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Heaven On Earth
Category Archives: Prime Divider Societies
The Mystery of Hate: Can Pallywood have anything to do with it?
Yair Lapid, an Israeli columnist asked a long, painful, and highly relevant question. Why the hate? Not Palestinian hate, but Arab, Muslim? My attempt at the beginning of a answer aftewards.
The Mystery of Hate
by Yair LapidHundreds of years of fighting, six and a half wars, billions of dollars gone with the wind, tens of thousands of victims, not including the boy who laid down next to me on the rocky beach of lake Karon in 1982 and we both watched his guts spilling out. The helicopter took him and until this day I do not know whether he is dead or survived. All this, and one
cannot figure it out.And its not only what happened but all that did not happen – hospitals that were never built, universities that were never opened, roads that were never paved, the three years that were taken from millions of teenagers for the sake of the army. And despite all the above, we still do not have the beginning of a clue to the mystery of where it all started:
Why do they hate us so much?
Why Arabs Suffer: Philip Salzman Nails it
Philip Salzman, an anthropologist at McGill who specializes in Arab tribal cultures, has written an excellent piece on Arab suffering gives the background to many of the points I’ve made about Palestinian suffering. Without understanding this dimension of the problem, all efforts to “resolve the Arab-Israeli problem,” no matter how well intentioned, are doomed not only to failure, but to making the situation worse by reinforcing precisely the forces that contribute primarily to Arab suffering — their political and religious elites.
This article is drawn from his forthcoming book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East [Humanity Books].
WHY ARABS SUFFER
Philip Carl Salzman
National Post, January 11, 2008By modern standards, contemporary Middle Eastern Arab nations are failed societies. On virtually every index of socioeconomic and political development, they compare poorly with other parts of the world.
Under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, an independent group of 20 Arab scholars analyzed the state of Arab human development in a widely-circulated 2002 report. Their findings were stark. In particular, the Arab Human Development Report 2002 found that the 19 nations under study suffer from a “freedom deficit”:
“Out of seven world regions, the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the late 1990s. The Arab region also has the lowest [score] of all regions for voice and accountability [based on] a number of indicators measuring various aspects of the political process, civil liberties, political rights and the independence of the media.”
The Arab region not only ranked last on the freedom scale, but the gap between Arab countries and the next-to-last ranked region, Africa, was substantial. The authors also found the Arab world lagged in gender equality, education, Internet use, human welfare and technological development. “The [total] average [scientific] output of the Arab world per million inhabitants is roughly 2% that of an industrialized country,” the authors noted. “In 1981, the Republic of Korea was producing 10% of the output of the Arab world; in 1995, it almost equalled its output.”
In the number of frequently cited scientific papers generated per million inhabitants, Switzerland scored 79.90, the United States 42.99, Israel 38.63. Among Arab nations, Kuwait led the pack with 0.53, followed by Saudi Arabia with 0.07, Egypt at 0.02, and Algeria at 0.01.
The poet Nizar Qabbani, quoted by Fouad Ajami in his famous book The Dream Palace of the Arabs, concluded that Arab societal dysfunction is so pervasive that he could no longer write:
‘I don’t write because I can’t say something that equals the sorrow of this Arab nation. I can’t open any of the countless dungeons in this large prison. The poet is made of flesh and blood. You can’t make him speak when he loses his appetite for words. You can’t ask him to entertain and enthrall when there is nothing in the Arab world that entertains or enthralls. When we were secondary schoolchildren, our history teacher used to call the Ottoman Empire [Europe’s] ‘sick man.’ What is the history teacher to call these mini-empires of the Arab world being devoured by disease? What are we to call these mini-empires with broken doors and shattered windows and blown-away roofs? What can the writer say and write in this large Arab hospital?’ How can we explain the discouraging state of Middle Eastern Arab societies? Is it the fault of Western imperialism or the existence of Israel, as often claimed?—Nizar Qabbani
It is true that there were brief European imperial and colonial disruptions in the Middle East, and that Arab leaders were guided by Western socialist and fascist political models in developing their dictatorial political systems. Yet these system have been largely over-layers added to—not replacements for—traditionally tribalized Arab societies, with their legacies of violence left intact from Bedouin days.
It is to the latter that we must look to understand the circumstances and difficulties of the Arab Middle East. The lesson is that, in the Arab world and elsewhere, culture matters.
The Arab Middle East has remained largely a pre-modern society, governaned by clan relationships and violent coercion. People in both the countryside and the cities tend to trust only their relatives, and then only relative to their degree of closeness. People define their interests in terms of the interests of their own group, and in opposition to those of other groups. A pervasive cult of honour requires that people support their own groups, violently if necessary, when conflict arises.
What is missing in the Arab Middle East are the cultural tools for building an inclusive and united state. The cultural glue of the West and other successful modern societies—consisting of the rule of law and constitutionalism, which serve to regulate competition among unrelated groups—is absent in the Arab world. The frame of reference in a tribalized society is always “my group vs. the other group.” This system of “balanced opposition” is the structural alternative that stands in stubborn opposition to Western constitutionalism.
Islam, which might have provided an overarching constitution of universalistic rules binding together all members of society, has failed as a political organizing principle, as well—for it too reflects the region’s underlying sociology, having been built up by the Arabs’ Bedouin forebears on a foundation of balanced opposition. This is why it has fueled rather than suppressed the Middle East’s various bloody feuds, such as those between Sunni vs. Shiite and between Muslim vs. infidel.
As a result, Arab political reform has proven elusive, and will remain thus so long as balanced opposition dominates the region’s political culture. Whatever formal unity is imposed by coercive force over a national population—we need only think of the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, etc.—remains illegitimate in the eyes of the subjects on the receiving end, and thus constantly open to violent challenge and radical replacement.
The primary goal of such regimes is to remain in power and maximize their spoils, rather than to enhance the lives of society members. Their dysfunction explains why so many Arabs have suffered so long, and remain without the liberties we in the West take for granted.
The irony in all this, is that such a failed culture on its own grounds can be so effective bringing down a successful culture like Europe.
Wafa Sultan: Why I am more American than Americans
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.
False but “Accurate”: Demopathic Myths from “Nelson Mandela”
Joel Pollack of Guide to the Perplexed has a couple of posts on the Sabeel conference at the Old South Church. In the first one he discusses a quotation from Nelson Mandela on the back of the Official Program.
I sat down in a pew near the front and opened the folder of conference materials. The back page of the official program was entitled “Apartheid?” and was filled with quotes and maps aimed at proving the Israel-apartheid analogy. They had a line from Jimmy Carter, a line from Archbishop Desmond Tutu (the conference’s keynote speaker), and a line from—no, wait, really?—Nelson Mandela:
“Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.”
Sounds rather damning, doesn’t it? And who could disagree with Nelson Mandela? There’s only one problem: Nelson Mandela never said, wrote or endorsed those words. They are the creation of an Arab journalist named Arjan El Fassed. When I exposed El Fassed’s fraud earlier this year, he claimed: “There is no possible basis for Pollak to say I intended people to believe the memo was written by anyone other than myself.”
In spite of El Fassed’s admission, the Israel-haters continue to use his Mandela quote to promote their views.
Do the authors of the pamphlet know that this attribution is not true? (Certainly, anti-Zionists are carefully attuned to the meaning of perceived mis-attribution when it’s in their favor, as in the case of Martin Luther King’s Zionist sympathies.) So either they don’t know a “mock memo” when they see one, and/or they don’t care.
On the contrary, my sense is that this text represents what might best be called, mythical status. It embodies an axiomatic “higher truth” for anti-Zionists, and attributing it to Nelson Mandela gives it a further luster that, inaccuracy aside, it clearly deserves in their eyes. In other words, they feel fully justified in presenting it as true. How else can people be mobilized to do what is so obviously the right thing to do “for peace and justice” (i.e., condemn Israel)? When confronted withe problem, they, like the defenders of Dan Rather’s forged memo, can always plead “fake but accurate.”
Such an attitude brings us to one of the key issues separating propaganda from information, separating the informing of an autonomous public, empowered to make decisions, and the manipulation of a public whose decisions, the activists wish to control. In our imperfect world where objective reality cannot be reduced to verbal formulae, only a commitment to accuracy and empirical evidence distinguishes those who report to us, as reliably as they can, from those who tell us what they want us to think. Fake but accurate is the refuge of true believers who consider convenient fictions — what medieval Christians referred to as “pious forgeries” — acceptable means to convey the message.
A commitment to calling it and telling it fairly, even when it is against your own interests, marks an informtion source with integrity. Note, for example, how the allegedly partisan CAMERA (which is careful to document everything it writes) had to deal with a similarly manipulated “Zionist” citation attributed to Martin Luther King, they didn’t mince words and in their headline called it a hoax.
