Grégoire Canlorbe

Islam

A conversation with Göran Adamson, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Göran Adamson, for Gatestone Institute

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Göran Adamson is an associate professor in sociology with a PhD from the London School of economics. He is engaged in public debate in Sweden focusing on free-speech issues, populism and diversity. He is an outspoken critic of multiculturalism from a left-wing political perspective. March 2021, his new book—Masochist Nationalism – Multicultural Self-hatred and the Infatuation with the Exotic—was published by Routledge.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You have been working on a statistical study of the relationship between ethnic background and crime in Sweden. Is the Islamic faith in migrants a strong predictor of delinquency?

  Göran Adamson: That’s a good question. I just want to give a little background on the report because the report builds on, or is an updated version of, a report by the crime prevention agency from 2005. It had been almost 20 years since the Swedish state had done any research about the relationship between migration and crime. And so, this was a completely private initiative. And I was the head of this study. And I can just tell you that the two most salient features in this study were that we found that among people who were suspects or, with reason, were suspected of a crime, about six out of 10 in Sweden were migrants, which is more than half of every second people, the suspect of crime in Sweden is a migrant. And when it comes to the murder rate people who were, with reason, suspected of murder, it was about 73 or 74 percent. You know what I mean? So, about three out of four people suspected of murder in Sweden in 2017 are migrants. So, these figures are frightfully high. But the funny thing is that the Swedish Social Democrats and people you might call multiculturalists—the politically correct—they have not been interested in investigating this even though these are issues that people have been talking about. Maybe the most important issue and the reason why the Swedish Democrats have become so huge over the last 10 years—they are now almost the biggest party in Sweden—it is like Front National—what is it called? Something else now. But you know, Marine Le Pen’s party. So, but talking about if there is a link between Islam and crime, I think you could say yes because if you check the migrants who are the most likely suspects of crime, the proportion of the—I mean, it is called overrisk. An overrisk is a term—it indicates the risk of any person on the street being the suspect of a crime. And when it comes to people from the Middle East, the overrisk is about three, generally speaking. So, the overrisk means that the person from the Middle East—and many of these people are regrettably Muslims—the risk that this person has committed a crime is about roughly three times higher than for a Swede. So, clearly, you could say that there is a link. So, if you were to say that crime among migrants has to do with culture, I think it is fair to say that association has to be made. But in Sweden—what people are talking about in Sweden is something different, namely socioeconomic factors, if you know what those are.

  Socioeconomic factors mean that the causes behind crime and rape and everything are marginalization, exclusion, unemployment and financial issues that are linked to our country and, notably, something we are to blame for, which is something completely different as if you would talk about culture, which is something that people bring when they come to Sweden. And so, the socioeconomic explanation, so to speak, has been completely dominant among left-wingers and among Social Democrats in Sweden for decades. They have been repeating the idea of socioeconomic factors as the main cause behind crime among migrants. And they have repeated that like parrots—with the persistence of parrots. They have kept repeating: “Culture has nothing to do with it” over and over again. So, that’s what they’ve been saying. And then, other critics and I, we have asked them: “Okay, but if socioeconomic factors are the reason behind crime among migrants then, how do you explain the fact that migrants from, say, Vietnam or Thailand, have a much, much lesser propensity for crime than migrants from other parts of the world, if you know what I mean?”

  If the socioeconomic factors have to do with marginalization then, how come marginalized people who come from other cultures, such as Thailand and, basically, the Far East—Thailand, Vietnam, etc.—how come these people are actually underrepresented in crime? They are less likely to commit a crime than Swedes! So, the socioeconomic factors do not give a proper explanation for that because you can clearly say that there are people who come from much worse circumstances, actually, than some people from the Middle East. And even so, these people who come from much worse circumstances—for instance, the Vietnamese, just to give a case in point—they are much less prone to committing violence than other migrants. So, my point here is that the socioeconomic explanation doesn’t quite hold water, which leads to my suggesting—and other people suggesting—that there has to be another explanation, which is cultural. Which is for instance, how you see women. For instance, how you see the state. For instance, whether you have any respect for the state, or whether you’d rather live in clan based societies. All of these things. And, again, I’m not criticizing individuals, but if you turn a blind eye to cultural differences, you will end up with this very appealing, sweet, self-critical left-wing explanation, saying that everything has to do with socioeconomic factors. And people walk about—politicians, members of the media and academics, they walk about repeating these things—this particular explanation—without realizing that it doesn’t quite explain huge differences in criminal propensity between groups of migrants from various regions of the world. So, I think that’s an important point to make.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: To what extent is Sweden losing its culture—compared with those other Western countries prey to Islamization? How does the Church of Sweden react to the Islamic presence?

  Göran Adamson: I think the interesting thing with Sweden is that we—I say it in my new book: it has to do with a kind of masochistic attitude. And the masochistic attitude is an interesting combination between—it’s the fact that we are somehow enticed and we simply like to paint our own culture, our own religion and our own history, background, identity in rather dark colors, and we are happy to compare our own culture unfavorably to other cultures. And I think this is not only Sweden. This has been going on in Britain and in many other countries, maybe less in France. But you should mention that George Orwell wrote about this—and this is actually the basis of my new book—in an essay called Notes on Nationalism in 1945 where he talks about two concepts—and I’d like you to bring this up in the interview. One concept is the idea of negative nationalism, which is: you’re obsessed with your own culture, not in order to trace it, but in order to criticize it. The second one is transferred nationalism. It’s a kind of exported nationalism, you know what I mean? It’s the same sentimental, idealistic, romantic, self-eulogizing bullshit as a far right winger. But the only difference is geographic. It’s not done on behalf and for the benefit of your own country. It’s done for the benefit of Syria, it’s done for the benefit of Iraq or Somalia, or any other distant culture or country, of which you know next to nothing. And George Orwell says this—and this is something I’d like you to bring up. He says that I know—because he’s written about similar things, about the working class. He says, “I know enough about the working class not to idealize it.” If you know what I mean. So, you can turn this around and say that the thing that enables these kinds of left-wing, loony ideas, images, and fantasies about exotic cultures is the fact that the left knows very little—next to nothing—about these cultures because if they knew enough—like, I have lived, over the last 10, 12 years, in six, seven countries. I’m not an expert, but I know a little bit about these countries, like in Jordan, now. You would not idealize these countries the way the left-wing academics in Sweden are doing it or in Paris, possibly, and in London, because you’d know too much. And there’s another aspect, here. I think it’s very important. It relates to when people come to Sweden, for instance—if migrants come to Sweden. So, what’s happening? They are greeted by those who know very little about their own culture, who care very little about their own culture, and again, who are very happy to make unfavorable comparisons with other cultures. Almost like a pastime. Like saying, “Oh, you know, the way we treat homosexuals in Sweden… oh, you know, the way we treat women in Swede… oh, the way we treat migrants in Sweden, and structural racism” and all that kind of nonsense. This is not true. If you were to wake up one of these left-wing people in the middle of the night, they might admit, “I know this is not true, but it’s great fun.” And everyone else does the same. We have all these dinners and we just sit around and harass our own country, our own dance traditions, and we love it. And so my question is: if people come to Sweden, how are they supposed to respect Swedish culture if we don’t do it ourselves? I think that’s an important question. Because, in basically every other culture, every other country, people have a certain respect—even in dictatorships, they love their country, the tradition, etc. But in Sweden, we are not allowed to do that. And of course, how are other people supposed to find any kind of respect for Sweden if the Swedish Establishment has nothing but contempt for its own tradition and culture? I don’t understand. And there is an illogical and very bizarre thing also going on because if Sweden is such a bad place, then why is everyone coming here? Why is everyone who’s escaping trying to come to France, to Germany and especially to Sweden, if it’s such a bad country? No one is escaping from Sweden to Yemen. People are escaping from Yemen or from Somalia to Sweden. It’s as if we simply cannot accept the fact that we are fortunate and privileged because it goes against our own self-deception. This whole self-critical, self-harassing attitude is a perfect let-out, so to speak, for our country. It’s a perfect excuse and it’s a perfect way to avoid and evade the kind of shame of being privileged. One more thing. It is all made-up, you know. This self-critical attitude among scores of western elites can only occur in wealthy societies. It is an odd fruit among those who are troubled by the fact that they are privileged and fortunate. But why on earth be troubled by it? Why be ashamed by all those before us who made our country so successful? This is just head-spinningly grotesque.

  But to get back to Sweden losing its culture, I remember when I was teaching in Malmö many years ago, and there was a huge poster in one of the corridors, and the question on the big poster was: “What do you know about Ramadan?” And I was wondering, “I don’t know anything about Ramadan, and frankly, I’m not interested.” And then, in order to protest, I wrote in small letters: “What do you know about Yom Kippur?” in the corner of the big poster. And then, I had lunch. This is a good case in point. You should bring this up. And then, when I came back, I had a look at the poster again. But to my great surprise, my question was gone. And it wasn’t gone, nobody had erased it. I was completely sure that within an hour, somebody had seen my question and they had taken down the whole poster, replaced it with a different one, identical, and put it back on. So, that made me think about some of these forces behind the scenes going on in Sweden where I would say that foreign cultures and most prominently Islam are being pushed forward and promoted to the detriment of Swedish culture.

