| | Mr. Zantonavitch's posts here have a strangely schizophrenic quality. First he insults me, then he praises me, then he insults me, then he praises me, then he insults me again. I'm going to take the sum total of his praise and insults for what they are--self-negation--and act as though none of them had appeared. A person who changes his mind so often on that subject is a person who for all intents and purposes is acting as though he doesn't have one.
The opening of his post 21 begins with a series of welcome concessions from him. Translated non-euphemistically, he admits that he misread and misunderstood what I wrote in my original article, and tacitly admits that he cannot find a single place in the article where I excuse Islamic terrorism (or Islam itself). Despite this abject and admitted failure on his part, he offers no apology to me for the egregious insult he's offered; instead, despite the concession, he later contradicts himself and accuses me of having written an "apologia" for Islamic terrorism. At one point, evading a rather obvious contradiction in his own view that I had pointed out, he likens terrorism to bad weather, ignoring the fact that bad weather is not morally responsible for itself, while terrorists are clearly responsible for terrorist acts. This is a person accusing me of "excusing" terrorism.
On Reagan and Botha, he admits that he is a defender of South African apartheid and makes the ludicrous and entirely unsupported claim that apartheid was morally justified, even "noble," and had nothing to do with racism. Since he offers no evidence for this claim, and since it is tangential to my article (and since one of the links in my article takes you to a source that refutes his claim to the tune of about 800 pages), let me simply say that I regard his claim as a perfect confirmation of the point I was making in my article, and also as a perfect confirmation of Ayn Rand's dictum ("Philosophical Detection," penultimate paragraph), that irrationality proves its own impotence. A person who cannot condemn the racism of apartheid is not worth listening to on any subject related to freedom or justice. He doesn't know what they are.
At this point, Mr. Zantonavitch simply ignores six or seven rebuttals I had offered of his claims, rebuttals he has not answered in any of his subsequent posts, either. The only attempt he makes concerns the founding of Judaism, and here he offers the eccentric assertion that Judaism came into existence in 250 BC. Taken seriously, this claim implies that Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon were not Jews, that the kingdoms ruled by David and Solomon were not Jewish, and that when Cyrus the Great allowed a certain people back into Jerusalem from exile in 538 BC, the people in question really weren't Jews at all.
Applying this "logic" to Islam, we reach the conclusion that Muhammad wasn't a Muslim, didn't found Islam, had no Muslim followers, and had no Muslim successors. The first four caliphs were not Muslims, and the dispute between Shias and Sunnis, which took place shortly after the assassination of the fourth caliph, remarkably enough, had nothing to do with Islam. After all, the Quran wasn't compiled until 150 years after Muhammad's death, so Islam didn't "really" come into existence until roughly 780 AD, not 610 AD as 99.999999% of scholars believe. In other words, Islam did not come into existence until after the "Muslim" armies had conquered Arabia and North Africa, just as Judaism didn't exist until hundreds of years after the founding and destruction of the "Jewish" kingdom of Israel. I think these absurdities should make clear why Mr. Zantonavitch's view is not the generally accepted one.
On the Reformation, the question I had raised was not whether Europe had been made better off as a result of it, but whether the Muslim world would be made better off as a result of something like it. Mr. Zantonavitch has nothing to say about this. Martin Luther was a raging anti-Semite, and Calvin's theology constituted an all-out negation of reason. Does he mean that Muslims would benefit from becoming more anti-Semitic like Luther, and would also benefit from engaging in more extreme negations of reason like Calvin? I guess so. The Reformation gave us hundreds of years of civil war and strife between Catholics and Protestants. Would it profit Muslims to emulate this, too? I guess so. The Reformation gave us Cromwell. Do Muslims therefore need an analogue to Cromwell? I guess so.
As for this,
As for Mr. Khawaja's rather inept, pot-shot attacks on my ability to read, reason, be honest, etc., I couldn't be more unintimidated and unimpressed
Perhaps Mr. Zantonavitch should be reminded that my attacks on his ability to read, reason and be honest were a response to his attacks on me, which (since I can't count on his memory) I'll repeat back to him:
I thought this was a remarkably poor and intellectually dishonest article. It's one long, round-about, obfuscating excuse for terrorism. That Civil War and Reagan/Botha stuff was particularly intellectually tricky, disengenuous, and PC.
The whole article reminds me of apologists for the police "blue wall of silence." It reminds me of Cornel West justifying black racism.The bottom line is: there's no excuse for any of this crap. And there's no excuse for the rest of us not morally condemning it. Indeed, the chief evil here lies with the good guys. By falling silent, we allow evil free run. In effect, we create it and are it.
Right. So Khawaja's article is poor and intellectually dishonest, he is an intellectual trickster, disingenuous, PC, and a racist. When he responds to such claims, he is actually engaged in an attack, and his aim is to impress and intimidate; we can expect no courage from such a person because he is "apologizing" for Islamic terrorism. For a guy who has so far not sustained a single substantive claim he's made here, that's a pretty bold set of claims. False, insulting, unsupported, bizarre, and inconsistently applied--but undeniably bold.
(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 9/25, 11:08am)
(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 9/25, 1:43pm)
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