Edward Said on Netanyahu & Terrorism.

Terrorism works if those it is directed at surrender, run away, or retaliate so asymmetrically as to prevent sensible deals being done thus making 'pay-for-slay' a lucrative profession. It goes without saying that moral inversion ensures that virtue signallers will end up celebrating the homicidal maniacs. This in turn ensures that the silent majority will side with those in the counter-terrorism 'mowing the lawn' business. 

A separate subject is random violence to signal preference intensity- e.g. shooting up the local kindergarten to protest J.K Rowling. 

Professional terrorism quickly morphs into organized crime starting with extortion & moving into drug trafficking, arms smuggling & most atrociously of all, pirating videos of Jennifer Aniston romcoms. 

In 1986 Edward Said reviewed Netanyahu's book titled 'Terrorism- How the West can Win' for the Arab Studies Quarterly. At the time Netanyahu was Israel's Ambassador to the UN

As a word and concept, "terrorism" has acquired an extraordinary status

in American public discourse.

It had even higher status for the Palestinians & their Arab allies. The PLO assassinated a senior Palestinian official in Cairo. The gunman stopped to lick the blood of the slain man. Clearly, there was some atavistic belief in the magical powers of doing evil shit.  

It has displaced Communism as public enemy number one,

Not yet. Art Malik was the Afghan ally of James Bond in 1987. He was the villainous terrorist in Tru e Lies in 1994. 

although there are frequent efforts to tie the two together. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric and argument that are frightening

terrorism is frightening because it kills people. Said shits himself because of 'rhetoric'.  

in their capacity for mobilizing opinion, gaining legitimacy and provoking various sorts of murderous action.

Like killing killers.  

And it has imported and canonized an ideology with origins in a distant conflict,

the Crusades?  

which serves the purpose here of institutionalizing the denial and avoidance of history.

Universities have Departments of History. But the Government has an Institute for telling History to fuck the fuck off.  

In short, the elevation of terrorism to the status of a national security threat

e.g. 9/11. Sadly, no Palestinians were involved. They had gone soft.  

(though more Americans drown in their bathtubs, are struck by lightning or die in traffic accidents)

Death should be abolished.  

has deflected careful scrutiny of the government's domestic and foreign policies.

Smart people were paid to do that. Professors of worthless shite weren't.  

Whether the deflection will be longstanding or temporary remains to be seen,

Longstanding. Muslims be kray-kray.  

but given the almost unconditional assent of the media, intellectuals and policy-makers to the terrorist vogue, the prospects for a return to a semblance of sanity are not encouraging.

Coz Muslims be kray-kray.  

I hasten to add two things, however, that are. The noisy consensus on our

Libyan adventures is, or seems to be, paper thin.

Bombing Qadaffi brought the fellow to his senses. Sadly, bringing him down created a worse situation. 

The few dissenting voices are a good deal more effective in stimulating discussion and reflection (which on their own, alas, cannot prevent the destruction we are capable of unleashing) than one might have thought. A small instance of what I mean occurred recently during a Phil Donahue show whose subject was the April 14 raid on Libya.

Donahue began the show by asking the audience for their opinion; he received

an almost total, even enthusiastic, endorsement of "our" righteous strike. Two

of his guests were Sanford Ungar and Christopher Hitchens, who, once they

got going, managed quite rapidly to extend the discussion beyond the audience's

unexamined assumptions and patriotic bombast. By the end of the hour, the

kicking of Libyan ass in revenge for terrorism seemed to be a less agreeable,

more troubling exercise than when the program began.

Said gets terrorized by rhetoric. Watching Donahue isn't supposed to cause you to shit your pants. As Said says, this is a disagreeable and troubling outcome.  

The second source of encouragement is related to the first. The obvious case

to be made against the ugly violence and disruptions caused by desperate and

often misguided people has little sustainable power once it is extended to in-

clude gigantic terror networks, conspiracies of terrorist states or terrorism as

a metaphysical evil.

It is a nuisance. It can be curbed. Torture & kill the families of terrorists. Be like China- 're-educate' entire populations in Concentration Camps. Genocide works too.  

For not only will common sense rise up at the paucity

of evidence for these preposterous theories,

Said lacked common sense. That's why he was teaching nonsense to imbeciles.  

but at some point (which is not

yet near enough) the machinery for pushing the terrorist scare will stand ex-

posed for the political and intellectual scandal that it is.

