Why History Matters

On 18/3/19 The Australian published a full-page opinion piece, Shared hatred of fanatics, by one of its stable of reactionary pundits, Paul Monk. Monk, thankfully, is only an occasional contributor to Murdoch's Australian mouthpiece. His specialty is Arab/Muslim history, with lashings of Islamophobia. (In earlier scribblings, he has referred to "the dark heart of Islam," declared the Prophet Muhammad to be "a very dubious figure," and claimed his "deity" is "a god of war and conquest." He has also given the thumbs-up to Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, and lauded the late Italian Islamophobe, Oriana Fallaci, as "the great Italian journalist.")

Monk is described grandiosely in an appended bio as "a former senior intelligence analyst, long-time consultant in applied cognitive science and author of 10 books, of which the most recent is Dictators and Dangerous Ideas: Uncensored Reflections in an Age of Turmoil."

But back to Shared hatred of fanatics, written in the wake of the Christchurch massacres. It would take multiple posts to deal with all of Monk's distortions, but I restrict myself to his characterisation of the Crusades as a war of self-defence by the West:

"The crusades were a sideshow and a largely unsuccessful pushback against the Muslim conquest of Palestine and the 'holy places' of the Christian religion. This isn't angry rhetoric, it is basic history."

Except that the Muslim conquest of Palestine happened in the 7th century and the First Crusade in the 11th.

God only knows where Monk's picked up his take on the subject - Murray? Fallaci? Any one of a number of historically unsound Islamophobic websites, such as The Gates of Vienna?

So let's see what a reputable historian of the Crusades has to say on the subject of the "basic history" of the crucial First Crusade (1096-99). The following extracts come from Thomas Asbridge's The First Crusade: A New History (2004). (Asbridge is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London.):

"From its genesis, the history of the crusade was blurred by distortion. The image of Muslims as brutal oppressors conjured by Pope Urban [II] was pure propaganda - if anything, Islam had proved over the previous centuries to be more tolerant of other religions than Catholic Christendom." (p 3)

"The first point to acknowledge is that [the Pope's] call to arms made at Clermont was not directly inspired by any recent calamity or atrocity in the East... And although the Holy City of Jerusalem, the expedition's ultimate goal, was indeed in Muslim hands, it had been so for more than 400 years - hardly a fresh wound... The reality was that, when Pope Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont, Islam and Christendom had coexisted for centuries in relative equanimity. There may at times have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbours, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish this enmity from the endemic political and military struggles of the age." (pp 16-17)

"At the end of the eleventh century, Christendom was in one sense encircled by Islam, with Muslim forces ranged against it to the east along Byzantium's Asian frontier and to the south in the Iberian peninsula. But Europe was a long way from being engaged in an urgent, titanic struggle for survival. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors of Iberia and the Turks of Asia Minor shared a religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose. Where Christians and Muslims did face each other across the centuries, their relationship had been unremarkable, characterised, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and others of coexistence. There is little or no evidence that either side harboured any innate, empowering religious or racial hatred of the other.

"Most significantly, throughout this period indigenous Christians actually living under Islamic law, be it in Iberia or the Holy Land, were generally treated with remarkable clemency. The Muslim faith acknowledged and respected Judaism and Christianity, creeds with which it enjoyed a common devotional tradition and a mutual reliance upon authoritative scripture. Christian subjects may not have been able to share power with their Muslim masters, but they were given freedom to worship. All around the Mediterranean basin, Christian faith and society survived and even thrived under the watchful but tolerant eye of Islam. Eastern Christendom may have been subjected to Islamic rule, bit it was not on the brink of annihilation, nor prey to any form of systematic abuse." (p 18)

"The problem addressed by the First Crusade - Muslim occupation of Jerusalem and the potential threat of Islamic aggression in the East - had loomed for decades, even centuries, provoking little or no reaction in Rome. Urban II's decision to take up this cause at Clermont was, therefore, primarily proactive rather than reactive, and the crusade was designed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of the papacy. Launched as it was just as Urban began to stabilise his power-base in central Italy, the campaign must be seen as an attempt to consolidate papal empowerment and expand Rome's sphere of influence." (p 19)