The ability to distinguish empirical information that reflects what happened, and information that comes from dishonest sources, constitutes one of the fundamental skills of any civil society. If you can look at the rushes taken by Palestinian cameramen at Netzarim Junction on the 30th of September, and not see street actors, completely unafraid of Israeli soldiers, with military directed by civilian directors, play scenes before the cameramen of injury and evacuation, rather than people actually injured and taken away, then you have failed the most elemental level of journalistic intelligence.
At that point, you can accept rebuke and become a more critical information provider, exercising shrewder and more penetrating judgment, or you can use the excuse of the PA TV official who explained that doctoring footage of al Durah to accuse the Israelis of deliberately targeting the boy was a form of “higher truth” to which he as a journalist is dedicated above all things. This is the excuse Enderlin used for running the footage of the boy without investigating the reliability of the report, because “it corresponded to the situation in Gaza and on the West Bank.” This is the way many people dismiss the significance of the al Durah as staged: “after all, the Israelis do target children.” As Adam Rose put it so succinctly,
- …the critical question in an examination of the dynamics of Mohammed al-Dura’s “martyrdom ” is not whether the singular “Story of Mohammed al-Dura” is true, but whether the “universal Mohammed al-Dura Story is true.
Nor is this merely a problem with Middle Eastern reporting. Fudging the line between real evidence and desired conclusions is a human tendency that threatens scientific research and reporting. The impact of CNN’s decisions on quantity over quality of information from around the world, had an enormous impact on the behavior of nations in the last decades of the 20th century — including Bosnia. Ultimately, critical issues like our understanding of the two great global threats of our age: global climate, and global Jihad warming, are at stake. Is Gore “fake but accurate”? Is that why he declares the debate closed. Or is he saying, the new global warming paradigm acquired and it’s time to move into action? Is Podhoretz just “making it up“? Or should we be taking strategic action against global Jihad? How do we asses the nature of future threats and make decisions on how to deal with them? We have to start with the best information about the present we can get.
The unique commitment to discerning and reporting the “truth,” as best one can consensually determine it, constitutes one of the more unusual characteristics of the West, and it makes modern science (and hence technology) possible. Civil society did not emerge as a constitutional experiment in the West until this commitment had given rise, thanks to the printing press, to a public sphere presided over by a city of letters, a culture of debate and information exchange. In order to do so, one must overcome the demands of honor and shame — above all, do not contradict an alpha male in public.
Of course, people are always tempted to, and often do lie. But one is much more careful about lying in a culture that punishes such behavior with public humiliation. Only through the acceptance of reliable negative feedback — i.e., the ability to self-criticize and deal with moral ambiguity — can we begin to grapple with the world beyond our egos; only when a free press informs the public as best it can, and trusts the public to make its own judgments, rather than manipulating the public to make the judgments journalists have decided are true, can a democracy sustain itself.
Apparently, for the organizers of this conference, not only was distributing material under false pretences legitimate, but in not taking questions from the floor, they indicated how little they are willing to deal with negative feedback. As Jacques Elul says, “Propaganda begins where dialogue ends…” And, apparently, that’s where this conference begins.
Arjan el Fassed
Let’s first consider the identity of the author of the document. This will not only raise questions about the reliability of the broad and aggressive generalizations this text contains, but also about the moral arguments which actually constitute the core of the indictment. According to CommonDreams.org, a news center for the “progressive community.”
- Arjan El Fassed, a Palestinian political scientist, media activist, and human rights specialist living in the Netherlands had also distinguished himself as an effective cyber-activist, spearheading boycott campaigns against Burger King and Benneton for opening franchises in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and producing a prodigious amount of Op-Eds and letters to editors of papers in Europe, the US, the UK and Canada. El Fassed is also a co-founder of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition.
He has a blog, and is one of the co-founders and regular contributors to the Electronic Intifada, which announces its stated intention of provide an alternative to what it deems “the prevailing pro-Israeli slant in U.S. media coverage by offering information from a Palestinian perspective.” El Fassed is clearly far more concerned with Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (which he makes a central focus), than either Palestinian crimes against Israelis (surprise!) or Palestinian crimes against Palestinians. When Arjan tells you that every Palestinian man woman and child in prison has been tortured, don’t expect that to refer to those in Palestinian prisons. This latter point is important: he claims to be a “human rights policy advisor,” and a proponent of Palestinian democracy.
It does not seem like too much of an exaggeration to say that his work represents partisan advocacy, and that he has no hesitation attributing evil intent to the Israelis regardless of the circumstances. As far as he’s concerned, Rachel Corrie was murdered regardless of discrepencies in the evidence. He is an avid consumer and propagator of Pallywood and Hizbollywood products.
In other words, the work of Arjan is impressively consistent in its use of every rhetorical device to indict Israel, and the accompanying omerta that reigns over internal problems. [The only surprise in his predictable record of opinion and moral indignation is his take on Darfur.]
Differently put, Arjan el Fassed is a prime candidate for an award in energetic demopathy. He employs a ringing moral discourse, but only applies it to the enemy: overwhelmingly Israel, but any Palestinian faction that looks like it will “cave” to the Israelis. Any report of Israelis killing Palestinian children outrages him. Reports of “democratically elected” Hamas executing civilians don’t seem to register.
Now calling someone a demopath is not just a smear tactic. Demopathy involves a specific moral hypocrisy which uses human rights language as a weapon with which to assault an enemy (one committed to human rights), while refusing to apply the same (or really any) standards to oneself. In other words, it’s a form of information warfare that weaponizes accusations of immorality, not to increase morality, but to win a battle for dominion with an enemy committed to morality. Nietzsche called this the ressentiment of the slave morality: the weak, whining at the injustice of their being down, even as they seethe with impatience to get the power whereby they can inflict their own injustices.
The “Mock” Memo: Studies in Demopathy
And one of the best indexes of such Nietzschean demopathy is the degree to which someone accusing his enemy shows an awareness of the same flaws on his own side. So in assessing the combination of strong generalization and moral accusation in each of these sentences, let’s consider the accusations in the framework of Palestinian behavior in each of the crimes that Arjan brings to the docket.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity.
We begin with a moral statement. The subsequent “observations” are all efforts to direct it against Israel.
Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property.
In order for this to hold true, the Palestinians would have to be able to point to a period in history where liberty “ruled” and property rights were respected. But the Arab inhabitants of the region never had liberty, and the vast majority of them were, before the advent of the Zionists, tenant farmers who worked land owned by the effendis is Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, and Istanbul. This historical observation is not to say that they should not have liberty and property. But it underlines two points:
- First, everywhere that Arabs rule Arabs, they deprive their subjects of liberty and property, certainly by any modern “civil” definition of the issue. Arab political culture has not yet figured out how to grant even their own people liberty, much less their minorities. Everywhere where Arabs rule, even in fabulously oil-rich states like Iran, Iraq, Lybia, Saudi Arabia, the majority live in poverty and powerlessness. Thus, we have the most embarrassing situation of all: Arabs in Israel enjoy more liberty and property than Arabs in the Arab world.
- Second, to therefore blame Israel for taking away an Arab “liberty” that never has and does not exist, blames Israel for an Arab failure, radically misdiagnoses the problem. Get the Israelis out of the equation, and the Palestinians will not be any freer… on the contrary, alas. When the border between Gaza and Northern Sinai (Egypt) opened up briefly, Egyptian brides came flooding across the border to marry Gazans since, at least from their view, Gaza in its worst condition under Israeli rule (2000-2005), was a step up from everyday condition in Egypt. Today, after two years of Gazan rule, it’s unlikely even Northern Sinai Egyptians want to go to Gaza.
So for Arjan to accuse Israel of taking away Arab liberty when Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Arab liberty has appeared, systematically misconstrues what liberty means.
But it does sound good as an accusation.
It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.
Here’s the “apartheid” accusations. Here is where Arjan as the author of the statement becomes significant. The culture he advocates for has the worst record of apartheid in human history. The only significant difference between the UN resolution’s definition of apartheid, and what goes on in the Muslim world is the substitution of the word “religious” and “gender” for “racial.” Islam systematically and legally discriminates against its own women and against infidels in its political control. For gross (and violent) discrimination, the Palestinians, in their few moments of power (Jordan, 1964-70; Lebanon, 1970-82; PA, 1993-present), have demonstrated the most extraordinary propensity to violence, hate-mongering, and discrimination against their neighbors, regardless of race, creed, or gender. They are equal opportunity offenders. So on what basis, by what standards of justice is Arjan complaining of Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians?
It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law.
