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The Decline and Fall of Ian Buruma

By Michael Weiss / June 7, 2007

Ian Buruma has lately become a specialist in emitting bland fatuities that provoke stronger reactions than a Dutch liberal intellectual might like to see. I’ve used this space before to declaim against his ridiculous assertion that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” echoed by Buruma’s co-thinker Timothy Garton Ash.

This nonsense term has now become the multiculturalist’s answer to the “social fascist” theory developed by the Comintern in the mid-thirties to indict any European democrat who prepared for inevitable war with real fascism. In other words, it purports to paint a noble ally in the ideological struggle of our time as a threat while rendering actual, albeit cloaked, threats—such as the rock-star Islamist Tariq Ramadan—as welcome moderates. Buruma embodies an impossible Third Way in the clash of civilizations.

Though his attention to nuance and detail is conveniently tossed over the side of the bumpy off-ramp he now travels. Hirsi Ali has consistently shown him up by paying far more respect to her Muslim opponents than they pay to her. For instance, she invites Tariq Ramadan to speak his mind about the Prophet Mohammed and the Egyptian Brotherhood on U.S. soil, from which he is currently banned. She also writes of the beauty inherent in the foot-bathing ritual at the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia in her fervidly atheist memoir Infidel. What would be the analogous Islamist gesture to Hirsi Ali’s “fundamentalism”? Osama bin Laden saying that the fossil record is also not without its charms…

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  • By aleya 3/18/08 at 6:14 a.m. UTC

    He has held a number of editorial and academic positions, and has contributed numerous articles to the New York Review of Books. grand canyon air tours

  • By Rabbi Landsberg 6/12/07 at 10:45 p.m. UTC

    Thank you for your clarification.  I do agree with you (in essence, if not in phraseology) about the issues in Buruma’s piece and it pains me as I too have been fan of his writing for some time.  I would still—with some hesitation given that I am far from a historian—question the seemingly hard line that you draw between different groups of Jews, “the most savvy and outward looking Jews” of Budapest and those “bourgeois Jews” who appreciated the rule of Franz Joseph.  Many a progressive Jew (a graduate of 1848) was bitterly disappointed to discover that the fruit of democracy was not enlightenment but reaction (in the form of Karl Lueger and others).  I think that one could be both a progressive Jew in the middle of the 19th century, but a more conservative one towards the end of the century as the public debate around Jews grew coarser.  Nonetheless, that would be for another conversation.  Again, many thanks to you.

    Kol tuv,

    Debra

  • Michael Weiss
    By Michael Weiss 6/11/07 at 12:24 p.m. UTC

    Thanks very much for your note and for your thoughtful criticism of my take on Buruma.

    My only reply is that I was not speaking of the whole of European Jewry with respect to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but rather of those Jews whom Buruma paints as progenitors of today's pro-interventionist lot. He makes a tremendous category error by referring, in that first excerpted paragraph, to Jews who "emerged from a leftist past, when a belief in revolution from above was commonplace — 'people's democracies' yesterday, 'liberal democracies' today" — and then easing into a discussion, in his second paragraph, of mainstream Jewish opinion under Franz Joseph. Well, which is it? People who spoke of "people's democracies" cannot be counted among the sympathizers of dynastic rule.

    As you indicate in your post, the Jewish Communists who supported Bela Kun's mercifully short-lived regime were quite distinguishable from Viennese bourgeois Jews… I take aim at Buruma's sloppy paradigm shift, and his mischaracterization of radical Jewish thought. Whatever the trappings of Kouchner's complicated French socialism, or the wider neocon project of changement de regime (to which he does not, as Buruma suggests, belong), these do not stem from a fuzzy nostalgia for the ethnic protectionism of the Hohenzollern or Hapsburg "houses."

    I focused more on the latter — and those I call the "most savvy and outward-looking" Jews — because Hungary was a faul-line for the twin totalitarian horrors of the 20th century; it was also a reflective rock pool for the run-off of a melting 19th century imperialism.

    You're right about one thing, however: I should have been more careful in my use of the word "quisling." Even though the term now refers to collaborators or traitors of any stripe, its Nazi connotation was unfair both to Buruma and, what is worst, to history. My apologies.

  • By RabbiLandsberg 6/10/07 at 12:04 p.m. UTC

    Thanks for the enlightening article.  I never really knew Strauss' "reductio ad Hitlerum" and was glad to discover it. I wrote a few more lines on your take on Ian Buruma here http://www.rabbilandsberg.com/blog/2007/06/reductio_ad_hit.html.

     Rabbi Landsberg

  • By jackson dyer 6/7/07 at 7:39 p.m. UTC

    Paul Berman in this issue of The New Republic has a far reaching critique of the Islamic intellectual Ramadan and intellectuals in the West such as Ian Buruam who support him.

    If you have a subscription to the magazine you can read it here:

    PaulBerman

    Otherwise the article is certainly worth the price of the cover issue if not a full subscription.

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