else what to do.
What the people of the World know and the Americans have trouble understanding is that it is a mistake to think of someone who urges everyone else to follow his lead as being confident because the reality is often the opposite. Such individuals, more often than not, turn out to be sham leaders who fear that if someone goes off on his own, he may leap ahead of them and leave them behind. Constantly urging everyone to follow one’s lead is not a manifestation of confidence, it is the manifestation of insecurity.
For this reason sham leaders have developed a variety of ways to piggyback on the ideas of original thinkers. As a nation and as individuals, the Americans behave like this today. Instead of engaging the World in an honest dialogue as equals, the Americans take someone else’s ideas, refashion them in their own image and try to shove the concoction down the throat of everyone else. And the resulting spectacle looks like what the draft dodger was doing to the Taiwanese student, and what Glassman is trying to do to the Arabs and the Muslims. No one in the World is buying this crap, and everyone is sickened by it.
What is sad about all of this is that America’s glory once stood on the shoulders of her original thinkers until she began to listen to members of the Jewish Lobby who conned her into believing they have a special covenant with God, something that makes them know better than all of her children put together. Members of the Lobby advised and she listened. They led and she followed. They ordered and she obeyed. They said jump and she asked: how high? Bit by bit America lost the engine of her greatness until she could no longer make a move without a push or a pull from the infamous Jewish Lobby.
Thus, what is left for the American people to do is to go back to the roots of their greatness. What broke America from her dependence on Britain and made her put down roots strong enough to lead the World was her revolutionary spirit. And it is within this spirit that the Americans must rediscover the greatness that is necessary to renew themselves and get their country back to where it may lead again.
And the revolution that is called for today is the one that will break America loose from the Jewish Lobby and allow her to deal with the Middle East in a manner that is consistent with the interests of Americans and not the interests of Israelis. James Glassman and those like him should worry about fixing broken America not about fixing an Arab World that ain’t broke.