This week, opening the tenth session of The Islamic Summit Conference, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia called for a war on the Jews. I don't intend for people who have heard the CNN quotes to believe that this is a question of context. This is anti-Semitic in intent and effect. This is a call for racial extinction:

We are enjoined by our religion to prepare for the defence of the ummah. Unfortunately we stress not defence but the weapons of the time of the Prophet. Those weapons and horses cannot help to defend us any more. We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence. But because we discouraged the learning of science and mathematics etc. as giving no merit for the akhirat, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defence. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies. This is what comes from the superficial interpretation of the Quran, stressing not the substance of the Prophet's sunnah and the Quran's injunctions but rather the form, the manner and the means used in the 1st Century of the Hijrah. And it is the same with the other teachings of Islam. We are more concerned with the forms rather than the substance of the words of Allah and adhering only to the literal interpretation of the traditions of the Prophet.

We may want to recreate the first century of the Hijrah, the way of life in those times, in order to practise what we think to be the true Islamic way of life. But we will not be allowed to do so.Our detractors and enemies will take advantage of the resulting backwardness and weakness in order to dominate us. Islam is not just for the 7th Century A.D. Islam is for all times. And times have changed. Whether we like it or not we have to change, not by changing our religion but by applying its teachings in the context of a world that is radically different from that of the first century of the Hijrah. Islam is not wrong but the interpretations by our scholars, who are not prophets even though they may be very learned can be wrong. We have a need to go back to the fundamental teachings of Islam to find out whether we are indeed believing in and practising the Islam that the Prophet preached. It cannot be that we are all practising the correct and true Islam when our beliefs are so different from one another.

Today we, the whole Muslim ummah are treated with contempt and dishonour. Our religion is denigrated. Our holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved and killed.

None of our countries are truly independent. We are under pressure to conform to our oppressors' wishes about how we should behave, how we should govern our lands, how we should think even.

Today if they want to raid our country, kill our people, destroy our villages and towns, there is nothing substantial that we can do. Is it Islam which has caused all these? Or is it that we have failed to do our duty according to our religion?

Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly. And so we find some of our people reacting irrationally. They launch their own attacks, killing just about anybody including fellow Muslims to vent their anger and frustration. Their Governments can do nothing to stop them. The enemy retaliates and puts more pressure on the Governments. And the Governments have no choice but to give in, to accept the directions of the enemy, literally to give up their independence of action.

With this their people and the ummah become angrier and turn against their own Governments. Every attempt at a peaceful solution is sabotaged by more indiscriminate attacks calculated to anger the enemy and prevent any peaceful settlement. But the attacks solve nothing. The Muslims simply get more oppressed.

There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse.The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak. Some believe, as I have said, this is the Will of Allah, that the proper state of the Muslims is to be poor and oppressed in this world.

But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people?

It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.

The response of the fifty-seven heads of state to whom more than one-fifth of the planet's residents owe fealty: a standing ovation. Not condemnation, or censure, or silence, or murmurs: from Hamid Karzai to Megawati Soekarnoputri, sustained long applause. Without rhetoric, to weep or to vomit?

As Daniel Drezner notes, the sad thing is that Mahathir's position is a fairly moderate one. "He's not advocating the use of violence to exterminate the state of Israel. He's advocating the use of brainpower -- to exterminate the state of Israel." And by extension, since Mahathir carefully equates the two: the Jews. This is the reality of world opinion of us today: it makes the action of any Jew the action of all Jews; it makes any action of the Jews an act worthy of destruction.

So, we are paranoid; we are rational. We are in a position of extreme influence; the world is silent at calls for our slaughter. This is what it is to be a Jew in America, now, regardless of belief. Israel becomes the crux of our humiliation—locally, because we are blamed for its excesses, abroad, because of our disbelief at the moral distortion of enforced moral equivalence: the consistent dismissal of the continuous murder perpetuated by the morally bereft Palestinian Authority and its Islamist contretemps, whose internal rivalry is played out in Jewish blood.

