A Multifaceted Fraud

A Multifaceted Fraud
Reviewing Irshad Manji's 'The Trouble With Islam', Part 1
by
Justin Podur;
December 05, 2003

Irshad Manji, according to the jacket of her book, is "abroadcaster, author, public speaker, and media enterpreneur, born inEast Africa and raised on the west coast of Canada." She was theproducer and host of QueerTelevision and calls herself "a journalistwith a reputation for flinging open doors" (pg. 76). Her new book,"The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change", is onCanadian bestseller lists and, with a glowing profile in the NewYorkTimes, will no doubt do well in the United States as well. Her bookis supposed to be an "Open Letter to Muslims and Non-Muslims", asking"tough questions": "Why are we all being held hostage by what'shappening between the Palestinians and the Israelis? What's with thestubborn streak of anti-Semitism in Islam? Who is the real colonizerof Muslims - America or Arabia? Why are we squandering the talents ofwomen, fully half of God's creation?" (pg. 2). A critique of Islam, like a critique of any religion orideology that has doctrines preventing people from exercising theirmoral sense, solidarity, and reason, is welcome. Orthodox (ormainstream) Islam, like dominant strains of Christianity, Judaism, orHinduism, is deeply sexist, homophobic, and authoritarian. Addressed as a letter to Muslims by a Muslim who is strugglingwith hard questions, the book seems to live up to a simple moral rule:that people should focus their attention on problems that they caninfluence, should 'look to their own backyards'. For Manji, this'backyard' would seem to be the Muslim community, making her critiqueone that, whatever factual errors, biases, manipulations, ordistortions it contains (and it contains many), is fundamentallymorally responsible. When she describes "Arab hypocrisy" (pg. 106)without ever using a phrase like "US hypocrisy" or "Westernhypocrisy", or "delusional Muslims" (pg. 109) without ever referringto "delusional Americans" or "delusional Westerners", this harshcriticism is to be understood as self-criticism. When she whitewashescrimes by the United States and Israel, citing the reports ofmainstream human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch andAmnesty International on Muslim countries but not on Israel or theUnited States, this is to be understood as the focus of a moral agenton her own community. Manji's own words suggest otherwise. Late in her book, shetalks about reasoning being "entirely compatible with the ideals Ihold as a Westerner." (pg. 229) Describing her visit to Israel, shedescribes the moment of her visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem:"As I spend time in search of an unused crack that will clasp myprayer, I realize I'm holding up the Jews behind me. Still, I don'tfeel like an interloper. I feel at home. More viscerally than ever,I know who my family is." (pg. 93). Reading her book, it becomes clear that it is not the work ofa self-critical individual trying to hold the Muslim communityaccountable, but a self-congratulatory Westerner, cheering forpowerful states and whitewashing the crimes of her "family". Manji, the disinterested intellectual To open Irshad Manji's website or book is to be exposed toquite a bit of posturing. The site accompanying her book launch iscalled 'muslim-refusenik.com'. She uses the word 'refusenik' toinvoke the dissidents of the former Soviet Union. In the contemporarycontext, the word 'refusenik' invokes the Israeli refuseniks(1) , theconscientious objectors who refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza.These courageous youths are serving jail terms because they don'twant to violate the human rights of an occupied people. They seethemselves as the 'true zionists', and believe that Israel would befar better defended if it withdrew to its pre-1967 borders. They saythat they are prepared to serve in a military that would defend thoseborders - but not one that systematically violates the human rights ofpeople in an occupied territory. Manji, the 'Muslim Refusenik' whospent time in Israel, seems never to have heard of them. Perhaps thisis because these refuseniks, like their Soviet predecessors, sufferjail terms and state repression for their views, while Manji isprofiting handsomely from hers. Opening the website, one is exposed to the picture of a youngwoman in an elaborate hijab, an outfit that covers all but her face. This type of picture invokes the women of Afghanistan, who havesuffered over 25 years of brutality, rape, and torture at the hands ofSoviet invaders, the jehadis trained by the US, Pakistan, and SaudiArabia in order to fight the Soviet invaders, and the factions thatthose jehadis split into - the 'Northern Alliance', the Taliban, andnow the Northern Alliance again. Afghanistan's