Clash of civilizations: prophecy or contradiction in terms?

Acts done from passion seem very far from being acts of deliberate choice.

Aristotle (1)

PROLOGUE

CONSIDER SCHILLER'S ACCOUNT OF the destruction of Magdeburg in 1631. While he dwelled on the "brutal appetites" of the multinational troops, he also made a special point of stressing that Tilly [the Catholic commander], ignoring the scruples of several of his own officers, did nothing to restrain them once they were inside the city gates. "Here commenced a scene of horrors for which history has no language, no poetry no pencil. Neither innocent childhood, nor helpless old age; neither youth, sex, rank, nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. Wives were abused in the arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their parents; and the defenseless sex exposed to the double sacrifice of virtue and life. No situation, however obscure, or however sacred, escaped the rapacity of the enemy. In a single church fifty-three women were found beheaded. The Croats amused themselves with throwing children into the flames; Pappenheim's Walloons with stabbing infants at the mother's breast. These horrors lasted with unabated fury, till at last the smoke and flames proved a check to the plunderers. To augment the confusion and to divert the resistance of the inhabitants, the Imperialists had, in the commencement of the assault, fired the town in several places. The wind rising rapidly, spread the flames, till the blaze became universal. Fearful, indeed, was the tumult amid clouds of smoke, heaps of dead bodies, the clash of swords, the crash of falling ruins, and streams of blood. The atmosphere glowed; and the intolerable heat forced at last even the murderers to take refuge in their camp. In less than twelve hours, this strong, populous, and flourishing city, one of the finest in Germany, was reduced to ashes, with the exception of two churches and a few houses.... Scarcely had the fury of the flames abated, when the Imperialists returned to renew the pillage amid the ruins and ashes of the town. On the 13th of May, Tilly himself appeared in the town, after the streets had been cleared of ashes and dead bodies. Horrible and revolting to humanity was the scene that presented itself. The living crawling from under the dead, children wandering about with heart-rending cries, calling for their parents; and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers. More than 6,000 bodies were thrown into the Elbe to clear the streets; a much greater number had been consumed by the flames. The whole number of the slain was reckoned at not less than 30,000" (2)

   Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you do not
   believe yourself.

Abba Eban (3)

WHY THIS PHRASE

Attempting to explain to a colleague why I objected to the phrase, "clash of civilizations," I had to retreat from the definitions I employ below and ask the question: why not use, "clash of regimes" or "clash of empires"? Or, why not use another word for 'clash', like 'competition among states' or "conflict of nations.' Or, to be more provocative, why not say, 'war of civilizations' or the 'crusade against the infidel'? Let it be said, the term "civilization' is what I most object to. The reason, I think, is that it suggests religious based conflict without having the candor to say so. In other words, "clash of civilizations" is academic code for one section of humanity's hatred, contempt and fear for another group of human beings who seem to be so different as to be qualitatively different from 'us,' all of which is intensified in the belief 'the other' sees us as we see them. When I began this analysis I had not yet heard, 'axis of evil,' but it captures my meaning and my concern. I believe it should concern all of us who believe peace is preferable to war, competition better than conflict, accommodation than discord. More parochially, but not less importantly, those of us who are academics, that is, those of us who carry the gentle cudgels of reason and semantic precision have an obligation to notice when our language and our concepts are being used pejoratively and duplicitously, especially by those who claim to be among our number. I do not have to remind the reader of the numbing and catastrophic effects of euphemisms, like 'transportation,' 'relocation,' or 'cleansing.' Duplicity is not limited to making the horrific palatable. It can make the merely different hateful, subject to annihilation, and so subject in the name of an ideal. (4) What end is more worthy than the protection of 'our civilization'? I hardly know where to place the emphasis; on 'our' or 'civilization,' save in the end the 'our' always turns out to be controlling. So I am not about to embark on a semantic exercise, although it may seem so.

