numerous errors of fact evident both in his campaign and presidential
speeches. Their assertions of his brilliance, despite gaffes such as
those on display in Cairo, are like their assertions of Bush’s stupidity: wish-fulfilling myths serving partisan ends.
But more important is the danger to our foreign
policy that such an ignorance of history represents. Particularly in
our fight against radical Islam, history supposedly provides the basis
of Muslim grievances against the West, especially the United States.
Colonial occupation, imperialist aggression, the Western imposition of
Israel on the “Palestinian homeland” in order to atone for the
Holocaust––these sins of the West against the House of Islam are
constantly put forth as rationalizations and justifications for
violence against Western interests.
If history is to provide the foundation of grievance, however, then all
of history is on the table, and that history must be factually accurate
and judged by consistent standards. If, for example, the enslavement of
Africans is an evil for which the West must take responsibility, then all slavery everywhere
must be condemned equally. But when do we ever hear about Islamic
slavery? In the three-century long heyday of Western slavery, some 10
million slaves crossed the Atlantic. Yet in the 14-century-long existence of Islamic slavery––still going on today in Africa in places such as Sudan -- an equal number of black Africans were enslaved by Muslims. We hear all the time about the horrors of the “middle passage” across the Atlantic, but never about the forced marches of Africans across the Sahara
desert, where thousands died of disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition.
We never hear about the African men who had been castrated to be sold
as eunuchs, if they were lucky enough to survive an operation in which
not just their testicles, but all their external genitalia were cut off.
And don’t forget that slavery in the West was
ended by movements of emancipation backed up by the British navy,
movements that have not arisen from within Islam simply because the
Koran does not forbid slavery. Don’t forget that included in the toll
of those enslaved by Muslims were millions of Europeans taken in raids
and sold for the harems, armies, and galleys of Muslim emirs, sultans,
and caliphs. Yet have you ever heard a Muslim leader today apologize
for slavery? Meanwhile, American leaders continually don the hair-shirt
of guilt over slavery despite the fact that only 800,000 of the 10
million slaves that crossed the Atlantic came to the United States, and
despite the bloody, destructive civil war that in part was fought to
end slavery.
So too with the presumed sins of “colonialism” and
“imperialism.” The modern European presence in the Muslim Middle East
lasted for less than two centuries. Yet Muslims occupied Spain
for over seven centuries, and the Muslim occupation of the Balkans for
half a millennium didn’t finally end until World War I. And vast
regions of the Middle East––north Africa, Egypt, Turkey, the Holy
Land––that were not Muslim but Christian homelands,
are still “occupied” by the descendents of imperialistic, colonizing
Muslim Arabs and Turks who came as alien invaders and conquered those
territories. In fact, if we are to add up historical grievances, the
West has a long way to go to catch up with the centuries of attacks,
raids, invasions, plunder, murder, and enslavement perpetrated by
Muslims against Christians. But do we ever hear any Muslim leader
apologize for this record of imperialist aggression and occupation, one
triumphantly documented by numerous Muslim historians?
This acceptance by Westerners of a double standard
when it comes to historical grievance is nothing other than groveling
appeasement. Why do we fret over the status of Jerusalem,
a city fixed by archaeology and history as the spiritual and political
center of Judaism, when one of Christendom’s most cherished churches,
Hagia Sophia in Istanbul,
remains in the possession of Muslims? Worse yet, we scold the Israelis
over Jerusalem even though the Temple Mount remains under Arab control,
and the Al Aqsa mosque still sits on the site of the Second Temple! If Israel
had Islam’s standards of justice, the mosque would have been razed a
new temple built where its two predecessors stood for over a thousand
years.
Because of this double standard, we fall all over
ourselves accommodating Muslim immigrants in the West, even as
Christians are disappearing from the lands they inhabited for seven
centuries before Islam even existed. We agonize over the 600,000
“Palestinian” refugees kept in squalid camps by their fellow Muslim
Arabs, yet never say a word about the 800,000 Jews kicked out of Egypt,
North Africa, Iraq, and Iran, places their ancestors inhabited in some
cases for two thousand years. We harp on the “two-state” solution and
demand a “Palestinian homeland,” yet never ask the Arabs why they
didn’t create this homeland when the so-called West Bank
was in their possession. We anxiously monitor our media and popular
culture for insults against Islam, even as state-run media and
universities in Muslim lands indulge anti-Semitic slanders that would
make Hitler blush––much of it perpetrated by the same Al Azhar
university that our President recently hailed as a “beacon of learning.”
There are many reasons for this double standard,
not the least being the fatal self-loathing of Western elites. But this
hatred of the West itself depends on an ignorance of history on display
in many of Obama’s speeches. And that ignorance in turn reflects the
corruption of history over the last forty years, which has seen a
once-noble discipline turned from the record of what has happened into
a melodrama of grievance used to advance political ideology. The next
few years will show us how large a price we will pay for ignoring
historical truth, as our acceptance of this skewed history saps our
will to resist an enemy passionately convinced of his righteousness.