Augean Stables

My colleague at BU has an interview with the alumni magazine Bostonia.

Bernard Lewis wrote a book entitled What Went Wrong?, in which he explored the Muslim encounter with the West. Here Haqqani meditates on why it’s still going wrong.

Why They Hate Us: The Long Answer

Husain Haqqani explores the roots of a Muslim instability.

By Tricia Brick

Husain Haqqani argues that a lack of economic, intellectual, cultural, and technological productivity in the Muslim world has left a vacuum that has been filled by paranoia and inflammatory rhetoric.

Husain Haqqani recalls a Newsweek cover from October 2001: a Pakistani child brandishing a gun and the headline “Why They Hate Us.”

The photo is emblematic of a question that has haunted Haqqani, director of BU’s Center for International Relations and a College of Arts and Sciences associate professor of international relations. “I have always wondered why the Muslim world is in the eye of virtually every storm, in my lifetime at least,” he says. “The Middle East is a cauldron. The India-Pakistan conflict has a Muslim dimension. In Russia, there’s Chechnya, another Muslim dimension.” Why is the Muslim world plagued by instability, undemocratic governments, and sectarian violence?

Haqqani has set out to find answers. He calls his project State of the Muslim World, and he draws broadly from such fields as anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and demography. He has written a series of articles exploring some of his questions, and he plans to begin writing a book this year.

Despite the diversity of the Islam-influenced world, he says, Muslims everywhere share membership in the Ummah, or community of believers. “There are many differences among Muslims, but there are also common streaks running from Egypt to Indonesia, and there is a sense of belonging together,” he says. “And yet, in the last few centuries, it has been a belonging together in decline. The Kuwaitis may be rich, but they know it is coming from oil in the ground, not from something they’ve accomplished. There is a lack of a general sense of accomplishment in modern times.”

He reels off a succession of surprising statistics in support of this argument: the GDP of the world’s fifty-seven Muslim-majority countries combined is less than that of France.

Mind you, this is what the Muslims produce for themselves… if you will, how they take care of their own people. The huge discrepency between production (GDP) and available capital (income) that characterizes the Arab world is what happens when a prime-divider elite can import everything it needs. No matter how wealthy the country inflated by petrodollars (new petroeuros?), the commoners get the scraps. It’s the sign of a culture of impoverization in which the eliites disdain productive activities and despise manual labor.

Those fifty-seven countries are home to about 500 universities, compared to more than 5,000 in the United States and 8,000 in India. Fewer new book titles are published each year in Arabic, the language of 300 million people, than in Greek, spoken by only 15 million. More books are translated into Spanish each year than have been translated into Arabic in the last century.

These are all signs of insularity, insecurity, incapacity to absorb criticism.

Haqqani is getting some help in pulling together the data. “On Fridays, I usually have a set of my students working with me on this project,” he says. “How many books are sold in Bahrain? Compare that with some other country comparable in size and resources.”

I’d advise a study of the media, the percentage of “conspiracy” narrative, the appeal to zero-sum emotions, the incidence of genuine self-criticism. Interesting question: how to quantify these qualitative phenomena?

Using these facts, Haqqani argues that a lack of economic, intellectual, cultural, and technological productivity in the Muslim world has left a vacuum that has been filled by paranoia and inflammatory rhetoric, fueling “a culture of political anger, rather than political solutions.” Angry rhetoric, he maintains, keeps Muslims in a constant state of fear that Islam and Islamic culture are in danger of being snuffed out, resulting in a persistent cycle of violence as Muslims respond to the perceived threat posed by both external and sectarian enemies.

Well, I guess that answers the implications of my suggestions. It’s so nice to hear a Muslim say this, because when I say it, my “progressive” colleagues call me a racist and a demonizer and my “liberal” colleagues edge away in the hope they won’t get tarred.

At the same time, this culture of anger prevents Muslims from examining the internal problems that plague the Islamic world, such as repressive governments, sectarian conflict, and a lack of democratic representation. “Muslims must rise and peacefully mobilize against sectarianism and the violence and destruction in, say, Iraq,” he wrote in the Gulf Times, an English-language newspaper popular in Qatar. “But before that can happen, Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on Muslim victimhood and toward taking responsibility, as a community, for our own situation.”