   From a cave of rot and dirt
   In blood and sweat
   A new race shall rise
   Proud, generous, and cruel.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (5)

TOWARD A DEFINITION

Let us first box in 'civilized' as something which is not barbaric, warlike or crude on the one side, and something which is sensitive, mannered or refined on the other. A civilization, then, is a sociopolitical entity which fosters civilized and discourages barbaric acts. In its most elemental, if negative, sense civilization indicates the absence of war or a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is "solitary, nasty, brutish and short." More positively, it indicates the rudiments of civil society, including a sense of law, as the first definition in the Oxford Dictionary stipulates. Thus premised it is possible to extend the idea of civilization to cover the relationship of the necessitous to the desirable or the good, in the Aristotelian sense. It does not imply pacifism or even nonviolence. It may be good to kill in certain instances. A wolf kills a deer to feed itself and its cubs. A man kills to protect himself and his family. Here killing is both necessitous and good. But where there is an alternative to killing, when it is not necessitous, it is not good. It cannot be good in itself. Extending this idea to the societal level, war and all its killing may be necessitous and good, if the survival of the society is at stake. It cannot be good to destroy another society without this justification. Applying this idea to the "clash of civilizations" means that, notwithstanding profound differences, one civilization cannot destroy another and remain civilized. At most then the concept of the "clash of civilizations" can only indicate a competition, a rivalry more akin to the Olympics than to war. Is this not why war among the civilized attempts to apply many of the rules of sport to the most violent actions? (6) For strictly speaking one civilization cannot destroy, or even want to destroy, another civilization without being involved in a contradiction in terms. For no civilization would engage in war except for self-preservation and no other civilization can so threaten another civilization. Civilizations therefore can only be at war with barbarism within it and with barbaric regimes without.

This may seem a round-a-bout way to deal with what seems to many to be the obvious state of the world today. Yet it is immediately fruitful. It accounts for the religious language which is employed when the rivalry of civilizations seems to get out of hand. This language pays tribute to the idea that a civilized society can only wage war against a barbaric regime or, to use the more colorful language of today, against the face of evil itself. Of course this is no longer a clash of civilizations but a conflict between good and evil or some other analogue of the war between the fundamentally civilized and the fundamentally barbaric. Less strictly speaking, the "clash of civilizations" refers to a conflict between regimes or cultural ideas which are expressed through regimes which see its rivals as anathema, as essentially uncivilized, that is, uncivilizable. While this notion may fit some pre-historic tribe, and I tend to doubt it, it seems ridiculous to apply it to any organized culture today, although any culture may come under the control of a barbaric government. To apply it to Islamic societies is simply absurd, just as it is absurd for Islamic societies to apply it to non-Islamic societies. (7) This is not to deny that there are adherents of Islam, as there are adherents of Christianity and Judaism, who believe that nonbelievers threaten the existence of the faithful and faithfulness and therefore must be destroyed. For example, Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher, believed: 'it is the duty to exterminate them [infidels] with one's own hands.' (8) Without questioning the sincerity of these fundamentalist extremists, they cannot be said to represent any civilization, even if their beliefs do capture the absolute truth of God. I would argue that the very assertion of a divine warrant for political activity amounts to a death penalty for the concept of civilization. Needless to say, I imply nothing regarding the ground for personal belief or action.

Just as there cannot be a clash of civilizations to the death, there cannot be a civilized clash of absolutist worldviews. It is not that the idea of absolute truth and civilization are incompatible, although I believe they may be psychologically at odds. It is that absolute truth cannot be the basis of the public or political actions of a civilization. This is so not because to act in accordance with absolute convictions is unsophisticated or crude, although it certainly is, but because it is barbaric. It must believe that the extermination or elimination of an alternative view and its adherents is mandatory, even when it is not endangered by it. The great sociologist, Max Weber, says this about holy war, which regarding Israel sounds as if he is commenting on recent events: 'The concept of a holy war, i.e., a war in the name of god, for the special purpose of avenging a sacrilege, which entailed putting the enemy under the ban and destroying him and all his belongings completely, is not unknown in antiquity, particularly among the Greeks. But what is distinctive of the Hebraic concept is that the people of Yahweh, as his special community, demonstrated and exemplified their god's prestige against their foes. The possession of the Promised Land, previously foretold, was supplanted by the farther-reaching promise of the elevation of Israel, as the people of Yahweh, above other nations. In the future all nations would be compelled to serve Yahweh and to lie at the feet of Israel." (9)