  And, of course, also to the detriment of, for instance, Jewish culture. Because if you tried to put up a poster informing about Jewish traditions like Yom Kippur or any other Jewish tradition, it would be taken down, it would be set on fire. So, you have this escalating self-harassment going on in Sweden and in many other cultures. Humility and self-criticism are fine, and to invite other cultures, that’s a good thing. But it is dangerous if all of these things become one-sided. If this means that other cultures, and Islam, most prominently among them, is allowed to be marketed and fostered, cherished while Swedish traditions are no longer seen as important, Christian traditions are no longer seen as important–because what will happen—then, you will see the slow, gradual shift of focus from Swedish traditions. All of these things people actually escape to. That’s the reason why they come to Sweden, and gradually, these ideas–I’m not saying these things will happen within the next five years, but there will be a slow shift of attention towards values, traditions and customs that might not have proven to be so successful throughout the years. You could take another case in point: the big community center a few blocks from Ground Zero in New York. There was a Muslim community center, but it was on for a few years and then, I don’t know what happened to it. And then, people said, “We don’t know if this is the right spot for a Muslim community center, just around the corner from Ground Zero where almost 4,000 people perished.” But then, again, you could say that this might not be a bad idea for cross-religious tolerance. But then, you need to think of the prospects for any church to be created and inaugurated in a Muslim country, in a Muslim culture. There are slim chances you could have a church, for instance, in many Muslim countries. They are not allowed. So, this is one-sided tolerance where justified self-criticism is replaced by self-annihilation. An idea fostered from above by the political left-wing elites whereby Western cultures, Western traditions, Western ideas are being dismissed for the benefit of some kind of multicultural veneration and idealization of anything exotic. And the more exotic, the better. And it seems as if the most exotic culture and religion has a name these days. And the name is Islam. And you should ask yourself–Douglas Murray, he asked this question: “What’s so great about Islam?” Ask yourself that question. This is an empirical question. And check. Ask yourself why. What is the benefit? Because there has to be some hidden scheme behind all of these tendencies, not only in Sweden, but in many other countries, also France. But I think France is somehow changing now with Macron’s speech and the decapitation of the teacher, etc. I mean, these are horrendous events, and things are likely to change. To sum it up, I think this kind of self-humiliating attitude only exists among a very thin layer of our societies: within the elites. Among the people, if you ask anybody living in a small town in Sweden if they are part of this self-harassing, self-hating agenda, of course not! They like Sweden. They like their country. They like their traditions. They celebrate Christmas and all of these things. So, what we’re witnessing is that there is a tiny elite with a huge impact in the media, in science, in the universities and in politics. And this also connects to another important aspect, namely the tension between the people and the elites. And this is increasing, this is intensifying all the time, and it doesn’t look good. If you would say that society rests on a close sense of solidarity between classes, then, in the West, we have a problem. Brexit is a problem. Trump is a huge problem from this point of view of solidarity between classes. Because there are clear tendencies of a political polarization. And the political polarization, I would say, is mostly polarization between classes.

  The church in Sweden, now that’s a case in point. There’s this fantastic book. And you know what you should try to do? You should try to have this book translated into French and English. It’s called The Art of Surviving the Swedish Church. It was written by a close friend of mine: Helena Edlund. She is a priest in Sweden. You should write about this. You should actually bring this up. Please, mention this in your article. The story is this: when she studied to become a priest, she was warned—people warned her about the so-called “Dark Coats.” Well, people who were labeled the Dark Coats, people who were supposed to be almost like Darth Vader: these were priest students who would be dangerously conservative. They would be terrifyingly religious. They’d be against homosexuals. They would be like monsters. But after a few weeks, she realized that she was one of them. She was a Dark Coat, too. She had these views herself. She had a belief in religion. She thought that reading the Bible was a good thing because when she was studying, the teachers kept saying, ‘Well, you don’t need to study that, it is just the Bible. Forget about the sacraments! Ignore all that! You can study other books instead.” And all of these religious traditions were seen as unimportant by the people in charge of the Swedish church. So, she wrote a book about this called The Art of Surviving the Swedish Church. And she, for being a religious person, she has been harassed, humiliated to an extent you would not believe could happen in the Western community. Her book came out a few years ago. And this book is a shocking example of what happens when the church is being kidnapped by left-wingers. And you should mention this. And so, her book is a very interesting case in point of what Rudi Dutschke, the German left-winger said, he said what the Left needs to do is to “march through the institutions.” You know what that means, to march through the institutions? So, this is what the Left has been doing in Sweden. Institution after institution: universities, the media, the entire educational sector from kindergarten all the way up, and in the Swedish Defense, we are promoting transsexual soldiers, and we have drafting campaigns for our army asking things like: “Suppose I came out as a gay while I’m out fighting for my country? » I mean, are these questions interesting? This is the rhetoric. And also, most importantly, the Left has been marching through the church, the Swedish Church. So, the Swedish Church is now hijacked by left-wingers and the archbishop in Sweden, she is famous for ignoring Swedish religious traditions. She’s much more keen on other more exotic religious traditions. And you might understand there is a particular religion she’s very, very keen on. This is Islam, because it’s connected to the whole idea of multiculturalism and the multicultural idealization of everything exotic. So, even if you go to the Swedish Church where you think you might find some—what do you call it?—refuge from the mayhem of political correctness, you end up from the ashes into the fire. And now, there is an increasing number—it’s been going on for many years—of people who are leaving the Swedish Church. They leave the Swedish church not because they are not religious, but because they are religious. They leave the Swedish Church because they have faith in God and they think that Christian traditions are important. And if you think that Christian traditions are important, you tend to stop paying your membership. You tend to send in an application saying, “I want to stop paying, I want to leave the Swedish Church and buy a few books per year instead.” So, when it comes to religious convictions, the Swedish Church is not what it looks like. I love churches, but I also left the Swedish Church a few months ago for precisely this reason. But you should actually mention the book. It’s called The Art of Surviving the Swedish Church. It’s a fantastic book. And if this book were available in English, it would have an impact. It’s a shocking witness to the state of Sweden.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A common left-wing criticism against multiculturalism says that the capitalist class uses immigration to place at its disposal a large, cheap workforce—and the occasioned ethnic struggle to divert the indigenous workers from the class struggle. Do you share such line of criticism?

  Göran Adamson: Well, to some extent, I do. And I’ve written about it, myself, in my previous book—The Trojan Horse – A Leftist Criticism of Multiculturalism in the West. I have a discussion about it, saying that this is a classic left-wing criticism, that instead of uniting—instead of being able to unite against the globalizing elites—the elites are manufacturing these silly, whimsy wars between the lower classes, between workers, Swedish workers versus Muslims, and Swedish workers versus migrants, whatever. To some extent this is true. And clearly, you could say that this whole focus on LGBTQ, sexual identities etc. sounds very much to me like not only sidetracking, but also an attempt to confuse, engage people into playing games or engage in futile, silly unimportant battles while there are much more important battles to be fought. For instance, or actually most prominently, the battle against globalization, neoliberalism and the dismantling of national borders, I think that is clearly the most important battle to fight. And so, I think there is a class issue here, which is important. Then again, of course, you need to realize that even if you were to somehow foster the lower classes’ unity against the exploitation by the European Union, the neoliberal elites and all those international organizations, etc., you would clearly bang your head against the wall of cultural differences because, simply, even though both are poor and in need of assistance to be aided into a better life, the Swedish worker and an unemployed person from the Turkish countryside might have—save for the fact that they are both low-income—very, very little in common. It is sometimes easy—if you’re faced with the whole amount of cultural agenda, you are really tempted to just shout that this is all bogus and this is actually a class issue. But then again, this is also often taken too far. Because if you do that, if you’re a Marxist and you only talk about class identities and the need to fight against the globalizing elites, then, you simply forget the fact that there are cultural differences between people. And if you would like to unite the Swedish worker with an elderly illiterate woman from the Turkish countryside, or a man from Somalia, go ahead.

  Then, you should also mention a little bit my attitude towards the idea of islamophobia. I think the entire idea of islamophobia is ridiculous. I think that if you use the words islamophobia and islamophobic, you are playing a sordid partisan game because nobody would be called liberalophobic if they criticized liberalism. So, there is only one religion, there’s only one structure out there where you can use this: it’s Islam. If you’re critical towards Islam, you’re seen as phobic in some way, which is a very strange idea, hugely strange idea that shouldn’t be used. And you could actually say that to people who are likely to suffer the most from this kind of on-the-surface tolerant idea are not people in the West because we try to go by as good as we can and have learned to handle criticism. But it is the people in the Muslim community because they are somehow seen as so childish, so fragile and so helpless that they cannot stand any solid, open, rational, reason-based discussion about certain shortcomings within Islam. So, under the surface, it’s an absolutely amazingly arrogant attitude towards an entire religion. The idea of islamophobia rests under the surface on arrogance against Muslims. And also, the funny thing is that people who use islamophobia, they, of course, can capitalize on this. They can use it. They use it, and then, they engage in one project or another where they are often fabricating problems, exclusions, marginalization, and suddenly our academics, social workers and politicians are sitting with a handful of nicely marginalized groups of migrants—helpless and uneducated to be used and exploited as tools for our own careers, and our quest for moral haughtiness, under the pretense of tolerance and anti-racism. It is all a rather fearful sight. This is how I see it.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Over the course of human history, only the Western man has come to morally condemn xenophobia and scientific, political racism—for the benefit of the “open society.” All other peoples on the face of the earth are keeping on praising racial pride and distance with respect to the foreigner. What’s more, Chinese or Japanese scientists are notoriously more open to discussions on racial inequalities in intelligence, etc., than are Western scientists. As a sociologist, how do you make sense of that cultural originality of contemporary Westerners?