This could make an enormous difference in Iraq, because despite the demonization of the West in Arab discourse, and its affirmation by BDS-impaired “critics”, what the US has offered Iraq — real independence if they can sustain it — is a fantastic opportunity. Of course, in the Muslim world Haqqani’s dream of peaceful mobilization against sectarianism and violence is a quasi-messianic leap of hope. It would help if Western progressives didn’t have Bush Derangement Syndrome so badly that they prefer everyone to lose if only they can blame Bush, and so feed the worst instincts in the Arab world.

But if there are bold Muslims who want to bring their people out of this land of self-defeating rage, no single dimension of their culture offers a simpler and more pervasive issue for reconsideration/reformulation than their collective discourse on Israel. This astonishingly uniform and harshly negative attitude not only features all of the elements of this larger discourse of grievance and rage, but each one of them appear in their most severe form. Indeed, I’d venture that anti-Zionism constitutes the “sacred narrative” of Muslim rage and fear, and only by reconsidering it, will Muslims be able to dismantle their prime dividers and enter the productive world of civil society.

Haqqani came to the United States after a career as a Pakistani journalist and statesman. He was Pakistan’s ambassador to Sri Lanka from 1992 to 1993 and was an advisor to Pakistani prime ministers Benazir Bhutto, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, and Nawaz Sharif.

Haqqani is the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, which was a bestseller in South Asia. He is also a practicing Muslim who studied in a madrassa, or traditional Islamic school, in Pakistan.

Although he hopes his message will reach Muslims, Haqqani believes that his research has something to teach Western policy makers as well. “Basically, I am saying that this is an entire section of the world that is reeling from the trauma of its decline,” he says. “How can the United States and other Western powers build relationships with the Muslim world without understanding what happens in the Muslim mind?”

Right on. It takes a great deal of courage to say this.

Instead our policy makers think of how they can appease the angry, resentful Muslim without having a clue about the doubt and anxiety that underlies that anger. Not a good idea.

The following article is from Kevin Myers at the Irish Independent. And it really does express a magnificent independence, a sense of moral outrage that one can be forgiven for thinking had all but disappeared from Europe, spent in the moral masturbation of attacking Israel and the US.

Among the more interesting aspects of the case, which the author raises, but whose implications he does not explore, is the fact that the girl in question got 90 lashes for being raped, and an additional 110 lashes for speaking to the press about it. There we touch on honor-shame issues; and we also touch on the enormous leverage the West has — if it would only use it — on the Muslim world.

EU inaction breeds contempt in a dictatorship of floggers
By Kevin Myers
Tuesday November 20 2007

There are some things — no, many things — which I do not understand in this world. But, what I find most incomprehensible of all is that the following story has not made world headlines. Without more ado, let me outline it.

An unnamed Saudi 19-year old woman — let us call her Fatima — has been sentenced to 200 lashes, after being gang-raped 14 times by a group of seven Sunni men in the town of Qatif. Not merely did they repeatedly rape her, but they also raped the male friend they found her with.

Her attackers received sentences of between 10 months and five years. The man she was found with in the car — we’ll call him Abdul– was sentenced to 90 lashes.

Why were Abdul and Fatima, both of them rape victims, sentenced to anything? Because they were alone in a car, and it is a criminal offence in Saudi Arabia for unrelated men and women to be in one another’s company.

This law represents the quintessence of sexual pathologies in Saudi Arabia. It embodies the pervasive fear that if two people who are not married are together alone in a car, they will engage in forbidden sexual behavior. No notion of self-restraint, no trust in the citizen — really the subject — to behave appropriately. Jealously — and envy — legislate.

So criminal, indeed, that even after being repeatedly raped, the two offenders were considered worthy of further punishment: 90 lashes each, which was increased to 200 lashes for Fatima after she had the temerity to appeal and to speak to the Saudi press about the horror which had befallen her.

There are many questions which result from this story. The first is the one I referred to in the opening paragraph: why is this is not a world-shattering headline?

Excellent question, and probably linked to the same forces that render British artists and political cartoonists, reknown for their iconoclastic assaults on all that is “holy” to become pussycats when it is a question of Islam. Intimidation. Britain, like so much of Europe and the rest of the West, has become a proto-Dhimmi state. This girl had the courage to speak to the press despite the pressure on her to shut up, but the press doesn’t have the courage to carry her words.
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Live blogging from Wafa Sultan’s talk here in Boston. She was asked by a member of the audience: “What about American atrocities like corporate greed and the income gap?” She responded:

I was asked by the Al Jazeera interviewer why I was more American than the Americans. I said, because I was born in hell and came to paradise. Americans are born in paradise and don’t know about hell. I don’t blame them for it. But I love every moment in America. Every time I walk down the street and am not called a whore, I love it.