If therefore one is to speak of a clash between Islam and Christianity or Islam and the West or Islam and modernity, one must assign 'civilization' to only one side of the dichotomy. In many of the centuries of rivalry of Islam and Christian Europe, this is precisely what each side did, portraying the other as barbaric and in the process provoking the barbarism each claimed to reject. It should be remembered that European Protestants and Catholics engaged in precisely the same sort of barbarities with the same justifications. Consider the prologue. Consider a contemporary Israeli scholar's statement, whose purpose is to diminish the significance of Old Testament injunctions to slaughter infidels: "Joshua's war of annihilation against the people of Canaan--in accordance with a divine command to Moses--had been justified in Jewish and Christian traditions, both of which denied the fights of idolatrous peoples to exist. Joshua served as an example for Cromwell and his soldiers in the war against the Irish and for the white settlers in America in their struggle with the Indians." (10)

If one prefers twentieth century examples, they are ready to hand, adding to the massacre of thousands the slaughter of millions. And the justifications remain distressingly familiar. Adolf Hitler repeatedly said that Nazi Germany was the last chance of European civilization. He enlisted the idealism of the decent German to fend off the depraved super-materialistic, anti-spiritual Jews and Bolsheviks. He engaged in a war of annihilation against them in the name of higher Aryan values, acknowledging that its pursuit required the utmost discipline and dedication, because many necessary actions went against the grain of ordinary decency. For their part did not the Bolsheviks enlist the sacred ideals of mother Russia to defeat the barbarian hoards from the West? Did they not match atrocity with atrocity and not us a result of individual criminal action but state policy? Lest one believe this was limited to the Eastern front, consider the intentional fire bombing of Hamburg and Dresden, the latter case being purely punitive and vindictive, having no military significance whatever. Nor are Americans immune to this disease of portraying enemies as subhuman. Would the atom bomb have been dropped on Hiroshima if American propaganda had not prepared the ground? Would the Japanese have raped Nanking if the ordinary soldier saw a woman or a child as a human being?

There is often a racist underpinning to these 'idealisms.' Consider Maimonides, this time from Book III, Chapter 51 of his major work, The Guide to the Perplexed: "Some of the Turks and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads of the South, and those who resemble them in our climates ... their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does." (11)

Unfortunately, one could multiply examples without number. Every so-called civilization has committed atrocities against its enemies which it portrayed as sub-human threats to its existence. Of course there were always rationales, even for the most aggressive and atrocious acts, some of which might have been justified by a reasonable, even civilized, interpretation of events, perhaps if they were truly defensive or truly pre-emptive. In these cases, in my view rare, the acid test is what happened once the threat, if real, was neutralized. Did a massacre take place? Or, was there an effort to rebuild, to lead fellow human beings back from a historically, not a biologically, aberrant path?

The past is of course the province of historians. Nevertheless, an appreciation of it is essential for political scientists and others whose concern is with national policy. National leaders and elites must not only understand their histories, they must face the facts, an often unpleasant task. They must see rationales for what they are. From past ill-considered behavior, under the pressure of events, they must draw prudent lessons which must include anticipating inevitable pressures with a view toward resisting their terrifying logic. It is imperative at least in hindsight to know, to take a personally painful example, why atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was it to forestall American casualties incumbent upon an invasion of the home islands of Japan? Or, was it to send a precocious cold war message to the Soviets? Nothing can be done to undue the horror of the acts, justified or not. But it is a minimal duty for national leaders to know whether or not the grounds for so irrevocable and devastating a decision had a clear, rational and defensible purpose. Or, did the decision merely follow the logic of events and pent up hatred for an inferior race that had dealt America some hard blows?

