Why HAMAS won: Religion

HAMAS won its shut-out victory in Gaza with alarming ease. And the reason Hamas won is even more alarming: Fanaticism trumps numbers. You'll hear no end of explanations for the terrorist triumph: Hamas was backed by Iran; Gaza is Hamas' base of support; some Fatah units ran out of ammunition . . . All true. And all secondary factors. Fatah's security forces in Gaza outnumbered the Hamas gunmen. Fatah had stockpiles of weapons and military gear (now in Hamas' arsenal). Fatah even had the quiet backing of Israel and America. And Fatah folded like a pup tent in a tornado.

Hamas won because its fighters are religious fanatics ready to die for their cause. Fatah runs an armed employment agency under the banner of Palestinian nationalism. Most of the latter's security men are on the payroll because relatives or ward pols got them jobs. And they want to stay alive to collect their wages. The result was predictable. Our government pretended otherwise. Now hairs should be standing up on the backs of thousands of necks, from the White House to the Green Zone.

Yes, Iraq is more complex than Gaza. But once you pierce the surface turbulence and look deep, the similarities are chilling: Iraq's security forces do include true patriots - but most of the troops and cops just want a job, or were ordered to join up by a sheik or a mullah, or are gathering guns until their faction calls. The al-Qaeda-in-Iraq terrorists, the core members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the hard-line Sunni ghazis are willing to die for the victory of their faction and their faith. They believe they're doing Allah's will. It gives them a strength we rush to explain away.

The raw numbers suggest that Iraq's fanatics don't stand a chance. The government has a far greater numerical advantage than did Fatah. But numbers often mislead analysts during insurgencies: Iraq's government wouldn't last a week without U.S. troops.

The lesson from Gaza is that such wars are neither waged nor won by the majority of the population. A tiny fraction of the populace, armed and determined, can destroy a fragile government and seize power. Polls showing that most Iraqis "want peace" and don't support the extremists only deceive us (because we want to be deceived). It wouldn't matter if 99 percent of the Iraqis loved us like free falafel, if we're unwilling to annihilate the fraction of 1 percent of the population with the weapons and will to dictate the future to the rest.

At the height of last week's fighting in Gaza, one Palestinian in 300 carried a weapon in support of Hamas - a third of one percent of the population. Now Hamas rules 1.5 million people. Numbers still matter, of course. But strength of will can overcome hollow numbers. And nothing - nothing - gives men a greater strength of will than religious fanaticism. We don't want to hear it. Secular virtues were supposed to triumph. They didn't, but we still can't let go of our dream of a happy-face, godless world where nobody quarrels.

Our refusal to acknowledge the unifying - and terrifying - power of extremist religion has deep roots. As academics rejected and derided faith in the last century, even the Thirty Years' War - the horrible climax of Europe's wars of religion - was reinvented as a dynastic struggle, or a fight for hegemony, or a class struggle.

But the Thirty Years' War was about faith. All the other factors were in play, but the core issue, from the Protestant coup in Prague in 1618 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was religious identity. And the atrocities committed on both sides make Iraq look like amateur hour: Wars of religion always demand blood sacrifice. (It was a compromise of bloody exhaustion that ended the Thirty Years War.)

Our problem is that, of those who rise in government, few have witnessed the power of revelation or caught a life-changing glimpse of the divine. They simply can't imagine that others might be willing to die for all that mumbo-jumbo. Our convenience-store approach to faith leaves us numb to the passion of our enemies.

The true believer always beats the feckless attendee. The best you can hope for is that the extremist will eventually defeat himself. And that does leave us some hope: Fanatics inevitably over-reach, as al Qaeda's Islamo-fascists have done in Iraq, alienating those who once saw them as allies. But the road to self-destruction can be a long one: The people of Iran want change, but the fanatics have the guns. And sorry, folks: Fanatics with guns beat liberals with ideas.

Faith is the nuclear weapon of the fanatic. And there's not going to be a religious "nuclear freeze." It doesn't matter how many hearts and minds you win, if you don't defeat the zealots with the muscles.