My candidate for both civic heroism and the courage to feel and show gratitude.

Remarkable piece by an Arab American who manages to transcend the “my people right or wrong” mentality of honor-shame, tribal culture.

‘I am with Israel’: One Arab-American’s salute

Despite all the spit, kicks & insults, the Jews would rather build than destroy
EMILIO KARIM DABUL
Wednesday, September 19th 2007, 4:00 AM

One of the greatest Arab poets of the 20th century was a Syrian named Nizar Qabbani. He was, in his own way, the Pablo Neruda of the Middle East. His love poems in particular are on a par with anything Don Pablo wrote.

So, it was with great disappointment that I came across one of Qabbani’s poems written in the late 1990s, entitled, “I Am With Terrorism.” I hoped the title would prove ironic. It didn’t. Not even close.

Just how I felt reading Scott Adam’s piece on Ahmadenijad at Columbia.

In fact, it is one of themost naked, awful pieces of anti-Israel, anti-U.S. drivel I’ve ever read.

Witness this rhetorical device in which he is able to insult two peoples with one poetic stone:
“I am with terrorism as long as this new world order is shared between America and Israel half-half.”

And that is actually one of the more moderate sections of the poem. As an Arab-American, I came away from reading it with a real sense of despair. If one of the great voices of Middle East poetry can do nothing more than recycle the Arabs-as-victims stance, justified in horrendous acts of violence against their “oppressors,” then what hope is there ever that Arabs and Israelis will ever know true peace?

I’d actually take that in a different direction. Forget about the Israelis. What hope is there ever that Arabs will ever know a semblance of peace among themselves?

Having just passed the sixth anniversary of 9/11 - and in the midst of a new conversation about the so-called “Israel Lobby” that allegedly dominates U.S. foreign policy - I want to offer an antidote to that toxic verse and the other vitriol that has poisoned too much Arab thought.

Israel, with all its imperfections, remains the beacon of light for the Middle East. For that reason, I wish to salute her, not only as one of America’s greatest allies in the war on terror, but as one of the true miracle countries of this time or any other.

With no apologies to Qabbani, I give you my twist on his verse:

“I am with Israel
because a people so long denied bread and freedom,
crushed under the wheels of pharaohs, emperors, czars and Führers,
has done more than any other people to free the world from itself.
What single people in history have contributed more to faith, science, philosophy and the arts?
And done so against the greatest odds, with a sword at their throats…
I am with Israel
because my people, so long in the desert,
have not had the courage to acknowledge the great teachers among them,
but instead have turned on them,
blamed them for all evil and shed their blood…
What other people could crawl away from the wreckage of the Holocaust
and, instead of seeking revenge, build the miracle called Israel?
Why, as Wufa Sultan has asked, have there been no Jewish homicide bombers?
Perhaps it is because despite all the spit, kicks and insults they’ve faced,
along with the constant threat of extinction,
the Jews would rather build than destroy.
I am with Israel
because I am with life,
and because beyond its verdant desert,
Israel offers the knowledge that those most desirous of peace and freedom
are a people who have so long been denied it,
and who with all they know of the world,
look still toward Jerusalem and reach for their enemy’s hand.”

Dabul, an editor with the American Congress for Truth, is author of “Deadline,” a novel about terrorism.

If Westerners want to see an example of genuine magnanimity and great heartedness, it’s hard to find anything to compare with this. From your mouth to your fellow Arab-Americans’ ears.

Mahmoud Darwish, noted Palestinian poet, reacts to the devastating Gaza revelations with some remarkable, scorching self-criticism. I append comments, understanding that I am working with a translation and may well misinterpret.

MEMRI Special Dispatch-Palestinian Authority/Reform Project
June 29, 2007
No. 1639

On June 17, 2007, renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his reflections on the internecine fighting in Gaza in the London daily Al-Hayat. Darwish is known both for his literary output and for his political activism; he was a member of the PLO Central Committee from 1987 until 1993, when he resigned in protest of the Oslo Accords.

The following are excerpts from Al-Hayat (London), June 17, 2007.

