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...
Since Buruma went back to his home city of Amsterdam in 2005 to try and understand the cultural “root causes” behind the brutal murder of documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh, he’s become, if not quite a useful idiot of European Islamism, then surely a utopian milksop of secular democracy. Buruma expects alienated and increasingly radicalized Muslims to enjoy the pragmatic blessings of faith-based politics—a trapdoor in the separation of church and state that I highly doubt he'd swing open for evangelical Christians in Kansas.
But can’t we all just get along?
Evidently not, since those who are most concerned with the plight of Muslims in the rest of the world receive the least of Buruma’s largesse. Here is he is at full-tilt stupid in the pages of the LA Times:
Another intriguing question is why there is such a remarkable, sometimes even fawning, trust on the part of some of these pro-interventionist intellectuals in the U.S. government to save the world by force. But perhaps even that trust is less mysterious than it seems. Here's one thought: Many neocons, and liberal interventionists as well, emerged from a leftist past, when a belief in revolution from above was commonplace — "people's democracies" yesterday, "liberal democracies" today.
Among pro-intervention Jews in particular (and it is of course true that not all Jews are interventionists, just as not all interventionists are Jews), another historical memory may play a part: the protection of the imperial state. Austrian and Hungarian Jews, for instance, were among the last and most fiercely loyal subjects of the Austro-Hungarian emperor because he shielded them from the violent nationalism of the majority populations. Polish and Russian Jews, at least at the beginning, were often loyal subjects of the communist state because it promised (falsely, as it turned out) to protect them against the violence of anti-Semitic nationalists.
Got that? Pro-interventionist Jews– said to be recovering Trotskyists with permanent revolution on the brain – are now depicted as nostalgic quislings of World Empire! How far and how quickly a cold war scholar has fallen.
In what way were the most savvy and outward-looking Hungarian Jews thankful for the Hapsburg dynasty?
Has Buruma never heard of the proto-fascist Miklos Horthy, an admiral in the Austro-Hungarian fleet, who established a dictatorship in Budapest after the expulsion of Bela Kun’s Communists? Indeed, the brutal Soviet Republic of 1919 only ever emerged—largely through Jewish support—out of the smoldering wreckage of that imperialist mash-up known as World War I, where the “interventionists” were almost all antiwar, and certainly anti-Prussian.
Bernard Kouchner, the ostensible subject of this witless editorial, is a socialist, which means that his “historical memory” is more attuned to the radical doctrines Jean Jaures and Rosa Luxemburg. Shall we compare their attitudes toward international human rights to the ethnic safeguarding offered by Franz Joseph I or Prussian Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who later, as president of the Weimar Republic, handed Germany over to Hitler?
Though Polish and Russian Jews indeed aligned with Stalinism in great number, they did so precisely because they found no protection under the tsarist imperial state that was responsible for pogroms, university quotas and other classically anti-Semitic horrors, not least of all the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
History is clearly no longer Buruma’s strong suit as he erroneously suggests that Kouchner supported the war in Iraq. Funny, given that the new French foreign minister published an essay in Le Monde in 2003 entitled, “Ni la guerre ni Saddam.”
The Jewish impulse to rescue Darfur may, as Buruma elsewhere states, derive from what Strauss called the redutio ad Hiterlum. However, one notices that the grand neoconservative and liberal interventionist “architects” for war in Iraq have dragged their feet when it comes to plucking Sudan out of the genocidal soup. Why? And would not most of the “Save Darfur” activists chanting "Never again" abandon the cause, or at least tone down their rhetoric, if they thought for a second that their agitation would lead to the 101st Airborne touching down in Khartoum? The tribal reliance on American military muscle is overblown and also well past its sell-by date.
Had this op-ed been a one-off in Buruma's otherwise outstanding curriculum vitae, it might have been both forgotten and forgiven. As the matter stands, however, it reflects the sorry ideological glaucoma that has befallen a once gimlet-eyed observer of the world scene.