Again, we run into this strange situation. The Palestinians have not even the semblance of law, domestic or international. People are executed in the streets without trial for “collaboration”; Hamas created “order” in Gaza by ruthless murders; Palestinian prisons abound with torture victims. Now, none of this excuses Israel from living up to its own (and international) standards, but it does call into question just how reliable someone who defends a culture with no moral standards can be when he throws out his accusations. Does Israel have thousands of Palestinians incarcerated. Yes. Of course, many are incarcerated because Israel doesn’t have the death penalty, and therefore, they are imprisoned despite involvement in mass murder. Listening to Arjan on Israel is a little like having a tour guide take you through a desert who focuses your attention on the lack of jungle in the only section where plants grow.
It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.
This brings us to the climax of Arjan’s moral dishonesty. If anyone has “waged a war against a civilian population, in particular, children,” it’s the Palestinians, who openly declare their desire to commit genocide, target civilians, and celebrate their successes. Indeed, they use their own children to kill Israeli children.
Given this shameful and shameless behavior on the Palestinian side, to have Arjan accuse the Israelis of what the people he advocates for advocate, is sheer hypocrisy. Indeed, he is engaged in only a slightly more sophisticated version of the systematic disinformation that Palestinian media feed their own people.
Now the real question is not why Arjan el Fassed does what he does, but why his “mock memo,” itself a shameless piece of demopathy, gets recycled as a statement by Nelson Mandela and used as an epigram for a conference where progressives secular and clerical, come to hear Israel assaulted for depriving of liberty a culture that can neither provide liberty for its own people, nor, a fortiori, for others?
The Kid-Gloves Approach to Iranian Honor/Shame
The following article, in today’s Independent, was written by Gabrielle Rifkind, a specialist in conflict resolution (i.e., in positive-sum, win-win, negotiations). While war should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, Rifkind’s solutions — hot lines, shuttle diplomacy, and regional summit — seem to be written from a stance of ‘avoid war at all cost’, instead of’ ‘keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons at all cost’. Once Iran understands that the West will not go to war against it, they are even more unlikely to give up their aspirations of regional dominance. Without the credible threat of military force, the U.S. would have to give Iran a free hand in Iraq in order to get them to surrender their nuclear ambitions. (Si pacem vis, para bellum.)
Rifkind also constantly draws parallels between ‘hardliners on both sides,’ which fails to understand the radical asymmetry of the role of the belligerents/peace makers on ‘both sides.’
She does make the very important point that we must understand Iran’s motivation, something we in the West have not done well. Much of what she describes as driving Iran is the manifestation of Iranian Honor/Shame. However, if the West ever fully comprehends Iran’s motivation, the result will not be the one Rifkind is advocating.
Gabrielle Rifkind, a specialist in conflict resolution, is a consultant to the Oxford Research Group
Further reading ‘Making Terrorism History, Scilla Elworthy and Gabrielle Rifkind (Random House, £3.99)
Prefatory remarks by Lazar, inter-textual remarks by rlandes.
Gabrielle Rifkind: This dialogue of the deaf is making war more likely
Only the hardliners in the US and Iran are helped by their mutual mistrust – but they are winning
28 October 2007Sabre rattling and ratcheting up tensions is the dominant discourse between Iran and the US. The BBC was yesterday full of talk of whether war had become inevitable. A US attack could make problems in Iraq look like a sideshow. There are plenty of hardliners on both sides who would welcome such an attack, as it would strengthen their positions. It could lead to the declaration of an emergency government in the country that could keep the hardliners in power for a decade.
Of course, there are other outcomes as well. This sounds like an echo of “War is not the answer,” which only makes sense when both sides want positive-sum outcomes.
Diplomacy is currently framed around carrot and stick. There is some engagement, but there is also a process of demonisation on both sides. The US has designated the foreign wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation. The Iranian parliament for its part has voted that both the US military and the CIA are terrorist organisations. This is not the climate in which deep political differences are accommodated.
Here we see clearly the catastrophe of adopting the “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” approach, one that our media — BBC in the forefront — have taken as policy. The problem here is, is the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization? Do they support, help, and deploy people who target civilians as a matter of policy? If so, then it’s not demonization to call them terrorists. The other side does not cease from its demonization (on a much grander — cosmic — scale), and the author is working from a place in which maybe, if we stop “demonizing them” (i.e., identifying the centrality of their most radical elements), then maybe the people we have ceased to demonize will return the favor.
But on the battlefield of information warfare — something Rifkind seems unaware exists — our move merely disguises the radical nature of our foe, and fills us with a false hope that our concessions will produce counter-concessions rather than proof of our suicidal combination of stupidity and weakness. Think aliens in Mars Attacks laughing themselves silly over the President’s message of peace.
Jews is News: What Percentage of those killed in conflicts since 1950 died in the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Hat tip fp.
The answer is, about .06% or 1 in 1700 deaths. Whereas 11 million Muslims have been killed in these conflicts, only .3% died in the Arab-Israeli conflict and over 90% were killed by fellow Muslims. The Arab Israeli conflict ranks 49th in the number of dead since 1950. (And if we were to average it out over years, it would rank even lower, is suspect since many conflicts kill large numbers in a relatively short period, whereas this one has spanned the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st with one long, unresolved conflict.)
So, ask the authors of the study that places Israel as 49th in a list of the world’s most deadly conflicts since 1950, why is it so prominent in people’s awareness that most people think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is
the world’s most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world’s most belligerent country? For example, British prime minister Tony Blair told the U.S. Congress in July 2003 that “Terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel.” This viewpoint leads many Europeans, among others, to see Israel as the most menacing country on earth.
The contrast between Muslims killed by Israelis and those killed by Muslims offers the key anomaly — one might even say, disproof — of PCP: if we’re nice to them they’ll be nice to us; if Israel would stop oppressing the Palestinians we could have peace. As The authors of the piece — Gunnar Heinsohn, director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen and Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum — note, this outsized importance given to Israel and the emphasis on her aggressiveness,
flies in the face of the well-known pattern that liberal democracies do not aggress.
So is Israel an exception, a rogue Western democracy still rampaging through the third world pursuing the kind of messianic imperialist projects that the Europeans carried out with such wantonly lethal proficiency until the middle of the 20th century, or is it a civil democracy trying to survive in a belligerent world where killing is the norm, and peace is a pause between conflicts? And what implications do the answers (however nuanced one wishes to make them), tell us about the kinds of assumptions that underly the rush to negotiations now underway, and the advice of Walt and Mearsheimer that Israel is a burden to the West in its efforts to “get along” with the Arab and Muslim world?
These are numbers worth pondering. They can help us keep our thinking trimmed hard to the sail of the matter, help us decide between, say, the two narratives about Jenin (a culture where massacring the enemy is idealized (suicide bombing), accusing its enemies of massacring hundreds of their own people in gang executions; or a civil society where massacre is abhorred, claiming that it did everything it could (including sacrifice 23 of its men), to keep civilian casualties to a minimum).
One thing that it does highlight is the importance of the narrative in giving meaning to the killing. Somehow, deaths in the Arab Israeli conflict are more meaningful to the “world information system” than any other, an observation supported by the statistic that there are more international journalists per square inch in Israel than anywhere else in the world.
It also highlights the importance of specifically what Segev and Levy dismiss as irrelevant, and what Poller underlines: the story must be a libel. Alone, the tragic death of a child is not the issue as the Israeli moralists want to claim, it’s who killed that child. Muhammad al Durah, or Houda Ghalia’s family are not useful as an icon of war if they were killed by their own people. (Which does not mean they are not meaningful — on the contrary, they reveal the real tragedy of the region.)
Right now, only if Israel is viewed as the perpetrator, does this conflict carry the moral charge that takes it from 49th place to such singular prominence that it eclipses all other conflicts. The media may not have created that situation — certainly not singlehandedly — but it has contributed mightily, almost as much, one might say, as the Arab elites have contributed to their own people’s suffering. And it blinds us.
Balaam’s ass, where are you?
On Liberal Overconfidence: Excerpt from Harris’ Suicide of Reason
Here is a telling paragraph from the end of Lee Harris’ Preface to his new book, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West.
Both the tribal mind and fanaticism are rational adaptations to a world ruled by the Law of the Jungle – rational in the sense that they increase the odds of surviving. On the other hand, the rational actor doesn’t have a chance of survival in the jumgle. He who has neither tribe nor pack to defend him will perish. That is why the rational actor must be horrified at the very thought of a return to the Law of the Jungle – in order to exist at all, the rational actor must be living in an environment in which the Rule of Law has replaced the Law of the Jungle. Yet in the modern liberal West, the Rule of Law has been so successful in pushing back the jungle that many in the West have forgotten that we are the exceptions, and no the rule.
In short, today there are two great threats facing the survival of the modern liberal West. The first is its exaggerated confidence in the power of reason to alter the human condition; the second is its profound underestimation of the power of fanaticism to change the world.