Leading Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish on the Events in Gaza

“Did we have to fall from towering heights and see our blood on our hands, in order to grasp that we are not angels, as we used to believe? Did we also have to expose all our faults before everybody, so that our true nature should not remain virginal? How much did we lie when we said: ‘We are an exception.’ That you believe yourself is worse than to lie to another. To be friendly with those who hate us and cruel to those who love us – that is the baseness of one who aggrandizes himself and the arrogance of the lowly.

Interesting on a whole series of levels. Let’s take them one at a time:

Did we have to fall from towering heights and see our blood on our hands, in order to grasp that we are not angels, as we used to believe?

Apparently, yes. The blood was on your hands a long time ago, in Lebanon, for example. Only the wildest fantasies — like your poetry — could have you thinking you were angels, and only, apparently, the most spectacular failures could get you to reconsider.

Did we also have to expose all our faults before everybody, so that our true nature should not remain virginal?

Apparently so. If it hadn’t been in public, a global shame, you could have continued to lie to yourselves, to pretend that you were virginal. And just what does it mean to say: “so that our true nature should not remain virginal?” You never were, you were born as a sacrifice to hide Arab shame. Is this an expression of the honor-shame attitude that holds that as long as others don’t know, it hasn’t happened?

How much did we lie when we said: ‘We are an exception.’ That you believe yourself is worse than to lie to another. To be friendly with those who hate us and cruel to those who love us – that is the baseness of one who aggrandizes himself and the arrogance of the lowly.

This is strong stuff. It also underlines the (non-racist, non-condescending) observation that Palestinians/Arabs know about lies and lying to oneself. They are not unaware of these issues, and when confronted with a stark situation, are capable of searing self-criticism. I’d love to know who Darwish has in mind when he refers to those who hate and love us. It does remind me of my exchange with Omar, whose blog at the time had an opening quote from an Arab proverb about how one sign of a fool is his inability to distinguish friend from foe. What I was trying to say to Omar was, “you have been fools for believing that your leaders — Arab and Palestinian — are your friends.” Is this what Darwish means? But then to whom have the Palestinians been cruel who love them?
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The Times editorial page tries its hand at “Honoring Rushdie.” You be the judge of just how much they understand (or are willing to acknowledge). Emphasis added.

Honoring Rushdie

Published: June 26, 2007
Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is causing a furor — especially in Pakistan and Iran — among Islamic extremists, who see it as an official state endorsement of a writer who has been anathema to them ever since the publication of The Satanic Verses. And it has caused a few ripples of conscience in the West, too, a part of the world where writers are not routinely threatened with death but where we do try, often perplexedly, to respect the validity and the intensity of other people’s feelings.

Mr. Rushdie’s new honor raises the same question now that his work raised when Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwah against him in 1989. Do we choose to live in a world that honors writers or in a world that kills them?

It is tempting to say that this is too simple a way to look at it. It’s possible to argue that our desire to protect free speech — and, in effect, do away with the very notion of literary heresy — is as much an acculturation as the desire to enforce religious orthodoxy. But the problem Mr. Rushdie raises is not about the origins of human belief. It is about the consequences of human belief and, specifically, the consequences of religious tyranny.

The imaginative range of his work, its complexity and its ability to test the limits of what we know and believe entitle him to the respect and the honors he has earned. Yet in some parts of the world it would earn him assassination. You cannot judge a society only by the way it treats writers. But you can be certain that if a society treats writers badly, it treats ordinary people no better.

Too short. Too wishy washy even as it tries to be decisive. The real problem is whether we’re willing to fight for freedom. This kind of sideways, on the one hand… but really… is hardly the kind of stuff to inspire a willingness to fight. We need a real critique of the nonsense that appears here as the “one could argue… but…” position. We need a ringing defense of literary heresy, especially since it is only with the freedom to criticize and be criticized that civil society exists.

In polite society, you don’t say certain things lest there be violence.

In civil society, you can say what you need to, and there won’t be violence.

Let’s stop being so damned polite to the wrong people.

Solomonia has a fascinating interview with Jeff Robbins, the attorney who defended several of the individuals and groups whom the Islamic Society of Boston sued for defamation (now dropped) for daring to criticize the building of a large mosque in Roxbury. Of the many interesting exchanges, the one I cite below discusses the issue of whether or not the criticisms of opponents of the mosque were an attack on Islam — i.e., the dreaded Islamophobia.

Q: There’s been a lot of talk about people being against “Muslims.” They tried to stop a mosque, The David Project is stirring up bad feelings about Muslims. Is it about Muslims?