Who are we, that we might know ourselves? Heavy weather in a highball glass, perhaps.

Would that this were only a physical relation—that at one table we might restrain ourselves, at another be outraged; that we might gather all our selves in and compartmentalize our voice. Still, if we were able to do so, we would be heard as if we were not; our age is one of much magnification and little separation, of much judgementalism and little judgement.

How can one explain that the Jewish voice is paranoid locally, that we have hurt a good man, and caused him no little injury from a great fear unwarranted, and then also to explain that Jewish warnings are justified—that Haman still attempts our slaughter and our extermination and that we will continue to shout in every fucking agora until everyone is aware of it, until the chattering classes of Paris and New York dismiss their dainty ambivalence and open their eyes.

I am often asked why I support Israel, given "how well off Jews are now," given how, as the last legacy of the colonial West in the Arab world, Israel is a perpetual reminder of the Islamic humiliation of this century, of their abiding failures to live with the modern world. "Arabs didn't hate Jews before Israel." True and untrue, but more true than not. The connection of the Arab cause against the Israeli state, which was secular, to the Islamic cause against the Jews (Mahathir Mohammed's words are chilling: "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews") is one of the great tragedies of the last thirty years, and it is almost surely because of Israel's continued existence. Pragmatically, of course, we, the people between the river and the sea, should have taken the higher Masadan ground, and died. Our negation would have almost certainly solved the conflict.

But my response is much simpler. As Wieseltier notes, all the Jews are not well-off; Israel remains a necessity in a world that has not made its peace with its favorite villains. Our victimhood is only performative on the Upper West Side; it is shockingly literal in Haifa.

I do not wish that I could convert away from my blood. Regardless of belief, it will be the same blood cleaned off the Israeli streets. Wieseltier argues that "It is the essence of anti-Semitism, as it is the essence of all prejudice, to call its object its cause. But if you explain anti-Semitism as a response to Jews, and racism as a response to blacks, and misogyny as a response to women, then you have not understood it. You have reproduced it." But as much as I agree that it is anti-Semitism to attribute the actions of some Jews to all Jews, it is the heart of Semitism to feel the Jewish problem personally, to make of this exclusive and excluding identity the feeling of collective responsibility, if not collective danger.

And in the end, perhaps, as a Jew, I end up making Gregg Easterbrook's 'mistake'. My actions, regardless of my current religious or political beliefs, have a historic obligation to my identity—this voice, so locally paranoid, so desperately unheard abroad, has its own responsibilities. This is heavy weather in a highball glass, indeed, but this is a highball glass floating on a dangerous tempest-tossed sea.

WHY AESTHETICS MATTER (TWO)

Part Two:

Yesterday, I presented a story about a couple engaged in two arguments, one aesthetic and one political. It should be said that the couple might well have disagreed violently in their tastes. Because the couple discussed television within the frame of their conceptions of the nature of the beautiful it does not necessarily follow that their discussion would be amicable. But I have come to agree with the contention (following Kant's Critique of Judgement) that people's general aesthetic conceptions, however grounded in subjective evaluations, have a "loose, general" objective validity. That is to say that regardless of where we place our priorities on specific goods, or relative applications of taste, we generally agree about which things are goods.

Nor do I find this view inimicable to my having cast my lots with pluralistic theory regarding the state (Walzer, Berlin), as long as "loose" and "general" mean exactly that: these aesthetic principles are grounded within certain local historical and geographical endpoints, and are subject to evolving modes of signifying those principles within different artistic media. Picasso's nudes are now as beautiful (and uncontroversial) as Courbet's now that the dislocation of their mode of signification of beauty has passed. Society has learned that Picasso codes for beauty; it is not that we have decided that beauty is unimportant. (As to the question of whether society may be pushed to view anything as beautiful, or whether there are some innate qualities in Picasso, or other novel modes of signifying beauty, which reach an "authentic" notion of beauty, I am unqualified to answer it, but surely think the latter.)