  Göran Adamson: That’s a very good question. I don’t know. I have a friend. He wrote a book years ago. It’s called Multiculturalism: Some Inconvenient Truth. Rumy Hasan is his name. Razor-sharp, fantastic. And he’s so good, he will probably never be professor. Anyway, he has a concept called the “Western post-colonial sense of guilt.” We had colonialism, and colonialism provides us forever with a wonderful excuse to go about attacking ourselves. I mean, Hitler and all the rest. We can attack ourselves as much as we please because it gives us this thrilling idea of self-hatred, which is so dominant among the educated classes, among the intellectual middle-class in Sweden, today. You wouldn’t believe it. And also, in many other countries. And I don’t know, because if we talk about—I mean in Sweden, there are courses in post-colonial studies. I mean, studies in what? Sweden was never a colonial power in the first place. It’s like you can have a course about Swedes murdering people from other cultures. And then, you say, “Well, we never murdered people from other cultures. We never took slaves.” And then, they would say, “Well, maybe, but stop talking about that. It’s such a nice thing to have a course harassing your own country.” But you’re asking about what the root of it is. If you think about it today, I think you can say the root somehow lies in the particular, peculiar Western interest in lack of reflection. And it’s like an ever-present desire among intellectuals to idealize people below, as it were, oneself, be it workers or migrants, or even kids. And maybe, I can finish off by—I had a glimpse of insight this morning because my youngest daughter, she’s nine years old. She’s not a toddler, she’s nine years old. And she tends to leave a mess all over the place. For instance, she was sitting, shelling an egg. And then, I saw the eggshells lying there. And then, I thought, “That’s quite wonderful” because it was real, it wasn’t intellectual, just a pile of eggshells. And I picked them up and felt some very primitive pleasure in doing it. And then, I thought, “Well, this is the problem because as an intellectual, I long for precisely this: some kind of authenticity.” And authenticity precludes intellectual reflection, if you know what I mean. And this authenticity, you may find it on a table among the eggshells of your little child, or you can find it among workers who don’t reflect all the time. Or you can find it among migrants. It’s the kind of desire, aspiration, longing for what you are not. It’s a longing for a lack of thought. It’s a longing, it’s an anti-intellectual endeavor. And this endeavor is not only strong among people who have read Friedrich Nietzsche, it’s strong among everybody. If you’re an intellectual in Europe, you like this, you like the lack of—you basically tend to appreciate what you are not. I think this is part of it. And then, you see people walking about, acting like migrants. They are not feminists. And then, Swedish women, they tend to love it because they see authentic men. They see authentic guys. And these authentic guys, they might be dangerous. They might be angry. They might possibly be rapists. I have no idea. But these Swedish women, they think, “We don’t give a damn because we think there is something genuine about these guys.” They are Swedish feminists. Can I give you a fine example of this? You should bring this up, put this in. A friend of mine was working for Sida, which is the Swedish Ministry of Global Aid. These two ladies who’d just come back from Afghanistan, gave a presentation. And then, Jens, my friend, he noticed that they were smiling all the time and almost bursting out laughing. Eventually, one of them apologized. And they showed pictures of some Talibans and said: “You know, these Talibans, with their beards and their Kalashnikovs, they are so manly!” Did you hear that? And then, my friend said, “Well, they might be manly on a primitive level, but if they ever got their hands on you, they might rape you. Or kill you. Those are not nice guys like your Swedish husband.” But when they go home from work, they might just start harassing their nice, feminine husband who might actually be a better guy—better man—than the Talibans in Afghanistan. But here you go: you have this kind of intellectual middle-class women in Sweden idealizing everything exotic to the extent they would even idealize the man who might kill them or rape them, and who certainly would not accept this woman walking about not covered. But this also brings us back to what I was talking about at the beginning of our discussion, namely that you have these politically correct left-wing intellectuals who idealize exotic cultures. And the reason why they can idealize exotic cultures is that they know next to nothing about them. This is why they can go on doing this.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In your article “Was Nazism anti-sex? – On left-wing fantasies and sex as the dark matter of politics,” you challenged the view that Nazism was wholly conservative on sexual freedom. Do you want to add something about left-wingers’ confusion on the matter?

  Göran Adamson: The Left seem to think that because they have reached the conclusion that National Socialism is the worst thing on Earth, all of its traits must also be equally repulsive, including the Nazis’ approach to sex. So, since Nazism is such a terrible idea, they must also be strongly opposed to sexual promiscuity. They must also be anti-sex. But judging from my own research, it seems that the Nazis, in terms of sex, at least in terms of sex among ordinary Germans, were basically looking at it as business as usual. There was nothing special about it. But what the Left has been doing ever since the end of World War II has been to buy into this idea of National Socialism as anti-sex. And if National Socialism is anti-sex, then sexual promiscuity and basically fucking around with everybody is an emancipatory anti-Nazi endeavor. So, if you check out the left-wingers, the 1968ers and people like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, they were basically thinking that their sexual promiscuity, collectivist living and all of that anti-authoritarian attitude generally was an anti-Nazi attitude. And I think you could basically say that the 1968ers and the left-wingers at the time and their huge focus on sexual promiscuity and sleeping around with everybody, to a great extent had its origin in a misconceived approach, misconceived understanding of sex during the epoch of the Nazi regime, namely believing that the Nazis were sex hostile. And if you were a good left-winger, you would be pro-sex. You would be promiscuous like mad, and you would just make kids left, right and center. And there is this famous dictum. It says: “Make love, not war,” as if the act of sex itself would be an act of peace, as if the act of sex would be an antiracist, anti-nazi antiwar, peaceful activity. I think this entire idea rests on a misunderstanding. If you study the sources—if you study the material, the empirical evidence, there is very little evidence proving that the Nazis were antisex. You can just check it out. There were condoms lying all over when they had their party rallies. There’s nothing antisex about that. So, again, the Left invents enemies, and then, they run like sheep in the other direction. And then, you have the entire anti-authoritarian movement, and all of these huge implications for the educational sector in the West. There are huge, extremely tragic implications for the education sector in the West. And this rests to a very great extent on the misconceived ideas of sexuality under National Socialism. That’s it.

See: Göran Adamson, Masochistic Nationalism – Multicultural Self-Hatred and the Infatuation with the Exotic (Routledge, March 2021)

That conversation was initially published in an abridged version by Gatestone Institute, in June 2021

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

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M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American Islamic forum for Democracy. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander. He is a former Vice-Chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) appointed by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from 2012-2016. He is a physician in private practice specializing in internal medicine, primary care, and medical ethics in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Jasser and his wife Gada and their three children live in Scottsdale, Arizona. You can find him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser

Canlorbe: Dear Dr Jasser, thank you for joining me. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the first two Muslim women to serve in American Congress. Do you sense they are promoting an enlightened, tolerant version of Islam? Are they representative of the mentality of the majority of Muslims in America?

Jasser: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are simply byproducts of the Islamist farm teams that recruited them and trained them in the art of Islamist ideology and dissimulation. Those farm teams include the alphabet soup of Islamist organizations (‘Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups’) that exist in the United States including but not limited to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) for example. Whether future politicians all the way up to Congress, media pundits, or the many demagogic imams, they all rise up from within the Islamist populist movement in the United States and the West telling insular Islamist communities what they want to hear while claiming to speak for all Muslims.  

Omar and Tlaib rose up in Democratic politics because they represent decades of cooperation and inter-connectivity between the Islamist movements here the West, if not globally, along with the far left’s progressivism. In 2011, I and other Muslim reform leaders were asked by various members of Congress to testify on the connection of the non-violent ideologies of Islamism to the radicalization process for militant Islamists. Since then, we have testified many more times on the Hill to the compromising influence of global Islamist ideologies and domestic Islam is organizations to our national security. The American Islamist groups worked in a coordinated fashion to attack me, the organization I represent, and the other Muslims in our Muslim Reform Movement each time we testified to Congress—their attempts at takfirism (declaring us not to be ‘real’ Muslims) were often less than subtle and typically disgusting. The Islamist groups and their domestic Islamist platform was piggybacked onto the social media popularity of various far left firebrands. They repeatedly attempted to smear us and never addressed the issues or ideas that we represented in our testimony. It is always beyond revealing how fearful Islamists are of actually addressing the connection between the separatism of their non-violent ‘political Islam’ (Islamism) and violent political Islam.

This is the classic method of Islamists—they tag onto identity movements and transform the belief in the ideology of the faith of Islam into an identity racial group which it is not. This stifles any real diversity of ideas and promotes a culture where the community is perceived to be a racial type monolith. Thus anyone who speaks out becomes a “uncle Tom” and against the tribe.

I believe there is nothing that better exemplifies and demonstrates the potent nature of the alliance between the far left and the Islamists (also known as the Red-Green alliance) than the so-called ‘squad’ and the combination of Congresswoman Omar, Tlaib and Cong. Ocazio-Cortez (D-NY) and Pressley (D-MA). In 2020, we saw the Islamist identity politics fit right in to the Black Lives Matter Movement and it’s racialization of every issue in its airspace. It is quite a cooperation to behold, even though ultimately the Islamists or theocrats in actuality agree with very little of the ideas of the far left for example when it comes to implementation of their draconian interpretations of ‘shariah law’.

The bottom line is that the template of the alliance between the far left extremists and Islamists is embodied in the relationship we see between AOC and her following and the Islamist members of Congress and their following.

To your question, and in pretty much every way, these two members of congress represent the current leading edge of political Islam in the West and its inherent collectivism and identity politics. They represent the stifling of dissent and dissidents against Islamism in otherwise diverse communities. They represent the empowerment of domestic and global Islamist supremacists and their Islamic nation-state ideologies over the exceptionalism of Americanism and of secular liberal democracy. Sure. They would ultimately deny this, and certainly there are some clear differences between Omar and Tlaib. For example, Omar‘s foreign policy is clearly proven over and over that she formulates her positions looking first for the interest and through the lens of the global political Islamist populist movement and then all else follows. She spins it to her benefit in a deceptively American context, yet you can see in her unwavering support of Turkey’s Erdogan, Qatar, various permutations of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and even Iran that her affinity for Islamists is something else! As a naval officer, there is nothing I found more offensive than her fabricated statements right before she was elected that somehow Americans killed thousands in Somalia, more than the terrorists we were fighting, implying that those of us who served in “Operation Restore Hope” were terrorists.

Canlorbe: You make no mystery of your Syrian origins. How do you assess Bachar al-Assad’s policy? Do you believe Donald Trump had the right attitude towards Bachar when, in April 2017, he decided a missile strike in response to the use of chemical attack?