Although he uses his terms differently, I think it fair to substitute, at least provisionally, my terms Civil Society vs. Prime Divider for Rule of Law and Law of Jungle.
Critique from a Listener to the Lars Larson Show: Whose Side am I on?
I was recently on the Lars Larson Show, interviewed about the situation in Gaza. One of the readers had some criticisms which he sent me. I publish them below with my response. First his letter as he wrote it, then my interlinear response.
July 7, 2007
Professor Richard Landes
Boston University
Boston, MassachusettsDear Professor Richard Landes;
This is written to comment somewhat critically of your thoughts as expressed on the Lars Larson radio program recently regarding the Palestinian question. The root problem with the Palestinian crisis is America’s creation of the state of Israel out of Palestinian lands in the full flush of U.S. world domination following World War II. The lands did not belong to the United States to give away. And this to this day remains the underlying source of antagonism that animates not only Palestinians but nearly all Arab Muslims. A secondary matter is the power which American Zionist interests hold largely in terms of social propaganda over the American body politic, most obviously in this country’s Middle East foreign policy. In order to maintain the fiction of moral authority of Israel over the Arab world, American Zionists have crafted an entire view of the world that isolates the United States and leads it into its many wars in the region. Since the early 1960s, America has foolishly dedicated its considerable powers to preserving the Jewish state in the Middle East at enormous cost to itself as to the countless millions of Arab Muslims who protest this state of affairs. Frankly speaking, by the direction of your own political dialogue on the Lars Larson radio program, one suspects a similar dedication to the Zionist cause. If so, it would be more objective and sincere that you announce your position unilaterally favoring the Israel side and not speak with words that imply dedication to American national interest.
Here’s my response.
Friedman’s Middle East Rules #3
Mideast rules to live by – Thomas Friedman
International Herald Tribune
Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all they won’t believe it.
I’ve repeatedly discussed the prominence of conspiracy theory in the Arab world as both a function of a) explaining away humiliation and impotence (3 million Israelis didn’t defeat 300 million Arabs, America did it), and b) projecting ill-will. This latter, more fundamental mechanism operates according to the basic rules of prime-divider society: since everyone works according to the political axiom “rule or be ruled,” no one can make a generous offer that he really means. It must be a ruse. Ditto with any “positive-sum” solution. As Arafat said about Camp David: “It was a trap.” And from his zero-sum universe, where any Israeli “win” is a loss for the Arabs, it was indeed a trap.
A remarkably self-critical post by the Jordanian blogger Omar, illustrates one aspect of this tendency to assume conspiratorial motives behind all action. He writes:
Arabs often see themselves as being more aware than others in what matters politics, they like to think of themselves as not being fooled like other nations and that they know why everything happens. In general, they have this thought of that most people around the globe are being fooled either by their governments or by their misleading media tools, while they (Arabs) are not.
What he means here — I think — is that Arabs assume people’s nasty motives: no one is in good faith; anytime someone claims altruistic motives, they are manipulating. Since all conspiracy theories are based on the assumption of (really vicious) malevolence on the “other side,” to see conspiracies everywhere is to assume malevolence in everyone. And as I’ve suggested, that paranoia often represents a projection of one’s own state of mind.
Hence, Westerners have the pitiful tendency to believe people who claim honest intent, and therefore, they are, to the Arab way of thinking, suckers. As a result, they can look down on us, as Omar describes here, for being so credulous. The irony of this self-perception (which, to his credit, Omar criticizes), is that to the Westerner, there is no example of a culture more credulous, more willing to believe the most outlandish nonsense than the Arabs. As Joanne commented:
Darwish has GOT to be kidding. Omar, too.Arabs weren’t being fooled by their own media. By media that promote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? By media that promote the blood libel, that say that Israel tried to make Arabs infertile with poisoned chewing gum and that Israel is developing a special bomb that targets Arab genes (!)?
Of course, the Arabs always know better. They were always more savvy. Unlike naïve Westerners, they KNOW that the Jews control the US and British governments. They KNOW that the US government caused 9/11. They KNOW that 4,000 Jews stayed home from Twin Towers on 9/11, having been warned away. They KNOW that the Jews control the Western media. They’re so savvy, they KNOW that the Jews want to extend Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Add to that, the predictable accusations in the Muslim media that Israel and the United States are behind the Gaza meltdown. Cui bono? Who benefits? If the meltdown hurts the Palestinians and benefits the Americans and Israelis, they must have done it:
The political [policy] of the conspirators in Washington and Tel-Aviv, [aimed at] spreading destruction and undermining the unity of the Arab societies in these three countries, as well as in other [countries] that they are able to influence with the help of their agents within them – is termed ‘creative chaos’…
Al-Thawra (Syria), June 18, 2007
Paradoxically, believing that everything stems from base motives (one definition of a cynic), actually makes people more susceptible to manipulation, more likely to believe nonsense as long as it’s phrased in ways that make sense. Hence Friedman’s deft formulation of the problem.
And, if I can reflect for a moment on the nature of the Israeli soul, we come to the great tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Israelis, even the most hard-bitten and bitter, are almost to a person desirous of a peaceful solution that benefits everyone. The sabra (cactus pear), hard and prickly on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside, is not the Israeli term for a native born by accident. That’s why the Israeli peace camp is so large, varied, and Pavlovian in its desire to believe Palestinian good will in the hopes that things will go better, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
And yet, in the most colossal illustration of the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, nothing the Israelis do can penetrate the hermetically sealed mistrust of the shrewd Arabs. So rather than economic cooperation — which should solve terrorism, no? — the Arabs see chewing gum that causes sterility and shampoo that makes you bald.
And rather than outsiders who can intervene in this tragic cognitive deadlock that threatens mutual destruction, the “progressives” come in to show their “solidarity,” armed with their Post-colonial paradigm, and confirm every fevered detail of Arab paranoia.
What’s in a Game? Aumann on the Blackmailer’s Paradox
Jewish Current Interest has an important post on Nobel prize-winning Robert Aumann’s game theory applied to the current state of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since I think game theory is extremely important, I offer it here with comments. (Hat tip: Judith Weiss)
June 18, 2007
Robert Aumann, Israel’s 2005 Nobel Prize winner in Economics (“for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis”), argues there is not a leadership crisis in Israel but a crisis among the people – an overriding yearning for peace that will produce war instead (hat tip: Naomi Ragen):
It’s not just the [failed and defeatist] policies. It’s also the defeatist state of mind. All day long people are screaming “Peace, peace, and gestures, gestures!” Concessions and disengagements were made and settlers expelled. All this has ultimately achieved the opposite result.
We have to stop the empty slogans such as “Peace is made with enemies and not with friends.” In order to achieve peace we must first and foremost be prepared for war. We have to change this state of mind at the core. It wasn’t only the Romans who said that those who seek peace should prepare for war. Even in game theory, for which I received the Nobel Prize, says so. We have to be emotionally prepared to bear and to inflict casualties – and not to scream “peace, peace,” all day long. Only if we are prepared to kill and be killed – we shall not be killed. This is the paradox of war.
I was always struck by that platitude: “Peace is made with enemies, not friends.” No, peace is made with people who are prepared to drop their enmity. If you make peace with enemies who have no intention of making peace, you commit suicide.
Another stupid remark: “War doesn’t solve anything.” I have an idea where the remark comes from, but why and how would it become a truism?
In an extensive interview in January 2005, Aumann described how game theory sets forth certain basic principles that Israel has forgotten during the decades-long onslaught on its legitimacy:
Aumann. . .[T]here is almost nothing as ever-present in the history of mankind as war. Since the dawn of history we have had constant wars. . . . A tremendous amount of energy is devoted on the part of a very large number of well-meaning people to the project of preventing war, settling conflicts peacefully, ending wars, and so on. Given the fact that war is so, so prevalent, both in time and in space, all over the world, perhaps much of the effort of preventing or stopping war is misdirected. . . . [G]iven the constancy of war, we should perhaps shift gears and ask ourselves what it is that causes war. Rather than establishing peace institutes, peace initiatives, institutions for studying and promoting peace, we should have institutions for studying war. . . . It’s like fighting cancer. One way is to ask, given a certain kind of cancer, what can we do to cure it? . . . Another way is simply to ask, what is cancer? How does it work? . . . Once one understands it one can perhaps hope to overcome it. . . .
This historical observation about war is crucial. This is the main point that Eli Sagan makes about the dominating imperative: “rule or be ruled” is the basic political axiom of the last ten millennia. Overcoming it is something just a little short of a major miracle. The Europeans, now so proud of the fact that they’ve gotten beyond war and conflict (hence they can look down on the cowboy Americans and the militaristic Israelis), would do well to remember that they were at war with each other right up to 1945.
