Nobel Prize-winner Calls for Destruction of Saudi Arabia and Iran

Re: Destroy countries inciting jihad: Naipaul

Choice quotes from Sir Vidia:

"Hate oppression, but fear the oppressed.

"We are told the people who killed the children in Russia were smiling. The liberal voices were ready to explain the reasons for their actions. But this has no good side. It is as bad as it appears.

"Well, clearly Iraq is not the place to have gone. But religious war is so threatening to the rest of us that it cannot be avoided.

"It will have to be fought... there are certain countries which foment it, and they probably should be destroyed, actually.

"The blowing up of the twin towers; people could deal with it as an act of terror, but the idea of religious war is too frightening for people to manage. The word used is jihad. We like to translate it as holy war, but really it is religious war."

One of the readings I use with my Freshman English classes here in Korea comes from Sir V.S. Naipaul's book Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (whose back cover incomprehensibly labels the author "a Tolstoyan spirit"). The reading is a conversation between the author and Shafi, a young Muslim Malay from the country who has moved to Kuala Lumpur. Shafi finds his rural and conservative Islam to be his only comfort in a materialistic, wasteful, and immoral modern city. [I spent over a year in beautiful cosmopolitan KL and can vouch for that description of the city.]

Sir V.S. Naipual strikes a very anti-Traditionalist tone in ridiculing Shafi's beliefs. In post-reading discussions, I usually find two or three students in each class who share the Traditionalist ideas of Shafi and myself, while the vast majority side with the Modernist attitudes of Sir Vidia.

I have used some of V.S. Naipaul's other anti-Islamic statements to teach my students to identify biases in writing. The above material will also be useful.

That said, I have to agree with much of what Sir Vidia says: "[C]learly Iraq is not the place to have gone." He is also right to assert that liberals have no explanation for smiling killers of children and that "[i]t is as bad as it appears." [Conservatives, in contrast, do have an explanation for the smiling killers of children: Evil.]

Sir Vidia might also be right about an upcoming religious war. If this occurs, Christendom should follow her tradition of the Just War, as outined in Paragraph 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

"- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

"- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

"- there must be serious prospects of success;

"- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

"These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the 'just war' doctrine.

"The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good."

[link to article via A conservative blog for peace]