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Backlash and Backtrack
by Edward
Said
For the seven million
Americans who are Muslims (only two million of them Arab) and have lived
through the catastrophe and backlash of 11 September, it's been a
harrowing, especially unpleasant time. In addition to the fact that
there have been several Arab and Muslim innocent casualties of the
atrocities, there is an almost palpable air of hatred directed at the
group as a whole that has taken many forms. George W Bush immediately
seemed to align America and God with each other, declaring war on the
"folks" -- who are now, as he says, wanted dead or alive -- who
perpetrated the horrible deeds. And this means, as no one needs any
further reminding, that Osama Bin Laden, the elusive Muslim fanatic who
represents Islam to the vast majority of Americans, has taken centre
stage. TV and radio have run file pictures and potted accounts of the
shadowy (former playboy, they say) extremist almost incessantly, as they
have of the Palestinian women and children caught "celebrating"
America's tragedy.
Pundits and hosts refer
non-stop to "our" war with Islam, and words like "jihad" and "terror" have
aggravated the understandable fear and anger that seem widespread all over
the country. Two people (one a Sikh) have already been killed by enraged
citizens who seem to have been encouraged by remarks like Defence
Department official Paul Wolfowitz's to literally think in terms of
"ending countries" and nuking our enemies. Hundreds of Muslim and Arab
shopkeepers, students, hijab-ed women and ordinary citizens have
had insults hurled at them, while posters and graffiti announcing their
imminent death spring up all over the place. The director of the leading
Arab-American organisation told me this morning that he averages 10
messages an hour of insult, threat, bloodcurdling verbal attack. A Gallup
poll released yesterday states that 49 per cent of the American people
said yes (49 per cent no) to the idea that Arabs, including those who are
American citizens, should carry special identification; 58 per cent demand
(41 per cent don't) that Arabs, including those who are Americans, should
undergo special, more intense security checks in general.
Then, the official
bellicosity slowly diminishes as George W discovers that his allies
are not quite as unrestrained as he is, as (undoubtedly) some of his
advisers, chief among them the altogether more sensible-seeming
Colin Powell, suggest that invading Afghanistan is not quite as
simple as sending in the Texas militias might have been, even as the
enormously confused reality forced on him and his staff dissipates
the simple Manichean imagery of good versus evil that he has been
maintaining on behalf of his people. A noticeable de-escalation sets
in, even though reports of police and FBI harassment of Arabs and
Muslim continue to flood in. Bush visits a Washington mosque; he
calls on community leaders and the Congress to damp down hate
speech; he starts trying to make at least rhetorical distinctions
between "our" Arab and Muslim friends (the usual ones -- Jordan,
Egypt, Saudi Arabia) and the still undisclosed terrorists. In his
speech to the joint session of Congress, Bush did say that the US is
not at war with Islam, but said regrettably nothing about the rising
wave of both incidents and rhetoric that has assailed Muslims, Arabs
and people resembling Middle Easterners all across the country.
Powell here and there expresses displeasure with Israel and Sharon
for exploiting the crisis by oppressing Palestinians still more, but
the general impression is that US policy is still on the same course
it has always been on -- only now a huge war seems to be in the
making.
But there is little
positive knowledge of the Arabs and Islam in the public sphere to
fall back on and balance the extremely negative images that float
around: the stereotypes of lustful, vengeful, violent, irrational,
fanatical people persist anyway. Palestine as a cause has not yet
gripped the imagination here, especially not after the Durban
conference. Even my own university, justly famous for its
intellectual diversity and the heterogeneity of its students and
staff, rarely offers a course on the Qur'an. Philip Hitti's
History of the Arabs, by far the best modern, one-volume book in
English on the subject, is out of print. Most of what is available
is polemical and adversarial: the Arabs and Islam are occasions for
controversy, not cultural and religious subjects like others. Film
and TV are packed with horrendously unattractive, bloody- minded
Arab terrorists; they were there, alas, before the terrorists of the
World Trade Center and Pentagon hijacked the planes and turned them
into instruments of a mass slaughter that reeks of criminal
pathology much more than of any religion.
There seems to be a
minor campaign in the print media to hammer home the thesis that "we
are all Israelis now," and that what has occasionally occurred in
the way of Palestinian suicide bombs is more or less exactly the
same as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In the process,
of course, Palestinian dispossession and oppression are simply
erased from memory; also erased are the many Palestinian
condemnations of suicide bombing, including my own. The overall
result is that any attempt to place the horrors of what occurred on
11 September in a context that includes US actions and rhetoric is
either attacked or dismissed as somehow condoning the terrorist
bombardment.
Intellectually, morally,
politically such an attitude is disastrous since the equation
between understanding and condoning is profoundly wrong, and very
far from being true. What most Americans find difficult to believe
is that in the Middle East and Arab world US actions as a state --
unconditional support for Israel, the sanctions against Iraq that
have spared Saddam Hussein and condemned hundreds of thousands of
innocent Iraqis to death, disease, malnutrition, the bombing of
Sudan, the US "green light" for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon
(during which almost 20,000 civilians lost their lives, in addition
to the massacres of Sabra and Shatila), the use of Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf generally as a private US fiefdom, the support of
repressive Arab and Islamic regimes -- are deeply resented and, not
incorrectly, are seen as being done in the name of the American
people. There is an enormous gap between what the average American
citizen is aware of and the often unjust and heartless policies
that, whether or not he/she is conscious of them, are undertaken
abroad. Every US veto of a UN Security resolution condemning Israel
for settlements, the bombing of civilians, and so forth, may be
brushed aside by, say, the residents of Iowa or Nebraska as
unimportant events and probably correct, whereas to an Egyptian,
Palestinian or Lebanese citizen these things are wounding in the
extreme, and remembered very precisely.
