By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

President Barack Obama cannot associate the word “radical” or “extremism” with Islam. It makes him choke. Hence, he cannot admit that Islam is at war with the United States.  After all, Islam is a world religion associated with monotheism. How can it be at war with America? In the surreal world of Barak Obama, 9/11 never happened or was a “workplace accident,”

Since Islam is a religion of peace, the notion of Islamic extremism is a non-sequitur. And since Islam is a monotheistic religion sharing moral precepts found in Christianity and Judaism,  it cannot possibly be at war with mankind.

Admittedly, Catholic theologian George P. Weigel is skeptical about Islam’s lofty reputation. He contends that “To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three monotheisms” or Abrahamic faiths” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, he says “ought to be retired.”^[1]

Like many secular scholars from a variety of nations, Weigel rejects the notion of “Muslim moderates.”  It thus appears absurd that Jews, famous for their rationality, should seek a genuine peace agreement by negotiations with their cultural and ideological opposites – Muslim Arabs whose mentality is fundamentally bellicose and arguably irrational. Indeed, the great intellectually liberated Islamic philologist and historian, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), has written that Arabs are a savage people, and that “savagery” describes their inherent character. But what is meant by “savage?”

According to that most erudite and marvelous Christian C. S. Lewis, “Savage beliefs are thought to be the spontaneous response of a human group to its environment, a response made principally by the imagination. They exemplify what some call pre-logical thinking. They are closely bound up with the communal life of the group.”

Consistent therewith, Moshe Dayan writes, “[The Arabs] live in a world which is not truth and they do this almost like a man who needs hashish … It often seems to me that all Arabs – and on all levels – act as though under the influence of drugs. Yet illusion is worse than a lie. You make a lie consciously and you dominate it, while the illusion will finally dominate you.”[2] This phenomenon is typical among savages.

It is futile to engage a savage in rational discourse, in which an idea is related to observation with a view of its affirmation or negation. The passion-driven and communal consciousness of a savage is impervious to reason.

This savage mentality is exemplified by the Taliban, whose religious police distributed placards in Afghanistan saying, “Throw reason to the dogs, it stinks of corruption.” (It would be futile to send one of these placards to President Obama, since he sacrificed s intellect long ago at the church of the Revered Jeremiah Wright.)

Obama can hardly be classified as a savage, but his contempt for truth – most clearly manifested in his saying America was founded by Muslims – which suggests he does not read serious books – exemplifies the deep-seated hatred of books manifested in the Muslim world.

Although savage beliefs may be dissipated by literacy, Muslims are famous for how few books they publish. Muslims account for 5% of the world’s population, yet produce only 1% of the world’s books. Muslims are also habituated to rote learning. This renders them more susceptible to the hackneyed remarks of demagogues. Obama displays little evidence of critical thinking.

In Modern Islam (1962), G. E. Von Grunebaum writes, “It is essential to realize that Muslim civilization … is. not vitally interested in analytical self-understanding, and it is even less interested in the structural study of other cultures, either as an end in itself or as a means of a clearer understanding of its own character and history.”

Bernard Lewis portrays Islam’s overweening arrogance and utter contempt for Western civilization in “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990). Contrary to Islam, the sages of Israel teach, “The Creator says of all who are proud, he and I cannot be together.” As stated in Proverbs 16:5, “The proud are despicable in the eyes of Hashem.”

Convinced of its possession of absolute truth, Islam cannot believe it is of any value to study cultures steeped in error. Hence it discourages among the faithful any incentive to understand other cultures from the latter’s own point of view. It is therefore ethnocentric folly that prompts Israeli and American officials to engage the Palestinian Authority in peace talks with the expectation of rational and reliable results, especially in view of the deeply ingrained cultural duplicity exemplified by the Islamic concept of taqiyya.

It never occurs to people like Secretary of State John Kerry, to say nothing of Israeli politicians, that in consorting with the Palestinians they are dealing with a savage culture, as was recognized by Ibn Khaldun and G. E. Von Grunebaum.◙

[1] George Weigel, Faith. Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Acton (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 17.

[2] Cited in Michael Brecher, The Foreign Policy System of Israel (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 354-355; Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (Jerusalem: Steimatzky, 1976), 332.