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"Tax is solidarity"

Long live tax. Thus read a recent headline in the leading French newspaper Liberation. Yet France's national sport is tax evasion. Theodore Dalrymple argues that the belief that tax is solidarity and justice is fairness is at the heart of France's current problems

Returning to France after an absence of three months, the first newspaper I picked up - Liberation - had one of the most arresting headlines I have ever seen anywhere: Vive l'impot, Long live tax. No wonder newspapers in France have the smallest circulation of any developed country.

Now of course we all recognise that taxation is necessary, just as we recognise that, in this fallen world, the police are necessary. No one could be more in favour of law and order than I, yet I should still mistrust someone who went around saying "Long live the police!" I would suspect that he was a sadist of some description, who enjoyed being cruel to animals and wanted criminals to be vilely abused or tortured.

The context in which Liberation published the headline was the forthcoming election in France. There is a profound sense of unease in the country: that it is has lost its rightful place in the world, that it is becoming a museum rather than an active economic force, that it is stagnating, that a substantial part of the population is completely and dangerously disaffected, and so forth. The question is what part high taxation and excessive bureaucratic centralisation plays in this syndrome. The fact is that the state, high taxes notwithstanding, is becoming ever more deeply indebted. It is living today as if there were no tomorrow. Apres nous le deluge has become government policy.

Both Le Monde and Liberation characterise any proposal to lower taxes in order to unleash the energies of the French people as demagogy. No doubt the subject is susceptible to demagogy: politicians will claim that they can lower taxes without sacking any of the employees who have a net negative effect on national output. But if you ask any small businessman in France why he finds it hard to expand his business, he will reply that the burden of taxation and regulation is simply too high. That is why so much has to be done na levo, as the Russians used to put it: on the left, or, in our parlance, under the table. The question of taxation is a real and important one, demagogues and demagoguery notwithstanding.

The real demagoguery, however, is on the other side of the question. An interview with an academic in the same issue of Liberation is headlined with a quotation from him:

Above all, tax is solidarity

No doubt our own Mr Brown could not agree more. The strange thing about this is that it views social solidarity as something that is forced and imposed rather than felt and voluntary. While taxation is supposedly a manifestation of the responsibility one citizen feels for the welfare of another, it has to be extorted from the citizenry, which does everything possible, and some things impossible, to avoid paying it. Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.

The peculiar thing is that the belief that tax is a kind of institutionalised kindness goes along with an attitude that makes a hero of anyone who succeeds in pulling the wool over the taxman's eyes, and commiserates with anyone who gets caught cheating on his taxes. I doubt that the journalists at Liberation are any different from their compatriots in this respect. We in Anglo-saxonia are hypocrites about sex, but they in France they are hypocrites about money. Does anyone, when he pays his taxes, think to himself,

With this cheque I am being compassionate towards those less fortunate than I?

He is surely more likely to think that he is contributing to the salaries of the vast armies of bureaucrats and regulators that the state has employed to inhibit real economic activity. No doubt such salaries have a Keynesian effect upon aggregate demand, but no economy can survive entirely by everyone taking in everyone else's washing. Ultimately, something must be produced.

The academic was asked whether an almost confiscatory inheritance tax would put everyone of a footing of equality. Yes, certainly, he replied, and even the most liberal [economists] defend this idea as a means of reshuffling the cards. The only inconvenience he could see was that the prospect of leaving an inheritance to one's children was an important motive for human activity.

In the first part of the answer we see the modern mania for justice as fairness, to the complete detriment of civilisation itself, which is not at all valued. Civilisation is an accretion of achievements that no single person, and no single generation of people, can be expected to make in his or its own lifetime. Those who come after unfairly benefit from the efforts of those who have gone before; and since it is inevitable that, at any given time, some people benefit more than others from the civilisational inheritance (if only because parents pass on a varying degree of cultural and intellectual capital to their children), it is only right - from the justice as fairness point of view - that the world should be constantly razed to the ground so that no one should benefit more from it than anyone else.

Nothing should be taught to anybody, for fear that one person will be taught more than another; and medical schools, for example, must operate on the principle that every student should make every discovery for himself. Every generation must discover the circulation of the blood for itself, or not at all; and every generation must discover anaesthetics and penicillin.

