I believe articles such as Berman’s need to be viewed with great caution especially in light of what happened since this was written in early 2003.
Here is a prescient quote from the Washington Monthly from that same time that captures it quite well:
washingtonmonthly.com
”… Though this is a serious book, it is shot through with an equally serious flaw: the desire to inflate the threat of Islamist violence--and particularly its intellectual stakes--to levels beyond what they merit and to force them into a template of an earlier era, for which Berman has an evident and understandable nostalgia. Over the course of the book, the disjointedness between what the radical Islamist menace is and what Berman wants to make it ranges from merely apparent to downright painful, and ends up obscuring as much as it clarifies. And, unfortunately, the obscuring elements may be the more important ones. Given the role intellectuals are playing in this war, these are mistakes that could have dire real-world costs. …”
Today we know that there were and are dire real-world costs. We now know that most of the assessments of the journalists supporting the invasion of Iraq were disastrously wrong and scarily uncritical. Berman was just one them, he had lots of company at the illustrious New York Times and Washington Post.
I found the article interesting but it hasn’t convinced me in any shape or form that there is a war of the religions. There have been many extremist philosophers with a certain following. What we need to do in liberal societies is to preserve our values within (a fight we are in great danger of losing at this point) and not try to extent them onto others as any such act simply invites and fosters such counter reactions as extremist Islam.
Instead what the West and the U.S. in particular lately have done is attempted to continue impose Western values and therefore reinforced the view that we are simply extensions of the crusaders and colonialists by using similar methods and highly questionable values while pretending to do right. And let us also not forget that the West under these pretenses has taken advantage of the Middle East by appropriating many of its riches.
From my perspective, to call it a war of religions is exacerbating the problem and feeds into aggressions and prejudices on both sides of the fence. It is of utmost importance to start to develop tolerance, understanding and respect for both cultures instead of letting ourselves be driven by extremist philosophies on each side of the fence.
I also consider it outrageously wrong to bundle Chechnya, Kashmir, Gaza, Kosovo, Iraq together. It is a dangerous but convenient oversimplification that ignores the real issues for the purpose of easy manipulation of the masses! It should be obvious today that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and that the war was an illegal war of aggression.
BTW, my point about Chechnya was that if Chechnya didn’t have oil riches and its strategic location, it would have become a separate country just like many other break off states from the former Soviet Union. |