This is another argument for Trilling's preservation of historical distance from aesthetic critique—often what is made to be a shift in values (i.e. modernism), seems in the soft light of historical distance to represent those same values using novel modes of perception and signification. Picasso was not against beauty any more than Nabokov was against "curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy" (the states which he associated with aesthetic bliss); both modern artists were merely against the false romantic representation of these values—kitsch. So instead of viewing modernism as radical in a normative sense, we should view modernism as more radical prescriptively. (This notion of radical means within established ends should be held in mind when considering the politically aesthetic pragmatism proposed below).

There is a basic incommeasurability of these positive aesthetic values (much as there is one over which positive political values to favor), but the concept of which is positive between beauty and ugliness, pain and happiness, fear and hope, is surely unquestionable. (Parmenidean oppositions still not a good mode for argument, to be sure).

So where does this leave our couple? I suggested yesterday that the collisions of weight between positive liberties seem to prove more serious than those collisions of weight between positive aesthetic judgements—pushing our putative arguers further apart. And for the conception of the state, this is surely true. Were we to suggest that a state be built on a notion of defending a ranking of competing positive goods, as suggested by the community, the road to authoritarianism seems well paved. (We might call this the "Oops, looks like Fascism" side of Sandel/Macintyre). We are well to recall Isaiah Berlin's famous words from the end of "Two Concepts of Liberty:"

To realise the relative validity of one's convictions," said an admirable writer of our time, "and yet to stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian." To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.

So our consideration of the relative validity of our moral beliefs needs to ground political discussion in a way that doesn't need gird our aesthetic disagreements. (If we are to engage in an evaluation of political means by their aesthetic ends, we need to limit the ability of the state to over-act. The stakes, are, after all, much higher. But these are the same limits the liberal state already faces when evaluating political means judged by their relative moral ends.) Does our couple's disagreement about base principles (as in abortion) then force them to merely respectfully disengage, to not enforce their moral principles upon one another (or to do so in a restrained liberal fashion)?

It would, if their actual beliefs were as contradictory as seem to be asserted in current political discourse. Many issues are framed in terms which seem to resolve to competing if not antithetical value claims: drug policy, abortion, private land rights, health care, even tax cuts, which now are considered almost for their moral implications than their ostensible economic effects... There is a political consensus that these debates are firm moral debates, with little middle ground for policy solutions.

But take the case of abortion. Neither side, with the exception of a small minority, favors abortions. I know almost no-one who campaigns for more abortions. Considered aesthetically, and I mean this seriously, there is an aesthetic argument against abortion. Abortions are ugly. This argument doesn't carry the moral force of the arguments against abortion or for a woman's control of her person and her privacy, but it still might guide policy. In fact, it is able to guide policy precisely because it lacks that moral force. It merely is a judgement of taste, not of condemnation, or one which requires absolute action.

What if the left and the right were committed to attempting to reduce the number of abortions, not out of moral fervor, for their moral ends are surely different, but out of a shared aesthetic sensibility? The different set of criteria over policy might enable a shift in consensus that moves towards a shared goal, rather than morally opposed and intractable positions. This is a pragmatic aestheticism, that turns to matters of shared judgements for compromise policy frameworks in places where competing value claims leave debaters at opposite sides of the table.

Before we snicker, we might consider that TR's national parks were argued for out of (among other things) a shared national aesthetic principle—not out of a historical view of environmental stewardship, but a belief in conservation of the wild. Rational drug policy, which acknowledges that drug abuse is a serious problem, and manages drug policy without recourse to moral arguments about freedom or the innate evils of drugs, stems from a similar aesthetic pragmatism.

There are many good objections to this argument, of which I will attempt to handle major ones tomorrow in Part Three. These include the libertarian critique that I am merely advocating the same communitarianism I dismiss, the liberal critique that aesthetic principles are naturally conservative, and the pragmatist critique that argues that policies developed from sentiment are ineffective. Got any more? Email me and I'll attempt to answer them.