Terrorism is self-defeating. That is why the Israelis gave it up. Those who didn't became plagued by their own Frankenstein's monster.  

The fact is that most, if not all, states use dirty tricks, from assassinations and bombs to blackmail.

But the US & Israel have nukes. Sponsoring terrorism might get you, not just invaded, but nuked to arma-fucking-geddon.  

(Remember the CIA-sponsored car bomb that killed eighty people in the civilian

quarter of West Beirut in early 1984?)

No, because it happened in March 1985. The Saudis paid off Fadlallah after failing to kill him.  

The same applies to radical nationalists, although we conveniently overlook the malfeasance of the bands we support.

We want to kill our enemies & are happy if our friends do it for us. Also we wipe our own bums, not the bums of strangers. How very strange! 

For the present, however, the wall-to-wall nonsense about terrorism can in-

flict grave damage.

It can cause Said to shit himself while watching Donahue.  

The difference between today's pseudoscholarship

like that of Said 

and expert jargon about terrorism and the literature about Third World national liberation guerrillas two decades ago is interesting.

No it isn't.  

Most of the earlier material was subject to the slower and therefore more careful procedures of print;

Journalists dashed off such books quickly enough. So did 'academics'. Soldiers were a different kettle of fish. Some of their work looks quite good at first glance. But that is just spit & polish

to produce a piece of scholarship on, say, the Vietcong you had to go through the motions of exploring Vietnamese history, citing books, using footnotes

i.e. spend a couple of hours in the library

- actually attempting to prove a point by developing an argument. This scholarship was no less partisan because of those procedures, no less engaged in the war against the

enemies of "freedom," no less racist in its assumptions; but it was, or at least

had the pretensions of, a sort of knowledge.

If it made testable predictions, it was knowledge till proven otherwise. If it was mere paranoid ranting- like Said's- it wasn't.  

Today's discourse on terrorism is an altogether more streamlined thing.

The same people were doing it under Reagan as had done it under Nixon.  

Its scholarship is yesterday's newspaper or today's CNN bulletin. Its gurus - Claire Sterling, Michael Ledeen, Arnaud de Borchgrave - are journalists with obscure, even ambiguous, backgrounds.

Said had obscured his own background. He was from Cairo not Jerusalem- though he was born there because his parents believed Egyptian hospitals were shit. In Jerusalem, there were good Jewish midwives & doctors.  

Most writing about terrorism is brief, pithy, totally devoid of the scholarly armature of evidence, proof, argument.

i.e. it was like Said's own dreck.  

Its paradigm is the television interview, the spot news announcement, the instant gratification one associates with the Reagan White House's "reality time," the evening news.

There were plenty of such TV interviews in the Sixties.  

This brings us to the book at hand, Terrorism: How the West Can Win , edited

and with commentary, weedlike in its proliferation, by Benjamin Netanyahu,

the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

Netanyahu is now occupying a goodly swathe of Lebanon while bombing the shit out of Iran.  

A compilation of essays by forty or so of the usual suspects - George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lord Chalfont, Claire Sterling, Arthur Goldberg, Midge Decter, Paul Johnson, Edwin Meese 3d, Jean- François Revel, Jack Kemp, Paul Laxalt, Leszek Kolakowski,

etc. -

some of whom had genuine influence. They didn't teach Literature to cretins.  

Terrorism is the record of a conference held two years ago at the Jonathan

Institute in Washington, Jonathan Netanyahu being Benjamin's brother, the

only Israeli casualty of the famous raid on Entebbe in 1976. (It is worth noting

that victims of "terrorism" like Netanyahu and Leon Klinghoffer get institutes

and foundations named for them to say nothing of enormous press attention,

whereas Arabs, Moslems and other nonwhites who die "collaterally" just die,

uncounted, unmourned, unacknowledged by "us.")

It is also noteworthy that few American Presidents have praised Hitler or Tojo. How very strange!  

The sections into which the book is divided roll forth with a reassuringly

steady acceleration:

In other words, the book serves its purpose quite well.  

"The Challenge to the Democracies" and "Terrorism and

Totalitarianism" are succeeded by (of course) "Terrorism and the Islamic

World," which in turn brings forth "The International Network" and "Terrorism

and the Media." These are followed by "The Legal Foundations for the War

Against Terrorism" and "The Domestic Battle," yielding in place to the final,

the biggest, the choicest subject of all, "The Global Battle." Compared with

earlier works on the subject (for instance, Walter Laqueur's Terrorism)

Lacquer was a smart Israeli. His 'Last days of Europe', published in 2007, warned of creeping Islamization.  

this one has shed all the introductory attempts at historical perspective and cultured con-

text.