If vague concepts based in fear and hatred can assume fateful proportions, resulting in the death of thousands of non-combatants in the last days of a war, then it becomes the duty of rational policy-makers and the elites who support and criticize them to test such concepts before they become part of a relentless chain of self-fulfilling prophecies.

I believe race-based imperialism was the most destructive concept of the Twentieth century. I hope that the cultural and religious differences that are enshrouded in the concept of the "clash of civilizations" do not become its counterpart in the Twenty-first century. If the concept refers to the purported incompatibility of states with a predominantly Islamic population with modernity, by which is meant Western civilization, then the ground may be laid for a war of annihilation to protect the West from the barbarian East. If the concept suggests, most often without argumentation, that there must be something in Islamic culture that is inherently anti-Western, that is, anti-modern, not in the sense of divergent cultures, but in the sense of the values which separate civilized men from hominid beasts inappropriately enthralled by a fanatic spiritualism, then several more steps towards the justification of annihilation will have been prepared. If the "clash of civilizations" means that the West assumes that states with predominately Islamic citizens are evil because they wish to engage in jihads, not merely against Coca-Cola, loose women, and rock and roll, but against freedom, truth and god, or the American way of life, then the future looks bleak indeed. If the White House were bombed, would that justify the slaughter of every man, woman and child in Iraq?

I hope I do not have to answer that question. Rather I would like to focus on the assumption of the concept which suggests that states with large Islamic populations will be impervious to the large-scale socio-political and economic forces which have transformed Europe and America over the last five hundred years. This is a curious position to say the least. For what it must mean is that Medieval Christendom, which dominated Europe for a thousand years, could not defeat the changes entailed in modernization, including most significantly the decline of the power and authority of the Church; what is more, it must also mean that, secular states with large Islamic populations will be able to resist modernization, after it has become ever more powerful and entrenched over the past half millennium. To hold this view is to say that urbanization, population growth, the revolutions in communications and transportation, the rise of science and technology, the emergence of the middle classes, their assumption of political as well as economic power, along with all the other signs of modern life, will not and cannot occur in such states. Not only does this position suggest that Islam has an antidote to civilization that Christianity had not, but that the Medieval Church with all its resources, it wealth, its monopoly of talent and its position of unquestioned authority in this world and the next, will prove to be less powerful than rag-tag groups of Islamic extremists, who are as profoundly at war with their own societies as they are with the West.

To combat the palpable absurdity of such a position, it is often said, even by those who should know better, that Islam is a way of life whereas Christianity is a matter of the heart. Islam is necessarily public, Christianity private. Not only has Christianity been as public and political as Islam, if not more so, many Christians today believe it should have a public role, if not through a political church, through active Christian politicians, like the current American attorney general. If Islam has an antidote to the privatizing implications of modernity, many Christians wish they could find its formula. In truth, there is nothing in either faith that makes it susceptible to modernization or resistant to it. In the West there was a centuries long battle to get out from under Christendom as a regime. Millions of people were brutally tortured and killed in the process, a process which still faces fanatical enemies, even in the United States. To suggest that the West is superior to Islam in this respect is to deny history or even more absurdly to deny that Islam is subject to historical forces. My own reading of Islam suggests that it is more open to the world and therefore the influences of the world than Christianity. It seems to me more humanistic, more accepting of Creation and its creatures, including man, than Saints Paul, Jerome, Augustine, or Luther, Calvin and the Mathers. It seems to me likely that the struggle to separate Islam as a religion from Islam as a regime will take far less time and cost fewer lives and less suffering than the process of separating Christianity from the state did in the West. If this were not so, how can one account for the great strides Turkey has taken in this direction only since Ataturk? On what grounds do we declare Egypt or Iraq states mired in Islamic fundamentalism?

