Finkelstein on Douglas
It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.
The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values”. (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.)
Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values.
Yet where do these ideas actually come from? Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe.
Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.
... and so on, and so forth with apologies for Islam ...
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/a-note-of-sanity/Douglas on Finkelstein
MK: They argue the other thing. The ones I’ve spoken to have said what you say but say it’s harder for left-winger. It may be a different situation in America. Although there are a to radical in universities faculties… Have you heard of Norman Finkelstein?
DG: Yes.
MK: Because of his anti-Israel…
DG: That’s what he blames it on…
MK: He was kicked out of about three universities in New York and he’s now in De Paul in Chicago.
DG: Seriously? I mean Princeton has one right-wing thinker and a couple of other visiting professors. If you go around American campuses… Israel is a different matter in some way and I don’t think Finkelstein is write, incidentally, about that – there are many reasons not to employ him! But, it is true that Israel in America is regarded in a different light to here. But, my God, the thing that they say on the campuses there about Israel, about Jews, I mean all sort of calumnies and they still, what Roger Kimble called “tenured radicals” – America is rife with these people. In Britain, comprehensively so. In Britain the think-tanks comprehensively so – the most well funded, most government used thinktanks like Demos – it’s just the same old stuff being churned out. They think they are radicals but they’re the ones in charge. The saddest, best metaphor for this is Gordon Brown – in that famous characteristically chippy thing when he came into Downing Street and when he went to the Treasury dinner and it’s always meant to be black-tie and he wore a lounge suit. But you do have to think when there are people around who are Chancellor of the Exchequer and they still they are outcasts! Who are at the top of their universities, at the top of their board and have tea with the President and Prime Minister and things and they still think they are radicals?! This is what Aryana Flush called the “phoney radicals” and we are covered with them in the Left. They run down a street with a bandana on their head pretending to feel like Che Guevara.
MK: That’s what people say about Noam Chomsky. He says he’s so far outside the mainstream and yet he’s sold 300,000 books.,,
DG: I wish that I could sell half of Noam Chomsky’s books. I wish that anyone would. I mean there is a great attraction to this. You do really well, you get all the money, and you get all the acclaim and you still get to pretend you are an outcast.
http://www.thecommentfactory.com/douglas-murray-neoconservative-thinker-on-the-war-on-terror-and-islamism-3116/So another way of looking at it: give the (sub-set of) people what they want to hear - and it sells.
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