women have become thesymbol of oppression by Islamic regimes. But Afghanistan's women havebeen resisting this brutality and sexism from the beginning. One ofthe most remarkable organizations in the world is the RevolutionaryAssociation of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). But there is not aword about RAWA in Manji's book. The story of how these women built acovert organization to teach women to read, to document the atrocitiesthat the West suddenly became interested in for the duration of the USbombing of Afghanistan, to strive for a secular democracy under themost repressive conditions imaginable, gets only an oblique mention:"Old Afghan women, some of them refugees, now attend schools thatyounger women run, and that they ran in secret during the Taliban'stime." (pg. 180). Manji might not have had access to Anne Brodsky'sexcellent book on RAWA, 'With All Our Strength', which was justpublished(2) , but she certainly had access to their website(3) andto their words. There are real women, fighting and dying for seculardemocracy and against the fundamentalism that Manji decries. ButManji has no time for them. Perhaps this is because RAWA was against the US bombing oftheir country while Manji wanted to say "America, your thrashing ofthe Taliban made millions of Afghanis happy. Since then, though, yourfailure to post soldiers beyond Kabul has made only tribal warlordsand Taliban sympathizers smile." (pg. 143). America's "thrashing ofthe Taliban" also left at least several thousand Afghani civiliansdead by cluster bombs, 'daisy cutters', and other weapons, byconservative estimates. An inconvenient fact, and one Manji makes nomention of, no doubt because her moral responsibility as a Muslimcompels her to ignore it. As the photo of the young woman fades, two quotes appear. Oneis from the Koran. The other is from an article by the late EdwardSaid, from an article he wrote for Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998. Itsays: "The intellectual's role is to speak the truth as plainly,directly, and honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed toworry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or displeasespeople in power." Manji presumably presents this quote to claim thatshe is engaging in an act of moral courage in publishing her book. But while she has use for Said's words on her website, she smears andmisrepresents him in her book. Her summary of him? "He's theArab-American intellectual who, in 1979, used the word 'Orientalism'to describe the West's supposed tendency to colonize Muslims bydemonizing us as the exotic freaks of the East." (pg. 22) In Manji'sworld, Said's "acolytes" were so powerful that they created a "chill"that harmed discussion of "just about anything that affrontedmainstream Muslims." (pg. 22) In fact, Said talked about actual colonization, not a"supposed tendency" - he talked about the British colonial conquests.He talked about the way scholarship was deployed as a weapon ofempire and a rationalization of it. Manji's summary dismissalsuggests, if anything, that she hasn't read Said's "Orientalism". Indeed, her later use of the same Le Monde Diplomatique articlesuggests she read only a part of it. As part of a multi-page longsection (pp. 116-123) of rhetorical questions intended to refute theidea that Israel is an apartheid state, Manji quotes Said as evidence:"Even the eminence grise of Palestinian nationalism, Edward Said,states flat out that 'Israel is not South Africa…' How could it bewhen an Israeli publisher has translated into Hebrew Said's seminalwork, Orientalism?"(4) . But the very article Manji cites explicitlysays Israeli is an apartheid state. A fuller version of the quote isas follows: "Israel is neither South Africa, nor Algeria, nor Vietnam.Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists.Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims ofanti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, orinitiate, the dispossession of another people that bears noresponsibility for either of those prior facts. I have been saying fortwenty years that we have no military option, and are not likely tohave one anytime soon. And neither does Israel have a real militaryoption. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded inachieving either the acceptance or the security they crave." Just a few paragraphs below this, Said says: "What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pappé(4) are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by whichJews and Palestinians inside the Jewish state have the same rights;there is no reason why the same principle should not apply in theOccupied Territories where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side byside, together, with only one people, Israeli Jews now dominating theother. So the choice is either apartheid or it is justice andcitizenship."