Roger’s Rules

March 15th, 2009 5:45 am

“Enemy Combatants,” David Hume, and “Islamophobia”

I trust that you, Dear Reader, feel as relieved as I do that our government’s guests at Guantanamo Bay are, as of Friday, no longer to be denominated “enemy combatants.” What shall we call them instead? Our new Attorney General’s law firm has called them “clients,” which tells you something. And Michelle Malkin has got the re-branding ball rolling with a few suggestions: “Undocumented Protagonists,” for example, and (even better) “Next Life Enablers.”

Some reports stress that the change is largely cosmetic, since the Obama administration is still asserting its right to detain the combatants formerly known as enemy. I think it is something more than that. After all, five Guantanamo veterans, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, have just gone on record boasting about their extracurricular activities, admitting, inter alia, that they are “terrorists to the bone.”

Please refrain from criticizing them for this, though, because in their own eyes being a terrorist is not just a job, it is a badge of honor. If you happen to think steering jumbo jets into skyscrapers is not the sort of thing nice people do, that’s just your narrow, Western, bourgeois perspective on the activity. In this multicultural age, you have to appreciate that different cultures have different values, yadda, yadda, yadda.

If you think I am indulging in caricature or exaggeration, attend to the letter signed by Messrs. Mohammed and his confreres. “To us,” they wrote, charges that they are terrorists “are not accusations. To us they are a badge of honour, which we carry with honour.”

Just as I was digesting this helpful expostulation, a friend reminded me about David Hume’s classic essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” Hume is primarily concerned in that essay with the question of aesthetic judgment. How do we know whether a given work of art is a masterpiece? asks Hume, and his answer, in brief, is durable appreciation: the judgment, that is to say, of the ages.

Hume has some interesting things to say about taste and its variabilities, and his discussion has pertinence far beyond the realm of aesthetics. There is, Hume observes, a remarkable cross-cultural “unanimity” about matters aesthetic and moral. “[S]ome part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for in the very nature of language. The word virtue, with its equivalent in every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame. And no one, without the most obvious and grossest impropriety, could affix reproach to a term , which in its general acceptation is understood in a good sense; or bestow applause, where the idiom requires disapprobation.”

In other words, candidness rescues us from “the most obvious and grossest impropriety” of deliberately calling things by the wrong names, e.g., calling vice–something bad, harmful, malicious–”a badge of honour.”

Hume goes on the to acknowledge that, unfortunately, there are plenty of uncandid people about. “The admirers and follows of the ALCORAN [i.e. the Koran], for example, who “insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed throughout that wild and absurd performance.” Hume continues:

But it is to be supposed, that the ARABIC words, which correspond to the ENGLISH, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity, were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

What do you suppose Hume would have to say about the decision to stop referring to Islamic terrorists as “Islamic terrorists” or “enemy combatants”? What do you suppose he would think of a group of self-confessed terrorists who, beyond the shamelessness of acknowledging the nature of their activities, presume to misdescribe wanton murder as “a badge of honour”?

In some Western countries today, to describe the Koran as a “wild and absurd performance” would be tantamount to “Islamophobia.” Ditto the description of Mohammed as a “pretended prophet” and his teachings as collusions with “treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry” that are “utterly incompatible with civilized society.” Was David Hume an Islamophobe avant la lettre? Or is the whole notion of Islamophobia one of those strange epistemic perversions of language that makes the just apprehension of reality impossible?

My own view is that “Islamophobia” is a misnomer. A phobia is an irrational fear. But what could be more rational that the fear of people who wish to compass your destruction while at the same time claiming that they regard doing so as “a badge of honour”? The issue is not “Islamophobia,” but Islamohobia-phobia: the entirely justified fear of those who parade around charging people with Islamophobia. I wish Hume were with us now to dispense some of the withering ridicule and contempt that our new multicultural euphemists so richly deserve.

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7 Comments

1. Gaffe Prices:

It just gets more Orwellian by the second.

Yeah, well and two or three can gather together to play this game too, that why I’ve taken to calling the whole kit and kaboddle of what’s shoveled out of D.C nothing but grudge packages. stead a “stimulus”.

D.C. Comic bookland can stop calling them enemy combatants, but I started calling them the enemies of humanity a long time ago.

Mar 15, 2009 - 6:56 am 2. elvis:

I know i read somewhere that a society that waters down it’s language and changes definitions of words it a society on the way out.
Maybe someone could help mw with where that is from???

Mar 15, 2009 - 11:36 am 3. heathermc:

the word “phobia” denigrates an opinion or judgement into a medical problem, a malady that can and should be treated (by professional experts) with measures of serotonin.

Mar 15, 2009 - 12:41 pm 4. ehunter:

Or is the whole notion of Islamophobia one of those strange epistemic perversions of language that makes the just apprehension of reality impossible?