War is what I would call a hard zero-sum game. It’s not an “I’ll take half, you take half” zero-sum solution. It’s a “I’ll take it all, you take none” solution. Not only is it that “if you win, I lose,” but, “I cannot win unless you lose.” If you try and make peace with hard-zero-sum players, you cooperate with their determination to make you a loser. Trojan Horse, anyone?
Aumann’s judo move — study why people go to war, rather than how people can find peaceful solutions — is interesting. Note how he’s still profoundly in the camp of peace: war, in his metaphor, is a cancer. But how do you fight it?
H: So, the standard approach to war and peace is to . . . try ad hoc solutions. You are saying that this is not a good approach. . . .
Aumann: Yes. . . . Saying that war is irrational may be a big mistake. If it is rational, once we understand that it is, we can at least somehow address the problem. . . .
Nothing illustrates the difference between honor-shame and guilt-integrity cultures better than the difference between what is “rational” in the two cultures. Honor-shame cultures are notoriously zero-sum. “I win, you lose” is reasonable precisely because “rule or be ruled” dominates the interaction between alpha males. In civil society, rationality is recognizing one’s “interests” and accepting positive-sum solutions that benefit everyone. What strikes many of us in civil society as irrational — insisting on pride even when it’s disastrous for everyone’s interests — actually makes sense in a world where honor depends on dominance. But that underlines the dual and related issue of a) what emotions are mobilized by the two approaches, and b) what emotions the peer-group values. One of the things that shifted southern attitudes towards dueling at the turn of the 19th century was when the public “peer group” stopped admiring the winners.
H: Here in Israel, we unfortunately have constant wars and conflicts. . . . You presented [at the Center for Rationality] some nice game-theoretic insights.
Aumann: One of them was the blackmailer’s paradox. Ann and Bob must divide a hundred dollars. . . . Ann says to Bob, “look, I want ninety of those one hundred. Take it or leave it; I will not walk out of this room with less than ninety dollars.” Bob says, “come on, that’s crazy. We have a hundred dollars. Let’s split fifty-fifty.” Ann says,” no.” . . . [I]t’s not enough for her just to say it. She has to make it credible; and then Bob will rationally accept the ten. . . . This is the blackmailer’s paradox. It is recognized in game theory . . .
What is the application of this to the situation we have here in Israel? Let me tell you this true story. A high-ranking officer once came to my office at the Center for Rationality and discussed with me the situation with Syria and the Golan Heights. . . . He explained to me that the Syrians consider land holy, and they will not give up one inch. When he told me that, I told him about the blackmailer’s paradox. I said to him that the Syrians’ use of the term “holy,” land being holy, is a form of commitment. . . . Just like in the blackmailer’s paradox, we could say that it’s holy; but we can’t convince ourselves that it is. One of our troubles is that the term “holy” is nonexistent in our practical, day-to-day vocabulary. It exists only in religious circles. We accept holiness in other people and we are not willing to promote it on our own side. The result is that we are at a disadvantage because the other side can invoke holiness, but we have ruled it out from our arsenal of tools.
Or as a lawyer I know puts it: if you act crazy enough, everyone will let you have your way. But what’s true in the immediate case is not true in the long run. If you give in to the blackmailers, rather than educate them, you doom yourself to a life of blackmail.
H: On the other hand, we do have such a tool: security considerations. That is the “holy” issue in Israel. We say that security considerations dictate that we must have control of the mountains that control the Sea of Galilee. There is no way that anything else will be acceptable. Throughout the years of Israel’s existence security considerations have been a kind of holiness, a binding commitment to ourselves. The question is whether it is as strong as the holiness of the land on the other side.
Aumann: It is less strong.
This idea of “nothing holy” is actually, in a weird way, related to the great Jewish innovation, iconoclasm. To dedicated secular iconoclasts, nothing is holy. In the world of honor-shame, honor is sacred. In the world of integrity-guilt, understanding the “other” has become sacred: egolessness. Or, as Baba Ram Dass reported back from India – “shame and fame are all the same.”
After years of inculcating an excessive, self-denying respect for the “Other,” accepting competing “narratives” as equally valid regardless of their basis in fact, and luxuriating in post-Zionist moral equivalence, Israel need to recover a sense of its own holiness. It needs to re-establish certain basic facts. Some of them are set forth in a short video that Melanie Phillips last week correctly described as “must-see.” Unless it reasserts them, Israel will eventually become a victim of the blackmailers arrayed against her.
One can go in the holiness direction, although I think that a combination of dignity and far-sighted self-interest might go a long way as well. But it means learning to value yourself enough to fight for yourself, even kill for your own survival.
The self-abnegation that has seized upon Israelis has a dual and doubly troubling etiology. On the one hand, Israeli/Jewish susceptibility to guilt means that, even though Arab irredentism forced it into an occupation, it feels primarily responsible for the “guilt” of being an occupier. (Note that occupying is a desiderandum in Arab culture.) On the other, Israelis and Jews are deeply humiliated and shamed by the images of that occupation/oppression that come to them primarily via a media that channels Pallywood. How many liberal Jews squirmed in pain before their liberal friends when Sharon was calling the shots? So when the media go on their feeding frenzies (like at Qana), the Israelis cannot apologize enough, and even when they point the finger at an enemy who hides among civilians (an unthinkable anathema to Israelis), they do it feebly. Wouldn’t want to look like we were demonizing the poor people.
So we have now an Israel reluctant to defend itself, a Jewish “left” that deals with its moral narcissism and embarrassment by violently attacking its own people, and an incomprehending outside world that adheres to a political correct doctrine that deafens it to the song of the canary in the mineshaft.
How to Respond to Islamism: Self Respect
Will Hutton has an excellent oped in the Guardian (of all places) which makes critical points about the importance of Western self-respect. Hattip: fp.
Why the West must stay true to itself
The only way we can live together peaceably with Islam is if we don’t compromise our own values
Will Hutton
Sunday June 17, 2007
The ObserverThe convictions of Banaz Mahmod’s father and uncle for murder – an ‘honour killing’ carried out because the 20-year-old had left her husband to love a man outside her tribe – has properly provoked a massive outcry. It was horrifying; it was preventable; it was alien. But for some the subtext is that it was also connected to the family’s religion – Islam.
Britain’s relationship with its Muslim community is not getting any easier. Many Muslims want to build mosques, schools, and adhere to Islamic dress codes with ever more energy. But that energy also derives from the same culture and accompanying institutions that produced British-born suicide bombers. The space in which to argue that Islam is an essentially benign religion seems to narrow with every passing day.
Now only a few months ago, that would have prompted cries of racism and Islamophobia, among other things, from the editors of the Guardian itself.
On the subject of aggressive expressions of Islam linked to suicide terrorism (and the incapacity of the politically correct to detect the connections, see the remark of a British woman who, after 9-11 and 7-7, had a strong urge to show her commitment to Islam pubicly.
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“I have a better understanding of Islam now, just growing up. The 7/7 and 9/11 events did make me think more about my identity, and although it didn’t change the strength of my faith, I’ve always been a strong believer, it made me want to assert my alliance… Now I wear the headscarf to say, ‘yes I am a Muslim and it is an important part of my identity and it shouldn’t be threatening to you…’” Female, Muslim, 21, Birmingham
As I commented at the time the study in which she was quoted first came out,
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if people from my religion did something like 7/7 and 9/11, I’d want to either crawl under the rug and hide, or denounce the deed to the heavens. This young woman (15 when 9/11 happened) responds radically differently: these monstrosities inspire her not to greater piety, but to want to state her religious affiliation all the more. What is the meaning of being proud to be Muslim after suicide bombings carried out by fanatics shouting Allahu Akhbar shatter the lives of thousands of innocent people? And where on earth does one get the nerve to say, “it shouldn’t be threatening to you.” And who in England is stupid enough to take such a “reassurance” seriously?
The people who did the study didn’t get it. Now we seem to be waking up.
Nor are matters likely to get better soon. The leading European theorist on Islam is Paris-based Professor Olivier Roy. In Globalised Islam, he argues that Muslims everywhere, but especially the minorities living in the West, are undergoing a crisis of identity that is easily misunderstood by both the West and Islam itself as being about the integrity of religious faith. But it is better not to understand a British recruit to suicide bombing like Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July attacks in London, or even al-Qaeda, in terms of their self-professed religiosity. Instead they are about a crisis of Islamic identity which makes mutual tolerance ever more elusive.
Roy’s belief is that the deep driver of Islamic fundamentalism, terror and murderous intra-religious rivalries is the interaction of this very particular culture and its norms with Western culture and norms.