Jasser: Bashar Assad’s policies are in line with the Syrian Ba’ath party fascism of over 50 years. The Syrian revolution which begun in 2011 needs to be understood in the context of the methods with which the ruling party wields its power. The Syrian Ba’ath Party is an Arab nationalist socialist party (akin to an Arab Nazism) which seized power by military coup in 1963. The Alawite (a Shi’a heterodox offshoot) sectarian faction of Ba’ath Party loyalists then took power in another bloody coup in February 1966. After the Alawite coup of 1966, the fascist Ba’ath transformed its predominantly supremacist political platform to incorporate a preference for Alawite religious sectarianism. Members of Sunni Muslim leadership were purged from the military. The entire leadership became comprised of Alawite Ba’athist faithful. Sunni, Christian, Druze, and Ismaili influence was all but eliminated. Non-Alawite officers who were ousted reported that in the late 1960s and early ‘70s Syria was on the verge of a sectarian civil war. This condition was often difficult to ascertain for blind analysts since like many Arab tyrants Hafez Assad ruled in a predominantly secular fashion rather than theocratic. Now this began to shift as the son, Bashar moved Syria into the complete orbit of Iran and essentially became a client-state of Iran as well as Russia.

But, in 1970, Hafez al-Assad took the reins from his fellow Alawites in another coup. Assad, in line with the totalitarian doctrine of the Ba’athist Party, ruled Syria with an iron fist for 30 years. Assad ended the Ba’ath Alawite in-fighting and the regime cleansed any non-Alawites in its midst, obliterating any Sunni protestations within or outside the party. To quell religious sectarian unrest, Assad placed a few party loyalists who were Sunni, Christian, and Druze in mid-level and a few higher levels of political, but not military, leadership, though most knew them to be window dressing and sympathizers. The Syria of Hafez Assad was much like the Iraq of Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, described by a pseudonymous expatriate as “A Republic of Fear”: “a regime of totalitarian rule, institutionalized violence, universal fear, and unchecked personal dictatorship.” Many of our Syrian families, after suffering for years in and out of prison, muzzled in every form of expression left for American freedom after realizing that a revolution to topple one of the world’s most ruthless military tyrannies would likely never materialize in their lifetimes.

  The Assad regime paralyzed the humanity of 22 million Syrians for two generations using incalculably cruel methods. Brothers, sisters, families reported on one another to Syrian intelligence (Mukhabarat); many vanished, never to be seen again; and anyone who dared dissent from the ruling party was systematically tortured and made an example with frequent collective punishment. By the twenty-first century, there would come to be more Syrians living outside Syria than inside, and some analyses claim that one in nine expatriates living abroad provided steady information to the Assad regime on expatriate Syrian activities in order to spare family. The Syrian Human Rights Committee has chronicled many of the atrocities committed in the past 45 years by the Assad regime: the Hama Massacres of 1963, 1982, and again in 2011, Tadmur, and the countless prisoners of conscience systematically snuffed out by the regime.

It is upon this background that the Syrian revolution commenced in March 2011 as part of the greater regional Arab awakening. The Assad regime calculated that it would be able to slow walk a persistent genocidal cleansing operation against the Syrian people who are part of the revolution. While the first year of the revolution showed significant diversity with a proportional representation from Sunni, Alawaite, Druze, Christian and others involved marching in the streets, Assad did as his party always did, driving internal sectarian divisions to rip apart the country leaving his regime alone. He was sustained with heavy foreign sustenance from Russia and Iran in military, financial, and human assets. The Sunni population eventually was significantly radicalized with ISIS arising in 2013 in Syria and Iraq due to a perfect storm of Assad’s radicalization of Sunnis, their ideological influence from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as well as Iraq’s descension into anarchy. The growth of ISIS provided the Assad regime a convenient cover for continued military genocidal operations with the use of chemical weapons against the majority of the population who were unarmed and had naively thought the world would put enough pressure on Assad if they saw it on Youtube to bring it to an end. Sadly, Russia and Iran were likely the primary reason Assad urvived and the civil war did not evolve organically. The UN remained feckless as Russia and Iran consolidated Assad’s grip on Syria’s humanity systematically exterminating over 600,000 people and displacing 10,000,000 of Syria’s 22,000,000.

This is not to say that the West or anyone should have intervened in any way close to what happened in Iraq. What use is the UN, however, if ruthless tyrants can use chemical weapons and eradicate swaths of their own population with no repercussions. A Bosnia type response akin to President Clinton’s and the UN’s response to Serbia’s crimes in 1995. President Obama however did not just avoid military intervention but his administration essentially actively supported the Assad regime at the altar of their “nuclear deal” with the Islamic Republic of Iran and empowerment of The Iranian Republican Guard Corps and it’s Masters in Tehran. Their hundreds of billions of dollars handed to the theocrats as well as their insurance of security gave them a green light to spread terror into Syria along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group Hizballah.

President Trump’s administration’s response to the Assad’s repeated use of chemical weapons in April 2018, while minimal in the scheme of what had happened in Syria to that point, did send a message that reverberated within the Assad regime, not to mention Russia and Iran, that red lines do mean something for this administration. It did appear to have some deterrent effect as limited as it was.

Canlorbe: At Trump’s request, Saudi Arabia, but also the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (who have just signed the Abraham Accords), promised to make peace with Israel. They also promised to stop financing, hoisting terrorist organizations. Do you believe those regimes can be trusted? How will they behave under Biden’s presidency?

Jasser: In Reagan’s words, “trust but verify”. But first, if I can reflect on the failed “Arab Awakening”? While it was not a Spring, except for Tunisia where a culture of democracy and some liberalism is actually beginning to take hold, a complete reset in the Arab world against tyranny, was certainly very appealing to those of us from families that have been fighting against these dictators, autocratic monarchs, and otherwise Islamist theocrats for now over two generations. But now after a decade of failed revolutions, there must be a better path forward? Somewhere between the 20th century’s ossified tyrannies and the chaos after 2011, must be a way forward? Some may appropriately simply say that no real democracies evolved quickly after centuries of tyranny and in fact often needed multiple revolutions before taking hold. Perhaps there can be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of reform and liberalization?

The challenge as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point of fiction which has been plan ‘A’ for the tyrants across the Middle East since WWII as they lied to the West about reforms in order to placate each new administration with a 5 or 10 year plan while transitions in power in the West along with our societal ADD gave them a pass. Remember the changes in 2011 created vacuums facilitating the re-emergence of tyranny and radical Islamists, but sometimes, like treating cancer, the patient has to get much more ill first before the dawn and return of health.

Essentially, a model of reform that I see possible, perhaps remotely, but possible, for liberalism and freedom may be an evolution in a brisk pace towards constitutional monarchies (as much as I disdain genetic supremacism), for example, that build civil society institutions that begin to modernize Islamic thought, end the concept of an Islamic state and its jihad, and instead look at their state and citizens through the prism of universal human rights. What we’ve been seeing in the UAE does frankly give some hope as does Bahrain, Sudan, and more to come. I so far have less optimism for Saudi Arabia relinquishing the dominance of the ideas of salafi-jihadism and its draconian interpretation of Islam even as the Saudis openly condemn and declare war on ‘political Islam’. Their track record is abysmal. But as we see them outlaw child marriage and make other changes, the principle of “trust but verify” may be appropriate to push them forward?

I am sure this is likely confusing to many non-Muslims, if we try to say, that well the Saudis are now anti-Islamist despite decades of supporting Muslim Brotherhood groups across the planet? And how can anyone blame them? However, please understand that the concept of an Islamic Republic, with an Islamic flag and an Islamic jurisprudence (sharia) in which the Qur’an is the source, not just a source of law, is in fact certainly still a form of political Islam, but rather just more of a top-down, corporate, theocracy no matter which way you cut it–while the Islamist populist movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) are bottom-up grass roots (viral) theocracies founded in populist sharia ideologies. Regardless, of whether it’s a top-down corporate approach or a grassroots bottom-up one, if the state’s raison d’etre is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than individual rights and the protection of minorities as in secular liberal democracies then it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.

We will have to watch very closely if there is an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel whether, it will also be followed by new interpretations from the pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca or mosques in Medina and across the country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.

For the first time I do also see peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia as not only a short-term possibility but even a long-term one. The combination of the populist Islamist movement threat to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its radical offshoots of ISIS and al Qaeda combined with the threat of Shia Islamism of Khomeinism has shaken the foundations of the Saudi state establishment and forced them to reckon with monsters they helped create (Muslim Brotherhood and their mosques) while also pushing them to forge more meaningful acknowledgement of the state of Israel and the West. Let us not also underestimate the role of the Trump administration and the Pompeo State Department in making this happen. This early reform however will only be real when it’s met with genuine reinterpretation of the antisemitic translations and interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith (Prophet’s sayings) that the government of Saudi Arabia pushes. Not until their imams begin to marginalize the bigotry (anti-Semitism) of so many of those interpretations and begin to present new interpretations will that change be in fact durable.

As for Qatar I’m strongly of the opinion that we should begin the process of closing our base there and finding other options for our regional security. Their state propaganda arm of Al Jazeera in addition to their relationship with Iran, Turkey and global Islamist movements of the Muslim Brotherhood has rendered them no longer an ally let alone hardly even a “frenemy”. This should not surprise anyone. The Al-Thani family went all in the Muslim Brotherhood since 1961 when they have safe haven to the spiritual guide of the Ikhwani movement– Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. He has since been a close partner of the royal family aligned ideologically and strategically with a global reach of at least tens of millions of Islamists. We have long followed and dissected Qaradawi’s English and Arabic work and there is little doubt that he and his followers are the central cancer of the Sunni Islamist global movement against the west and our way of life. The Qatari government’s fealty for Islamists has brought them economically and ideologically closer to Iran’s Khomeinists in addition to the Taliban. My position has always been that Qatar sees itself as the global center for Islamists ie. “The Caliphate”. Their extreme wealth makes for a toxic global brew for most of our Islamist enemies.

