When I first met Yigal Carmon in November 1988, he was counter-terrorism adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a position he held under Shamir’s successor, Yitzhak Rabin, until 1993. If memory serves, our meeting took place in a room in the basement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv. During that conversation, which extended over 90 minutes, I watched Yigal handle calls on three or four different telephones, switching seamlessly from Hebrew to Arabic to English, making what might be life-or-death decisions about reported terrorist threats—and then picking up the threads of our conversation without missing a beat. It was an extraordinary demonstration of grace under pressure.
On September 1, 1990, Yigal was my driver to, and guide at Masada, Herod the Great’s rock-plateau fortress, to which the Tenth Roman Legion laid siege in 72-73 A.D. (Looking down from the fortress, one can still see the imprint in the ground left by the Romans and their equipment.) Saddam Hussein had helped himself to Kuwait in August 1990 and tourists, fearing a Middle East war, fled Israel in droves — save for an American group whose bus, parked near the entrance to the aerial tramway that takes visitors up to the ruins of the fortress, identified these hearty souls as members of a fundamentalist church deep in the American South. Yigal and I rode the cable car with a dozen or so of these amiable folk, and when they went their own way on arriving at the fortress, Yigal asked, “Everyone else has left; why are these people still here?” I explained that they probably imagined that they’d stumbled onto prime seats at the Battle of Armageddon and weren’t about to miss that.
After leaving government service, Yigal co-founded the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which translates media content from Arabic and Persian and makes the translations available worldwide. MEMRI, recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal, thus offers an invaluable service to public officials charged — as Yigal once was — with interdicting terrorism before it happens, or responding to it quickly before even more lives are lost. Unfortunately, those who might benefit most from MEMRI’s translations of speeches, video rants and articles by the masters of terror often display little interest.
Why? Because too many Western policymakers cannot imagine that calls to various forms of violent jihad, whether from Sunni or Shiite Islamic sources, make any real difference. Those declarations of war are religiously based—and we all know, don’t we, that religious conviction has no real influence on “world affairs”?
There are occasional exceptions to this dangerous blind spot among foreign policy professionals. A recent MEMRI translation of a speech in which the October 7 massacres by Hamas were celebrated as “self-defense” and “liberation” by the leader of the Council on American Islamic Relations led to that organization being removed as a participant in the Biden Administration’s Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. But as a general rule, the U.S. foreign service, like its counterparts in the major powers of Europe, is so thoroughly soaked in the juices of rationalist secularism (one underpinning of foreign policy “realism”) that the professionals find it hard to take religiously-based political radicalism seriously. Yet it’s precisely because it’s religiously grounded that such radicalism is exceptionally dangerous.
One might think that 9/11 would have caused some rethinking of this willful secularist blindness—and MEMRI’s work makes the raw materials for such a rethinking abundantly available. But old habits die hard, especially among the self-imagined best-and-brightest.
Before his work as counter-terrorism adviser to prime ministers Shamir and Rabin, Yigal Carmon worked with Menahem Milson, a world-renowned scholar of Arabic literature and another man I am proud to call a friend, in the civil administration of the West Bank. Their goal was to empower a Palestinian civil society that would, over time, produce a Palestinian political leadership with which Israel could make an enduring peace. The essential complement to that effort involved disempowering perpetrators of terrorism like the PLO—or, in today’s context, Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah, each of which appeals to religious warrants to justify its murderous practices.
Over the long haul, that strategy still seems to me what creative statecraft, informed by moral reason, requires. However challenging the path ahead, though, the first step along it is to recognize the obstacles currently making the journey so difficult. MEMRI provides an indispensable service in identifying those obstacles and one of their sources: fanatical hatreds inflamed by claims of divine sanction. MEMRI’s work is thus of crucial importance to those involved in interreligious dialogue as well as to policy-makers.
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It’s a long road ahead. Fundamentals dies slowly and gives way to a rationalism that has no soul. So how to proceed?
How to proceed?