I mention these empirical questions only to indicate the limitations of the "clash of civilizations" as an analytical concept. Even if, as I believe, the concept were bankrupt, this would say nothing regarding its value as part of an ideology or a movement. Most scholars believe racism is a bankrupt analytical concept, yet how would one understand a racist ideology like Nazism without understanding its function? Belief in a divine figure who acts in history may be a relic of a tribal past or the product of an underdeveloped psyche, yet how could one hope to understand Christianity, Judaism or Islam without appreciating its value in these monotheisms?

Yet great care must be taken. The concept cannot be taken as an analytical given, for the reasons stated, an unquestioned assumption or a premise upon which inferences can be drawn. What then? It can be studied as a rhetorical device. In my view Western scholars who believe or pretend to believe they are being analytical have used the "clash of civilizations" in some instances as a 'secular' version of 'holy war.' It can be studied as a key concept in an ideology. Here it serves to separate the 'enemy' from normal discourse, rivalry, and conflict. Even war becomes transformed, no longer politics by other means, but a fight to exterminate an alien presence. In this instance the very existence of the 'other' is a deadly provocation that by itself justifies the most extreme measures including annihilation. A concept's shallowness as an analytical device may allow it to be more formidable as a rhetorical or ideological one, for while seeming scholarly, it is elastic enough to mean anything that is demagogically useful. This elasticity can go so far as to corrupt long struggled for legal and philosophical concepts which are the basis of any modern society.

Note that this tendency to push a concept to its rhetorical extremes is considered primitive and uncivilized. Modern societies (read European) and sophisticated cultures are moderate by their very nature. They are democratic in politics and free market in economics, both expressions of middle class prudence and practicality. Customers and neighbors are preferable to antagonists. Competitive markets and athletics are preferable to war. By and large this generalization is true. But it has limits. The acid test is what happens when such societies are under pressure or attack. Do they act in accordance with their central tendencies or do they revert to precisely the primitivism they ordinarily ridicule? The events of 11 September do not bode well. Could President Bush's rhetoric in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster sound more unsophisticated? We are engaged in a war between "good and evil." "You are either with us or against us" or "Wanted dead or alive" to cite but two of many overly simplistic and gratuitously pugnacious statements emanating from the White House and the Pentagon. In the immediate aftermath, I wrote these statements off, more in hope than expectation, as rhetorical flourishes perhaps necessary to rally a stunned populace. As operations in Afghanistan unfolded, it seemed for a time that the excessive rhetoric was the tribute a democratic leader believed he had to pay to gather support for a more moderate and rational policy, which would be more sophisticated than an uninformed and angry public could appreciate.

Now I am not so sure. The rhetoric may serve two different purposes, one insidious, the other misconceived. My first concern deals with the ambiguous nature of the conflict with 'terrorists of global reach'. Were American efforts a war.? If so, against which state? The Taliban regime partially helped the Bush administration out of this difficulty by not separating the government of Afghanistan from Al-Qaeda. So, stretching the term a bit, war might be an applicable concept, notwithstanding the absence of an official declaration. If America were at war, it was at the very least with the Taliban-Al-Qaeda nexus. Sometimes the Bush administration seems to be pursuing this course, but then it undercuts the applicability of the war concept. In war, even in the midst of battle, the enemy has the opportunity to surrender, becoming thereby a prisoner of war, who can expect repatriation at the cessation of hostilities. Yet, to some extent, American policy seems to be pursuing a policy of assassination. This has to mean that should bin Laden et. al,, emerge from some cave, they would not be permitted to surrender but would be shot on sight. Such an assassination would be a war crime similar to the SS massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy in World War Two.