I see no inkling of reform or change on the programming of Al Jazeera or any of their imams or clerics. In fact, only months ago did we see systematic Holocaust denial on the programming of Al Jazeera as they attempted to quickly erase history of that. They are too deeply embedded at heart and economically with Iran, Turkey and other Islamist supremacists across the planet to have any hope at reform unless their regime falls. We can only pray.

There’s little doubt that the Biden administration will simply be Obama 3.0. It may even be worse than the Obama administration because it’s going to trip over itself in such an exaggerated fashion trying to whiplash the progress against Islamists domestically and abroad we have made since ’16 that the pendulum will swing back further than even the Obama administration was proud to advance in defense of Islamists.

We’re already seeing this in the Islamist that was selected to be a senior White House staffer for legislative affairs—Reema Dodin. She is notably not only historically an operative with Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups like CAIR in DC but she also stated as a student at UC-Berkley, “Palestinian suicide bombings are the last resort of a desperate people”. With her likes running interference with the Hill for the White House, we may see an even more radicalized policy in favor of not only Iranian appeasement but overt support of Islamist interests domestically and abroad. What is certain based on how Dodin while at Senator Durbin’s office with her allies at Muslim Advocates beat the drum of Muslim American victimization against our testimony on the Hill, it will only get worse.

As for Biden’s foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So the Pentagon is a branch of the State Department? If that’s not “leading from behind 3.0”, I don’t know what is.  Sources say he wants to “de-emphasize the military” and lift up diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that will signal a green light to actually usher in more war, not less. Peace through weakness doesn’t work against thugs like Khamanei and Assad across the planet. We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden’s apparent appeasement strategy. Now more than ever, our private work needs to push for anti-Islamist reformers against the likely ascendant Islamist threats.

Canlorbe: Putin is an ally to the mullahs and sits at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In Russia, Muslims are representing 10% of the total population (and Islam is the second most widely professed religion). Is the Russian regime a trustworthy ally in promoting enlightened Islam and fighting against terrorist, theo-political Islam?

Jasser: Oh my, is that a trick question? Just kidding. Domestically, as Michael Weiss pointed out in 2017, the Russians have long played a double game with radical Islamist terror, in fact helping fuel ISIS with recruits from Chechnya to give Assad cover and allow Russia to ship out the jihadists it creates. Regionally, Putin’s regime has empowered our greatest enemies—Iran’s terror regime from its IRGC to Hizballah, and Assad. Its state propaganda, RT, is finally listed under FARA and is an unwavering part of the Assad/Khameinist media arm—state sponsored media. They have worked with our nominal ally, Turkey (selling them missiles) and giving them the greenlight against our Kurdish allies in Syria. Part of their longtime interest in Syria is their only Mediterranean port and base at Tartus. Chechnya’s tyrant, Kadyrov portrays himself as a devout Muslim but he is a two-bit radical tyrant and Putin tool who has systematically radicalized his population while violating the human rights of every minority group from the gay community to dissidents.

As I discuss in my book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriots’ fight to Save his Faith” my father told me that our family’s deep seeded anti-communism and anti-Islamism is what drove them to become enamored with the West and learn about the exceptionalism of secular democracy and especially about Americanism. Russia’s Putin and its kleptocrats would never promote an enlightened anything, let alone defeat theocracy. They still have a state sponsored church and the other faiths whether within Christianity or outside have lesser to no rights. There’s a reason their entire economy is oil and produce no products of any kind competing in the free markets. The Putin regime is against individual creativity and battles of ideology. In order for reformists to emerge, we need a public platform of critical thinking and modern civil institutions that protect universal human rights.

Canlorbe: Both Maimonides and Averroes endeavored to conciliate religion and Hellenic philosophy (especially Aristotle). They believed the obeisance to God’s law was consistent with the philosophical, rational exegesis of the latter. How do you assess the legacy of Averroes in Islam with respect to that of Maimonides in Judaism?

Jasser: As a physician dedicated to treating the ill, your question resonates with me more than you would ever know. My chosen profession is as a doctor and it was the inspiration of clear broad-minded thinkers (and doctors) like Maimonides and Averroes who influenced so much of my idealism about medicine and medical ethics. Their confidence in weighing in on philosophy, theology, legalisms, and politics are an example of what I have always aspired to be and do in my own life even if their ideas are from almost 1000 years ago. Because it was not necessarily the specifics of their ideas, but the courage of their inquiry. Scholars have oft pointed out the strong resemblance between Maimonides’ “understanding of God’s manifestness in the order of nature” and Averroes’ “conception of God and providence which focuses heavily on God’s essential preservation of all species, and his role as the cause of being and unity in all hylomorphic substances.” Averroes, for example, saw God in every element of nature’s diversity. Averroes’s gift or legacy to Islamic thought was much like Maimonides, he took human feelings and sensations, like ‘heat’, ‘intellect’, ‘mind’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘creativity’ and used them to broaden our human understanding of God. To most Salafists, even the suggestion of imparting human-like attributes to God is blasphemy whether or not it is intended just to understand and relate better to our understanding of God. Giving philosophical descriptions of God using human metaphors and nature provided Averroes, like Maimonides, a flexibility of thought about God which in the right era of boundless human creativity and inquiry can become the foundation of real enlightenment and liberalism.

Similar to Maimonides, Averroes sought to bring to Islamic thought a “blending of God as pure unity and God as intellect” a very Hellenic thought process seen throughout Arabic discourse seen in, for example, the Theology of Aristotle.

Contrary to essentially every extremist or literalist movement in Islam today, Averroes’ legacy was about taking God’s unity (tawhid) and giving Muslims a way of looking at that unity, consistency, and omnipresence in a way that does not conflict and actually explains the infinite diversity of the human condition, our nature, and our laws. This is actually also the essence of our Muslim Reform Movement—an attempt to bring back such a deep understanding of diversity of thought and interpretations of Islamic law (shariah) in a way that allows us to live in harmony with modernity and secular liberal democracy through a separation of ‘history and religion’ or more allegory and less literalism. Averroes may not have explicitly gone so far as real liberalism. But then again there were no liberal democracies upon which to reflect for these thinkers at the time. But the foundations of his thought, similar to what Maimonides was to Judaism, gave metaphysical nuggets of what God is and what God is not, along with the infinite possibilities for human nature brought about by God. Averroes, like Maimonides, looked at scripture, the Qur’an for Averroes as allegory. This courage to go beyond literalism is part of his legacy and similarities to Maimonides.

Sadly, while both Maimonides and Averroes did their amazingly open-minded and deep work during the 12th century, both in Muslim majority nation states, Averroes’ legacy has so far been very difficult to find in the “Islamic world” if not lost to hundreds and hundreds of years of intellectual and philosophical stagnation and reactionary movements that ultimately dominated and decimated most free Islamic academic and civil institutions since his life. It is my hope and prayer that our work contribute not to what the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model of Islam based on infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights rather than the oppressive collective and the proverbial Islamic state.

That conversation was initially published by the Gatestone Institute, in March 2021

A conversation with Pierre Bergé, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Pierre Bergé, for The Postil Magazine

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Pierre Bergé—born on 14th November 1930 and deceased on 8th September 2017—was a French award-winning industrialist and patron. He co-founded the fashion label Yves Saint Laurent, and was a longtime business partner (and onetime life partner) of the eponymous designer.

  A supporter and personal friend of François Mitterrand, Bergé was currently described as a social liberal. Bergé participated in all the campaign rallies of François Mitterrand (except in 1981, when he did not vote for Mitterrand). Bergé later served as President of the Association of the Friends of Institut François-Mitterrand.

  A longtime fan and patron of opera, Mitterrand appointed Bergé president of Opéra Bastille on 31 August 1988. He retired from the post in 1994, becoming honorary president of the Paris National Opera. Bergé was also president of the Comité Jean Cocteau, and the exclusive owner of all the moral rights of all of Jean Cocteau’s works. In 2010, he bought a stake in Le Monde newspaper, along with investors Matthieu Pigasse and Xavier Niel.

  A supporter of gay rights, Bergé supported the association against AIDS, Act Up-Paris, and assumed ownership of the magazine Têtu. He was also one of the shareholders of Pink TV, before withdrawing. In 1994, he participated in the creation of the AIDS association Sidaction, and he became its president in 1996 until his death.   Bergé was finally the author of several essays devoted to Yves Saint Laurent, as well as to freedom and republican values. He published in 2010 a book, Lettres à Yves, which was translated into English with the title Yves Saint Laurent: A Moroccan Passion, in 2014.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you approve the decision of the international community, during the Paris conference on the Middle East, to condemn “the colonization of the Palestinian territories by Israel”?

  Pierre Bergé: I approve this decision. I am absolutely in favor of the State of Israel, but just as indisputably pro-Palestinian. I am extremely wary of Mr. Netanyahu; in fact, I do not trust him much more than Mr. Trump. I am extremely shocked that one can, while being from the Jewish people, the martyred people, the people of the Shoah, challenge territories to other peoples.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Donald Trump was described by gay journalist Milo Yiannopoulos as the most pro-gay candidate in the electoral history of the United States of America. Do you subscribe to this judgment? What is your view, in general, on the election of Donald Trump?

  Pierre Bergé: For the moment, it seems to me that the American President the most favorable to homosexual rights, and in general human rights, was none other than Barack Obama. My admiration for this man is immense and unwavering. I am waiting to see what Trump will do. With regard to election results, not only in America but around the world, I would say that people are tired of the commonly agreed assumptions and let themselves be tempted by new ideas. I fully understand that, although I do not approve their choices.

Having said that, I would also like to point out, without questioning the American institutions and the Electoral College system, that Hillary Clinton, a woman I do not greatly appreciate, was almost 3 million votes ahead of Donald Trump. One must be careful not to overestimate the enthusiasm of the American people for the man who will make the oath this week [week of Monday 16 January 2017]. Without necessarily incriminating the American electoral system, one can still deplore this gap between the choice of ballot boxes and the outcome finally imposed. This situation is not unique; it has many antecedents, and not just on the American soil. Bertrand Delanoë, in 2001, was also elected mayor of Paris while he was a minority in numerical terms. 