Well, in the Regensburg Address (2006) Pope Benedict XVI explained that the radically RATIONALISTIC West violates the nature of man at the expense of religion, while radically FIDEISTIC Islam violates religion by enabling terrorism. Secularism takes religion out of the public square, while Islam takes the public square out of man.
Such is the asymmetry. . .
The Islamic world responded with street violence and a nun murdered in Egypt, while the West responded with a yawn and silence. Not sure that a middle-ground “pluralism” of religion, by itself, gets us very far.
Instead, historically does the coherence of faith and reason hang by a thread from the seamless garment of the incarnate Jesus Christ? The “Word made flesh” versus “the word made book”? The Mutazilite effort at some sort of reason was suppressed in the 9th Century, partly because it implied a stable awareness of “good and evil”…an inborn awareness (Natural Law?) superior to the “uncreated” book and an inscrutable Allah which side-by-side profess basic contradictions (termed “abrogation”).
A troubling trend, now, within the formerly perennial Catholic Church: Proclamation and basic education are eclipsed by abrogating edits, as in Amoris Laetitia and now Fiducia Supplicans. The self-validating “paradigm shift.”
Yes, “How and whether to proceed”—in season and out of season?
The same analysis (the refusal to face the reality of the violent nature of Islam) goes for what can fairly be labeled as “the-contemporary-secularized-Katholik-establishment,” schooled on the naive V2 “teaching” documented in Nostra Aetate, now personified by the “Pontiff-professing-the-spirit-of-V2,” the Pontiff Francis.
As George Bush the younger, and the Pontiff Francis sing to the audience in unison: “Islam is Peace” and “we insist that all citizens must pretend that reality isn’t happening.”
Mr. Weigel, what are you talking about? The Israeli government helped bring Hamas into being in the 1980s for the purpose of diminishing the PLO. It is widely acknowledged in the Israeli press, but apparently not in the precincts that you haunt. The mostly secular PLO (which, yes, had plenty of blood on its hands) is the organization with which Israel could have potentially could have struck a deal. That ship has sailed and now the fundamentalist Hamas is the only game in town. The Israelis also backed the Islamist groups trying to overthrow the Assad government in the Syrian civil war. Fortunately, they were thwarted in that endeavor. I would call all the above anything but creative statecraft.
Religious fanatics are more dangerous than secular dictators. Usually, secular dictators usually have at least some twisted logic, but religious fanatics are happy to lose many people and even their own lives to advance their agenda. Sometimes, they even want to die.
We westerners fall into the trap of trying to reason with the unreasonable.
“Religious fanatics are more dangerous than secular dictators….”
Debatable. The 90-100 million who were killed in China, Russia/Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Latin America, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and parts of Africa because of various forms of Marxism, communism, Leninism, etc., would disagree.
That said, I agree completely with this: “We westerners fall into the trap of trying to reason with the unreasonable.”
Good point about the perils of Communism and I would add the Nazis to this. Although “secular”, both groups had adherents who had a quasi religious belief in their systems. Not religious fanatics, but fanatics.
Politicians from either party are not our saviors. They are typically “the lesser of two evils” if you vote for them. They certainly are not worthy of devotion.
Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Northern Ireland, Sunnis and Shiites killing each other in the Middle East and other religious conflicts around the World,may not have racked up the total death toll of Communism, but they are indicative of dangerous fanaticism. Reasoning with them is futile.
Very nice art. I know Carmon as well.
In my view, the way forward is for the press to conduct interviews with the leading clerics of the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem religions, and inquire of them what their views are, concerning the idea of the Eternal Covenant and Divine Revelation. Could these gents please show forth that God responds to their claims of religious authority, please? If they have no content in that direction, then it is easier to dismiss their rabid claims of the right to decide on moral issues. To just declare that a person is right, without vetting their foundation of a claim to authority seems to me to be at the base of the problem.
Mr. Weigel writes: “is so thoroughly soaked in the juices of rationalist secularism. . . . ” Got it. The secular media skips theology as being relevant to solving problems. Now that’s job security.