"A central feature of Urban's doctrine was the denigration and dehumanisation of Islam. He set out from the start to launch a holy war against what he called 'the savagery of the Saracens', a 'barbarian' people capable of incomprehensible levels of cruelty and brutality. Their supposed crimes were enacted upon two groups. Eastern Christians, in particular the Byzantines, had been 'overrun right up to the Mediterranean Sea'. Urban described how the Muslims 'occupying more and more of the land on the borders of [Byzantium], were slaughtering and capturing many, destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God. So, if you leave them alone much longer they will further grind under their heels the faithful of God. The pope also maintained that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being subjected to horrific abuse and exploitation... The accusations had little or no basis in fact, but they did serve Urban's purpose. By expounding upon the alleged crimes of Islam, he sought to ignite an explosion of vengeful passion among his Latin audience, while his attempts to degrade Muslims as 'sub-human' opened the floodgates of extreme, brutal reciprocity. " (pp 33-34)

Getting the history right matters, because if it's left in the hands of Monk, Murray, Fallaci and other xenophobes to distort and mangle, their distortions may well influence the likes of the Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant - with deadly effect.

One to Avoid

Paul Monk's review of Douglas Murray's book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam tells us more about the Islamophobia of the Monks and Murrays of this world than it does about either contemporary Europe, the Middle East or Islam. (Murray, BTW, is an associate editor of the Spectator.)

Here's Monk's hilarious opening paragraph:

"Douglas Murray was born in London in July 1979, putting him midpoint between Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's January flight from Paris to Tehran to lead the Shia Muslim revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, which triggered a global Sunni Muslim jihadist reaction." (Resisting Europe's Muslim tide, The Australian, 26/8/17)

No hint here that the Iranian revolution was a popular revolt against the repressive US client regime of the Shah, which emerged as the result of a CIA-engineered coup against the democratically-elected  government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Just a "Shia" brainsnap on Khomeini's part, apparently.

Likewise, there's no hint that Monk's grand "global Sunni Muslim jihadist reaction" was kicked off in Afghanistan by the US, which funded, trained and armed Sunni Arab jihadis such as bin Laden for use against the Russian-backed secular government of Afghanistan.

IOW, poor old Murray had the terrible misfortune to be born at a time when those fiendish Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, experienced a sudden rush of blood to the head, which caused them to drop everything, and plot the forced Islamification of Europe, while the imperialist West, both the US and its European clients, was just innocently standing by, minding its own business as usual.

"In short, this journalist, author and political commentator has lived all his life against a background of Muslim insurgency and terrorism, as well as massive and now all-but-unrestricted Muslim immigration into Europe."

Of course, what prompted said "massive" Muslim immigration into Europe just may have had something to do with US/US client regime-change wars in Libya and Syria, but hush, we don't want to go there, it might spoil the story.

"Against that background, he reflects on the angry last writings of the great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, denouncing what she saw as the betrayal of the West and the capitulation of its leaders to Iranian and Sunni jihadist intimidation."

"Great"? Totally unhinged, actually.

Monk concludes his review with his own (and - what a coincidence! - Murray's) "uncomfortable" reflection on "the Gothic and other Germanic migrations into the Roman Empire," and "the Arab migrations of the 7th and 8th centuries that swamped the southern and eastern littorals of the Roman world and overran the Persian and Turkish worlds."

So the Arabs are the new Goths and Vandals, and the Turks, who did not appear on the scene until the 11th (Seljuqs) and 13th (Othmanlis) centuries were rolled (swamped!) by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries? Right...

Robert Manne & Murdoch's Australian

How interesting that Robert Manne, who slammed Murdoch's Australian for its multitude of sins (but not its knee-jerk support for Israel) in his 2011 Quarterly Essay, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & the Shaping of the Nation, is now having his new book, The Mind of the Islamic State promoted by... Murdoch's Australian.