Grégoire Canlorbe: “A woman,” writes Yukio Mishima in Forbidden Colors, “is never as exhilarated with happiness as when she discovers desire in the eyes of a man.” As a fine connoisseur of the feminine soul, do you hold this remark as insightful?

Pierre Bergé: This Mishima’s quotation echoes what Yves Saint Laurent said about the beauty of a woman in love. “The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves.” Do not think I am bringing everything back to Saint Laurent, I am not so candid! But you will agree that the resemblance of his intuition with that of Mishima is striking. What Saint Laurent had in mind, with this statement, is that a woman does not need clothes to be happy, because the essential lies elsewhere.

You describe me as a fine connoisseur of the feminine soul. This may be true, but I nonetheless think I am more aware of the male soul. As to whether I agree with Mishima, it seems to me that he is somewhat reductive in his statement. I believe that it is every human being who is never so happy as when he discovers sexual attraction or admiration in the eyes of another human being, whether the latter is a man or a woman.

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon, among conservative circles, to deplore what they perceive as a pronounced disdain for the military and religious functions – the warrior and the priest – in post-1789 society, while “merchants,” i.e., entrepreneurs and capitalists, are excessively valued in the nation. Would you say that the captains of industry are precisely the warriors of the capitalist era, the samurai of modern times, by virtue of their conquering character, their sense of abnegation, and their competitive spirit?

Pierre Bergé: Georges Clémenceau said, of the French Revolution, it is to take “en bloc.” In other words, if one adheres to the values of the Revolution, one must also accept the bloodbaths that accompanied the promotion of the ideals of 1789; and what the Revolution has brought to the world is too great and too decisive for us to be entitled to deny it in the name of the atrocities committed during the Terror. I regret it obviously, but the Revolution is to be taken in its entirety, with its good and its bad sides.

Your question is interesting. Unfortunately, your idealist portrait of businessmen is far from reality. I am often taken aback when I hear a politician, such as those who present themselves during this campaign period, claiming to be concerned exclusively with the fate of France. The truth is that a politician cares, in the first place, for his own interests – and only secondly for France. But those you call captains of industry, for their part, have no ounce of patriotic consideration. They care so little about the interests of France that they do not hesitate to relocate their production sites or to settle in tax havens.

I may surprise you, but I am not admiring the business company. I remember talking about it with President Mitterrand, who had somewhat let himself be distracted at the end of his first seven-year term. “You would make a mistake,” I told him in essence, “if you thought the company was there to create jobs.” He was visibly intrigued by my remark. “In reality,” I continued, “the company is there to create profits; and the day it can make a profit without creating a job, it does it.” This is all the more true at the moment. Like the assembly line a century ago, the robotization is about to allow the companies to do without a considerable part of manpower; and this is what the company is there for.

The company is there to produce, sell, negotiate, and optimize; and all the rest, I tell you straight away, is bullshit. If you ask big business leaders, you will certainly hear them claiming great principles, such as, the fight against unemployment, the economic influence of France, or its leadership in technological innovation. No doubt they will agree that they are the samurai of modern times. But let them perpetuate the custom of seppuku, if they really want to walk in the footsteps of the samurai of old! I fear very much that you will not find many who have the courage to give themselves a “beautiful death,” or even to renounce some juicy profit, to do honor to France.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Feminist sociologists are generally inclined to denounce all kinds of voluntary female behavior, particularly with regard to sexual preferences or dress habits, on the grounds that these behaviors reflect “symbolic violence” from males. Yet the veil often escapes their warnings, and they even see in it a mark of feminine dignity and resistance to the diktats of male lust. How do you explain this apparent complacency on the part of feminists towards Islam?

Pierre Bergé: Your ascertainment surprises me. It seems to me that it is a minority of feminists, not the majority of them, who make this complacent speech vis-à-vis Islam. You do well, however, to draw attention to the possible straying of today’s feminism. Our society, imbued with gender theory, wants to make women and men equal. But equality is a dreadful word. Men and women are certainly equal before the law; they are not equal in anything else.

We evoked above the Revolution of 1789. As beautiful as the triptych on the pediment of the French Republic is, the choice of the term equality was a regrettable error. The word justice would have suited our motto “freedom, equality, fraternity” better. No human being, male or female, is equal to another, except that everyone has the right to freedom and to the pursuit of happiness. Men and women are certainly unequal; it does not follow that women are inferior to men in dignity and freedom; they are simply different.

My friend Louise de Vilmorin used to say, in essence, that if men and women were not there to perpetuate the human race, if they had no sexual attraction, a woman would walk next to a man like a rabbit next to a hat. Women and men belong to two different worlds. I have many female friends, whom I respect; and I spent my life defending women. But in wanting to make women absolutely equal to men, one ends up preaching total nonsense. The search for parity is one such nonsense. Hiring a woman on the pretext that she is a woman cancels the exercise of judgment on her objective skills, and prevents a sincere appreciation of her work and her talents.

That said, that women are rarely at the level of men in working life, and there are persistent inequalities in treatment. I will not dispute it. After centuries of female oppression by religion and the law, society is marked by old power struggles; and one cannot seriously expect the gap between men and women in business, and elsewhere, to be leveled overnight. There is no denying injustice. But denouncing this state of affairs is not an alibi to promote the egalitarian feminism on which I have just expressed myself.

As concerns, more particularly, the Islamic veil, there is undoubtedly an attempt to standardize the hijab, even the full veil, in our Western lands. I obviously denounce this trend, because I see the Islamic veil for what it is: a perfect instrument of legal and religious oppression, which is out of place in a lawful society. No coherent defender of the freedom and dignity of women can rejoice at the trivialization of this dress custom in public space and in homes.

The contemporary complacency with regard to the Islamic veil takes on a paradoxical allure, when we know to what extent the emancipatory ideals of feminism, indisputably incompatible with traditional Islam, have moreover conquered our era, not without some excesses which I have spoken of above. In your question, you do well to suggest this tension. But it is much less the feminist intellectuals and activists, rather the previously mentioned “merchants,” who advocate a spirit of misguided tolerance. I recently spoke in the media to denounce the “Islamic fashion” that several major clothing brands adopted.

When the sense of priorities is reversed to the point that the spirit of profit prevails over the values of the Republic, one can effectively claim that the City is corrupted by an excessive valuation of the market function. I told you that I do not admire, personally, the business company. I admire art and creation; that’s true. But I hate commerce and marketing. In addition, I have always felt that a fashion designer was there to embellish women, to encourage them on their path of freedom, and not to be the accomplice of misogynistic manners that are hostile to the liberal principles which are theoretically those of Westerners and, in particular, of the French since the Revolution.

Grégoire Canlorbe: “A very common error (…) consists in believing,” Konrad Lorenz tell us in his 1972 essay, Behind the Mirror, “that feelings of love and respect cannot be associated together (…) I have the absolute certainty to have never loved and respected a friend more deeply than the undisputed leader of our group of children of Altenberg, four years my elder (…) Even those of my age whom I would classify (…) as inferior to me, always had some something in themselves that impressed me and in what I felt them to be superior to me (…) I don’t think that one can truly love someone whom one looks down on, from all point of view.” In regard to your own experience, do you subscribe to this analysis of love?

Pierre Bergé: All those I have loved in my life were also people I admired. I endorse Konrad Lorenz’s wording: I do not believe either that one can truly love someone that one looks down on, from all points of view. It is true that one can have a very strong sexual attraction towards someone whom one despises. One can even get on remarkably well with him in the bedroom. But if one does not admire him, one may well be subject to his animal charm, sensitive to his dangerous side, but it will not be love – even if this means deluding oneself about the tenor of feelings that one experiences towards him.

I would add that one can love and admire someone who is self-destructing before one’s eyes. It happened to me; and it was with a heavy heart that I had to bring myself to leave Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s. Addiction is a disease just like cancer or depression. Would you stop admiring and cherishing someone because he has a tumor?

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to hear that a “deregulated” market economy necessarily leads to growing income inequalities which state intervention is fortunately able to correct. Opposed to this first approach is notably that which estimates that, whatever the economic system considered, communism or capitalism, the market economy left to its own devices or accompanied by a redistributive system, the state of affairs is such that 20% of the population holds 80% of the national income. Which of these two opinions do you prefer?

Pierre Bergé: The second option that you evoke seems to me to present what has actually happened so far. All economic systems have experienced a highly unequal distribution of wealth. I do not know whether one should see in it the manifestation of an eternal law of human affairs, inscribed in the natural order of things. But as a man of the Left, I would prefer, of course, that it be possible to correct this tenacious tendency for the majority of national income to be concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population. That said, I am no longer fifteen; and I am no longer under the spell of communist or Proudhonian ideals. I will not tell you, like a François Hollande, that finance is my “enemy.” But I keep being shocked, in the age of globalization, by the indecent distribution of wealth and the dubious practices of certain companies.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Which one, between Putin’s Russia, religiously Orthodox, and militant Islam, do you currently see as the greatest threat to the freedom of women and minorities?

Pierre Bergé: Both seem to me to be dangerous, beyond the shadow of a doubt; but the greatest danger assuredly comes from militant Islam. I am aware that the Orthodox Church is close to power and that the Patriarch of Moscow is making an authoritarian speech on social issues. Even though homosexuality was decriminalized in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR, the government expressly talks about fighting “homosexual propaganda,” in other words, the political and social demands by the LGBT community.

The fact remains that the terrorist acts which strike France and other countries in the world are concretely coming from the Muslim community. It is easy to notice that it is not the Orthodox who provoke a crash, besiege an embassy, assassinate journalists and caricaturists, take hostages in a supermarket, commit assaults in a performance hall, the street or a Christmas market, and enslave men and women.