There have been many murky replies to this line of reasoning, all of which more or less assert that Al-Qaeda is not an ordinary enemy, but a criminal conspiracy. If this is true, then America is not at war, not with al-Qaeda at least, but engaged in the pursuit of international criminals. If this were the case, then legal, not military procedures apply. Bin Laden et. al., should be arrested and tried in court. One would then hope that the same protections that are afforded alleged serial killers, child rapists, and other defendants accused of horrific capital crimes, citizens or not, in the U.S.

Thus the nature of my first concern can be summed up. If America is at war, then the rules of warfare apply. If America is engaged in the pursuit of criminals, then the rules of due process apply. There is another category, that of war criminals, which has a very dubious jurisprudential pedigree. Be that as it may, if someone commits a crime during a war, that person may be tried as a criminal, but tried just like any other defendant, in public, with counsel, with right of appeal. Yet there seems to be a clear desire to treat Al-Qaeda as something more than an enemy and more than a criminal, as something less than human, as something that is evil in its substance, something non- human or anti-human, which deserves to be annihilated. Thus the purpose of the religious rhetoric of the Bush administration seems to be to gloss over these fundamentally important concepts, concepts that go to the heart of what it means to be an American.

My second concern is perhaps more serious, although it is difficult for me to think any concern is more important than rule of law. The Bush administration seems to believe that to attack a fundamentalist Islamic sect, it needs to apply and equal and opposite absolutist rhetoric. It seems to he saying something to the effect that "Our religion or our interpretation of your religion will be used to combat your cynical misinterpretation. Our true absolutism will defeat your false absolutism." Again, if this rhetoric could he restricted to rallying the ignorant and ill informed, it might have some tenuous justification, although appealing to the lowest levels of society in the name of rational policy seems precarious at best. More frightening is the possibility that the Bush administration believes its own fundamentalist rhetoric should be the articulation of a fundamentalist policy. Is America in a life and death struggle with the forces of evil, as is uncritically reiterated ad nauseam? If so, then a holy crusade, might one say, a jihad is indicated? Or is America engaged in a struggle for the allegiance of a large portion of the third world? Is this another cold war, with its episodic flash points? Is America engaged in another long-term ideological contest that it can only win by demonstrating the links between freedom and rule of law and prosperity? The strategy of victory remains the same. Prove the superiority of one world view over another, not by employing medieval rhetoric, not by responding with a bigger and better howl, but by employing the down to earth advantages of a free and courageous society over an theocratic tyranny whose subjects look forward only to an unearthly paradise.

My purpose here is not to analyze American foreign policy in Afghanistan or the Middle East. It is to demonstrate that the slip into rhetoric is all but inevitable under the pressure of events and that this slip can lead, as it does in this instance, to the fudging of cardinal concepts which lay at the basis of American society. To do so, for any reason, entails the corrosion of what it means to be a free society. To do so in the name of eliminating primitive, antimodern extremists is ridiculous, as bald-faced a use of rhetoric as any Hitler employed.

The role of all honest scholars is clear. They have a duty to unmask any concept's epistemological pretensions, revealing its inherently pejorative or rhetorical usages, especially when the concept in question has genocidal implications. Any effort in this direction in this time of virtual panic in the West over the assumed Islamic penchant for jihad and terrorism would perform a great service for the universal values of reason, rationality, understanding and moderation. Exposing the "clash of civilizations" might therefore prevent a fallacious concept from becoming a true prophecy.

   And then they teach men that to accept which is of service to
   them--the 'myth'--is an undertaking that does them honor,
   while it shameful to admit a truth which harms them.