Of course it is..and thats the entire intention of the whole MultiCulturalist enterprise..and much of the modern University..
“to make the just apprehension of reality impossible”

Mar 15, 2009 - 4:33 pm 5. ChipD:

Please…isn’t this just another straw man, erected to pummel?
Yes, of course, anyone who questions our Government’s right to do whatever it wishes, whenever it wishes, is obviously a lover of terrorists, who hates America, and probably kicks his dog.

Is abandoning the Geneva Conventions REALLY the only way to protect us from attack? Is it really only crazed leftists who are alarmed at the massive enlargement of Goverenment power that the war on terror has given us?

Maybe this is why conservatism is adrift- it prefers to chase after the ghosts of long-dead Socialists, to dealing with the hard questions of the present.

Mar 15, 2009 - 5:42 pm 6. Gaffe Prices:

Let’s return to Hume’s text, shall we?

But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

And let’s not forget child abduction, child kidnapping, child murder and beheading- A/K/A honor killings, child rape, forced child marriages, or the Sudanese Moslems in the north, near Khartoum, who, when they asked for reasonable, just compensation for the oil reserves and revenues exploited by the chinese (on their land, the land they have dwelt on for millenia) were answered with slaughter, rape, mass murder, subjected to slow and agonizing death by starvation, thirst, and whatever else the elements the could deliver, one can’t but ask- All in the name of what? That they were infidels perhaps?

And not just delivered by the (Islamic) “government” in Kartoum, but by imported JanJawed to put down “this perception of Freedom and autonomy gone wild”.

Kinda reminds me of that other Islamist sympathizer and national socialist who, after accepting surrender from Holland, then proceeded to bomb Rotterdam to rubble, then machine gun strafe from airplanes any remaining survivors fleeing the city that choked the roadways- Adolf Hitler.

In Hitler’s case, those 60.000 post-surrendered dead, most likely represented target practice for those in cities like Stalingrad, or London or New York that stood in the way of national socialist expansion. Why Darfur remains a question not even answered by a Khalid Sheikh Mohameds “badge of honor” chest-thumping rhetoric.

I long ago ceased to regard these professional slaughterhouses of humanity and their (financial) supporters as peaceful practitioners of a religion, but for those who elevate them to the status of singular spokespersons for the cause of “social justice” and “freedom fighting” everywhere, by stampeding across those who just might be peacefully practicing Islam, just to get the micophones and cameras in close so as to give voice to all that exiting, “tingle down my leg”, uh “journalizm”, well, my answer is, uh, “sorry, no sale”.

And besides, this practice has been going on for quite a while, and ubhamas administration tut-tuting, and ha-rumphing the deeds of the enemies of humanity, domestic variety, have been ongoing and this is but the latest installment, nay, indeed evolution! of clarification on this very delicate, offending-producing, misapplication of “labels”. Or so they would have us believe…

Mar 15, 2009 - 9:21 pm 7. Gaffe Prices:

Oh ChipD, you are a chip off the ol’ pile:

In your concern for “abandoning the Geneva Convention”, have you concern for who it was that first abandoned said Geneva Conventions?

So, Listen Up. for I will add, for the sake of clarity, that it, now and forever shall be further mentioned, as The Rules of the Geneva Conventions.

And those Rules</b state quite clearly, that those nations who engage in warfare against (an)other nation(s) must wearthat nations uniform, and bear that nations insignia, in order to qualify for those prisoner protections provided to those soldiers whose nations abide by the Rules of the Geneva Conventions.

And now why would that be? To whom would those protections apply?

Those protections, apply to those soldiers who wear the uniform of their nation, and bear that nations insignia, so that Those Soldiers would be protected under those rules, as would all soldiers whose country’s abide by and respected the Rules of the Geneva Convention.

So, it (the it in this case being the Rules of the Geneva Convention, remember those?) exists to protect those soldiers, no matter who “started it”. It being whatever “war” it is in question.

So, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and co. not only do not qualify under the Rules of the Geneva Convention, THEY HAVE WILLFULLY, AND PURPOSELY DISQUALIFIED THEMSELVES UNDER THE RULES OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION.

So the Rules of The Geneva Convention have not been abandoned, now have they ChipD? No. and Not by U.S.

And you talk of Strawmen? Shame on you. Shame on you.

Shame on you.

To abuse the Rules of the Geneva Convention the way you do makes a mockery of them and everything else dear in this world in ways you could scarcely even imagine, and in doing so imperils them and throws them and all else that evolved from the application of the mind and reason G-d gave us to the very flames of chaos and disorder in precisely the means and the method that these enemies of humanity fully intended all along. thanks Chip.

and to abuse the Rules of the Geneva Convention as you and others do, is nothing short of suicidal, again, in ways you and others have neither the imagination, nor the logic to perceive.

You and your ilk are just as dangerous as they are.

we go through this time and time again, we with the logic, and reason and You, with the megaphone, the blathering and the bloviating that destroys the very thing it is you invoke.

So, could you and the ‘others’ sho’nuff do us all a favor and show just maybe enough respect to put on the uniform and insignia of whoever or whatever it is you are fighting for?

Mar 16, 2009 - 3:48 am