Or, as I would put it, the conflict between an honor-shame culture (and religion), in which I can only be “up” if you are “down,” where the crisis of faith comes from the dependence of faith on dominance. Confronted by the obvious superiority of the West in so many realms — wealth and knowledge production, military might, cultural influence — Muslim feelings of helpless inferiority translate readily into rage. If you (the West, a fortiori, Israel) blacken my face, I can only whiten it with violence. Competition on “your” Western terms is itself defeat.
Those who think that what we are observing is solely a blowback against Western foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq and Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians vastly underestimate the profundity of what is happening – or the possibility of changing it by changes to foreign policy. The tensions between Islam, the British and the West have much deeper roots.
Can Islamic theology and culture compete with the march of globalisation, Western values and their self-evident superiority in delivering a prosperity that Islam cannot match? The West provokes Islam not by doing anything, although what it does is hardly helpful; it provokes at least some strands of Islamic thought simply by being.
Just as the 21st-century West has little place for traditional views of manhood, for example, so generating a crisis of masculinity, so it has little place for some interpretations of Islamic canons – provoking an Islamist fundamentalism in response. Western animal rights and green activists lose all sense of proportion in their violent campaigns because a personal agenda over how they assert their identity in today’s world is in play; so Islamic jihadists lose their sense of proportionality in the same way.
The invocations of the Koran and Allah to justify suicide and death may sound like throwbacks; in fact they are utterly contemporary. They signify globalised Islam responding to modernity and the success of the West. Thus a golden, global thread links the militant jihadists in Britain, the Taliban-like fundamentalism of the Hamas militias who have just taken over in Gaza and the rise of Wahhabi schools everywhere.
It is a complex if depressing thesis, but it is brilliantly driven home by an important article in this month’s Prospect on Mohammad Sidique Khan. If you think Sidique plotted 7 July and took his life only because, as he said in the video clip released after his death, ‘we are at war and I am a soldier’, think again. The underlying reasons were much more to do with identity and culture.
Shiv Malik, who undertook months of research into the Sidique story for an aborted BBC drama documentary, explains that political jihadism occupies only one quarter of Sidique’s taped message. The rest is about settling deeply personal scores that related to his identity and experience as a second generation immigrant. This was a man who had been cut off from his family for marrying out because at first he had rejected Islamic norms, and who, in relative social isolation, had been recruited by tried and tested means into a jihadist network – an effective way of making sense of his circumstances, finding friendship and fighting back both as an individual and as a member of a culture. Thus the tape’s savage indictment of his community leaders and scholars; they looked for material wellbeing before the rigours of truly following Allah. Sidique would show them how.
The message from Roy and Malik is bleak. There is no quick fix. Nor should the West too readily accept at face value demands to accept Islamic dress codes, protocols over food, the cultural context of honour killings, Islamic schools and Sharia law. The virulence and sometimes violence with which these demands are made are not because of religiosity or genuine grievance which we should respect; they are ways of responding to a profound identity crisis and should be understood as such.
I recently heard Aayan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel and The Caged Virgin, speak of her experience of being brought up in Somalia under the restrictive doctrines of the Koran. As she explains she remains a Muslim, but one with a Western attitude of proper scepticism to her religion. She has found a new identity, but she needed the West not to compromise on its values while she made the journey.
There are many years of tension ahead. There needs to be an equitable settlement between Israel and Palestine not because of hopes it will halt Islamic fundamentalism or al-Qaeda but because we believe in equity. To respond to jihadism by declaring a war on terror was wrong; to make war on a crisis of identity is crass. Jihadist terror is a security issue. Peace will only arrive in the Middle East and Leeds when many more Muslims arrive at Hirsi Ali’s destination. And that will only happen if the West never gives ground on its values, and never accepts it has sole responsibility for the tensions. The violent engagement with modernity by some strands within Islam is inescapable. We should certainly avoid inflaming matters with injustices such as Guantanamo Bay. But we cannot and should not stop being ourselves.
He gets a bit flabby at the end. In comparison with what Islam does to violent enemies, Guantanamo is a cakewalk. By our peacetime standards, it’s not right. But we should never let Muslims invoke our (by their standards) minor offenses in order to accuse us of wartime behavior that stands head and shoulders above theirs.
But to do that, we have to be able to at once criticize ourselves while keeping a sense of proportion and pride in the astonishing accomplishments of our culture which, however (inevitably) flawed, nonetheless has shown a remarkable dedication to freedom and humane respect for “the other.” We may have a long way to go, but to imagine that we’ve not already come a long way — and much farther than Islamic cultures — is to throw away a precious and rare accomplishment.
Self-Criticism and Well-Meaning Western Wimps
Barry Rubin has a provocative piece on how hard it is to be an Arab these days, when not only do your elites victimize you and you can’t protest, but the West, in thinking they’re doing you a favor, praise your oppressors. In it he recounts an anecdote that illustrates a key element of our problem in the West.
Years ago, when Saddam Hussein was still in office, I was asked to address a visiting delegation of Arab journalists. The other American speakers gave the standard blah-blah. We felt their pain, we were working to resolve the Israel-Palestinian issue, we were sensitive to their Arab nationalist sentiments.
Having no ambition to hold high political office, I decided to introduce a dose of reality. Let’s face it, I explained, we know that your real enemy isn’t Israel or the United States but the regimes in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran, as well as Yasir Arafat and others. They are the ones who take away your rights, wreck your societies, destroy your dreams. Afterward I was mobbed–in the friendliest sense possible–by the audience who all wanted to thank me and say that they agreed.
Almost the same thing happened at Harvard Center for Far Eastern Studies a couple of years ago when my father, David S. Landes and a Western scholar specializing in China, Kenneth Pomeranz had a debate. Pomeranz argued the thesis of his book, The Great Divergeance: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, in which the West and China were neck and neck in economic development really up to 1800, and then only the “luck” of the discovery of the “New World” and coal in Britain account for the West’s decisive advantage in modernizing. So, echoing Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, he placed the industrial revolution and modernity in the context of aleatory, evolutionary phenomena. Cudda happened in China just as easiy as the West if only…
Landes, whose book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations analyzes economic growth in terms of cultural variables like the amount of empowerment commoners are permitted, the attitudes towards manual labor, the intellectual capital and willingness of a culture to learn from others, and the constraints on the behavior of the power elites, argued the opposite. According to him, already, well before 1800, the Europeans were on a trajectory that was qualitatively different from that of China, which, with all the coal and New World contacts it wanted, would not have “modernized” without fundamental changes in its cultural attitudes both towards the outside world, and towards its own commoners.
After the talk, Pomeranz was “mobbed” by the Western graduate students eager to hear more about how great the Chinese were and how dumb lucky Westerners were. But the Chinese graduate students wanted to talk to my father. Why? Because they were far less interested in having their ego stroked by well meaning Westerners who were basically condescending to them with useless information (unless you consider that kind of misinformation “therapeutically” valuable), than in hearing some hard concrete criticisms that they could actually absorb and respond to.
In his essay on “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us” in Newsweek right after 9-11, Fareed Zakaria wrote the following:
About a decade ago, in a casual conversation with an elderly Arab intellectual, I expressed my frustration that governments in the Middle East had been unable to liberalize their economies and societies in the way that the East Asians had done. “Look at Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul,” I said, pointing to their extraordinary economic achievements. The man, a gentle, charming scholar, straightened up and replied sharply, “Look at them. They have simply aped the West. Their cities are cheap copies of Houston and Dallas. That may be all right for fishing villages. But we are heirs to one of the great civilizations of the world. We cannot become slums of the West.”
This disillusionment with the West is at the heart of the Arab problem. It makes economic advance impossible and political progress fraught with difficulty. Modernization is now taken to mean, inevitably, uncontrollably, Westernization and, even worse, Americanization. This fear has paralyzed Arab civilization. In some ways the Arab world seems less ready to confront the age of globalization than even Africa, despite the devastation that continent has suffered from AIDS and economic and political dysfunction. At least the Africans want to adapt to the new global economy. The Arab world has not yet taken that first step.
Misplaced pride, fear of the heavy hand of a power elite that — unlike the Chinese — enforces the ego-gratifying discourse of anti-Western self-assertion, and perhaps a pervasive sense that no matter what they do, they’ll always be behind tiny, humiliating Israel, has the Arab world in its grip. And well-meaning Westerners, eager to feed them the “therapeutic” discourse of our own anti-Western moral equivalence, condemn them further to the mind-forged prison they have constructed for themselves.
As Rubin concludes his essay:
It is heart-breaking. What do you say to a Syrian dissident who is facing prison and quite possibly torture? Can you tell him that the West will support him, that journalists will condemn the regime that beats him, Middle East experts will give papers at conferences praising his work, U.S. congressional delegations won’t visit unless he is freed, or European governments will demand his release?