Julian Benda (12)

EPILOGUE

I ask the indulgence of the reader for a few more moments. A short time after the Gulf war, I flew from Beirut to London. I found myself sitting next to a fifteen-year-old girl with Middle Eastern coloring, who spoke upper class British English. She was flying home from Baghdad. Somewhat nervously, since I was an ardent supporter of that war, I asked her if she experienced any of the bombing. She had and still dreamt about it, unable to drive the screams of the children huddled in the shelters from her mind. I still believe that war was necessary. I believe other wars will be necessary. Yet never again will I be able to support one, however necessary, without hearing the screams of frightened children. It is those children, past, present and future which must elevate this conference above the academic. This is a room filled with gifted people. Some of us have more girls and blessings than we know what to do with. Each of us has the gift of reason, of logical inquiry, of a capacity to gather and array facts, of an ability to separate justifications from rationales, of the ability to distance ourselves from our passionate concerns, if only temporarily. We are called upon to use these gifts not merely to achieve positions of influence, honor, prestige and material security. We have a responsibility to use these unearned blessings for the benefit of those ordinary, decent, hardworking millions of people who populate our countries. We have to do what they cannot do: inoculate them against the diseases of fear, hatred and retribution. We have to do or fry to do what their leaders fail to do. We have to create the rational grounds for civilized behavior. We have to listen to the screams of frightened children, all children, as if they were our own. Dare we call ourselves civilized if we lack the courage to try?

ENDNOTES

(1.) Aristotle: Loeb, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by H. Rackham, book III (Cambridge: Loeb, 1934), pp. 2, 6.

(2.) Arno Mayer, Why Did The Heavens Not Darken (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p.22. Mayer's book is very useful in a number of ways. First, he places the Judeocide in Europe by the Nazis in the context of European history. The two World Wars "claimed about 100 million lives, 80 million of them in Europe." p.4. Secondly, he describes many other genocides in history to which the West has paid scant attention or worse, has glorified as Holy Crusades. "On entering the Holy City on July 15th, 1099, the soldiers of God were seized by divine fury against all infidels. Even during the first day they shed an incredible amount of blood, putting both men and women to the naked sword." p. 24. He further details atrocities committed by these soldiers of Christ. Thirdly, Mayer refuses to use the term 'Holocaust' to describe the destruction of European Jewry and for reasons which directly relate to this essay. 'Holocaust,' originally a term which applied to a religious sacrifice, has become central to the 'cult of remembrance,' which 'more and more ... has helped disconnect the Jewish catastrophe from its secular historical setting, while placing it within the providential history of the Jewish people, to be commemorated, lamented, and restrictively interpreted.' p. 16.

(3.) Abba Eban, Contemporary Aphorisms, quoted by Norman Finkelstein (New York: Verso, 1995) in Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality in Palestine (New York: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 2001), p.123.

(4.) This may seem a perverse use of the word 'ideal.' Consider Mayor's discussion of the First Crusade: "What was decisive was their [weapons and tactics] sacralization and their use by warriors serving a holy cause and prone or authorized to view their enemies as less-than-human misbelievers deserving of depersonalized killing." Why Did the Heavens, p.32.

(5.) Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Movement Anthem', quoted by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York: Olive Branch, 1993), p.102.

(6.) One should not push this notion too far. Nevertheless, limits have nearly always have been placed on warfare, primitive and modern. Although they have been breached, they have not been abandoned, if only for prudential reasons. For an elaborate discussion of these and many other elements of warfare, see John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1994).

(7.) John Keegan makes this point with regard to war. "The history of Islamic conquest and the exact nature of the doctrine of holy warmaking are both misunderstood outside the Muslim community. The era of conquest was comparatively short-lived and came to an end not simply because Islam's opponents learned how to mobilize opposition to its advance but because Islam itself became divided over the morality of warmaking." History of Warfare, p.389. As warmaking became the province of a special class, the real holy war became 'the war against the self.' There is another point to be made in this regard. I call it the freezing of concepts. In essence there is a tendency to fix the concept of an enemy in its worst possible light, e.g., jihad, must always mean a relentless war against all infidels and never as personal struggle of the self against sin.

(8.) Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London: Pluto Press, 1994), p. 24.

(9.) Max Weber, Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p.87.

(10.) Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980), p.29.

(11.) Shahak, Jewish History, p.25.

(12.) Julien Benda, The Treason of Intellectuals, quoted by Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality, p.88.

Christopher Vasillopulos is a Professor of Political Science at the Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic.