FIRST SATURDAY'S PEOPLE, THEN SUNDAY'S PEOPLE....

Today’s Financial Times [sorry, only the broadsheet has it and it is not online, even in pay-version] has what seems to be a recent FT Monday tradition of a comment piece that could have been tossed over the transom from Osama bin Laden on LSD. Last week, I blogged a multi-culturalist named Patrick Chabal, and this week, it is the turn of a fellow named Faisal Devji to be on the FT rogue's gallery of Lacan-Derrida wannabees.

You can tell this fellow is someone special by the FT title of the piece "Islam offers a role model of the most modern kind."

While your mental tuning fork overcomes the cognitive dissonance of that title, you should understand that Faisal uses language and tropes peculiar to the cocoon that multiculturalists inhabit, waiting for the inevitable[?] metamorphosis.

The thought processes of Devji, such as they are, go somewhat like this: Thesis: The debate on the cartoons are proceeding on the basis of freedom of speech as proclaimed by traditional western democracies. Antithesis: The "radical novelty" of the Islamic challenge is in the "new rationality" of a "global arena." Ergo, the global village, pace McLuhan who is likely spinning in his coffin over this, is a "hyper-modern" entity which is stateless and therefore somehow immune from rationality, the Enlightenment, and therefore free speech.

Okay, I put in the immunity part, but that is the gist of this bunch of paragraphs in search of a synthesis.

Devji says that the Muslim "hyper-modern" entity is not theological, but is "familial in a global context and based on media." And he says that liberal democracies are therefore outmoded since they are merely state-based and therefore inevitably "parochial."

And "because global Islam comes to us from the future...it exposes clearly the limits of liberal democracy." Ante hoc, ergo propter hoc? Devji then talks about wigs and breeches and liberalism's Dickensian past, and the fact that Islam is a "religion [that is] the most volatile global phenomenon of our times."

The only comment I can make is that the global village of 1.2 billion Muslim believers, or family-members if you follow Devji’s dodge'em descriptions of something that is not-theological-but-a-religion, is going to overwhelm the 5 billion of the rest of mankind, including 2 billion Christians, by proving the strength of solidarity over free expression.

Isn’t that the combined-cudgel symbol of fascism overcoming the singularity of one’s individual conscience, or am I off-base?

Or maybe Torquemada and the Inquisition?

How about the hyper-modern Salem and its witchcraft trials?

Or the "I have seen the future and it works" of John Reed during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917?

Anyhow, the author obviously believes that the self-abasement of some European entities like the EU’s Justice and Security Commission led by Signor Franco Frattini will become the politically-correct pandemic of all democratically-based institutions.

And that that tradition of individual freedom of speech belongs in the dustbin of history.

He lives in NYC and teaches at the New School for Social Research, so Devji may be deluded into thinking that the rest of America shares the cultural-suicide vibe prevailing in Greenwich Village.

As Mark Steyn quoted memorably yesterday the old Arab proverb, "a falling camel attracts many knives," there is a strong element of Western weakness, especially in Europe, which draws violent Islamic activists as a shark is drawn to blood in the water.

When I lived in Beirut three decades ago [you can see the ambience in Clooney’s paranoid tour de force Syriana], there was the saying among Shi'ite radicals and Sunni PLO, "first Saturday's People, then Sunday's People."

First overcome the Jews, then the Christians.

Although the saying at that time pertained to the Middle East, the vision statement Faisal Devji now perceives is that Islam is making this its global goal.