Grégoire Canlorbe: A fashionable assertion is that Western societies have secularized to the point of giving rise to a spiritual void unprecedented in human history. In the opinion of Vilfredo Pareto, in his 1917 treatise The Mind and Society, the Christian religion has only given way to the democratic religion.

“The acts of worship of the Christian religion,” he writes, “have diminished among modern civilized peoples, but have been partially replaced by acts of the worship of socialist saints, humanitarian saints, and especially of the worship of the State and of the god People (…) The Catholic processions have almost disappeared, but have been replaced by ‘processions’ and by political and social ‘demonstrations’ (…) For many of those who deviate from the Christian religion, Christian enthusiasm has changed to ‘social,’ or ‘humanitarian,’ or ‘patriotic,’ or ‘nationalist’ enthusiasm; there is something for every taste.”

Do you subscribe to Vilfredo Pareto’s iconoclastic thesis, or to the common opinion that we have indeed come out of religion in the West?

Pierre Bergé: This analysis that you cite is perhaps iconoclastic, but it does not hold water. To begin with, it is wrong that the Christian religion is on the decline in the world. We mentioned earlier the Orthodoxy that is rising from the ashes. Furthermore, it is excessive to present democracy as a substitute for the Christian religion. In fact, democracy is simply not a religion. But it is quite true that men on the left regrettably tend to classify all Catholics as reactionary rightists.

I like to say that men on the left, to whom the Republic very much owes its existence, have emptied the churches to fill the museums. I totally agree with it. But we certainly have not replaced Catholic worship with socialist worship. It is foolishness to pretend that we would worship a “State god” or a “People god.” The state does have a significant weight in society; and the ambient discourse is indeed articulated around the values of assistantship, secularism and the nation. But none of this has ever taken on nor could have ever taken on a religious character.

I fail to see how Christian practices and beliefs would have diminished on the grounds that democratic institutions were gaining ground. They have certainly decreased, at least in France, but if they have done so, it is certainly not in the context of a competition with the values and customs of the Republic. The reason for this relative decline of Christianity, more particularly Catholicism, is to be found in the obsolete side of its beliefs and practices. After having been in the spotlight for two thousand years, not without the support of force, to the extent that the Church burned heretics, they are simply going out of fashion.

In the end, what has changed with the secular Republic is not that a new official cult has tried to supplant Catholic worship, but that religious affairs have been relegated to the private sphere. This was not the case before. Let us not forget that the Catholic Church has persecuted the Protestant community from which I come. Even if religion now belongs to the intimate sphere, and no longer to the political sphere, the religious beliefs of Catholic citizens have of course an impact on their electoral preferences and on their positions about a given subject in society or a given draft law.

As evidenced by a recent survey, relayed last week by an article in Le Monde, it is however a biased perception that every Catholic is opposed to marriage for all or to surrogacy. In reality, there are multiple scenarios among Catholic voters. A number of them are politically right-wing, when it comes to the economy, and yet sensitive to left-wing concerns about so-called social issues. I think, therefore, that we have to take a step back from the overly obvious prejudices that we leftwing men commonly share about Catholics.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add a few words?

Pierre Bergé: You did well to request this interview. Now I would like it if you tell me about yourself.

That conversation with Grégoire Canlorbe, which happened in January 2017, was initially published in French in Revue Arguments, in Mars 2017; then published in English in The Postil Magazine, in September 2020

A short conversation with Daniel Pipes, for Gatestone Institute

A short conversation with Daniel Pipes, for Gatestone Institute

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220px-Daniel_pipes_bw  Daniel Pipes is an American historian and president of the Middle East Forum. His writing focuses on Islamism, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy. His archive is at www.DanielPipes.org 

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you expect the George Floyd protests to leave, in the American collective memory, a mark comparable to the September 11 attacks and the Vietnam War?

  Daniel Pipes: The great question is: Will the current lurch to the left be temporary or permanent? I worry it is permanent because liberals are capitulating to progressives as never before. Will that trend continue or end? It is hard to forecast when very much in the moment.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Donald Trump’s foreign policy is often praised as dismissing nation-building in favor of short-term intervention, economic asphyxiation, and striking a deal with US enemies. How do you assess Trump’s approach? Do you subscribe to John Bolton’s criticism?

  Daniel Pipes: Trump came to office with minimal knowledge of the outside world, just impressions and emotions. He also lacked a philosophy or a network. The result has been haphazard. Bolton saw this from close-up and was understandably appalled. Fortunately, some of Trump’s instincts are solid, for example, as concerns China, Iran, Israel, and Venezuela, and he does not get intimidated by the Establishment consensus. So far, anyway, no catastrophe.

[Read more…] about A short conversation with Daniel Pipes, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Philippe Fabry, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Philippe Fabry, for The Postil Magazine

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Philippe Fabry  Philippe Fabry is a lawyer and a theorist of history. His approach, which he calls “historionomy,” endeavors to identify the cyclical patterns of history. He authored Rome, from Libertarianism to Socialism, A History of the Coming Century, and The Structure of History. His website is: https://www.historionomie.net/.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You do not hesitate to challenge the usual discourse (which liberals [libertarians, classical-liberals, anarcho-capitalists, free-marketists] do not avoid, even for the most conservative of them) claiming France to be an artificial construction from the building and unifying State: a political work whose plinth is no more geography than ethnicity or blood. Far from having formed differently from other European nations, France has, according to you, been built around an ethnic and territorial reality; and globally follows the same trajectory in its history. Could you come back to that subject?

  Philippe Fabry: Yes, it is indeed a common place in the commentary on the history of France to say that it is the State which made the Nation, while among our neighbors it would be the Nation which made the State. I can’t say if historians believe it, because it’s just not the kind of question they ask themselves these days, but it’s the kind of ready-made thinking that is prized by journalists and politicians who pride themselves on diagnosing “French trouble.” But in truth that dichotomy opposing France to the rest of Europe, if not the world, is fallacious, in two respects: first, all Nation-States are constituted according to a standard model (in reality two, but France is in the most frequent, I will come back to it), then the State does not have a more determining role there than the territorial and ethnic factors.

  There are two models of the appearance of Nation-States: the most common model, the most immediate, primary one, is that of the long-term gathering—around six centuries—of territories and people under one single state authority. The other model is the one that I would say “secondary” of the Nation-States born by secession, during an independence revolution: that is the case of Rome vis-à-vis the Etruscans, the separated United Provinces formerly Spanish possessions, the United States of America; those are formed when a population geographically and culturally too much distant from the state base of a “primary” Nation-State is under its control for various reasons.

  France belongs, like all major European States, to the first category. The model is as follows: in a populated territorial area, ethnically and linguistically relatively homogeneous, but where there is no State, either because none has ever emerged—for example Germania of the early Middle Ages—, or because it is a former imperial state which has withdrawn—that is the case of Gaul at the same period or of Great Britain after the ebb of the Danes in the X century—, the primitive regime is feudalism and therefore extreme political fragmentation. In the absence of a large-scale exogenous event, generally the invasion by an imperial power, a feudal lord more powerful than the others appears over time, who is logically the one who reigns over the economic lung of the territorial area. That economic lung, a fertile agricultural region, is very easily identified by looking at a relief map: it is a large plain, the largest in the territorial area: the Paris basin in France, the North German plain for Germany, the Guadalquivir plain for Spain, the London basin for Great Britain. The seigniorial power which can rely on this economic lung has a decisive advantage in resources and can extend over all the space which is naturally peripheral to it, that is to say both culturally close, and belonging to a geographically well-defined territorial area: the whole of Gaul for the Paris basin, including the Breton peninsula, the Massif Central and the smaller plains of Aquitaine and Languedoc; the entire island of Great Britain for the London basin, winning over Cornwall, the mountainous Wales and Scotland; all of southern Germany for the northern plain, including mountainous Bavaria. Of course, those centers of power do not stop at sharp boundaries, which for centuries engenders conflicts over the exact boundaries of the areas of influence. Those conflict zones are generally characterized by a hybrid character allowing them to be linked to several groups: an ethnic aspect could make Britain be disputed to France by England, language linked Alsace to Germany while the largest geographic proximity to the Paris basin made it lean towards France, and so on. It is rare that a border so clear separates two territorial areas that it is never challenged, but we can say that this was the case of the Pyrenees between France and Spain—although Roussillon, close to culture Catalan, did not become French until the XVII century.

  That dominant seigniorial power then builds the state, first by going beyond the feudal system by creating an assembly representative of the orders: urban bourgeoisie, nobility, clergy, to which the peasantry is added in the Nordic countries. That assembly allows the dominant seigniorial power to give itself a higher stature than that of the rest of the nobility and to embody the first national representation. That new paradigm leads to the construction of an administration exercising, more and more uniformly throughout the controlled territory, the regalian functions. The population gathered under the same authority gradually becomes a political community, becomes culturally uniform, and develops a national feeling. And it is when that national feeling is sufficiently present, and when happens an event—a lost war which discredits that regime which is called “administrative monarchy”—, that what I call a movement of national revolution occurs, which is the final stage in the constitution of a Nation-State by making the Nation the true holder of sovereignty, and therefore of the power of the State, through a parliamentary regime. That revolutionary movement lasts about forty years and goes through various systematic stages: collapse of the regime, radicalization of the revolutionary phenomenon, military dictatorship, partial restoration of the old regime, and final parliamentary change.

  So it’s always a bit the State that makes the Nation, but at the same time the Nation that arouses the State. The geographic expansion of the State is constrained by cultural, demographic, linguistic and obviously purely geographic factors, but its emergence and consolidation are themselves the product of an ethno-geographic reality. It is a kind of feedback loop, and it is rare that a State absolutely corresponds to its natural ethnico-geographical zone: the competition of large States creates disputed zones which are often resolved either through an arbitrary delimitation, or through fragmentation and the appearance of multi-ethnic, multicultural, plurilingual buffer States like Belgium or Switzerland—which may end up developing their own identity, certainly, but one more accidental.

