“Please, if there’s anyone who still thinks ISIS doesn’t represent Islam, know that they are wrong. ISIS represents Islam 100 percent. If someone says that, no, we have Muslims that are nice — yes, they are nice here. But there they are killers.”
Douglas al-Bazi, a Chaldean Catholic priest from Erbil, Iraq, spoke those strong words and more earlier this week in Rimini, Italy, at the annual Meeting for Friendship among Peoples, hosted by Communion and Liberation, a Catholic ecclesial movement. See Andrew Doran’s profile of Father Douglas here at National Review.
More from Father Douglas in Rimini:
When Islam lives amidst you, the situation might appear acceptable. But when one lives amid Muslims, everything becomes impossible. I’m not here to instigate you to hate Islam. I was born amid Muslims and I have more friends among them than I have with Christians. But people change, and if we go to my country, no one will be able to distinguish the light from the darkness. There are those who say, “But I have lots of Muslim friends who are very nice.” Yes, certainly! They are nice over here. Over there, the situation is very different.
Curt Schilling was recently denounced from coast to coast, and suspended by ESPN, after tweeting an observation on a note similar to though more nuanced than the one sounded by Father Douglas: If only 5 to 10 percent of Muslims can be described as extremists, Schilling indicated, remember that membership in the Nazi party never constituted much more than 10 percent of the German population.
Schilling provoked outrage not because he compared Germans to Muslims who are extremists but because he compared Muslims to Germans who were Nazis — or, rather, because he was thought to have drawn such a comparison. Read the tweet. He was precise in a way that his critics are muddled. The comparison he pointed to was between the ratio of Muslim extremists to Muslims today and the ratio of Nazis to Germans in 1940.
Schilling’s critics have responded in the spirit of, as Father Douglas puts it, “I have lots of Muslim friends who are very nice.” Schilling did not suggest otherwise. The suggestion otherwise is in the minds of those who have been projecting it on him.
The estimate that only 5 to 10 percent of Muslims worldwide are in sympathy with what most people reading this Corner post would consider Islamic extremism is charitably conservative. Opinion polls on the question are all over the map but include findings, for example, that 52 percent of Saudis view Hamas favorably and that 88 percent of Egyptians favor the death penalty for Muslims who convert to another religion.
But Schilling’s tweet would have offended if his comparison were between Nazis and anyone. The meme he included featured an image of Hitler. Anyone who debates about moral issues a lot has encountered the reductio ad Hitlerum—e.g., Hitler was a vegetarian and a Nazi; vegetarians are vegetarians; therefore, vegetarians are also Nazis, or crypto-Nazis.
Thoughtful people repudiate that logical fallacy. They have done so long enough and with enough vehemence — it trivializes the Holocaust — that it has acquired a stigma. Fear of being associated with it then leads them to overreact, to reflexively reject any argument that entails references to Nazism even when those references are logically cogent.
To pass from repudiation of the fallacy to overreaction to the fallacy is itself a fallacy, which is now entrenched in polite society. Anyone who defies the taboo against acknowledging a moral kinship between certain present-day evils and Nazism will be shamed and ostracized. ESPN bowed to that social pressure, as did Schilling eventually.
“Needed to actually think a bit before acting on that one, or not acting,” he tweeted again, after deleting the original tweet. Note: That’s not an apology. It’s the beginning of an argument for esoteric writing, through which we advance an unpopular truth but discreetly, in veiled terms.
Let us say that you are a man of faith, as Schilling avowedly is, and take a spiritual view of politics. You believe that spirits, those of God and those not of God, are mingled in the affairs of men — that we wrestle only superficially against flesh and blood and that ultimately our enemy is not our neighbor but a coalition of powers, principalities, the rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places. If you believe that — that is, if you are a Christian — don’t say so if you want to save your message from being twisted by the prince of lies and his mostly unwitting human accomplices. Hint at your meaning. Speak in parables. Lead your audience to the correct conclusion while speaking in terms that provide you cover, plausible deniability.
Given that Nazism as a historical precedent for the kind of evil now represented by ISIS and other agents of Islamic extremism is off limits, someone who sees a correspondence between the two evils — who sees them as two incarnations of the same spirit — has to do more than just include the keywords “Nazi” and “jihad” in the same sentence and hope that his listeners will know how to connect the dots. He may have to be bold, like the apostles at Pentecost, scrap the coyness, and try to convey his ideas in direct language.
This side of kingdom come, when the devil will be consigned to the lake of fire permanently, our victories are never final because neither are the devil’s defeats. His loss in 1945 was not conclusive; he only departed for a season.
“The Second World War can rightly be understood and probably only appreciated as a holy war fought for multiple and mixed motives, but in its deepest meaning as a campaign against evil by defenders, consciously or obliviously, of the good,” George W. Rutler writes in his book Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat, 1942–1943. “If anything is to be learned from reading old journals, it is how the same moral dilemmas of an old war, in their display of human dignity and the anatomy of cruelty, are background for the same realities in our own day.”