A: Look, I saw no evidence that it was ever about Muslims at all. On the contrary, all you have to do to realize how ludicrous that is is to think about who did the ISB sue? They sued a very courageous Islamic Cleric, Ahmed Mansour, and they accused him of having a “non-authoritative” view of Islam. Of all the ugly aspects of this lawsuit — the decision to file it, the allegations that were made, the strategy of suing people in order to intimidate them into silence — in some ways nothing was uglier than the decision that was made by whoever it was that made it, whether it was made in Saudi Arabia or Washington, D.C. by Mr. Bray or elsewhere, the decision to sue and to frighten Ahmed Mansour and through him other moderate Muslims into staying silent is to my mind one of the most grotesque aspects of this lawsuit.

Here’s a man who was jailed in the Middle East for having spoken out in favor of pluralism and respect for democracy and tolerance for other religions. He comes to the United States and gets political asylum. He goes into the current ISB mosque and he sees literature which is exactly, to his mind, the kind of stuff that made him disgusted and outraged in the Middle East, and he thinks “How can this be? How can this be in my new country?” and he has the courage to speak out. Let there be no mistake. The decision to sue Ahmed Mansour, like the decision to sue Anna Kolodner, Steve Emerson, Bill Sapers and the journalists, was borne of a desire to bully people into submission. I understand why the day after they were forced to cave in the ISB did its best to try to peddle this as an attack against Muslims. It was no such thing. It was their attack. And it was their attack on Muslims, and on Christians and Jews. I joked to some people that where the ISB sued a Muslim Cleric, a Christian Political Science professor, and a Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, they had managed to achieve the perfect ecumenical exercise. They were trying to bully everybody, without regard to their religion.

Human interest story that gets at the moral asymmetry of the conflict. Note that it was a visit to an Israeli hospital that transformed Brigitte Gabriel’s understanding of the conflict. (Hat tip: David Frankfurter)

Shot by their own side, healed by the enemy

By Charles Levinson in Ashkelon, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:55am BST 10/06/2007

In the Gaza Strip’s Jab aliya refugee camp, Aref Suleiman was raised on Palestinian struggle against the Jewish state. Today he lies in an Israeli hospital bed, his body riddled with Palestinian bullets, his wounds tended daily by Israeli nurses.

For the 22-year-old Mr Suleiman, who was shot five times point blank by Hamas militants last month during a renewed bout of Palestinian infighting, this is not the Arab-Israeli conflict he learnt about as a child growing up in Gaza’s desperate, rubbish-strewn alleys.

“Palestinians shoot me and Jews treat me,” he laughs bitterly. “It was supposed to be different.”

The Barzilai Hospital sits on a sandy hilltop above the Mediterranean Sea in the southern Israeli port city of Ashkelon. In recent months, five Palestinian rockets have landed in the grassy dunes that encircle it, just six miles from the Gaza Strip.

Barzilai, however, has become a rare bastion of civility in an increasingly hate-filled conflict and a unique meeting ground for two peoples who otherwise have little direct contact.

Wounded Palestinians who get permission from the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army are allowed into Israel to seek medical treatment that is not available at Gaza’s rudimentary clinics. Here, Israelis and Palestinians meet their erstwhile foe, in many cases for the first time in their lives.

It is worth noting here that before 1994, those clinics were far less rudimentary. When the Israelis evacuated Gaza as part of the Oslo Peace Process, they left those clinics with a year’s worth of medicine. Within weeks it had been plundered by the strong men who took over: difference between civil society and prime divider society.

Mr Suleiman, who was only 15 when the second intifada erupted in 2000, had never been to Israel or met an Israeli. Suleiman, a guard in the Palestinian security services who was a devoted follower of the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

So he came to political consciousness under the sign of Muhammad al Durah.

As he flirts with the Israeli nurses who bring him lunch, check his wounds and blood pressure and empty his bed pan, Suleiman seems, at least for the time being, to have forgotten historical grievances.

“The Jews are like honey, like flowers,” he says theatrically. “They wash me, clean me, and change my gown every day. Even in my home, my own family wouldn’t change me every day.”

“Here, everything is beseder,” he adds, using the Hebrew word for “okay”.