How can one not feel the misery of the Arab peoples, intoxicated as many are by the opiate of Arab nationalism and Islamism, the false promises of impending triumphs and the horror stories of satanic foes?
How can one not sympathize with the frustration of real moderates who live in societies where they are treated as madmen and traitors?
And how can one not feel the utmost disgust at those living comfortably in the West who celebrate or advocate their own countries’ surrender to all the evil forces holding them down and back?
Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center university. His latest book, The Truth about Syria was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in May 2007. Prof. Rubin’s columns can be read online at: http://gloria.idc.ac.il/articles/index.html.
From the Nile to the Euphrates: Paranoid Imperialism Projects Its Cognitive Egocentrism
PMW has a review of the Palestinian contention that Israel wants the land from the “Nile to the Euphrates.” Perhaps one of the least-well appreciated elements of the Arab-Israeli conflict lies embedded in this belief that pervades the Arab world. Given what they believe about Israel, their hostility is more than understandable. For them Israel is, like the other European powers who came to the Middle East, an expansionist state with imperialist ambitions. Now this has virtually nothing to do with Israeli realities, where we find a powerful voice agonizing over occupying the small area of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But it has a great deal to do with Palestinian and Arab realities.
Indeed, the dream of Arab conquest from the Nile to the Euphrates represented the earliest imperial ambitions of Islam, and defines the core of Arab imperial expansion (Islam went further East than the Euphrates, but Arab ethnic dominance stops in Iraq). What we see in their hysterical accusations of imperial ambitions on the Israelis is a projection of their own profoundly imperial mentality. The fact that this imperial ambition appears once in the biblical text (Deuteronomy 11:24), confirms for Arab and Muslim observers that this must be at the core of Jewish religious ambitions. The theological reality that this text never appears in the rabbinical corpus as a warrant for expansion or in current Jewish discourse, that it cedes to a far more extensive narrative where the Jordan is the border within the biblical narrative, makes no impression on Arab analysts. Again they project their own maximally belligerent reading of the Quran onto the Jews: Who would have such a sacred text and not use it to justify conquest?
I speak often at this blog on LCE (liberal cognitive egocentrism). This is the other side of the moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism, DCE (dominating cognitive egocentrism), where the imperialist projects his mentality onto the other. This is the core projection that “nails down” prime divider societies, and justifies the principle of “rule or be ruled,” that is, “do onto others before they do onto you.” It is the kind of thinking that poisons the existence of Arabs everywhere where their own elites rule, and most especially poisons the Palestinians, whose “reality” gets defined by such paranoid and debilitating fantasies, what Blake called “the mind-forged manacles.”
Now normally, this information would be a dead give-away for anti-imperialist progressives (notice, no scare quotes). The deeply seated cultural and psychological signatures of libido dominandi are here for anyone who cares to, to see. To ignore this, and assume that the conflict pits an expansive Israeli imperialism to a modest “we just want our state” Palestinian national aspiration, systematically misreads the sitauton and strengthens the imperialist impulse.
But on the contrary, the Western “progressive” tendency towards PCP strengthens the grip of these mind-forged manacles by affirming the Palestinian “victim narrative.” Post-colonialism comes in and affirms the paranoid fantasies of the Arabs that the Israelis are imperialist; politically-correct comes in to silence anyone who might point out the gaping chasm between Israeli and Palestinian culture, between the fantasies of the Palestinians and the reality they supposedly describe. As a result, the Palestinians remain locked in their universe, feeling fully justified in telling their self-destructive scape-goating narrative, incapable of the self-criticism that will get them out.
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook – June 12, 2007
Lies and libels have been used for many years by the Palestinian Authority to present Israel as a dangerous existential threat to the Arab and Muslim world. One of the repeating libels, that Israel is planning to conquer Arab lands, including lands in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia – “from the Euphrates until the Nile” – was repeated this week in the PA daily Al-Ayyam.
For many years the Palestinian Authority (PA) has promoted this “Euphrates to the Nile” libel, and below PMW has cited more than 20 additional Palestinian references in recent years. As with all effective propaganda, detailed fictitious allegations are often advocated to make the lie sound credible.
The following are some of these PA fabrications:
The term “From the Nile to the Euphrates your land, oh Israel,” is written above the gates of the Knesset.
The term “The Nile to the Euphrates” appears on Israeli money
The two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates and the Star of David represents the state of Israel.
Israeli children in school are taught through repetition of the expression: “Land of Israel -from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
Repeatedly presenting Israel as a country that plans to expand and destroy other countries is an integral part of Palestinian hate promotion. Palestinians are more likely to feel justified fighting and killing Israelis when it is presented as an act of self-defense. The repetition of this charge over so many years should categorize this almost as an ideology.This week the PA presented the “Nile to the Euphrates” libel again as an principle so intrinsic to the State of Israel it is said to be written above the gates of the Knesset: “From the Euphrates until the Nile, your land oh Israel.”
Former Israeli PM, Ariel Sharon, on a map of Mid-East
looking at the Nile.Caption: “From the Euphrates to.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 5, 2003]Below is this latest version of this libel, and more than 20 other references from among the many times this libel has been made in the past:
Click here to see previous PMW reports on Lies and Libels
A video clip which has been airing on PA TV since 2001 depicts a classroom of Jewish children wearing kippot (religious skullcaps) in front of the Israeli flag, repeating after a teacher: “The Land of Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates”. The video clip is shown as if were an actual classroom in an Israeli school. The child actors speak Hebrew
.[PA TV, since January 31, 2001]Click here to see the video
“In 1967, it [Israel] occupied all that was left of Palestine in addition to the larger Arab territory… before initiating the third stage, in order to make the slogan written on the top of the gates of the Knesset come true: “From the Euphrates until the Nile, your land oh Israel.”
[Al-Ayyam, June 4, 2007]“…The Zionists’ aspirations are not limited to Palestine from the sea to the river, and not to Egypt and the Sha’am lands [includes parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel], extending to Iraq and Al-Medina, or from the Euphrates to the Nile … the idea of ‘the greater Middle East’ includes [lit: swallows] many countries in the Islamic world…”
[Al-Risalah, December 7, 2006]Political sciences lecturer, Dr. Hamd Al-Fara claims that “Israel already realized with success its dream to be from the Nile to the Euphrates – since, currently, Israelis from the Mossad [Israeli secret service] are in Iraq, and there is an Israeli embassy in Egypt.”
[PA TV, July 7, 2006]“The Israelis think in a completely different way. They think that the problem is summarized with how to get away with the loot they looted during unusual circumstances, in the near and distant past, that is the land of Palestine they hold serves as a departure point to the [territory] between the Euphrates and the Nile.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nihad Munir Al-Rees, March 20, 2006]Barakat Al-Fara of the PLO, former Palestinian deputy ambassador to Egypt:
“The June 67 war took place and emphasized that the Zionist enemy did not set as a goal only Palestine, but it set as a goal the Arab nation, from the ocean to the gulf, and it plans a Jewish state which will spread out from the Nile to the Euphrates…”
[PA TV, January 1, 2006]“There is a fairy tale or a slogan of the global Zionist movement which states that the borders of Israel are from the Euphrates to the Nile. When [the settlements] were destroyed, and when the settlers were banished from the settlements, the Palestinian people, all the free people and all Arabs erased this fairy tale.”
[PA TV, August 5, 2005]“There is no escape, but to clarify to the world that our enemies, that Zionism in particular, yearn to establish their state to control the world from east to west, and not the greater state of Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile, but they stare and want to establish their state over the entire planet earth.”
[PA TV, June 18, 2004]“The Arabs and Muslims must consolidate a political-military defense strategy, in which the armed masses will participate… I emphasize the word ‘defense’… for taking a defensive stance and a defensive initiative, which are meant to prevent the most dangerous and the worst [thing] of all, that is seen in the horizon, that is approaching comes from the United States, that is allowing Israel to establish the Israeli empire from the Euphrates to the Nile including the city of Medina [the second most sacred site in Islam, the burial site of the Prophet Muhammad].”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, September 22, 2003]Headline: “Why are the Palestinians committed to the Hudna [ceasefire] and the Roadmap, and the Israelis are acting as opposed to it?” by international law lecturer, Dr. Hana Isah:
“There is no doubt that the politicians in Israel are not interested in stability, and as a result, they escape from any agreement we will sign with them, since their goal is to extend their theft and their arrogant repression with all that concerns Palestine… ‘The land of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates, from Lebanon to the Nile.’ This slogan is the basis which drives the foundation of Israel since the foundation of the Zionist movement until today, and the future.”
