However, the world does not lack fools and knaves. In Al Ahram, Galal Nassar writes:

The Americans would be wrong to assume that the death of Zarqawi means the end of resistance in Iraq. Resistance is bigger than one man or one group. Perhaps time will prove that the fall of Zarqawi will be a boost to the national resistance, for it would rid it of the mindless mayhem that terrorist has brought into the picture. Perhaps now the world will see the Iraqi resistance for what it is: a noble and honourable movement that aspires to free the country from occupation. Zarqawi was the fig leaf that covered US crimes in Iraq. Now that the Americans had to sacrifice that leaf, one wonders if they'll be looking around for someone to fill his shoes.

What sort of moral degeneracy could see the Iraqi terrorists as anything other than what they are: a motley crew of sectarian fanatics intent on imposing their will by terror? Nonetheless, there are people who accept this reasoning. It is the result of the same sort of tortuous ideological acrobatics that were once used to justify the pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR, or the Soviet invasion of Hungary or indifference to the plight of Darfur.

In fact, in the current menu offered by ideological cafeterias, we may be may be forced to chose between the grotesque alternative of glorifying the murderers, offered by Al-Ahram, and the unappetizing and equally uncomfortable stance of offering unquestioning support to the fiasco being perpetrated by the Bush administration in Iraq. Is there a third way?

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have provided an account of the ideological framework of such fools and knaves, in a book called Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies reprinted by Penguin and reviewed by Marko Attila Hoare in Democratiya, and further discussed by Jeff Weintraub under the title Occidentalism and "Anti-Imperialism".

Occidentalism, the complementary phenomenon to "Orientalism" described by Edward Said, views the West and all its doings as automatically evil and immoral.

The central argument of Occidentalism was presented in a 2004 article by Ian Buruma, "The Origins of Occidentalism", in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Vol. 50, Issue 22 - February 6, 2004 - Page B10).:

... the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discotheque in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.

Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism . The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of "U.S. imperialism." Similar hostility, though not always as lethal, has been directed in the past against Britain and France as much as against America. What, then, is the Occidentalist idea of the West?

That is the problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals who gathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan's mission to smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia. The topic of discussion was "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism.

Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. [....]

All agreed that culture -- that is, traditional Japanese culture -- was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and Western intellect.

Precisely the same terms had been used by others, in other places, at other times. Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries invoked against the universalist claims of the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon's invading armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the "Westernizers," that is, Russian advocates of liberal reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European fascists and National Socialists sought to smash "Americanism," Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and "rootless cosmopolitanism" (meaning Jews). Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote a book in the 1930s about fascist ideology in Austria and Germany. He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially under Stalin, although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western liberalism and "rootless cosmopolitanism." Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and Germany. The founders of the Ba'ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase "Westoxification" to describe the poisonous influence of Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and soil.

Clearly, the idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization. Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder.

Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. [....] Humiliation can easily turn into a cult of the pure and the authentic. Among the most resented attributes of the hated Occident are its claims to universalism. Christianity is a universalist faith, but so is the Enlightenment belief in reason. [....]

Just as the main enemies of Russian Slavophiles were Russian Westernizers, the most immediate targets of Islamists are the liberals, reformists, and secular rulers in their own societies. They are the savage stains that have to be cleansed with blood. But the source of the barbarism that has seduced Saudi princes and Algerian intellectuals as much as the whores and pimps of New York (and in a sense all infidels are whores and pimps) is the West. And that is why holy war has been declared against the West.

Since the target of the holy warriors is so large, figuring out how to defend it is not easy...

Buruma and Margalit's analysis, Hoare's article and Weintraub's commentary have in common the characteristic that they fit the facts more or less, but they do not fit a particular brand name of ideology. Standard issue "leftists" will be irate at this explanation for obvious reasons. However, the joy of neoconservatives will be short lived, because of the injunction in the continuation:

But it is not immediately apparent that a war against Iraq was the most effective way to fight the Islamist jihad. [....] In the West itself, we must defend our freedoms against the holy warriors who seek to destroy them. But we must also be careful that in doing so we don't end up undermining them ourselves.

This analysis is either the work of people who are only happy when everyone is angry at them, or it is part of a new ideological third way, being pioneered in works and ideas represented in Democratiya and The Euston Manifesto. You can read a bit of the background of the Euston Manifesto here, but that preliminary sketch looks like an attempt to define something new in terms of older ideas and slogans such as "progressive" and "leftist" and "socialist," terms whose associations may confuse as much as they explain. If like me, you cannot read either an entire average article in The Nation or an entire article in NRO without feeling sick and angry at some point, this new intellectual path may be for you. If however, you must label anyone you meet or anything you read as "leftist" or "rightist" or "pro-Palestinian" or "Zionist" before you will dare to venture an opinion about it or them, you may feel very uncomfortable with these ideas.

The danger of abandoning your "left" and "right" stickers are that you will be forced into the dangerous occupation of original thought, and that you might reach conclusions that are not popular among your friends. The potential gain is that you would no longer have to support odious causes such as Iraqi "resistance" on the one hand, or undiluted Bushism on the other, just because they are decreed to be politically correct by your currently accepted political label.

Perhaps you will hear more from me about this third way soon.

Ami Isseroff