"Dialogue" with Islam and its Backlash.

 

by Raphael Israeli

 

This Pessach eve, of the year 2009, we are faced by announcements of the British government, to the effect that it has ceased its dealings with the major Muslim  Council of Britain  (MCB) , and by the Jewish organizations of France that they discontinued their “dialogue” with  French Muslims. In both instances, the reasons cited were the same.

 

Namely, the double game the Muslim groups were playing: on the one hand seeking “dialogue” with their partners, as a means of coexistence and of smoothing over difficulties in communications; but on the other hand supporting Hamas, which wants no dialogue with Israel. The non-Muslim parties in these “dialogues” were late in awakening to the reality, that Muslim culture understood “dialogue” not as way to facilitate rapprochement and understanding, by way of negotiation and clarification, but as a means to lend legitimacy to the monologue it wishes its partners to hear and to heed. When, after a few years of vain encounters, the non-Muslim participants finally understood, they withdrew  from that exercise of goodwill once they realized that  the other party did not respond in kind.

 

Some naïve minds in the West have come to believe that dialogue and negotiations with Muslim radicals can and will alter those attitudes and lead to coexistence between Muslims and their rivals. The problem is that dialogue has been treated in the West as if it were a real policy, whereas it is in fact a non-policy, designed only to fill an awkward vacuum and to make royalties like Prince Charles, and legislators, feel virtuous for “doing something.” But while Europeans have regularly entered a “dialogue” with Muslims in good faith, fully intending to find common ground with their often unruly Muslim interlocutors—for the Muslims, “dialogue” means something else entirely. For them, it signifies the submission of a lesser culture and religion to their own superior one, which they seek to impose on the others. Muslims hope to inspire in the Westerners and Israelis, conversion to an Islamic view of the world. Anything short of that is regarded by them as an abject “failure of dialogue,” and a signal to resort to threats of violence or acts of terrorism. They are well practiced at both, while the Westerners have literally become pushovers at this stage in their history. Except for the U.S., they hardly believe that anything is worth fighting over. Nor do they have a stomach for a fight of unlimited duration. They would rather capitulate than investigate in depth the meaning of tolerance, understanding, dialogue, and peace to the Islamists.

 

The problem today lies in the juxtaposition of a resurgent Islam on the one hand, and a self-deprecating West on the other, unsure of itself, its values, or even what it stands for. Its people have made a virtue of instant self-gratification, and therefore they invest next to nothing in the future—hence they have stopped having children. Their preferred way of life amounts to a “credit card culture.” They want everything, and they want it instantly. Never mind that their governments no longer raise sufficient funds from taxation to cover exorbitant welfare entitlements, or that a bleak financial future awaits tomorrow’s pensioners. In short, the West has become a disgrace to its own heritage in sharp reversal of its fortunes when at the turn of the twentieth century the Muslim Ottoman Empire was considered the “sick man of Europe,” and was therefore no match for a confident West. Former U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was onto something apart from the obvious when he distinguished between “old” and “new” Europe—except that in their eagerness to grab some (necessarily short-term) economic benefits after emerging from Soviet control, the headlong rush of “new” Europe to join the EU, will inevitably contaminate them with the prevalent Western disease.

 

There is another drawback to this constant resort to “dialogue.” It lulls the  Western populations into believing that their governments are doing something constructive to avert violence, or threats of violence, in the future. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, for this non-policy simply serves to embolden and concomitantly empower those Muslims whom Western governments have chosen to act as intermediaries with the wider Muslim community. Invariably, Western governments have elected these Muslims largely because they are the activists, and therefore are prominent in the community, while the governments comfort themselves with the injudicious belief that these figures represent “moderate” Islam. However, these Muslims have been living in Europe long enough to have learned to tailor their vocabulary precisely according to whom they are facing across the table. They speak the language of peace, reconciliation, and goodwill to Westerners, and reserve their true thoughts and beliefs for fellow Muslims. In other words, they have learned to “work the system,” admirably so. In effect, these “moderate” Muslim leaders gradually extract one concession after another from Western policymakers, rendering “dialogue” a one-way street. They enter each session with the full intention of testing the limits of the concessions they can extract, and it is a rare government minister who would risk disappointing them—or else the headlines in the papers the following day would be sure to inflame the Muslim community.

 

Herein lies the value of the worldwide Muslim penchant for overreacting to every perceived slight, real or imagined, by demonstrating their “rage” loudly and violently. Temperament comes into play here too, for unlike other peoples who experience anger or humiliation, many Muslims are either unable or unwilling to contain those sentiments. One has only to recall the Arafat-orchestrated “days of

rage” in the early days of the Intifadah against Israel, in order to understand that,

in sharp contrast to Westerners, Muslims make a fetish of celebrating their anger. Such an uncontrolled behavior is unthinkable in the West, but not because of lack of provocation, particularly since September 11. Funerals too are manipulated to vent wrath and fury, emotion, general mayhem, and impromptu rifle-shooting. The total and shameless lack of dignity, even at what should be a somber occasion, is jarring to western eyes. Bodies are held aloft and bounced along the route, in a manner that would be regarded as disrespectful to the deceased in other cultures. Bodies have been known to fall off the stretcher amid the melee, and other processions turning chaotic as was recorded for posterity in the case of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral.

 

The explosion of the Cartoon Affair in Europe and the Middle East in 2006, which occasioned many deaths, boycotts, rage and world-wide demonstrations by Muslims, because some obscure artist dared to depict, in an obscure journal,  Muhammed in derogatory terms, in itself not only points to the pathological sensitivities of Muslims, but also  to their obtuse attitude to others in their “dialogues”. When the President of Iran vows to eliminate the Jewish people and to wipe Israel off the map, none of those dialoguing Muslim organizations raises its voice in protest; none also protested when Christian churches were torched, as a matter of course,  throughout the Muslim world, or when the Joseph Tomb and the Jericho synagogues were burned and destroyed by Palestinians during the Intifadah. Only hurting the reputation of Muhammed matters, and justifies the use of violence, while the very notion of respect for other religions, simply does not exist. Therefore, dialogue is only made to instill into western minds the respect of Islam and its values, as the resolution of the Human Rights Commission, just adopted in Geneva, plainly attests. As more and more western and Jewish organizations are finally grasping  the meaning of “dialogue” for their Muslim partners,  they may also try, at long last, to make it  more egalitarian, reciprocal, and perhaps also efficacious.

 

 

Raphael Israeli

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