Re: Editor Suggests "Nuking Mecca"

From: Juan Cole

Re: Lowry



and Coulter

One reason that Lowry's (and earlier Coulter's) remarks are alarming is
that the political Right in the United States has a track record of
actually getting into power and then implementing policies earlier thought
bizarre by mainstream American society. Ronald Reagan was widely written
off in 1976, and the Laffer curve and supply side economics and cutting
taxes while increasing military expenditures without creating deficits
were viewed as 'voodoo' even by Republicans like George Bush senior. So
that Lowry is so far on the Right that few take him seriously is no
guarantee his views will never be prized by a sitting president. Given
that W. is so far right that he lost the senate because a member of his
own party could not stand with him, one is not sanguine about the Lowry's
of the world remaining without influence.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's security doctrine, which
seeks perpetual war and aims at the break-up or overthrow of nations
perceived as potential security threats by the U.S. would likewise have
once seemed too bizarre for words. And yet the recently leaked Pentagon
plan for using tactical nuclear weapons against the very states Wolfowitz
had earlier tagged shows that his views are gaining currency in the
post-9/11 atmosphere.

Another reason for alarm is that corporate media consolidation is
gradually restricting the range of permissible expression in truly mass
media. The rise of Fox cable news and its recent defeat of CNN, and
Rupert Murdoch's strategy of appealing to the hard core Right in the U.S.,
is pushing all cable news in the U.S. further to the right. The National
Review, the Weekly Standard, and other conservative organs provide the
talking heads for cable news. Christopher Hitchens is the only leftie I
can think of who gets much air time at all, and one wonders if this is in
part because he is a hawk in the War on Terror. The Lowrys and Steve
Emersons are increasingly the ones telling ordinary Americans about the
Middle East and setting agendas in the media. Interestingly, the academy
has been almost completely blackballed from the talking head circuit on
cable news. See:

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Historians-Not-Consulted.htm

Yet another reason for alarm is that Lowry's column is likely to be picked
up and widely circulated in the Muslim world. Osama Bin Ladin himself
could not have thought up a better way of stampeding people into
al-Qaida's arms than Lowry's logorrhea about the U.S. nuking Mecca.

As for converting Muslims to Christianity, such a dark plot was hatched
here in the U.S. in the mid-19th century by the Presbyterian Church, that
bastion of Western irredentism. Large numbers of missionaries were
dispatched to Beirut, Tehran and elsewhere. Large amounts of money were
expended. The yields in saved souls were so tiny as not to be worth
mentioning. The Presbyterians then fell back on proselytizing the Eastern
Orthodox Christians (who still bear a grudge about Western "cults" preying
on them) and orphans. Some of the orphans reverted to Islam on reaching
adulthood.

Given that there are an estimated 100,000 white American converts to
Islam, and probably on the order of 300,000 in the Nation of Islam, and
given that no more than a few thousand Muslims have gone Christian in the
Middle East (mainly in Iran in the 1990s where the evangelicals claim some
successes), I'd say Lowry's side is falling down on the job.

Sincerely

Juan Cole
History
University of Michigan

- Juan, 12:21 PM