tripudiate /traɪˈpjuːdɪeɪt/ (intransitive verb):
"To dance with excitement; to trample an opponent in triumph."
Two months after the 9/11 attacks, during an Arab book fair, a rumour suddenly made the rounds that an aircraft had crashed into a high-rise building in Italy. Many people immediately thought this was a repeat of the previous attacks on America. Numerous publishers and editors shouted Allahu akbar... and welcomed the presumed act, which turned out never to have happened at all. Some of these intellectuals are welcome guests at conferences on Euro-Arab dialogue...
-- Khalid al-Maaly, Arab Intellectuals and Terror, October 17, 2006
Postscript:
On a related note, as Martin Kramer reported in September of 2002 on Campus Watch, Muslim academic Azzam Tamimi said in an interview on November 8, 2001, in the Spanish news journal La Vanguardia, that everyone in the Arab world celebrated when seeing the Twin Towers fall:
Interviewer: ¿Se alegró alguien allí [en el mundo árabe] al ver caer los Torres Gemelas?
(Did anyone [in the Arab world] exult to see the Twin Towers fall?)
Tamimi: Todos. (Everyone.)
Interviewer: Perdón, ¿ha entendido mi pregunta?
(Excuse me, did you understand my question?)
Tamimi: En los paises árabes y musulmanes, todos saltaron de alegria. ¿Me pregunta eso, no?
(In the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy. That's what you asked me, no?)
Interviewer: Sí, pero… ¿de verdad se alegraron?
(Yes, but... they really rejoiced?)
Tamimi: Mire, los americanos se han portado muy, muy mal con la gente del mundo árabe y musulmán; han sostenido a dictatores, han burlando los derechos humanes…
(Look, the Americans have brought great, great evil to the people of the Arab and Muslim world; they have propped up dictators, they have flouted human rights...)
…
Interviewer: ¿Y cuál es ahora el sentimento?
(And what is the sentiment now?)
Tamimi: El de que Osama Bin Laden es un héroe.
(That Osama bin Laden is a hero.)
Oh, and this was in addition to saying, in that same interview:
"I admire the Taliban; they are courageous (Admiro a los talibán: son unos valientes)."
This Azzam Tamimi, as Martin Kramer also reports, is a close associate of the American academic John Esposito (among other cozy things, they co-edited a book together), a liberal Catholic who heads The Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and who makes a big fuss about defending "moderate Muslims" (who, of course, must be in the vast majority) -- among whom, one would reasonably infer, is Azzam Tamimi.
Conclusion:
I realize this is old news; but unfortunately, it is still relevant and ominously prescient for our future.
Notice two telling things in that interview:
1) Tamimi is careful, twice, to say "the Arab and Muslim world" -- clearly speaking of the entire Umma, including all the millions of non-Arab Muslims outside of the Middle East as well.
2) Toward the end, it should not surprise when Tamimi lapses into the usual "It's all the Americans' fault" routine out of his kitman-bag. What should ring particular alarm bells in one's head (at least those heads relatively unpadded with PC MC cotton) is that this screaming extremist is on the side of the "Arab and Muslim" people against their tin-pot dictators: a clear indicator of the more realistic meaning of the so-called "Arab Spring" unfolding in these past months throughout the Arab world.
6 comments:
Hesperado,
I suggest you actually go to the "Arab world" and the "rest of the non-Arab muslim world" and ask who is Tamimi - the answer will be "who?".
Yes there is radicalism, terrorism and violence and yes the moderates should be condemned for allowing it as should the liberal left in the west for tolerating it in their countries - but it is a gross generalization of hysterical (and bigoted) proportions to consider that the Muslim world supports them.
Over-simplifications and media excitment works on both sides and when the 9/11 attacks occured yes the ignorants fed BS from Mullahs in Pakistan and in countless unsanctioned mosques around the world announced that the "great Satan" was dealt a blow but the vast majority in the Muslim world not subject to such propoganda were stunned, shocked and saddened.
If we were to believe what you say then most of the 56 Muslim nations would have supported 9/11 instead of condemning it and most would have givin haven to Al Qaeda instead of issuing arrest warrents and freezing assets.
There was, until recently, a long term suspicion on America and there is no denying that, it had to do with eight years of American Exceptionalism with a hint of evangalism mixed with thugary and that thawny issue of Israel that has been exploited, abused and frankly confusing everything, but in the end if we are again to believe your comments - there would be no dealings, business, diplomacy or even tourism to and from the US and the Muslim World - think again.
Donny,
I suggest you actually go to the "Arab world" and the "rest of the non-Arab muslim world" and ask who is Tamimi - the answer will be "who?".
First, the cogency and veracity of a claim is not dependent upon whether the claimant is famous among the people about which he is making his claim.
Secondly, I suspect that had Tamimi parroted the usual comforting, and politically correct bromides, about the Muslim world -- e.g., "The Muslim world is not monolithic; it's a wonderfully diverse tapestry of peoples and cultures, and when the Twin Towers fell on 911, the vast majority of Muslims were sad and supportive of America" -- your tune would suddenly change, and you wouldn't hesitate a New York minute to avail yourself of Tamimi as an astute observer of the Muslim scene.