(5) Indeed, Manji could have benefited from reading the entirearticle in more than one way. Said's points about the intellectual'srole were to distinguish intellectual from political behaviour. "Speaking the truth to power means additionally that theintellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate ora career interest: only the truth unadorned. Political behaviourprincipally relies upon considerations of interest - advancing acareer, working with governments, maintaining one's position, etc." With features in the New York Times, the New York Post, andCanada's Globe and Mail, Manji's book seems to be something that"pleases people in power", and she is on her way to "advancing acareer", by distorting citations and ignoring facts. Manji, the journalist of Israel/Palestine Said's 1998 article is not the only source Manji distorts, northe only cited piece one is forced to wonder whether Manji actuallyread, to which we return. Manji's posturing includes a stance that she is "askingquestions, not providing answers". But her account of her trip toIsrael is filled with answers - the standard answers of apologists forIsrael's occupation and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Palestinianterritories. Manji's Photos It turns out that Manji was in Israel at around the same timethat I was in the Occupied Territories. I was there from June 18-July3, 2002. Her interviews, conversations, and photo notes indicate shewas there in mid-July of 2002. She took a series of photos, as did I. I would encourage you to look at her photos, available online(see the table below, with her photos in the left-hand column and minein the right-hand column), since she took them, as I said, atapproximately the same time as I took my own, not very far away. Oneof them is of a woman leading a column of Israeli male troops (to showthat Israel's armed forces have women in positions of power). One isof Manji in front of the Al-Aqsa mosque. One is of a group ofchildren. Another set is of Manji, posing with various people at thesite of Al-Aqsa. The last is of an Israeli boy on a scooter in theold city. Also compare five photos that I took at around the sametime. Please, as you look, note that I did not have to go digging tofind these photos. I was in Jenin, Ramallah, and Gaza, and thesescenes were quite typical (6) . the Israeli army Checkpoint wire Manji at al-Aqsa Checkpoint lineup Children Destruction of Trees Manji al-Aqsa Jenin Destruction A boy in the old city Blowing up a bank in Jenin That Manji could travel to the Israel and the OccupiedTerritories and not notice the ongoing, physical destruction ofPalestinian society, instead publishing numerous photos of herself,despite being a "journalist with a reputation for flinging open doors"should not come as too much of a surprise. That might be a disserviceto Israel which, Manji finds (and the photos suggest), "brings morecompassion to 'colonization' than its adversaries have ever brought to'liberation'" (pg. 123). The Newspapers Manji's thesis is that Israel is an open society that debatesissues openly, is self-reflective. As proof, she provides variouscitations to newspaper articles in the Israeli press, primarilyHa'aretz and the Jerusalem Post for the period June 24 - July 9, 2002,when she was there, but also a few other periods. These newspaperarticles are supplemented by some interviews she conducted herself. Manji paints a picture of Israelis debating openly and honestly intheir media questions of whether Israel should accept more religiousimmigrants from North America; whether state lands should be allocatedto exclusively Jewish towns; and whether CNN was too biased againstIsrael to be shown on Israeli airwaves. (pp. 82-83) The open debateson these topics impressed Manji, who thinks Arabs and Muslims do notdebate issues so openly. But - and again, to be fair, it's not clearwhether or not she was checking Ha'aretz every day in detail - shedidn't cite a very good article by Gideon Levy that was published inHa'aretz on July 5 (7) . That article describes the murder of an11-year old child in Jenin in some detail: "The video shows it all: Here are the three kids on theirbikes, three black dots on the slope of the road, two on the right,close together, the third on the left, and a white car passes betweenthem. A woman calls out something unclear, maybe a warning to thechildren about the tank; the car disappears down the hill, and thenthe tank suddenly appears from the corner on the left. First you seethe tank's turret gun, then the base of the turret and then the tankitself, charging after three little kids on their bicycles a few dozenmeters ahead. The picture freezes for a second to show the detailsbetter. Then suddenly the screen goes dark. Sound of firing. Boom.Lots of noise, dust and smoke everywhere, and that's it. The anonymousphotographer stopped filming… "The IDF spokesman, this week: "The incident is still beingdealt with." Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer issued an apology.No one from the IDF came to the family's home; no one even bothered towatch the video." Amira Hass, also in Ha'aretz, on July 9, 2002, described thedestruction of the economy in Gaza: "The Gaza Strip's welfare is dependent on severalborder-crossing points where Israel has absolute control. During Apriland May, for example, there was a serious shortage of flour, one ofthe main dietary components of a society where two-thirds of thepopulation are living below the poverty line. And construction wasalmost suspended because of a shortage of building materials."(8) If Manji's point is that Israeli journalists often have moreintegrity, empathy, and openness than North American ones about whatIsrael is doing to the Palestinians, it is well taken. Gideon Levyand Amira Hass are exemplary in this regard. That Manji, a NorthAmerican journalist, cites Ha'aretz repeatedly without mentioningthese fine writers (just as she mentions the debate within Israelisociety without mentioning the refuseniks, or Gush Shalom, orTa'ayush), reinforces the point with some irony. Manji the historian On Israel's History Manji claims her book is an "open letter" to Muslims, asopposed, perhaps, to a work of historical scholarship. Since hersources are, with few exceptions, from 2001-2002, this claim holds up.But when she discusses Israel/Palestine, Manji suddenly becomes ahistorian, citing primary sources and documents like the PalestineRoyal Commission Report, Cmd 5479 (London, July 1937)(9) , "BeirutTelegraph, September 6, 1948, no page number assigned to article.Confirmed by the Newspaper Archive Division of the American Universityof Beirut."(10) . She reads 50-year old books like "Maurice Pearlman,Mufti of Jerusalem: The Story of Haj Amin el Husseini (London:V.Gollancz, 1947)"(11) . She reads an article from the Journal ofPalestine Studies, and books on the Palestinian refugee problem (12) .She also relies heavily on a single article in the Jerusalem Post onthe history of the current intifada (13) . Her history is as dishonest as her journalism. DiscussingBenny Morris, an Israeli historian who shows that Israel did expelPalestinians en masse but claims that it did so because of war and notby design, she says: "Acknowledging war as the root of the refugeeproblem doesn't mean you can't be balanced or even sympathetic to thePalestinian cause. For proof, see Benny Morris, The Birth of thePalestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989)."(14) When she talks about being "balanced or even sympathetic tothe Palestinian cause", Manji must be talking about Morris's book andnot Morris himself, since, as Norman Finkelstein reports, quotingBenny Morris: "Benny Morris explicitly justifies expulsion of thePalestinians not only in the event of a regional war but in the nameof Lebensraum: 'This land is so small that there isn't room for twopeoples. In fifty or a hundred years, there will only be one statebetween the sea and Jordan. That state must be Israel.'… "Morris professes that as a historian his only concern istruth. Indeed, finding evidence of yet more 'massacres' of Arabs in1948 'makes me happy.'… "The Palestinians, according to Morris, are 'a sick, psychoticpeople'. They refuse to acknowledge that 'Jews have a just claim toPalestine' and that 'Zionism was/is a just enterprise.' Yet, Morrisfurther states that this 'just claim' couldn't be redeemed and this'just enterprise' realized without expelling the Palestinian Arabs: 'aremoving of a population was needed. Without a population expulsion,a Jewish state would not have been established.'(15) Finkelstein's careful assessment of Morris's work concludesthat there was an element of design in the expulsion of thePalestinians in 1948, and not only war as Morris claims. Indeed,Finkelstein provides evidence cited by Morris himself that supportsthis conclusion, including a quote from the diary of a prominentZionist from 1940, 8 years before the war, saying "There is no way butto transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and totransfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem,Nazareth, and old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one[bedouin] tribe."(16) Another excellent work on the origins of the refugee problemas the first attempt in Israel's ongoing campaign of "politicide"against the Palestinians is the book of the same name by Israelisociologist Baruch Kimmerling. Using an eight-volume Hebrew series onHaganah history never published in English, Kimmerling shows how amilitary plan developed in advance to expel the Palestinians wasimplemented on the ground during the 1948 war (17) .
