The classic book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” was published by Dale Carnegie, an expert in self-improvement, salesmanship and personal skills as far back as 1936. Still in print, it has sold 15 million copies worldwide.
My advice to Daesh: Cash in by writing a book about how to win enemies and generate hatred, because you guys are quite adept at doing just that — sowing distrust, fear and anger against Islam, even among those progressive non-Muslims in the West who had chosen to give our faith an embrace, as opposed to their bigoted counterparts on the right who had instead chosen to give it a choke-hold, demonizing it and its adherents.
Following the horrors that Daesh terrorists inflicted on Paris last week — coming close on the heels of several other attacks against innocent civilians, including the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai that killed 224 people, and the two coordinated bombings in Beirut set off by suicide bombers that killed 43 others — there are already whiffs of hardened feelings in France against French Muslims, feelings that appear to be diffusing throughout the entire Euro-American world and feeding into already existing Islamophobic sentiments there.
As the New York Times correspondent, Adam Rossiter, explained in a news report filed from Paris last Tuesday: “The grim public mood, with hardened jaws and frowns on the emptied streets, is bubbling up. Deep shades of distinction that previously separated France’s political groupings — left, right and far right — on how to handle the terrorist threat, or even how to deal with France’s large Muslim community, are blurring.”
These putative anti-Muslim sentiments, held in check or kept under wraps, presumably by compassion for “the other” or perhaps by political correctness, have now openly come to the fore, and far right politicians like the National Front’s Marine le Pen, have become more emboldened to promote their venomous anti-Muslim rhetoric, as if to say: “Hey, told you so, these Muslims in our midst can’t be trusted.” Already le Pen is calling for an “indispensable cleaning out of the cellars and suburbs gangrened by criminality.” The suburbs, or “banlieues,” is code in French idiom for those impoverished parts of suburban Paris where Muslims live, and cellars, or “caves,” is a colloquialism for a rat hole, a squalid or cramped residence.
Laurent Vaquiez, secretary general of the Republicans, the conservative party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, went even further. He demanded that the country erect detention camps for roughly 4,000 people considered actual or potential terrorists. And Francois Hollande, the president, echoing his nation’s grim mood, told an emergency session of Parliament last Monday: “There are, living on our soil, individuals who from delinquency go on to radicalization and then to terrorist criminality ... with the acts of war on Nov. 13, the enemy has crossed a line.”
He promised a crackdown. And heaven knows, as rights advocates wonder, how far the government intends to go in curtailing the rights of a community of six million souls — mostly law-abiding Muslims, many of them second or third generation French citizens. He has, for starters, asked the French parliament for new legislation that would give the authorities more flexibility to conduct police raids without a warrant and broader surveillance powers without court consent.
The other consequence of the harrowing scenes of carnage in Paris last week — calls to shut down European borders in order to halt the arrival of asylum seekers from Syria. And those calls have spilled over the Atlantic to the US.
But even more bigoted — but no less surprising — than that is what Republican presidential candidates have had to say about the subject. Marco Rubio, himself the son of refugees fleeing Cuba, said the US should not take in any Syrian refugees whatsoever. Jeb Bush, seemingly more compassionately but no less idiotically, suggested that the government should admit “only Christians.” And several governors around the country have stated bluntly that their states would not accept refugees of any religious stripe.
The long and short of it is this: Daesh, despite its theological pretenses, is promoting an ideology — if ideology it is — that is not just a degradation of Islam but a menace to Muslims everywhere. Its leaders are, at best, under-educated buffoons and, at worst, nihilistic terrorists who reject religious faith and moral principles, and argue that human life is without objective meaning, purpose or intrinsic value, thus worthless.
Whoever and whatever these folks are, Daesh has subverted the language of our Holy Book, a language that belongs, and should continue to belong, to a stage in our history where it speaks to us, about us and from us, where it speaks, that is, of compassion and the sanctity of life. We too should “declare war” on this monstrous group, if for no reason other than the fact that its soldiers have, in the name of what R.P. Blackmur, the American autodidact and critic, called the “new illiteracy,” performed acts of ever increasing tawdriness and cruelty.
Our hearts go out to Parisians and all the people of France.