Because it was obvious that A-rabs be kray kray. Their culture consisted of chopping off heads & licking the blood.  

Terrorism is now a fully formed object of more or less revealed wisdom.

There are some low-level oddities about this book that should be noted quick-

ly. Very few efforts are made to convince readers of what is being said: sources

and figures are never cited; abstractions and generalizations pop up everywhere;

and, except for three essays on Islam, historical argument is limited to the single

proposition that terrorism has never before presented such a threat to "the

democracies." I was also struck that the verb in the book's subtitle, How the

West Can Win , doesn't seem to have an object: Win what? one wonders.

The War on Terror. There's a reason Netanyahu is the longest serving Israeli PM. Now Vance is saying he tricked Trump into the Iranian quagmire. You've got to be pretty smart to manipulate POTUS. 

So great is the number of contributors, so hortatory the tone, so confident and

many the assertions, that in the end you retain little of what has been said,

except that you had better get on with the fight against terrorism, whatever

Netanyahu says it is.

Bibi is a friggin genius!  

No wonder, then, that Mario Cuomo, who consults on foreign policy with

Netanyahu, an official of a foreign government, has endorsed the book in a

jacket blurb, urging "presidents, premiers, governors, mayors," to read it for

its startlingly "valuable lessons": that "state-sanctioned international terrorism

is purposeful and often conspiratorial, and that the world's democracies are

targets of terorism."

Bibi had ingratiated himself with both parties. He was only 37 years old.  

If Cuomo's presence in this august company is designed

to make him appear serious and presidentabile by association, he really ought

to reconsider for a moment.

He should take advise from a shithead. 

Because the whole book is unfortunately staked

on the premise that the Western democracies and their leaders are gullible,

soft and stupid,

which is what Vance is now saying. Bibi bamboozled my boss!  

a condition whose only remedy is that they abandon their

"Western" essence and turn violent, hard and ruthless.

Like cowboys? John Wayne was Chinese- right?  

And if,in addition, they could be led by the Netanyahu family, Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Arens (all of them contributors to How the West Can Win), their successful transfigu-

ration would be assured. At that point, however, would a liberal Mario Cuomo

stand any chance at all?

He was right not to stand. The Dems needed 'Workfare' Clinton not an East Coast tax & spend liberal. 

In fact, Terrorism: How the West Can Win is a book about contemporary

American policy on only one level. It is equally a book about contemporary

Israel, as represented by its most unyielding and unattractive voices.

Those are the voices which prevailed- thanks to terrorism.  

An attentive reader will surely be alerted to the book's agenda from the outset,

The good thing about the book is that the title says it all. You don't have to read it.  

when Netanyahu, an obsessive if there ever was one,

So obsessive that he has run Israel for 18 years 

asserts that modern terrorism emanates from "two movements that have assumed international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism." Later this is interpreted to mean, essentially, the KGB and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the former much less than

the latter, which Netanyahu connects with all nonwhite, non-European anti-

colonial movements, whose barbarism is in stark contrast to the nobility and

purity of the Judeo-Christian freedom fighters he supports.

Netanyahu's party- Likud- was in alliance with the Labour party. In 1985, Reagan made financial aid conditional on economic reform (the Stabilization plan) & Israel signed a free trade agreement with the US. This fundamentally changed how Israel was perceived by its neighbours. As it turned into an affluent knowledge economy, Arab countries felt that it would not seek to grab territory so as to achieve fiscal viability.  

Unlike the wimps who have merely condemned terrorism without defining

it, Netanyahu bravely ventures a definition: "terrorism" he says, "is the deliberate

and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear

for political purposes." But this powerful philosophic formulation is as flawed

as all the other definitions, not only because it is vague about exceptions and

limits but because its application and interpretation in Netanyahu's book de-

pend a priori on a single axiom: "we" are never terrorist; it's the Moslems, Arabs

and Communists who are.

Said is putting words into Netanyahu's mouth. The fact is, Bibi wanted to keep a distance between himself & Begin & the terrorists of the Stern gang. Still, the Israelis gave up killing each other so as to focus on bread & butter issues. The Arabs didn't.  