The latest expression of this promotion is Paul Monk's largely favourable review of the book in The Weekend Australian. Monk being Monk, of course, doesn't think Manne has gone quite far enough because he doesn't trace IS's roots all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad and to Islam itself. As he puts it:

"In short, the one God of Islam is not the God of Abraham, of Micah, of Isaiah - or of Jesus. Mohammed's deity is a god of war and conquest and the Sunnah, the example of the prophet, is one of jihad and the killing of one's enemies and critics. Manne does not address this fundamental problem." (5/11/16)

Monk, of course, conveniently omits any reference to the God of Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua (presumably the same "the God of Abraham" etc), who urges his people to practice herem warfare, that is, total destruction/ extermination, something which has no parallel in the Qur'an. For example: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations... and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).*

But my interest here is not in Monk or his madness, it's more in Manne and his newfound accommodation with that fountainhead of "bad news," as he called it in 2011, The Australian. Will we be seeing a letter from Manne, distancing himself from the mad Monk in tomorrow's Australian, for example? I, for one, won't be holding my breath.

[Required reading on this business: Philip Jenkins' 2011 book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses.]

Why I Read The Australian

Ever notice how well endowed The Australian's opinion page is with, ahem, Middle East experts?

One such is a gentleman by the name of Paul Monk. Here's his bio:

"Paul Monk MA PhD is a polymath and widely known as a public intellectual. After completing his PhD in International Relations, looking at cognitive and policy aspects of US counter-insurgency operations during the Cold War, he worked for a number of years in Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation on East Asia, with a particular emphasis on the challenge of North Korea, the stagnation of Japan and the rise of China. He was head of China analysis in 1994-95 and has remained a widely consulted commentator on international affairs in the Australian media and may well be unequalled in this country for intellectual breadth and depth, but especially for his ability to rapidly apply that profound resource to challenges in the broad arena of human affairs. He has written four books including Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009)." (Our Team - van Gelder & Monk, vangeldermonk.com)

 As you can see, he positively oozes Middle East expertise. And thank God for that too. Did you know, for example, that we had to wait until 2011 to find out that what we'd always assumed to be the Balfour Declaration was not in fact the Balfour Declaration. That's when Monk came along and set us straight.

For example, in the benighted pre-Monk era (November 1917 - April 2011) we used to think that this was the Balfour Declaration:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

But, thanks to Monk's scholarly revelation, we now know that this is the real Balfour Declaration:

"1. His Majesty's government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people. 2. His Majesty's government will use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organisation."

(You can read all about this epic scholarly feat in my 12/4/11 post Only in The Australian.)

As I discovered, when reading Monk's latest revelation in yesterday's Australian, Like Voltaire, be candid on Islam - to whit, Mohammad was no Mr Nice Guy - Monk's intellectual breadth and depth doesn't end there:

"Karen Armstrong has portrayed Mohammed as 'a prophet for our time'. But the classic Muslim sources (Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Kathir, Waqidi, al-Tabari, going back to the 8th and 9th centuries) make clear that he was a very dubious figure even in his own time."

That's right! A dubious figure in his own time. And still, today! (Why only the other day I saw him...)

It's obvious from the above that Monk has an encyclopedic grasp of all things Middle Eastern. Nothing is beyond him. Ibn Ishaq. Tick. Ibn Kathir. Tick. Waqidi. Tick. al-Tabari. Tick. He's read em all, and in Arabic too. And some fools wonder why I read The Australian!

Massacre & Incident

Another book review* by Paul Monk in The Australian. Here's how it begins:

"'Barely in modern times has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences,' Michael B. Oren wrote in the opening paragraph of Six Days of War (2002),** his compelling history of the June 1967 conflict in which Israel crushed its Arab neighbours and seized control of Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. He listed some of those consequences: the Black September incident in Jordan (1970), the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes (1972)..." (Partial gaps in revisionist critique of Israel, 4/10/14)

So when 11 Israelis are killed it's a massacre, but when nearly 3,500 Palestinians are killed it's merely an incident.***

Why would you bother reading on?