Is it not manifest unfairness (and therefore injustice) that I should have a longer life expectancy than my father merely by virtue of having been born after him, and that those who were born after me should have a longer life expectancy than mine? What, indeed, could be worse unfairness (and therefore injustice), for is not life itself a precondition of everything else? It follows that each generation should start from a position of complete medical ignorance.

The belief that justice as fairness is the most important desideratum, indeed the only really important one, is profoundly destructive. In a world in which not everyone shares it, it also guarantees relative decay and economic regression. And, of course, it doesn't even lead to fairness; only to the creeping tyranny of bureaucrats.

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Angry Muslim reaction after last week's decision by Queen Elizabeth to knight Salman Rushdie came as no surprise

Unfortunately, too many people do not understand the serious consequences of misplaced respect for offended religious feelings. A prime example - the United Nation's Human Rights Council's passage of a scandalous resolution condoning state punishment of speech deemed insulting to religion, which helps regimes that silence criticism and crush dissent

"The only right you don't have in a democracy is the right not to be offended." These words by New York law professor Ronald Dworkin come to mind when reading about the angry Muslim reactions after last week's decision by Queen Elizabeth to knight Salman Rushdie.

Unfortunately, too many people do not understand the consequences of their misplaced respect for insulted religious feelings: this respect is being used by tyrants and fanatics around the world to justify suicide attacks and to silence criticism and to crush dissenting points of view.

Here's what Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq, the religious affairs minister of Pakistan -our ally in the war on terror- had to say about Sir Salman's knighthood: "If someone blows himself up he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?"

Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq is the son of former president Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who was killed in a plane crash in 1988. One of the characters in Rushdie's novel about Pakistan's political turmoil, Shame, is based on Zia ul-Haq. The late president's son was later forced to soften his attack on Rushdie, but his line of "reasoning" exposes the problem in a nutshell: he is absolutely sure that blasphemy and terrorism are comparable crimes. And he can find many arguments for this perverted logic in the reactions among people in the West to the fatwa against Rushdie after the publication of "The Satanic Verses" in 1988, which was denounced blasphemous for its depiction of the prophet Mohammed.

Minister ul-Haq was joined by another cabinet member, Pakistan's minister for parliamentarian affairs Sher Afgan Khan Niazi: "The `sir' title from Britain for blasphemer Salman Rushdie has hurt the feelings of Muslims across the world. Every religion should be respected. I demand the British government immediately withdraw the title as it is creating religious hatred," he said.

Again: insult, blasphemy, respect for religion, those words are being repeated over and over again as justification for violent attacks and death threats. By the Iranian government, by the chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, and by leading politicians and opinion makers in the West.

And they have made their way into the United Nation's Human Rights Council, the highest ranking international body with the mission of protecting human rights. On March 30 it passed a scandalous resolution condoning state punishment of speech that governments deems as insulting for religion.

"The resolution is based in the expectation that it will compel the international community to acknowledge and address the disturbing phenomenon of the defamation of religions, especially Islam," said Pakistan, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

What does this mean? Well, it means that the UN is encouraging every dictatorship to pass laws that make criticism of Islam a crime. The UN Human Rights Council legitimizes the criminal persecution of sir Salman Rushdie for having insulted people's religious sensibilities. Beautiful, isn't it?

And the Labour Government in Britain was delivering ammunition to this kind of policy when back in 2006 it put a lot of effort into passing a law against religious hatred. It failed by one vote. Salman Rushdie fought this law. In an essay "Coming After Us" for the anthology "Free Expression Is No Offense" he wrote:

"I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me. At that time it was often difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader, global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms. The aggressors in that matter, by which I mean the novel's opponents, who threatened booksellers and publishers, falsified the contents of the text they disliked, and vilified its author, nevertheless presented themselves as the injured parties, and such was the desire to appease religious sentiment even then that in spite of the murder of a translator in Japan and the shooting of a publisher in Norway there was widespread acceptance of that topsy-turvy view."

Fortunately, Salman Rushdie is doing well, celebrating his 60th birthday today and working on a new novel, "a fantasia or shaggy dog story which connects Renaissance Florence with 16th century India", as he put it in a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph.

But the fact of the matter is that by adapting the resolution against "defamation of religion" the UN has tacitly endorsed the killing of Rushdie's colleagues in parts of the world where no one can protect them.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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