The view is as simple as that, and it goes back in time to the fundamental

and inaugurating denial in Israeli history: the buried fact that Israel came to

exist as a state in 1948 as a result of the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Israel had no choice but to side with the Allies. Sadly, the Grand Mufti sided with Hitler. To the victors go the spoils. The British thought the Jews might create a fiscally viable state. The Palestinians were incapable of any such thing. This remains true to this day. 

Said is silent about the dispossession of the First Nations by Europeans.  

In the early 1970s there was, I believe, a subliminal recognition on the part of

Israel's leaders that no conventional military option existed against the Palestin-

ians, who number 650,000 inside Israel, 1.3 million in Gaza and the West Bank

cheap labour- nothing wrong in that.  

and 2 million in exile,

their hosts would soon turn against them 

and that therefore they would have to be done away with by other means.

Bore them to death by getting them to read Said's shite. 

That recognition was certainly the result of the emergence

of post- 1967 Palestinian nationalism as a force resisting Israel's occupation of

historical Palestine in its entirety.

It failed in its entirety.  

The principle of "armed struggle" derives from the right of resistance ac-

corded universally to all peoples suffering national oppression.

Like the right of resistance of the American First Nations.  

Yet like all peoples (including, of course, the Jews) the Palestinians resorted on occasion

to spectacular outrages, in order to dramatize their struggle and to inflict pain

on an unremitting enemy.

They failed. Pay for slay backfires if Israel trades blood for land.  

This, I have always believed, was a political mistake with important moral consequences.

It was a necessity. If Palestinians become peaceful they might prefer to live under Israeli rule. Their own politicians are utterly shit.  

Certainly Israeli violence against Palestinians has always been incomparably greater in scale and damage. But the tragically fixated attitude toward "armed struggle" conducted from exile and the relative neglect of mass political action and organization inside Palestine

such action & organisation would focus on bread & butter issues. It would end with integration into Israeli society.  

exposed the Palestinian movement, by the early 1970s, to a far superior Israeli military

and propaganda system, which magnified Palestinian violence out of proportion to the reality.

The reality was worse in Jordan & then Lebanon & so forth. Nobody wants Palestinians.  

By the end of the decade, Israel had co-opted U.S. policy, cynically exploited Jewish fears of another Holocaust and stirred up latent Judeo-Christian sentiments against Islam.

Not really. The Americans wanted the Rodgers Plan & a path back to pre-'67 borders though maybe the Golan heights would have to be annexed for military reasons.  

An interesting article by the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk in the

February 1986 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique suggests that it became a con-

scious aim of Israeli policy in the mid-1970s to delegitimize Palestinian national-

ism in toto by defining its main expression - the PLO - as terrorist, the better

to be able to ignore its undeniable claims on Israel.

Not to mention its claim on Jordan, Lebanon etc. Assad, of Syria, had turned against the PLO by 1976.  

The major consequence of this policy was, of course, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, allegedly carried out to defeat terrorism but in reality designed to settle the fate of the

West Bank and Gaza, particularly given the fact that the PLO had scrupulously

observed a cease-fire between July 1981 and June 1982.

It is believed that the Abu Nidal group carried out the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat which was the cause of the war.  The war was a failure because Maronites are crazy mofos. The Lebanese Shia turned out to be a far more formidable opponent than the PLO.  

Yet one of the complexities of the 1982 invasion was that it showed the West

a side of Israel hitherto well hidden.

That was the side people liked. 

All the more reason, therefore, to efface the picture of Sabra and Shatila

where Lebanese Christians took revenge for some previous massacre 

by waging a full-scale ideological and cultural battle against terrorism - a battle whose main thrust has been, first, its selectivity ("we" are never terrorists no matter what we may have done; "they" always are and always will be), and second, its wholesale attempt to obliterate history, and indeed temporality itself.

This so terrifies Said that he shits his pants again.  

For the main thing is to isolate your enemy from

time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as

ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake.

Very true. That was Eisenhower's strategy. Churchill couldn't understand it because he thought 'ontology' was about the study of ontes- which is what camels are called in Bangalore, where Churchill was a subaltern.  

Thus if you can show that Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, generally

speaking, have no reality except that which tautologically confirms their ter-

rorist essence as Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, you can go on

to attack them and their "terrorist" states generally, and avoid all questions

about your own behavior or about your share in their present fate.