On 'Muslim complicity in the Holocaust' Citing Maurice Pearlman's work on the Mufti of Jerusalem'srelationship with Hitler, Manji concludes there was Muslim 'complicityin the holocaust'. This is true, as true as there was Christian, andparticularly US complicity in the holocaust (18) . Inconveniently forManji, the Zionists' own record on the holocaust is not spotlesseither. Tim Wise, a Jewish anti-racist writer based in the US, alongwith many others, has used the Zionists' own words to argue thatelements of Zionism embrace anti-semitism: "Far from resisting Nazi genocide, some Zionists collaboratedwith it. When the British devised a plan to allow thousands of GermanJewish children to enter the U.K. and be saved from the Holocaust,David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first Prime Ministerbalked, explaining: "'If I knew that it would be possible to save all the childrenin Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them bytransporting them to (Israel) then I would opt for the secondalternative.' "Later, Israeli Zionists would again make alliances withanti-Jewish extremists. In the 1970's, Israel hosted South AfricanPrime Minister John Vorster, and cultivated economic and military tieswith the apartheid state, even though Vorster had been locked up as aNazi collaborator during World War II. And Israel supplied militaryaid to the Galtieri regime in Argentina, even while the Generals wereknown to harbor ex-Nazis in the country, and had targeted ArgentineJews for torture and death."(19) Complicity in the holocaust against the Jews was not themonopoly of any religion. And neither was resistance to the Nazis. In a review of Manji's book for the Toronto Globe and Mail, TarekFatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress addressed this issue: "Has Ms. Manji ever heard of the Palestine Regiment, a unit inwhich Jew and Muslim fought side-by-side against Hitler's Afrika Korpsin Libya? In the cemeteries of El-Alamein lie the dead Muslims, theMohammeds, the Alis and the Ismails who gave their lives so thatNazism could be defeated. The cemeteries of Stalingrad bear the namesof the young Central Asian Muslims who lie buried, unable to refutethe falsehoods being spread by fast-food historians. And what aboutthe hundreds of thousands of Indian Muslims who foughtshoulder-to-shoulder with our own Canadians in Italy and France?" (20) On the Second Intifada On the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000,Manji cites Khaled Abu Toameh's article of September 19, 2002 in theJerusalem Post, in order to suggest the intifada was 'planned inadvance', as opposed to a spontaneous response to Sharon's visit tothe al-Aqsa mosque accompanied by hundreds of armed men who proceededto fire into the crowds and kill nearly a dozen people (21) . Thisarticle, too, is a distortion of the facts of both the intifada andthe breakdown of the Camp David talks, presented for example by TanyaReinhart, an Israeli intellectual. An article written several daysafter the outbreak of the intifada shows that there was, indeed,advance planning of what happened on September 28, 2000: "His visit was carefully planned, with a thousand soldierssecuring it and taking shooting positions on the roofs in advance. Itis not Sharon who is responsible for the present massacre, but Barak,Ben Ami, the Israeli government, and Israel's "peaceniks" who havebeen supporting them all the way through."(22) There are numerous analyses of the failure of Camp David thatinclude what was actually on offer. Tanya Reinhart's (23) relies onthe Israeli press, Baruch Kimmerling's uses books and other accounts(24) . A readily available account of what was on offer comes fromSeth Ackerman of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (25) "Although some people describe Israel's Camp David proposal aspractically a return to the 1967 borders, it was far from that. Underthe plan, Israel would have withdrawn completely from the small GazaStrip. But it would annex strategically important and highly valuablesections of the West Bank--while retaining "security control" overother parts--that would have made it impossible for the Palestiniansto travel or trade freely within their own state without thepermission of the Israeli government (Political Science Quarterly,6/22/01; New York Times, 7/26/01; Report on Israeli Settlement in theOccupied Territories, 9-10/00; Robert Malley, New York Review ofBooks, 8/9/01). "The annexations and security arrangements would divide theWest Bank into three disconnected cantons. In exchange for takingfertile West Bank lands that happen to contain most of the region'sscarce water aquifers, Israel offered to give up a piece of its ownterritory in the Negev Desert--about one-tenth the size of the land itwould annex--including a former toxic waste dump. "Because of the geographic placement of Israel's proposed WestBank annexations, Palestinians living in their new 'independent state'would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled orshipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israelcould close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a networkof so-called 'bypass roads' that would crisscross the Palestinianstate while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividingthe West Bank. "Israel was also to have kept 'security control' for anindefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip ofterritory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboringJordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own internationalborders with Jordan and Egypt--putting Palestinian trade, andtherefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military."
Manji may think that her distortions and omissions of historymake her a better 'supporter of Israel'. But, to use Noam Chomsky'sphrase, she is more of a 'supporter of the moral degradation andultimate destruction of Israel, and not Israel alone' (26) . She isdoing Israelis no better service than she does Muslims.
On to Part II