[*Cursed Victory: A History of Israel & the Occupied Territories, by Ahron Bregman; **From Norman Finkelstein's 2002 review of Oren, Abba Eban with footnotes: "Whenever Israel faces a public relations crisis in the US - ie, a jot of the reality of its brutal policies manages to break free of ideological controls - a new propaganda initiative is launched to lift the spirits and close the ranks of the Zionist faithful. After Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Zionist book of the month was Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial. Soon after the Palestinians entered into revolt in September 2000 and Israel unleashed a new round of violent repression, From Time Immemorial - although definitively shown to have been a hoax - was reissued and soared to the top of the Amazon list, soon followed by Oren's book (Amazon frequently featured them together). While certainly a much more sophisticated enterprise, Six Days of War serves the same political agenda as From Time Immemorial. In the introduction Oren states as his goal that the June war 'never be seen the same way again.' In fact he simply repeats the same old, tired apologetics. Like From Time Immemorial, its real purpose is to reclaim the lost world of Zionist heroism and innocence. With so much water under the bridge, however, except among true believers (admittedly not a small number) it's unlikely to succeed."; ***See my 14/8/12 post Bob Carr Rewrites Jordanian History.]

Only in The Australian

Paul Monk's review of Jonathan Schneer's new book, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, in last weekend's Australian, is one of the dodgiest book reviews I've ever read.

As I'm wont to say: Only in The Australian.

Monk, described as "founder of Austhink Consulting," kicks off How the dragon's teeth were sown thus:

"The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was the foundation stone on which, with British support, the Zionist movement was able to set about creating what would become the state of Israel in 1947 [sic: 1948]. It consisted of two simple but pregnant sentences: 1. His Majesty's government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people. 2. His Majesty's government will use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organisation."

Except that that is NOT the text of the Balfour Declaration. For the record this is:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Monk has simply plucked his two "pregnant" sentences from p 335 of Schneer's book and ignored completely the full and final text of the declaration quoted on p 341. What he claims to be the Balfour Declaration is actually only one of several drafts cobbled together by Zionist lobbyists which were rejected by their British interlocutors until pared down to the final, more deceptive, and so more marketable, version. This would have been abundantly clear to anyone who'd been paying attention.

Several questions therefore arise: Did Monk actually read, as opposed to merely skim, Schneer's book before writing his review? Was he even familiar with the text of the declaration in the first place? If not, why was he chosen to review the book? Did he, perhaps, deliberately choose the earlier draft to fit with his own Zionist prejudices, prejudices which become clear as one reads on? And what does all of this tell us about the knowledge base and/or political prejudices of the editor of The Weekend Australian's Review who had engaged Monk to review the book in the first place?

Monk goes on to write that:

"The more important questions... are why did the British government see fit to make such a declaration and why were the Arabs so opposed to it then and ever after?"

I'll deal with the second question later. In answer to the first, Monk construes Schneer thus:

"Above all, what Schneer shows... is that the British decision to support Zionism was due much less to the lobbying of the Zionists than to the opportunism of British statesmen in the increasingly desperate struggle against the Central Powers and their illusions regarding the true global power and influence of the Jews. He remarks that 'the Balfour Declaration sprang from fundamental miscalculations about the power of Germany and about the power and unity of the Jews'... Schneer argues the idea would never have gotten up had it not been for the British establishment forming the erroneous opinion that the Jews carried enormous influence in world finance and the secret counsels of government and that this should be brought to bear against the Central Powers before the Central Powers themselves exploited it."