You can avoid all questions from shitheads by telling them to fuck the fuck off.  

In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu:

The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward un-

bridled violence. This can be traced to a world view which asserts that certain

ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral

inhibitions. In this context, the observation that the root cause of terrorism is

terrorists is more than a tautology.

It is a policy prescription. Kill terrorists. Kill their families. Kill people who might become terrorists. Suddenly, you run out of terrorists though you may now face a proper army.  

To reduce the whole embroiled history that connects "us" with terrorists (or

Israelis with Palestinians) to Midge Decter's tiny, scornful phrase, "the theory

of grievances," is to continue the political war against history, ours as well as

theirs, and leave the problem of terrorism unsolved.

Netanyahu knows how to wage actual war. Said would get confused & think one should bomb the fuck out of the History Department/ 

Consider now the rigorous selectivity of this approach. Julie Flint, a reporter

for The Guardian of London, described an Israeli intervention in Lebanon in

early March of this year, just as Farrar, Straus was getting the Netanyahu com-

pilation ready for the bookstores. Looking for two missing Israeli soldiers, an

Israeli military unit accompanied by South Lebanese Army men (Israeli

mercenaries) entered the village of Shakra: "Throughout the week, every day

at daybreak, the Israelis herded all Shakra's men into the courtyard of the local

school for interrogation. 'We've spent the whole time sitting on the ground,'

Mr. Nassar [a young merchant in the town, just returned from several years'

absence] said. 'If we stood up they hit us.'" Flint's report continues in terrifying

detail;

Said just shat himself again.  

I shall cite it here at length because it is not likely to be found in any

American publication, so powerful are the restraints against printing material

that openly discredits the Israelis and compromises their antiterrorist stance.

The point about terrorism is that it licenses in advance any and every evil shit. Clint Eastwood played 'Dirty Harry' not 'Squeaky Clean Harry'.  

It should be set against the items regularly produced by the U.S. media that

purport to describe the U.S. -Israeli view of "terrorism," for example, the hand-

outs given to and dutifully reproduced by Thomas Friedman of the New York

Times.

As opposed to the hand-jobs Said dutifully supplied to Arafat.  

(A particularly egregious instance was an article on February 16, 1986,

in which we were treated to such solecisms as the Israeli intelligence notion

of the "terrorilla.")

Neologism not solecism. The Israelis were trying to convey the notion that an insurgent force may operate like both a rural guerrilla army as well as a cell-based urban terrorist network. Why? My guess is that some in the Israeli defence establishment want to annex southern Lebanon and displace its indigenous population. One can either exchange land for peace or exchange war for land. Forty years after Said's article, we are still guessing

The evidence from Shakra undermines, to say the least, Netanyahu's definition of terrorism as applied exclusively to the PLO and the KGB:

he defined terrorism as the deliberate targeting of innocents as opposed to collateral civilian casualties or action taken against hostile populations in occupied territory. There is a legal angle to this. Bibi isn't a lawyer but has Masters in Management. There are ways to break the law while minimising 'command responsibility'.  

The Irish [UN] troops tried to send in water, milk and oranges, but the Israelis

and the SLA men threw it all on the ground. Then on Friday, the routine changed:

men, women and children - the youngest a day-old baby - were all locked in the

courtyard and interrogated in two schoolrooms. Villagers say the first interro-

gation was with Israeli soldiers and the second with SLA thugs - in a room where

bloodstains were still to be seen last week on the floor and on two school desks.

Scattered all over the small room were objects villagers said were used in the

interrogation - chair legs, wooden sticks, cigarette butts in ash trays still sitting

on electric stoves, electric coils, and nails with which the interrogators reportedly

pierced ears. Throughout the day, the Irish were refused access to the detainees,

although screams could be heard and several people could be seen badly hurt

in the schoolyard. In the late afternoon, five men were thrown into the street

outside the school, still crying and some unable to stand upright.

They had been brutally sodomized. The Irish- having been buggered senseless by evil English toffs for centuries- were greatly traumatized. It was with great difficulty that they were persuaded to swallow a spud or two. 

They were taken to the hospital. Although UNIFIL declines to discuss "full documentary evidence"

i.e. did not give an inventory of all the objects retrieved from the rectums of these simple Semites 

in its medical report, reporters who visited the five saw they had been brutally

beaten and burnt on the back with cigarette ends.