For the young Israeli nurses, most from nearby communities that live in constant fear of the Palestinian rocket fire, the cultural exchange flows both ways. The Palestinian patients they treat put a human face on the conflict. Nurse and patient can even find a shred of common cause now that the Islamist Hamas movement, which has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings, is locked in a deadly power struggle with the more moderate Fatah movement [sic! — ed. rl].

Victims on both sides of the war’s de facto frontline are treated side by side here. Five doors down from Mr Suleiman, Ludmilla Visiptzky, 60, awaits her third session of surgery to patch up the shrapnel wounds she suffered when a Palestinian Qassam rocket struck her home in mid-May.

Both confined to their hospital beds, the two patients have had little contact, but each knows the other is within shouting distance. Meanwhile Nurse Kokhava Kohi, says gleefully of her patient, Mr Suleiman: “He’s going to go home and shoot Hamas in the head,” - as if that alone would justify her daily ministrations.

Good luck to her. What a silly way to end the article.

I haven’t written anything about the UCU boycott, mostly because I’m trying to figure out from what angle to approach it. In the meantime, Helen of EUReferendum (of “Green-Helmet Guy of Qana fame) has written a powerful piece, and now, of all places, the New York Times. It almost restores one’s faith in self-professed “liberals”: crisp moral thinking, firm crap detector.

Malicious Boycotts

Published: June 3, 2007

The University and College Union, a newly formed British union of college teachers, shamefully called last week for a boycott on contacts and exchanges with Israeli academic institutions. That follows on the shameful call in April by the National Union of Journalists in Britain to boycott Israeli goods.

It is hard to imagine two organizations that should be less given to such nonsense. Who would respect the judgment of a scholar who selects or rejects colleagues on political grounds? Who would trust the dispatches of a reporter who has been openly engaged against one side of a conflict? The unions argue that they have an obligation to demonstrate labor-union solidarity with the oppressed, as they did in opposing apartheid. That is absurd.

First, Israeli journalists and academics are among the most dedicated critics of their own society. Second, the lack of similar “solidarity” by these unions with any other oppressed or suffering people in the world, and there are plenty, reduces these gestures to an exercise in hypocrisy, or worse.

It is good to see that most respected British journalists, scholars and students — including the preponderance of British editorial writers and the heads of Oxford, Cambridge and 20 other top universities — as well as representatives of all major political parties condemned these malicious gestures.

Critical thinking and well-thought-out criticism are intrinsic to good scholarship and good journalism. These boycotts represent neither. Posturing like this only alienates the very forces in Israeli society that should be encouraged and offends the calling and honor of journalism and academia.

Hear! hear! Now if only the folks who wrote this paused to think how badly misled they have been by just the kind of advocacy journalism they profess to abhor — including subtle work by their own people — then maybe we might have the separation we so need between real liberals (what Michael Walzer calls a “decent left”) and the radicals who have now descended into the depths of paranoia and anti-Semitism from which it is rare that movements “return” unscathed.

In my previous post, I responded to Prof. Bisharat, who at least had the decency to acknowledge the existence of the Holocaust, even if he had the moral obtuseness to compare it with the fate of the Palestinians — the most widely supported victims with the longest life-expectancy and demographic growth rate of any victim in history (a fortiori any victim of a “genocide”). Here Mark Steyn reflects on the direction of public education in England.

When I was in Shanghai I we shared a hotel with the a large and noisy group of American Chinese students making a visit to China from an international school.

“Will you take them to the memorial for the victims of the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” during the war?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he blurted out, “we have Japanese students in the group.”

I thought about this a great deal afterwards. Of course, both Japanese and Chinese are “honor-shame” cultures in which it would be most humiliating to the Japanese students to attend such a site, especially in the face of Chinese students who might take advantage of this to attack the Japanese students (as, in the previous post, I pointed out that the Palestinians responded to Israeli admissions of responsibility for the Naqba).

But wasn’t this conceding precisely to the kinds of sentiments that need to be confronted — should we not “face history”? Shouldn’t the Japanese students learn to absorb this incident as they grow up in a multi-national world — as so many of their elders refuse to do?
Then I came up with a great “even-handed” solution. Lest the Chinese get too aggressive, the teachers could combine the discussion of the Rape of Nanking (in which at most some 300,000 Chinese were victims) with the rape of China by Mao Tse Tong, in which some 70 million were killed (most of the in peacetime). I didn’t get a chance to suggest it.