Monk would have us believe that, for Schneer, the Zionist lobbyists who argued for, and drafted, successive versions of the declaration before finally 'getting it right' were almost innocent bystanders in the process. But what does Schneer actually say? Certainly he acknowledges British misconceptions:

"Implicit here is the wildly unrealistic estimate of the power and unity of 'world Jewry' that we have seen such British officials as Hugh O'Bierne and Sir Mark Sykes to have displayed. Let an infamous notation, jotted down by Robert Cecil... stand for all such miscalculations: 'I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the international power of the Jews'. In his memorandum... Montagu had discounted 'the anti-Semitism of the present government'. But stereotypical thinking about Jews did play a role in the War Cabinet's decision to issue the Balfour Declaration." (pp 343-344)

Hm... a role, eh? What Monk omits entirely from his review is Schneer's acknowledgment that the Zionists played on these stereotypes for all they were worth:

"It is a further irony that British Zionists had done everything in their power to foster such thinking. The inimitable Harry Sacher wrote long afterwards: 'Many... have a residual belief in the power and the unity of Jewry. We suffer for it, but it is not wholly without its compensations. It is one of the imponderabilia of politics, and it plays, consciously or unconsciously, its part in the calculations and the decisions of statesmen. To exploit it delicately and deftly belongs to the art of the Jewish diplomat'. During 1917 the Zionists did just that. Starting in June 1917, they began warning that Germany was courting Jews. Usually they did not say, indeed it was better left unsaid, that if Germany won Jewish support, then the Entente would lose it - and possibly the war. British officials were capable of reaching the conclusion themselves. On one occasion, however, Weizmann went even that far. The Germans had 'recently approached the Zionists with a view to coming to terms with them', he warned William Ormsby-Gore on June 10. 'It was really a question whether the Zionists were to realize their aims through Germany and Turkey or through Great Britain'. He [Weizmann], of course, was absolutely loyal to Great Britain'. Meanwhile the British Jewish press had taken up the issue. Lord Rothschild repeated it to Balfour: 'During the last few weeks the official and semi-official German newspapers have been making many statements, all to the effect that in the Peace Negotiations the Central Powers must make a condition for Palestine to be a Jewish settlement under German protection. I therefore think it important that the British declaration should forestall any such move'. Thus did the Zionists indirectly play 'delicately and deftly' upon the ignorance and prejudice of British officials..." (p 344)

Monk's omission of the above seriously misrepresents Schneer's account.

With regard to his second question - 'Why were the Arabs so opposed to [the Balfour Declaration] then and ever after?' - Monk's real agenda emerges. He complains that Schneer "nowhere digs down into the roots of Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism, confining his explanation of Arab grievances to the double and, indeed, triple dealing in which Britain engaged during World War I. This, I think is a weakness in an otherwise fascinating work of history."

It is obvious that Monk's disappointment in Schneer is simply because the historian hasn't parroted the usual Zionist dogma. It doesn't occur to him that Palestinian resistance to the Zionist takeover of their homeland arose for exactly the same reason every colonised people has resisted the colonial invasion and settlement of its homeland. But then most Zionists baulk at acknowledging their colonial-settler roots.

In his concluding paragraph, Monk writes that:

"The prospect in 1917 was a Middle East made up of new nations. There were hundreds and thousands of Jews in the Islamic world. Why should they not have been a welcome, constructive part of the Semitic world? That question goes to the dark heart of Islam. There Schneer does not venture."

Monk's Zionist frame of reference aside, his ignorance of the matter at hand is truly astonishing. Those pushing for a Jewish state in 1917 were European Jews, not Arab Jews who, at the time, wouldn't have known Theodor Herzl from T E Lawrence. Then there's his arrogant assumption that Arab Jews were not a "welcome, constructive part of the Semitic world," and could only be so providing they were first uprooted from the homes in which they'd lived for centuries and relocated to Palestine.

So who is Paul Monk? Austhink Consulting's website, austhinkconsulting.com, hypes him thus:

"Paul Monk is a founder, Director and Principal Consultant. He is a polymath and widely known as a public intellectual. He worked for a number of years in intelligence, where he rose to head China analysis for the Defence Intelligence Organisation. Dr Monk may well be unequalled in Australia for intellectual breadth and depth, and his ability to rapidly apply that profound resource to challenges in the broad area of human affairs."

If Monk's review is an example of the application of "unequalled intellectual breadth and depth" to the Palestine/Israel problem, then God help us.

As I say: Only in The Australian.