In other words, there is
a dialectic between specific US actions on the one hand and
consequent attitudes towards America on the other hand that has
literally very little to do with jealousy or hatred of America's
prosperity, freedom, and all-round success in the world. On the
contrary, every Arab or Muslim that I have ever spoken to expressed
mystification as to why so extraordinarily rich and admirable a
place as America (and so likeable a group of individuals as
Americans) has behaved internationally with such callous
obliviousness of lesser peoples. Surely also, many Arabs and Muslims
are aware of the hold on US policy of the pro-Israeli lobby and the
dreadful racism and fulminations of pro-Israeli publications like
The New Republic or Commentary, to say nothing of
bloodthirsty columnists like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire,
George Will, Norman Podhoretz, and A M Rosenthal, whose columns
regularly express hatred and hostility towards Arabs and Muslims.
These are usually to be found in the mainstream media (e.g., the
editorial pages of The Washington Post) where everyone can
read them as such, rather than being buried in the back pages of
marginal publications.
So we are living through
a period of turbulent, volatile emotion and deep apprehension, with
the promise of more violence and terrorism dominating consciousness,
especially in New York and Washington, where the terrible atrocities
of 11 September are still very much alive in the public awareness. I
certainly feel it, as does everyone around me.
But what is nevertheless
encouraging, despite the appalling general media performance, is the
slow emergence of dissent, petitions for peaceful resolution and
action, a gradually spreading, if still very spotty, relatively
small demand for alternatives to more bombing and destruction. This
kind of thoughtfulness has been very remarkable, in my opinion.
First of all, there have been very widely expressed concerns about
what may be the erosion of civil liberties and individual privacy as
the government demands, and seems to be getting, the powers to
wire-tap telephones, to arrest and detain Middle Eastern people on
suspicion of terrorism, and generally to induce a state of alarm,
suspicion, and mobilisation that could amount to paranoia resembling
McCarthyism. Depending on how one reads it, the American habit of
flying the flag everywhere can seem patriotic of course, but
patriotism can also lead to intolerance, hate crimes, and all sorts
of unpleasant collective passion. Numerous commentators have warned
about this and, as I said earlier, even the president in his speech
said that "we" are not at war with Islam or Muslim people. But the
danger is there, and has been duly noted by other commentators, I am
happy to say.
Second, there have been
many calls and meetings to address the whole matter of military
action, which according to a recent poll, 92 per cent of the
American people seem to want. Because, however, the administration
hasn't exactly specified what the aims of this war are ("eradicating
terrorism" is more metaphysical than it is actual), nor the means,
nor the plan, there is considerable uncertainty as to where we may
be going militarily. But generally speaking the rhetoric has become
less apocalyptic and religious -- the idea of a crusade has
disappeared almost completely -- and more focused on what might be
necessary beyond general words like "sacrifice" and "a long war,
unlike any others." In universities, colleges, churches and
meeting-houses there are a great many debates on what the country
should be doing in response; I have even heard that families of the
innocent victims have said in public that they do not believe
military revenge is an appropriate response. The point is that there
is considerable reflection at large as to what the US should be
doing, but I am sorry to report that the time for a critical
examination of US policies in the Middle East and Islamic worlds has
not yet arrived. I hope that it will.
If only more Americans
and others can grasp that the main long-range hope for the world is
this community of conscience and understanding, that whether in the
protection of constitutional rights, or in reaching out to the
innocent victims of American power (as in Iraq), or in relying on
understanding and rational analysis "we" can do a great deal better
than we have so far done. Of course this won't lead directly to
changed policies on Palestine, or a less skewed defence budget, or
more enlightened environmental and energy attitudes: but where else
but in this sort of decent back-tracking is there room for hope?
Perhaps this constituency may grow in the United States, but
speaking as a Palestinian, I must also hope that a similar
constituency should be emerging in the Arab and Muslim world. We
must start thinking about ourselves as responsible for the poverty,
ignorance, illiteracy, and repression that have come to dominate
our societies, evils that we have allowed to grow despite our
complaints about Zionism and imperialism. How many of us, for
example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular
politics and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world
as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of
Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? How many of us have
denounced all suicidal missions as immoral and wrong, even though we
have suffered the ravages of colonial settlers and inhuman
collective punishment? We can no longer hide behind the injustices
done to us, anymore than we can passively bewail the American
support for our unpopular leaders. A new secular Arab
politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning
or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to
kill indiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score.
I have been arguing for
years that our main weapons as Arabs today are not military but
moral, and that one reason why, unlike the struggle against
apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle for self-
determination against Israeli oppression has not caught the world's
imagination is that we cannot seem to be clear about our goals and
our methods, and we have not stated unambiguously enough that our
purpose is coexistence and inclusion, not exclusivism and a return
to some idyllic and mythical past. The time has come for us to be
forthright and to start immediately to examine, re-examine and
reflect on our own policies as so many Americans and Europeans are
now doing. We should expect no less of ourselves than we should of
others. Would that all people took the time to try to see where our
leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason. Scepticism and
re- evaluation are necessities, not luxuries.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001 Al-Ahram Weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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