When Reality’s up for Grabs
Mark Steyn - Monday,21 May 2007

I find myself mulling over the future of the past. By which I mean that the latter depends very much on the former. For example, much as it may astonish younger readers, there are millions of people who grew up all over the world in schools that taught them that the Britannic inheritance was on the whole a good thing as opposed to the root cause of all the world’s woes. Indeed, they’d be the astonished ones if you’d told their 15-year-old selves that by the time they reached middle age the history they learned would be . . . well, history. As in that useful American formulation: “Rumsfeld? Ah, fuhgeddabouttim. He’s history.” In Canada and around the western world, we have discarded large chunks of our past. The question is: what else can be junked?

I’m not sure I’d say we’ve junked our past. We’ve junked a good deal of it (it’s really DWM [dead white male] phallo-logo-centric nonsense). But we’ve also inverted it. The self criticism of Western culture makes Western historiography by far the most honest and searching, starting both with the Biblical historiograpy and its often unflattering portraits (from Abraham’s treatment of his wife, to the whining Hebrews in the desert, to the adulterous king David) and with Greek historiography and Thucidydes painful portrait of the Athenians and Spartans in a suicidal war of dominion. We’ve now taken that self-criticism to the point of reversal: rather than read the self-crticism as a crucial sign of emotional maturity, we interiorize it as a tyrannical super-ego, and trash the very culture that produced it. Other cultures, still in thrall to the typical historiography of prime divider societies — demonize the other, justify yourself — get to articulate the criticism we are so exceptionally willing to consider, rather than be challenged by our willingness to engage in their own self-criticism. They get to demonize, we get to play masochistic omnipotent.

Over in London the other day, there was an interesting story in The Mail On Sunday, which began as follows:

“Schools are dropping controversial subjects from history lessons–such as the Holocaust and the Crusades–because teachers do not want to cause offence, Government research has found . . . Some teachers have even dropped the Holocaust completely from lessons over fears that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions in class.”

Indeed. This was from a study for the Department of Education, which reported: “Teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned. Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”

I felt vaguely I’d read this story before, and I had: different country, same discreet closing of the door on awkward corners of the past. In the Netherlands, schoolteachers are reluctant to discuss the Second World War because “in particular settings” pupils don’t believe the Holocaust happened, and, if it did, the Germans should have finished the job and we wouldn’t have all these problems today.

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The indefatigable Khaled abu Toameh, who has more than anyone, addressed the issue of Palestinian press freedom, has an extremely important article in today’s Jerusalem Post on the problems of journalism in the Palestinian Authority. For those of my readers who think that I’ve been exaggerating the role of intimidation by Palestinians, and hence the culture of “access journalism,” on MSM press like Steven Erlanger, consider the implications of what Toameh reveals in his article. [Toameh in bold, blockquote.]

Mar. 31, 2007 18:52 | Updated Apr. 1, 2007 7:00
Palestinian journalists calls for a media boycott of the PA
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate on Saturday called on the local and foreign media to boycott the Palestinian Authority in response to the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in Gaza City three weeks ago.

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped by masked Palestinian gunmen in Gaza three weeks ago.

This is nothing short of monumental for this organization to call for such a strike. In some senses, it resembles the Israeli academics who call for a boycott of Israeli academics, although in this case it is a cry for help not an insane, ideologically driven stab at seppuku. The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate is hardly the most committed organization in the world to the civic values it here invokes to appeal to the world, so one must assume they are genuinely fearful. As long as both the authorities and the press agreed on the anti-Zionist victim narrative, and Pallywood served both their purposes, the problem remained concealed. Now that it’s civil war, and the Israelis are not involved, the issue of press repression becomes unavoidable.

Meanwhile, a prominent human rights activist in the Gaza Strip expressed fear that the kidnapping of foreign journalists was designed to “prevent the world from seeing what’s really happening here.”

It’s obvious, the activist said, “that those behind the kidnappings want to have a monopoly over the news coverage in the Gaza Strip. They don’t want the world to see the anarchy on the streets and the infighting between Fatah and Hamas. Unfortunately, they have succeeded in achieving their goal because most foreign journalists are today afraid to come to the Gaza Strip.”

Note that the activist remains nameless. No one wants to be in the Palestinian territories and a known critic. Also note that the activist would not have spoken earlier about this — kidnappings and control of the news have characterized Palestinian media culture (and the Western journalists who learn to play by their rules) for decades, certainly since the 1970s.