  The determinism is not absolute and leaves the possibility of several combinations, but it is clear that it is the most “obvious” one which generally triumphs. Thus in France, two nations could have been born, because there are two basins: the Parisian and the Aquitaine. For a long time Bordeaux was the capital of that Aquitaine basin and Aquitaine dominated the country of Oc, while the country of Oïl depended more naturally on Paris. The distinction between the two countries could have endured, since each had a certain linguistic and cultural unity: the language of Oc against the language of Oïl, a country of written law against a country of customary law. But on the one hand the Parisian basin is much larger than the Bordeaux basin, and on the other hand the “natural” territorial area was rather on the scale of the whole of the former territory of Gaul, whose settlement base had besides remained the same as during Antiquity, the Great Migrations having not constituted a real demographic break. The Paris basin therefore succeeded in its vocation to dominate the whole which has given France.

  Another example: Germany saw the development of two centers capable of unifying the German nation: Austria and Prussia. Prussia controlled the plain of North Germany, and Austria dominated the plain of Pannonia (Hungary). That resulted into a division of the Germanic space between the two centers until the Great War, and ultimately the impossibility of keeping them lastingly unified after the failure of the Third Reich—even while the Germany of the seven electors appointed by the Golden Bull in 1356 covered all of those German-speaking territories.

  I think that the political debate would often gain if those invariants of the state and national construction are better known, because they say a lot about what can or cannot be a Nation-State, about the deleterious effects that can have on a Nation-State a constituted mass immigration, for example.

  And as for liberals [libertarians, from classical-liberals to anarcho-capitalists] there is a remark that I like to make to them, and that they generally take badly, it is that if the Nation-State is built in such a systematic way, it is because it is the most efficient product on the public security market, so that if we were to recreate an anarchic society, in the long term it would be towards the re-emergence of Nation-States that the political and social order would tend.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: While Greco-Roman paganism—on that point, in phase with Judaism—breaks with the veneration of motherly Nature, the pre-Indo-European gynecocratic spirit, the biblical conception of time as linear (and of cosmic and human history as endowed with a beginning, an end, and a progression) contrasts with the pagan motif of the eternal return of the same. You assert both your Catholic heritage and your cyclical conception of history. How is that duality conciliated within your intellectual life?

  Philippe Fabry: It always seemed natural to me, faced with that kind of conceptual opposition, to think that the truth was more likely to be a mixture of the two. Cyclicity and linearity are not necessarily contradictory if we consider that there are several scales to consider, several temporalities. And it seems obvious to me that history is both cyclical and linear. And that is not proper to human history, but also to natural history. Take the evolution of species: it is linear, there is no turning back, but it is based on a cyclical phenomenon which is the life of living individuals: their conception, their birth, their maturation, their reproduction, their death. It is through that recurrence that nature, through mutations which are then selected naturally, makes species evolve. The same goes for humanity: it is subject to certain recurrences, but those recurrences end up drawing a linear pattern and a general progression: in the demographic mass of the species, the size of its political communities, its scientific and technical power, its artistic sophistication. Its destiny is linear, but its embodiment is recursive. Which led me to suggest, and my work always leads me further in that direction, that human history can be modeled in the mathematical form of a cellular automaton, which is also a tool for modeling the appearance and development of life.

[Read more…] about A conversation with Philippe Fabry, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Kamel Krifa, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Kamel Krifa, for The Postil Magazine

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Kamel Krifa  Kamel Krifa is an actor, film producer, and Hollywood’s stars trainer—including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michelle Rodriguez, Eddie Griffin, Steven Seagal, and many other ones. Krifa ranks among Van Damme’s longstanding collaborators and personal friends, acting alongside him in various movies. This conversation with cultural journalist Grégoire Canlorbe first happened in Paris, in July 2017; it was resumed and validated in April 2020.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In Kickboxer IV, you have given flesh and soul to iconic villain Tong Po. Do you intend to return to the saga?

  Kamel Krifa: At the time I had been offered a contract of five films to interpret the character of Tong Po. It was an interesting challenge, for my acting was essentially limited to the expression of my eyes and to working the articulation of the mouth. Indeed, I was asked to wear a mask, destined to give me oriental features. Alas, concerning fighting scenes, I did not have the opportunity to really prepare them thoroughly, because I had to avoid spoiling, through my respiration, the three hours of make-up that were devolved to me each day. (Knowing that an extra hour was still required to remove my make-up after filming.)

  Finally, I will have only once lent my traits—or rather, lent my stature and my agility—to the deceitful and cruel Tong Po. But I effectively returned to the franchise Kickboxer, since I appear in Kickboxer: Retaliation, alongside Mike Tyson, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, Christophe Lambert, and none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme. The movie was released in January 2018. It is the sequel to Kickboxer: Vengeance, a remake of Kickboxer released twenty-seven years after the original film.

Kickboxer IV final fight
Final fight in Kickboxer IV, exhibiting the martial prowess of Kamel Krifa (in the role of Tong Po)

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Jean-Claude Van Damme has directed a single film, The Quest, in which he plays in the company of the late Roger Moore. According to you, why did JCVD not want to repeat the experience since then?

  Kamel Krifa: Jean-Claude has an undeniable talent as a director and he does not hesitate to advise the directors who work with him. They benefit from his experience, acquired both before and behind the camera. In turn, he offers them the best of himself in his acting. Since The Quest, he indeed prefers to delegate the task to the director and to focus on his interpretation. It allows him to let his mind float — instead of cornering his attention with a host of technical considerations that never leaves his mind in peace. In that way, he can prove fully invested, relaxed, and reactive under the eye of the camera; he can put himself in the skin of his character with an optimal ability to concentrate.

  Also, entrusting the filmmaking to someone else, whom he knows qualified, and to whom he transmits his directives, allows him to take time for himself: time to commune with himself, and to read and meditate on subjects that are dear to his heart. Jean-Claude is not only a man of great culture; he is an authentic gifted, a superior intelligence, who carries a unique and insightful look at people, the things of life, and the universe.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Whether as his coach, his producer, or his on-screen partner, you have been working steadily and consistently with JCVD. Would you care to say a few words about it?

  Kamel Krifa: I have known Jean-Claude since he was thirteen. When I met him, I was twenty years old; and from simple sports room colleagues, we quickly became best friends, spiritual brothers. In 1989, Jean-Claude, who had just acted in his launch pad Bloodsport (and who was about to become an international star with the tremendous successes of the early 1990s), proposed to me that I become his exclusive trainer; very honored, I accepted his offer. I then had the opportunity to act alongside him in Death Warrant and Lionheart—and that is how I became a Hollywood actor.

Kamel Krifa in Death Warrant
Kamel Krifa in Death Warrant

  During the 1990s I continued to appear alongside Jean-Claude in various action movies; on the same token, I launched into production. That is how I was an associate producer for Double Impact, featuring Bolo Yeung. I also co-produced Legionnaire, for which I made location scouting in Morocco for two years. I must confess that I have a special affection for that period film, which deals with the Rif War and which features Abdelkrim Khattab, whom I had the good fortune to play. Most recently, I collaborated with Jean-Claude on the pilot of the TV series Jean-Claude Van Johnson, sponsored by Amazon—and, of course, on the last installment of the saga Kickboxer.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Let us talk about the origin of your cinematographic vocation. What could be, in particular, the “double impact” of your Tunisian childhood and of your early discovery of martial arts?

  Kamel Krifa: At the age of seven I had stars in my eyes in front of peplums and other spy films from the 1960s; and it is to a large extent in the popular movie theaters of Tunis, where action movie left me mesmerized, that my vocation of actor was born. But it is also at home, from a very early age, by having fun shooting amateur films through a play of shadow and light, by imagining myself in the shoes of role models like Tarzan or Maciste, that my attraction for cinema took shape. The martial arts, which I have been practicing since my childhood, seemed to me early on to be the royal way to make my entry into the Hollywood milieu. As an adult my experiences in the army, the police, or as a bodyguard allowed me to perfect my combat skills.

[Read more…] about A conversation with Kamel Krifa, for The Postil Magazine

A short conversation with David Horowitz, for FrontPage Magazine

A short conversation with David Horowitz, for FrontPage Magazine

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800px-david_horowitz_5450881229  David Joel Horowitz is an American writer. He is a founder and president of the think tank the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); editor of the Center’s publication, FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.

  From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive and Marxist ideas and became a defender of conservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You have long established yourself as a Jewish intellectual committed to the defense of your homeland America and its Protestant values. While in conservative circles it is not uncommon to address the totalitarian commonalities between Islam and Marxism, you like to raise the connection of Marxism (and other laicized socialist ideologies) with the Pelagian heresy. Could you tell us more about this filiation?

  David Horowitz: Pelagius, a 4th Century Christian Monk—even more than Rousseau—is the father of all leftist schemes to remake the world into a social justice paradise. Pelagius believed that sin was against human nature. Therefore if people would just be true to their nature—and therefore good Christians—they could build a heaven on earth. Leftists believe that people are good at heart, and therefore if they are good Marxists, or good socialists, or politically correct, they can build a paradise on earth. Saint Augustine was Pelagius’ nemesis. To counter his utopian vision, Augustine posed the doctrine of original sin—that we all participate in Adam’s sin because it is in our nature to sin, not against it. In secular terms, the root cause of all social problems, of all human problems is us. That’s why when progressives achieve total power they kill and impoverish millions—even hundreds of millions—of people who refuse to participate in their schemes because they go against their nature.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It turns out that a number of icons of the sixties and the seventies who were most often considered left-wing at the time—for instance, David Bowie, Kirk Douglas, or the duo of Easy Rider, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper—are rather positively perceived among right-wing nationalist youth today. As a repented lieutenant of the counterculture, how do you react to this lasting popularity?

  David Horowitz: I don’t take actors seriously. After all, they’re actors.

[Read more…] about A short conversation with David Horowitz, for FrontPage Magazine