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Illuminating Polemic | The Flight of the Intellectuals | Paul Berman

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	• The Flight of the Intellectuals Paul Berman Melville House, 2010 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very Well Done

Berman does a great job of research and writing in this book. Though he may not have intended to, he confirmed a belief I took on in graduate school-- while researching the Heidegger/Derrida controversy-- that many of the established American and European intellectuals that write reviews these days don't read carefully and throughly. Berman does both and writes about it clearly.

The book is not an easy read, he does go into a fair amount of detail and cover a fair number of writers. But it is well worth the moderate effort required to follow the details.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the state of relations between "Islam and the West" and the state of western intellectuals-- who really have become a pretty spineless bunch.

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Paul Berman deserves our thanks for documenting why Islamo-Fascism is indeed a good name for radical Muslims. The JIHADI MOVEMENT is truly fascistic, terroristic, and deserving of our unending struggle against it. But beyond that this book is a tiresome and belabored revelation of the feckless immorality of leftist intellectuals. Berman is apologizing for his own juvenile leftism, but who cares? Really intelligent people have long known about the criminal careers of leftists, whether they called themselves MARXISTS, SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS, TROTKYISTS, or PLAIN OLD DEMOCRATIC AND LIBERAL PROGRESSIVES. After Koestler, Orwell, and their fellow disillusioned leftists what need do we have of Paul Berman?

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Illuminating Polemic

Berman's book is exceptionally well researched and always enlightening. It is a book calling on liberals of all stripes to call a spade a spade. That Islamism is a fascist movement. That Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and others willing to question Islamism are to be celebrated as heroes. While those "liberals" that apologize for fascists are to be ridiculed for their inconsistency and fuzzy sense of morality. The book tends to meander through many discussions that, at first glance, seem cursory to his main thesis. However, in the end he manages to bring all his arguments together into a compelling final chapter. Below is an example of Berman eloquent outrage at the foolishness being peddled by many western intellectuals.

"And so, Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia--its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including other people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Fear--mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology--has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life. And yet, if someone like Pascal Bruckner intones a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin--"Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?"--and onward to the litany about fascism. In The New York Times Magazine Ian Buruma held back from hinting even obliquely at the genuinely fascist influences on Ramadan's grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death--Hassan al-Banna, who spoke highly of Adolf Hitler and helped the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem escape from getting tried at Nuremburg. Yet Pascal Bruckner, the liberal--here is somebody, Buruma would have us think, on the brink of fascism" (Location 3713)!

This book was a joy to read.

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*****

A brilliant book. Berman obviously read reams of books and publications when researching this book, and he distilled the essentials from all his research into this intelligent and often gripping analysis. It was a major eye-opener for me. For one thing--among many eye openers--I never before knew that the mufti of Jerusalem during WW II, Haj Amin al-Husseini, actually persuaded the Nazis not to free thousands of Jewish children that they were set to free, and insisted the children be killed instead. And because of al-Husseini's intervention, those children were sent to the gas chamber. What's more, after being freed from prison in France after the War, al-Husseini was welcomed in Cairo as a hero! (With info like that in this book, be sure that the one-star review I see below--and any that will follow--tells more about the reviewer than it does about this book!) A fantastic book. P.S. Paul Berman answered the critics of this book in an editorial in the 7/10/10 WSJ. Visit link to read it: [...]

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Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie?and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie?s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, ?Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class??an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as ?strident? or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely claim to be ?moderates.?

How did this happen? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman??one of America?s leading public intellectuals? (Foreign Affairs)?conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West?s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence.

Berman?s investigation of the history and nature of the Islamist movement includes some surprising revelations. In examining Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he shows the rise of an immense and often violent worldview, elements of which survives today in the brigades of al-Qaeda and Hamas. Berman also unearths the shocking story of al-Banna?s associate, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated personally with Adolf Hitler to incite Arab support of the Nazis? North African campaign. Echoes of the Grand Mufti?s Nazified Islam can be heard among the followers of al-Banna even today.

In a gripping and stylish narrative Berman also shows the legacy of these political traditions, most importantly by focusing on a single philosopher, who happens to be Hassan al-Banna?s grandson, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan?a figure widely celebrated in the West as a ?moderate? despite his troubling ties to the Islamist movement. Looking closely into what Ramadan has actually written and said, Berman contrasts the reality of Ramadan with his image in the press.

In doing so, THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS sheds light on a number of modern issues?on the massively reinvigorated anti-Semitism of our own time, on a newly fashionable turn against women?s rights, and on the difficulties we have in discussing terrorism?and presents a stunning commentary about the modern media?s peculiar inability to detect and analyze some of the most dangerous ideas in contemporary society.

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