You can't tell me things didn't stop there 

Radwan Ashur, a student, had badly damaged hands; friends said his interrogators walked over them in army boots. Another man had his penis burnt with a cigarette lighter. A short

way from his school, young men including Mr. Nassar, were assembled at night

by the village pond. They said they were thrown into it and then, dripping wet

and their hands tied behind their backs, were made to lie until dawn on the floor

of an unfinished shop. "You have to tell us everything about this town," Mr. Nassar

was told. He replied: "I don't know anything. I've just come from Liberia." After

the Israelis finally departed late on Saturday having failed to find their men, the

security report for Shakra showed that fifty-five men and six women, one of them

pregnant, had been taken away, three houses had been dynamited and many

others looted and wrecked, their doors blasted off with grenades. Several dozen

cars were stolen.

The Shias would soon gain hegemony. Karma is a bitch. The odd thing is that Hezbollah was actually less nasty than the Maronite militias. 

The point about this little episode (which features the innocent civilians whom

the United States loves to defend) is not that it occurs daily, or that such behavior

has been characteristic of the Israeli state from the very beginning (as revealed

by revisionist Israeli historians Tom Segev and Benny Morris, among others),

or that it is increasing in viciousness as the spurious excuse of "fighting terror-

ism" serves to legitimize every case of torture, illegal detention, demolition of

houses, expropriation of land, murder, collective punishment, deportation, cen-

sorship, closure of schools and universities. The point is that such episodes

are almost completely swept off the record by the righteous enthusiasm for

deploring Arab, Moslem amd nonwhite "terrorism."

No. The point is nobody gives a shit. Said, because he taught worthless shite, thought that pearl-clutching was important. It wasn't. The dowager who clutches her pearls started off as a can can dancer. Anyway nobody is really shocked that soldiers kill and torture people- more particularly if they are looking for members of their own squad. 

In this enthusiasm a supporting role is played by the accredited experts on

the Islamic world.

Like Said? His supporting role was as that of the pearl-clutching dowager who doesn't understand that soldiers kill people. That's their job.  

Note here how, unlike those scholars of Latin America, Africa

and Asia whose naïveté leads them to express solidarity with the peoples they

study, the guild of the Middle East Orientalists seems to have produced only

the likes of Bernard Lewis, Elie Kedourie and the utterly ninth-rate P .J. Vati-

kiotis, each of whom contributes a slice of mendacity to Netanyahu's

smorgasbord.

Israel is in the region these guys study. They are welcome to express solidarity with it. However their failure to chop off their own dicks in solidarity with Bihari Hijras is truly shocking.  

Far from offering insights about their area of specialization (which

provides them with a living) that might promote understanding, sympathy or

compassion, these guns-for-hire assure us that Islam is indeed a terrorist

religion.

No. They say some Islamist movements say that terrorism is jihad.  

So untoward and humanly unacceptable is this position that the New

York Times's John Gross refused to recognize it in his review of this book.

He also refused to cut off his own dick. How very sad! 

He therefore especially commended Lewis's view - Gross paraphrases freely- "that

there is nothing in Islam as a religion that is especially conducive to terrorism."

But had he read past the second paragraph of Lewis's essay, he would have

found the great man saying that "it is appropriate to use Islam as a term of

definition and classification in discussing present-day terrorism."

Because some terrorist groups are Islamic.  

Gross and Lewis are symptomatic of the whole deformation of mind and

language

which only exist in Said's mind. Does it cause him to scream his tits off & soil his pants? Yes. This is because of the ontological chrematistics of the oesophagus or the peristalsis of something Walter Benjamin mentioned to Berthold Brecht.  

induced by "terrorism." Gross is so ideologically infected with the

antinomian view that, on the one hand, no respectable scholar can say racist

things and, on the other, one can say anything about Islam and the Arabs if

one is a respectable scholar,

This isn't an antinomian view. Christians may be under no obligation to follow the moral law because salvation is by Grace but that has nothing to do with respectable scholarship. Respectable people can say anything about anything. If they say 'suck my dick, niggah scum!', they aren't respectable.  

that he just gives up on reading critically.

i.e. inserting stupid lies he has himself cooked up into the text 

Lewis, who is by now reckless

coz he was a British soldier during the Second World war & had spent a lot of time at SOAS meeting with the elite of the Arab world 

with the confidence inspired by having the New York Times , the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and Commentary more or less at his disposal,

jealous much? Lewis was Jewish. He was an ex-soldier & British diplomat. He had gravitas. Said was a Nancy boy clutching his pearls & screaming his tits off.  

serves up one falsehood or half-truth after another in his essay. `Islam, he tells us, is a political religion, a unique thing. Whereas, he intones, Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross and Moses died before he entered the Promised Land, Mohammed (clever fellow) founded a state and governed it.'