Third, Azziz Tamimi is no random faceless peon with no credentials: He's a Muslim academic who is director of the International Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. As I said in my article above, he also has been a long-time colleague Prof. John L. Esposito with whom, among many other activities related to Islamic "reform", he co-edited a book, Secularism in the Middle East.
Esposito is also no insignificant player in this issue. He is "Georgetown University professor of Religion and International Affairs, specializing in Islamic studies, as well as the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service" and "an award-winning professor, an author of more than 30 books, a consultant for the Gallup polling organization and an expert on Islam frequently called upon to brief government agencies including the State Department, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and various branches of the military."
Moreover, Esposito would agree with you wholeheartedly that the problem is only a TMOE (Tiny Minority of Extremists) and that Islam and the vast majority of Muslims are good and have nothing to do with the TMOE (that indeed is one main reason why he's so influential in the mainstream, since he thinks inside the PC MC Box which remains dominant and mainstream throughout the West).
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"...but it is a gross generalization of hysterical (and bigoted) proportions to consider that the Muslim world supports them [the TMOE]."
It could be; show me the evidence that it is. Of course, you can't. And neither can I show you hard evidence that the Muslim world supports them. What we have here is two sweeping hypotheses about a global diaspora of over one billion people unified by a culture based upon the Koran and Sunna (and for the Shia, an equivalent to the Sunna). A reasonable reading of both foundational sources which Muslims support and by which their worldview is shaped (in all realms of life, from hygiene, to family matters, to tribal matters, to society, to entertainment, to politics, to medicine, to law, to ethics; etc.) would conclude that any person or group or culture shaped by such texts cannot but be outrageously anti-liberal, anti-humane, and socially and geopolitically dangerous. When this approach is presented, the PC MC person's reflexive response is either
a) to try to argue in various ways that most Muslims aren't in fact shaped that much by their founding texts (thus conceding that there would be something wrong with being shaped by them) but are for the most part as lax and religiously decaffeinated as everyone else in the Modern Secular World;
or
b) to pull a Straw Man/Red Herring/Tu Quoque (or as I have termed it, "Ego Quoque") and deflect attention onto the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and the violent and intolerant conduct of Christians in centuries past (and, why not, also throw in the pitiful smattering of abortion clinic bombings that have occurred and which pale in comparison to the atrocities Muslims have been perpetrating all over the world for years, decades, centuries);
or
c) to actually go the extra mile to engage in yoga pretzel contortions in order to try to argue that the Koran and Sunna aren't so bad after all (often this doesn't take mental and rhetorical contortions -- it may be performed with minimal thought and study, as for example when George Bush repeatedly cited Koran 5:32 that sounds all peaceful and lovey-dovey, but neglected to put it in wider context by also reading the following verse, 5:33, and then reading the authoritative tafasir (exegeses) on those verses).
Most often, the PC MC will slop on the table of discussion an incoherent mish-mash of a-b-c.
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Damn, I lost my final installment. Oh well, if I can reconstruct it later, I will.
This isn't my final installment I had written to conclude my previous comments; but it'll do.
Hugh Fitzgerald came up with a great line, about our PC MC Westerners and their strange inability to appreciate the systemic disease, and danger, of Islam. "They lack," he wrote, "the mental pencil to connect the dots."
What are those dots? Each dot is a datum; and, as I wrote above, we have a mountain of data -- indeed, veritable mountain ranges of data, from all over the Muslim world (which, increasingly, is encroaching upon the non-Muslim world). A datum may be a single incident, like the Fort Hood massacre by an American Muslim military psychologist who realized his Islamic duty was to kill Infidels. Or a datum may be a more complex conglomeration of events, such as the violent and hateful and fanatical Muslim reactions all over the world to the Mohammed cartoons; or the violent and hateful and fanatical Muslim reactions to a schoolteacher naming a teddy bear "Mohammed"; or the violent and hateful and fanatical Muslim reactions to rumors that a spray of urine may have accidentally gone through a fan and touched a Koran; or the violent and hateful and fanatical Muslim reactions to the rumor that a policeman had dropped a Koran in India; or the violent and hateful and fanatical Muslim reactions worldwide to Salman Rushdie, a novelist, writing what he damned well should be free to write about their precious, and preciously deranged and evil, Prophet Mohammed.
And these are only a handful out of literally thousands and thousands of dots from all over the Muslim world -- from the Philippines to Morocco, from Mauritius to Turkestan, from Albania to Malaysia, from Indonesia to Sudan, from northern Nigeria to Syria, and everywhere in between, not to mention in the growing Muslim diaspora within the West -- which one could adduce and lay out on the table, which only someone strangely deficient in the mental pencil to connect them would fail to see the gravity and horror of the full picture they delineate.
Or, yet another dot: as we learned yesterday of what those newly "free" Egyptians are up to:
Egypt: 4000 Muslims chanting "Allahu akbar" torch church, attack Christian homes
And what sparked off this mass lynching of Christians in Egypt?
"The father of the Muslim woman was killed by his cousin because he did not kill his daughter to preserve the family's honor, which led the woman's brother to avenge the death of his father by killing the cousin. The village Muslims blamed the Christians."
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/03/egypt-4000-muslims-chanting-allahu-akbar-torch-church-attack-christian-homes.html
And "Donny" is here to tell us there's no systemic problem of Islam. What a hoot.
"the Arab and Muslim world" is Islam.
The entire community of the faith-- even those in America.
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