“ELIMINATIONISM” A PERFECT WORD FOR ISLAMIC AIMS
The Warped Mirror: Eliminationism
Posted by Petra Marquardt-Bigman
In the mid-1990s, political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen caused a heated controversy with the publication of a book arguing that the Holocaust was possible because ordinary Germans served as “willing executioners […] who believed that exterminating Jews was right and necessary.” Last month, Goldhagen came out with a new book, that is likely to once again generate much controversy.
The book’s main title, Worse Than War, is already provocative: what could be worse than war? The subtitle hints at the answer: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity.
Some of the controversial aspects of this book – as well as the still-lingering controversies about Goldhagen’s previous work – are addressed in a recent interview with Goldhagen published by the German news magazine Spiegel.
One issue that will certainly invite much criticism is Goldhagen’s view that “political Islam” poses a very serious danger. As Goldhagen explains in the interview:
‘Political Islam’ is the appropriate term to describe political movements that are grounded in an understanding of Islam and seek to assert control – often totalitarian control – over their societies and other societies which they think should be Islamic. These movements often use violence and often with a genocidal or eliminationist attempt.”
Goldhagen’s views on this subject are also highlighted in a New York Times review of his book. Noting that Goldhagen argues “that ‘political Islam’ – jihadism – constitutes ‘the most coherent and deadly massÂmurderous ideology since Nazism,'” reviewer James Traub accuses Goldhagen of turning “political Islam into an eliminationist bogy.” Traub also argues that “even al Qaeda, with its ideology of mass murder, has not been able to marshal the resources of a state to attain its ultimate goals.”
However, from an article published in the spring 2007 issue of the progressive journal Democracy (free registration required), it is clear that Goldhagen’s primary concern in this context is not al Qaeda. Indeed, he explicitly argued in his concluding paragraph:
Abandoning the Middle East to the Political Islamists and having Israel capitulate (and ultimately surrender its existence) is the only thing that will satisfy them – the only thing that will stop Political Islamists [Â…] from feeling ‘humiliated’ (and then only partly, given the growing number of Muslims in Europe). Needless to say, this would be extremely self-injurious, not to mention immoral.
Instead, we should recognize the broad-based danger not merely of terrorism, but of Political Islam. And we must realize that it can only be defeated by active diplomatic, economic and military containment and, when practical, rollback by the United States and its allies in Europe and in the Middle East.
We should stop fixating on al Qaeda and terrorism, narrowly construed, as the overwhelming problem and recognize that the biggest danger is the Political Islamic colossus and aspiring hegemon: the soon-to-go-nuclear Iran.”
This view will of course be vociferously rejected by many as just another variation of the “clash of civilizations” theme. While there is obviously room for a legitimate debate about Goldhagen’s arguments, it is clear that this debate will inevitably reflect the wide-spread Western ignorance – and even denial – of anti-Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world.
Writing just a few weeks after 9/11 in Slate, David Greenberg noted that “many Americans have been surprised by the prevalence and depth of anti-Semitism in the Arab world.” He emphasized that it was important to realize that “Arab anti-Semitism isn’t confined to the fringes of society […] mainstream Arab culture promotes extreme anti-Semitic ideas through schools, newspapers, television, popular culture and official ideology. It’s hardly even controversial.”
As Memri’s Antisemitism Documentation Project illustrates, not much has changed in the meantime. The popular notion that all this should be dismissed as “just talk” was addressed by Goldhagen in the Spiegel interview, where he emphasized:
Language transmits prejudices and descriptions of others that lead some to believe that the other must be eliminated. This is a critical factor in understanding the generation of mass slaughter, which is often not seen to be important. People say ‘it’s just talk,’ but it’s talk that is the soil from which these genocidal assaults eventually grow.”
So what to make of it when the leader of a regional power that doggedly pursues a nuclear program predicts over and over again that the end of “the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime” is near? If this doesn’t qualify as an alarming indicator of eliminationist ambitions, what does?
It may be tempting to dismiss Ahmadinejad’s visions of “a world without Zionism” – and even “a world without America” – as mad ravings, but it is hardly consistent to argue at the same time that Iran’s regime is rational and can be expected to handle the nuclear power status it seeks in a rational way.
Moreover, the rhetoric emanating from Iran’s rulers must seem all the more chilling given the brutality the regime has been willing to mete out to its own people in the wake of the recent post-election protests.
Similarly disturbing were some recent remarks by Ahmadinejad in an interview with Time magazine. The opening question invited Ahmadinejad to explain to an American audience the traumatic impact of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, which is estimated to have cost up to one million Iranian lives. But Ahmadinejad claimed in response that the casualty figures were much lower and, emphasizing that “there are 70 million people in Iran, it is a very big nation,” he explicitly rejected the notion that this war “has left a specific impact on the psyche of the Iranian nation.”
Reading these cold remarks that revealed no empathy with Iranian suffering reminded me of the notorious “Quds Day” (Jerusalem Day) speech delivered on December, 2001, by the supposedly “moderate” Rafsanjani, who explained:
If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”
To simply shrug off such publicly entertained eliminationist calculations would certainly be irrational.
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