What's wrong with that?  

Those three millennial facts alone are supposed to have determined the whole of Christian, Jewish and Islamic history and culture ever since.

It is a fact that England has three sources of law- Canon Law, King's Equity & the Common Law- because there were three Estates with separate origins, languages, & trajectories. In Islam, every Muslim became a member of all three Estates simultaneously along with the Prophet & his Companions. Islam can have a political horizon in a sense in which Calvinist Geneva or Holland could not.  

Never mind that Jewish and Christian leaders have - to this day - founded and governed

states,

where the sacred was separated from the secular. I suppose, you might say the Papal States were an exception but they weren't really. Civil Law was separate and Roman in origin.  

or that Jews and Christians (quite ignoring the charity of Christ or the

misfortunes of Moses) fought battles in the name of Christianity and Judaism

that were as bloody as anyone else's.

Jews haven't slaughtered each other with might and main in the manner of Christians or Muslims. How many Ashkenazis were killed by Sephardics- none at all. How many Protestants were killed by Catholics- too many to count. The same is true of the various sectarian wars in Islam.  

What matters, says Lewis, is that at the present time there is "the reassertion of this association of politics and Islam" as if it isn't clear that Israel is perhaps the most perfect coincidence of religion and politics in the contemporary world,

It isn't clear at all. Hitler targeted Jews who had converted. Thus, race- not religion- was the binding factor. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a pure example of religion & politics coinciding.  

or that Jerry Faiwell and Ronald Reagan time and again connect religion and politics.

Which proves they are actually Ayatollahs- right? 

No, not at all; it is only Moslems, unregenerate combiners, like their founder, of politics and religion, who are guilty of this atavism. It can make you quite angry to read such

nonsense.

It makes this Protestant Christian angry even though his parents had sent him off to WASP America. They themselves had to leave Egypt.  

Terrorism: How the West Can Win is thus an incitement to anti-Arab and anti-

Moslem violence.

People would read the book & then punch Said in the face.  

It further inflames an atmosphere in which it is considered

natural that when Leon Klinghoffer is senselessly and brutally murdered, the

New York Times devotes 1,043 column inches to his death, but when Alex Odeh,

no less an American, is just as senselessly and brutally murdered at the very

same time in California, he gets only 14 column inches.

Why encourage kids to target the local Arab Mom & Pop restaurant? I think Israeli policy is to allow extradition of terrorists if they killed non-Arabs. This is understandable.  

Have we become so assured of the inconsequence of millions of Arab and Moslem lives that we assume it is a routine or unimportant matter when they die either at our hands

or at those of our favored Judeo-Christian allies?

Arab & Muslim lives matter for economic reasons. We want to buy stuff from them and sell stuff to them. Hopefully, Israel won't nuke its enemies before we found some cheap substitute for the region's oil & gas. 

Do we really believe that Arabs and Moslems have terrorism in their genes?

Sure. We all do. If terrorism is a rewarding profession, it will attract high quality recruits. 

The worst aspect of the terrorism scam, intellectually speaking, is that there

seems to be so little resistance to its massively inflated claims, undocumented

allegations and ridiculous tautologies.

Sadly, Lewis & Co. were right. Said was wrong. 9/11 is the most significant even of the twenty first century.  

What will happen next? I think the US, as a net oil exporter, will retreat from the area. Israel will be off the leash. It will do ethnic cleansing to get defensible borders & do cheaper, more indiscriminate, 'mowing the lawn'. There will be less money for 'pay for slay' as everybody focuses on gaining strategic deterrence. In Europe & America, I think there will be some amateurish tit-for-tat Muslim v Jewish (or Hindu) terrorism possibly involving criminal gangs. But the real interest will be in asymmetric warfare against trade routes- e.g. using drones to lay the straits of Hormuz. The technology may have evolved to a point where a non-State Actor could make a profit on operations of this sort. The truth is being killed by a nutjob is a manageable risk. It is losing your fucking pension pot which is truly terrifying.