What Does James Dobson Have in Common with Osama bin Laden?

Technorati Tags: Islamophobia, war on terror, Phyllis Chesler,

Phyllis Chesler has a polemic in the Times Online about the evils of Islam:

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.

I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Take another look at that last paragraph -- in it, Chesler herself reveals the contradiction that demolishes her entire argument: "To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism. ..."

But a "universal standard of human rights" is exactly what Islamophobes refuse to adopt. Quite the opposite: There is no standard of human rights the Bush administration and its supporters have not shown themselves willing to jettison; and any criticism of such violations is greeted with outraged cries of "moral relativism" -- a fuzzy term intended to convey the idea that Americans (Christians) are morally superior to non-Westerners (Muslims) by definition, not by deed. In practice, it's really Islamophobes who are "moral relativists," because they believe that morality is defined by who you are rather than by what you do.

"Multicultural relativism" is a variant on the same notion: it's neocon code language implying contemptuous dismissal of the idea that all cultures and religious traditions contain both harmful and positive aspects; that there is no such thing as a culture or religion that is inherently superior to all others. "Cultural absolutists" like Chesler believe that some cultures are pure and enlightened and civilized; and others are corrupt and backward and barbaric:

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Never mind that "enlightened rationalism" is the bete noire of the Christian right in our own country; and that the current president does everything he can to pander to religious fundamentalists right here at home who would dearly love to see a theocracy established in America in which law and public policy would be based on a literal reading of the Christian Bible. The Christian fundamentalist movement known variously as "Dominionism" or "Christian Reconstructionism" is relatively small in size, but its political influence is growing, and reaches into the highest levels of government. Mahonoy at Street Prophets "deconstructed the Dominionists" last June:

I use the term "Dominionist" deliberately, for two reasons. First, it is necessary to distinguish between this type of conservative and nationalistic American Christianity and the American Christianity of Martin Luther King, Jr., William Sloane Coffin, and the Niebuhr brothers. Second, the term "Dominionist" refers to a particular subgroup within conservative Protestant Christianity. (I want to stress that not all evangelicals and fundamentalists are Dominionists). It recognizes that these thinkers do stand within the Christian tradition (as much as we might not like to admit it), but it also recognizes that there is an important distinction between this type of Christianity and the more progressive strains of Christianity as represented by many mainline denominations as well as the more liberal traditions within Roman Catholicism.

Dominionism is a relatively recent term coined by critics and rarely used by its own representatives. The term itself is taken from a reading of Genesis 1:26:

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

Rousas John Rushdoony, generally considered the father of "Christian Reconstructionism" (a type of Dominionism), published The Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973, in which he argued for the application of biblical laws to modern society, i.e., a theocracy. Chip Berlet at Talk to Action describes Dominionism as follows:

Open advocates of dominionism declare that "America is a Christian Nation," and that therefore Christians have a God-given mandate to re-assert Christian control over political, social, and cultural institutions. Yet many dominionists stop short of staking out a position that could be called theocratic. This is the "soft" version of dominionism.

The "hard" version of dominionism is explicitly theocratic or "theonomic," as the Christian Reconstructionists prefer to be called. For America, it is a distinction without a difference.

It is important to reassert here that not all conservative evangelical or fundamentalist Christians are Dominionists. Dominionism is a much smaller category. But its roots are to be found in conservative Protestantism, and Dominionism is a branch of the conservative Protestantism to which modern conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists also belong.

Chris Hedges talks about Dominionists in his recently published book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He also points out that one of the central dangers of fundamentalism is its dichotomized, "us versus them" worldview. From the book:

... [Because] fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. This belief system negates the possibility of the ethical life. It fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight. It is only by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is always external, then moral purification always entails the eradication of others.

This rhetoric of depersonalization creates a frightening moral fragmentation, an ability to act with compassion and justice toward those within the closed, Christian circle yet allow others outside the circle to be abused, silenced and stripped of their rights. And the passivity of many in America who do not acknowledge the danger of this rhetoric, and the moral fragmentation it inspires, lends itself to the pleasant fiction that these radicals are fundamentally decent, that they do not mean what they say, that they will never actually persecute homosexuals or nonbelievers or execute abortion providers. Such passivity only accelerates the probability of evil. Extremists never begin as extremists. They become extremists gradually. They move gingerly forward in an open society. They advance only so far as they fail to meet resistance. And no society is immune from this moral catastrophe.

Oh -- by the way. The answer to the question in this post's title is: They both despise enlightened rationalism.