When suspiciously absolutist moral preaching attacks::
Or at least the Right Blogosphere. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve read recently whose general message is that “Islam is the enemy”. This includes bloggers that I’ve respected and even some I’ve got on my blogroll… And even more improbably they sometimes include statements like “I have nothing against Muslims” or words to that effect. This is a violation of reason, logic, charity, sanity, and strategy. Let me tell you what the meaning of “is” is. If all members of class A are also members of class B and all members of class B are also members of class A then class A is class B. Further, all elements that are members of class A are each, severally, members of class A. That is the meaning of membership. I don’t care how many circumlocutions or false analogies you resort to or how much specious reasoning you present or how many paranoid assertions you make if “Islam is the enemy” then all Muslims are enemies and that’s that.
Not to go too inside-baseball, but this is why Wittgenstein eventually abandoned analytical philosophy – because it’s very bad at describing what words mean. When people say “Islam is the enemy”, they don’t mean that all people who are Islamic are enemies. You could disingenuously use convoluted set theory to demonstrate that they COULD have meant that, but that’s not what they meant. Rather, the question is the way in which the religion itself has gotten ‘so deep’ that it now itself has become a force driving people who are doing some quite nasty things. Contra the polemic, there are certainly some ways in which the cluster of concepts around “Islam is the enemy” is justifiable: the notion that a culture based on radical submission can ever be sustainable, the notion that a religion grounded in a transcendental deity can ever be moderated, etc etc. There are plenty of Muslims who live a day to day life that’s not particularly grounded in the precepts of Islam, in the same way that there are plenty of Jews who live a day to day life that’s not particularly grounded in the precepts of Judaism. It’s simply inconsistent to demand logical argument while dismissing out of hand anyone who questions the tenability of a moderate yet theologically robust interpretation of Islam.
The symptom for what’s going on – an overly conclusive homilies to tolerance as a screen for ignoring genuine problems with Islamist ideology – is in the last sentence:
A soldier does not fight because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.
War is a bloody, killing business. You’ve got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours! Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it’s the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you’ll know what to do!
That would be from one of the greatest speeches ever given to soldiers in the history of the universe.