In understanding this remarkable reaction, it is important to realize, that Alan Johnston was a pro-Palestinian advocacy reporter. The BBC explicitly articulated that in pleading for his release. Like the French government responding to its journalists being kidnapped in Iraq, his father begged for Johnston’s rapid return by emphasizing how “good” he was for all Palestinians.

Mr Johnston’s father made a direct plea to his son’s kidnappers in a televised statement, imploring: “It is not helping the Palestinian people. It’s no way to treat a friend of the Palestinian people.”

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PMW has recently posted a remarkable piece of Palestinian self-criticism. Since I often tout self-criticism, and as often complain that Palestinians rarely if ever engage in the practice, I want to highlight this remarkable case, and congratulate the courageous and perceptive author, Dr. Nadir Sa’id, Director of Development Studies at Bir Zeit University.

Some Imams incite to
kill women, beat children: PA Academic
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook - March 15, 2007

In an open challenge to Palestinian leadership, Dr. Nadir Sa’id of Bir Zeit University condemned the violence in Palestinian society and placed the blame on the political and religious leaders. He blamed both Fatah and Hamas, including the Prime Minister and others ministers, for hundreds of killings. He condemned some Imams who preach the killing of women and beating of children. He criticized these actions, as well as the hate incitement that has created a Palestinian society permeated with violence. Children have learned that the use of violence achieves power and influence.

This self-criticism is rare in the PA media. If it continues, this is a positive development.

Click here to see Dr. Sa’id’s condemnation of Palestinian leadership

Dr. Nadir Sa’id, director of Development Studies at Bir Zeit University:

“The last months in particular proved without a doubt the existence of political crime [in Palestinian society], and it is related to the attempt to achieve a high level of power, control and influence … The political struggle for rule. One of the primary and clear forms, which draws attention, having powerful and clear influence, and which caused hundreds of deaths, is clearly the crimes committed in the struggle for influence in the [Palestinian] Authority. But there are other types, including the attempt to threaten opposition, threaten those who disagree…

What is important regarding political crime, and especially in the Palestinian situation, is that there is a kind of conspiracy not to punish the criminals. This is the big problem. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in the recent struggle between Fatah and Hamas. First: Who will punish those who facilitated these violent environmental conditions? Who will punish those who gave the orders? Who will punish those who committed [the crimes]? Who will punish the people who remained silent and did not hesitate to justify this type of violence?

What we see now, and this is the basic problem in the culture regarding the culture of violence, is that what has happened, he who killed here and there, is now appointed as a minister in the [Palestinian] National Authority. That is, it is a clear message.

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A fine piece on the 24-CAIR controversy. Since I first realized what demopathy was (didn’t yet have the word for it) when CAIR mobilized thousands to protest Muslims portrayed as terrorists in the movie True Lies, (1994) but couldn’t mobilize one mouth to protest Muslims behaving as terrorists in the attack on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Ares the same year, I am particularly interested in their movie-based complaints. If civil society survives, it will be because people like Zuhdi Jasser speak up. (Hat-tip: Lisa Magnas)

Why Do They CAIR about Jack Bauer?
24 is an opportunity for American Muslims to fight the real enemy: Islamism.
January 29, 2007, 5:00 a.m.
By M. Zuhdi Jasser

Yet again, the old, tired “major” American Muslim organizations have come out in full force to object to something unobjectionable. This time, they’re angry about the storyline of 24, the highly popular TV drama on Fox: When the recent premiere episode ended with a terrorist network detonating a nuclear device in a Los Angeles suburb, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced its fear that “this would serve to increase anti-Muslim prejudice in American society.” The show had begun with a depiction of an America gripped in fear after an eleven-week run of suicide bombings, apparently by radical Islamist terror cells, in cities across the country.

The show addresses a real concern. While the U.S. has not been the victim of an attack since 9/11, a vast array of networks have been dismantled around the world — including a plot run out of London that was targeting the U.S. And, since 9/11, there have been a number of successful attacks upon civilian populations in other parts of the globe — in Bali, Istanbul, Spain, London, Egypt, Jordan, and other places.

As an American and as a Muslim, I find 24 to be not only a profoundly engaging program, but one whose portrayal of Muslims in quite fair. In the show, the president’s sister works for a “leading” Muslim civil-rights organization in D.C.; she is portrayed as a protector of constitutional freedoms. The head of this Muslim organization, who is in detention, reports to authorities on prisoners’ terrorism-related conversations that have alarmed him.

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