A Medium article intended to rebut an earlier Hungarian Conservative article of mine has only proven it. It’s worth examining, as it underscores just how widespread the original confusion I warned against has become.
In ‘The Seesaw Fallacy: Israel “Bad” Does Not Equal Islam “Good”’, I wrote:
‘Everyone now seems to view Islam (a religion) and Israel (a nation) as inextricably linked—riding atop a moral seesaw, where one goes down precisely as much as the other goes up.
This is no exaggeration; virtually every observer—irrespective of political and ideological persuasion—sees Islam and Israel as locked in a rigid framework that makes them mutually exclusive: if one is good, the other must be bad; if one is bad, the other must be good.
This has become particularly evident as Israel faces mounting criticism. For decades, the prevailing assumption throughout much of the West ran as follows: if Islam is bad, then Israel must be good. Today, however, the syllogism has flipped on its head. We are now regularly told—explicitly or implicitly—that if Israel is bad, then Islam must be good.’
I then spent the rest of the article demonstrating that the two—Islam and Israel—are not linked, and that one could—and should—speak about them separately, specifically in the context of Christian Europe’s long history with Islam, a time when Israel did not exist:
‘From its very inception in the seventh century, Islam emerged as a militant faith that expanded primarily through violent conquest—above all against Christian lands and peoples. What is today described as the “heart” of the Muslim world—the Middle East and North Africa, stretching from Iraq to Morocco—was once the heartland of Christendom. Islam violently conquered it all.
For centuries thereafter, Islamic forces repeatedly assaulted Europe, the last bastion of Christian civilization. Nearly a millennium after Muslims overran Christian Spain in 711, they stood at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Even the United States was not immune. America’s first war as a nation—the First Barbary War of 1801—was fought against Muslim states that raided American ships and enslaved their sailors….
Here’s the point: Israel did not exist during any of this. Indeed, during more than a thousand years of Islamic jihad against Christendom, there was no Jewish state to provoke, justify, or explain Muslim behavior. As such, modern Israel’s brief existence—whether one applauds or condemns its policies—tells us nothing about Islam’s historical or contemporary relationship with the West.’
‘Here’s the point: Israel did not exist during any of this’
Now comes Richard J Morrissey of the Medium to debunk me. In ‘The Seesaw and the Shift’, he writes:
‘Raymond Ibrahim’s recent piece in Hungarian Conservative,“The Seesaw Fallacy,” represents its [the argument against Islam’s] most serious available form—historically grounded, rhetorically controlled, and mistaken in ways worth tracing carefully.
For over a thousand years—the very period Ibrahim treats as evidence of Islam’s civilisational hostility to the West—Jews lived in Muslim lands with a degree of security and communal autonomy unavailable anywhere in Christian Europe. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, they fled not to Christian territories but to the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. By the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire contained the world’s largest Jewish population.
Ibrahim’s argument requires Islamic hostility toward Jews to be hardwired into the tradition. A thousand years of coexistence is not a footnote that can be explained away—it is the argument. If Islamic theology contained an intrinsic, irresistible drive toward Jewish persecution, 1,300 years of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, documented by scholars from S.D. Goitein to Mark Cohen, would be inexplicable. I examined this record in detail in an earlier piece, Before Israel: When Muslims and Jews Lived Together, but the headline facts bear repeating here. Moses Maimonides worked as court physician to Saladin. Samuel ibn Naghrillah served as vizier of Granada and commanded Muslim armies. No equivalent participation was available to Jews anywhere in Christian Europe during the same period.
Ibrahim’s account of Islamic history moves from Muhammad to the present as though the intervening millennium were continuous civilisational assault. The long period of relative Jewish-Muslim coexistence simply disappears from his narrative.’
‘Looking at Islam, I showed that it was inherently hostile to the Christian West for a millennium before Israel came into being’
Do you notice anything conspicuous here? My argument is that we should separate Islam from Israel, and look at them independently. Looking at Islam, I showed that it was inherently hostile to the Christian West for a millennium before Israel came into being.
Morrissey’s supposed response is not to address that long history of conflict between Islam and Christian Europe, but to return the entire discussion right back to Muslim and Jewish relations. Rather than grapple with my actual point, he does exactly what my article warns against: hop right back on the Islam/Israel seesaw—including by offering an irrelevant deep dive into the history of Muslim and Jewish relations, a topic I never once broached, as it has nothing to do with my actual thesis: Islam’s perennial hostility for the West.
After spending several more paragraphs where he traces a ‘transformation’ in Jewish–Muslim history, Morrissey informs us that:
‘Ibrahim’s argument requires us to treat this transformation as either irrelevant or merely the re-emergence of something always latent. But if it were always latent and equally potent across history, the coexistence needs explaining. He offers no explanation because his framework cannot accommodate one.’
Yes, I offered no explanation because I was discussing a completely different topic—not Islam and Jews but Islam and Christendom: historic relations between Muslims and disaffected Jewish dhimmis tell us nothing about historic relations between Muslims and Christian Europe.
By totally ignoring my entire point that Islam is ‘the most formidable and persistent enemy’ of Christian civilization, to quote Hilaire Belloc; and by forcing the argument right back to Islam and Israel, Morrissey has magnificently validated my seesaw thesis.
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