[Al-Hayat Al’Jadida, August 10, 2003][Ahmad Halas Abu-Maher, Fatah secretary in the Gaza Strip] confirms the matters: “We are not only fighting for the Palestinian people. We are fighting in defense of the Arab nation and on this region, in which every people is a target for Israeli aggression. The slogan of Israel is ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates,’ in geographic terms. But in terms of its interests, Israel is larger than that. It extends to the entire Arab and Muslim territory. Therefore, when we are fighting and being killed in Gaza and Jenin, it is for the sake of the entire Arab nation.”
[PA TV, July 29, 2002]Abu-Karsh: “Even the Israeli flag, the blue line and the second blue line, and the Star of David in the middle, this is what is between the two rivers, that is the Nile and the Euphrates.”
Abu-Sharakh: “The Zionist project still exists. They want a greater state of Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile. If it will not happen in the next 50 years, they will ask [to make it come true] within the next hundred years, until their hopes and their aspirations in establishing a greater state of Israel will be realized. And this must be understood by the Arab nation and the entire world… They [Israelis] think about the state of Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile as something that cannot be avoided. From the Euphrates to the Nile.”
[PA TV, July 17, 2002]“The Zionists are behind the plot aiming to disconnect the rivers that extend from outside the Arab homeland in, such as the Euphrates and the Nile. The Zionists stole the Palestinian water and founded projects that transferred the water from the north to southern areas. They control the southern waters and steal them, and established the settlements above the water sources.”
[PA TV, March 22, 2002]“Zionism decided in the Basel committee in 1897 that Israel will be established between the Nile and the Euphrates, and this is what Israel aspires to realize. Therefore, every piece of land that we achieve is a withdrawal from the Zionist idea.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, February 11, 2002]“The Hebrew state adopted an official flag – a blue Star of David (symbolizing the state of Israel), between two blue lines symbolizing the Nile River and the Euphrates which the Zionist movement viewed as its borders.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, October 28, 2001]“Poor Israel: Its primitive, childish dream “the land of Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates” is reduced to a flag with a Star of David and two blue lines, one of them is the Nile, in the imagination, and the other is the disappointing Euphrates. These two lines will approach inwards, and will squeeze the Star of David until it bursts. This is what it [Israel] chose for itself…”
[“The Voice of Women” in Al-Ayyam, July 19, 2001]“… All the killing is followed by an intensive bombing of the national security outposts… what does it mean if not a declaration of an encompassing war on the Palestinian people, if not the determination to realize the constant goal of Zionism, of extending the occupation territory as far as possible, from the Euphrates to the Nile…”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 19, 2001]Friday sermon by preacher Dr. Muhammad Madi:
“Arabs and Muslims! The Zionist slogan, the slogan of the Jews’ state in Palestine – from the Nile to the Euphrates. It is written in their books and on their coins…”
[PA TV, May 4, 2001]“The Palestinians view the Israeli flag as a symbol for the greater Jewish state that spreads out from the Nile to the Euphrates according to the Zionist dream: the two blue lines symbolize the two rivers, and the Star of David between them is the symbol of the state. The Palestinians pride themselves in their flag with the four colors, which represents the blood, the war, and the peace…”
[Al-Ayyam, May 14, 2000]“A strategy was consolidated by some of the ones who hold a Jewish perspective, which was subsequently known as ‘Zionism’ aiming to establish a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine – or according to the traditional idea which sets the borders of the state of Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
[Al-Ayyam, February 12, 2000]Hussein Abu-Shanab: “The map storm reminds us of the three superpowers [that emerged] in the [original] map in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’… Herzl sent a furious letter to these nations and demanded they change the mandatory borders of Palestine so that they include the Litany River, that is ‘from the water to the water’ – [a slogan] expressed by the poster spread over the Knesset ‘from the Euphrates to the Nile.’ Sharon’s declarations to journalists following the Palestinian-Israeli-American triple-meeting were for abolishing the process… considering that the historical homeland, according to the Zionist perspective, is from the Nile to the Euphrates…”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 21, 1997]
Note how often the claim serves as a justification for “defensive” total war on Israel. Note also the use of contempt — fairy-tale, primitive, childish dream… — which actually refers to the primitive, childish dreams of the Arabs and Muslims to control the world. Cognitive dissonance, for sure (i.e., they think of these dreams — in others — as immature, do they know they cherish them?). Awareness? Not until people in the West tell them that this is nonsense and says more (and deeply unflattering things) about them than about Israel.
Reality up for Grabs: On the Difficulties of “Facing History”
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 2007I 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.
Subjection of (Muslim) Women and Fecklessness of (Western) Feminists
Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, author of The War Against Boys and coauthor of One Nation Under Therapy, takes on the outrageous cowardice of Western feminists in the face of Muslim patriarchy. It’s not right to claim that men should not have a monopoly on leading, and then, in so critical an issue that cuts so close to home, show so much lack of moral fiber. (Hat tip: NP)
The Subjection of Islamic Women
And the fecklessness of American feminism
by Christina Hoff Sommers
05/21/2007, Volume 012, Issue 34The subjection of women in Muslim societies–especially in Arab nations and in Iran–is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.
If you go to the websites of major women’s groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women’s centers at our major colleges and universities, you’ll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.
It’s because today’s “apartheid campaign” targets Israel, one of the most gender-equal cultures on the planet.
It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before September 11, 2001, many women’s groups protested the brutalities of the Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women’s issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?
The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is — by tendency and sometimes emphatically — antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.
Writing in the New Republic in 1999, philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted with disapproval that “feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States.” Too many fashionable gender theorists, she said, have lost their dedication to the public good. Their “hip quietism . . . collaborates with evil.”
This was a frontal assault, and prominent academic feminists chastised Nussbaum in the letters column. Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton pointed out the dangers of Nussbaum’s “good versus evil scheme.” Wrote Scott, “When Robespierre or the Ayatollahs or Ken Starr seek to impose their vision of the ‘good’ on the rest of society, reigns of terror follow and democratic politics are undermined.” Gayatri Spivak, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, accused Nussbaum of “flag waving” and of being on a “civilizing mission.” None of the letter writers addressed her core complaint: Too few feminist theorists are showing concern for the millions of women trapped in blatantly misogynist cultures outside the United States.
Good example of the same kind of evasive rhetoric we find from anti-Zionist Jews in defense of their rhetorical excess of anti-Zionism (Westernism) and silence about the morally depraved world of Palestinian resistance. The French have a saying: “Il ne faut pas mettre le doigt entre l’arbre et l’écorce” [Don't put your finger between the tree and the bark]. Don’t get between Western radicals and their anti-Westernism.
One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the “underrepresentation” of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women’s movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.
Why are Palestinians Killing Each Other in Gaza: Pollak Takes on Yglesias
Noah Pollak takes on Matthew Ygliesias at Michael Totten’s blog:
Who is responsible for Gaza? A reply to Matthew Yglesias
Read the whole thing, but for here, the conclusion:
There is something very consistent about governance in the Arab world. Among the Arab countries today in which there is a modicum of internal stability, each is controlled by an Arafat-type figure — an anti-democratic strongman who is able to crush all challenges to his authority. Likewise, among those Arab countries that aren’t ruled by a despot, the political dynamic is also consistent: In Lebanon, Iraq, and now Gaza, sectarian violence is the dominant form of political expression. It’s true that Arafat’s authority was weaker in Gaza than in the West Bank, but in Gaza there was always another strongman present to keep a lid on things: the Israeli occupation. When Israel disengaged in the summer of 2005, suddenly Gaza was without any master at all, and that’s exactly when the territory started going full-tilt toward the Hobbesian state of nature it now finds itself in.
And so to blame recent Bush administration choices for this lawlessness — or more precisely, to invent stories about administration choices — is more than a bit much. Even if the PA elections in 2006 hadn’t occurred, I doubt the battle we are seeing today wouldn’t have happened. The fight is foreordained by Gaza’s demography, its political and religious extremism, Arafat’s death, and Israel’s unwillingness to police the territory. The Bush administration is simply along for the ride — as is Israel. And the reason why Abbas has never been able to emerge as a leader of the Palestinians is because his weakness is similarly foreordained. Consensus-based political leadership is anathema to the Arab world. We’re seeing that rather starkly today in Gaza.
All of that said, I think that Yglesias ends up being partially right (even though he doesn’t mean to be) when he lays the lawlessness in Gaza at Bush’s feet. The sad truth is that Gaza today is a testament to the failure of the entire 14-year project of creating the Palestinian Authority, retrieving Arafat from exile, and attempting to drag the Arabs of Palestine, against their will, into western political modernity. This process was started, and most forcefully pushed forward, by the Clinton administration, and today its corpse is still being dragged around the Middle East, Weekend at Bernie’s-style, by Condoleezza Rice.
Readers might be surprised to hear — Mr. Yglesias probably among them — that less than a year ago, Yglesias wrote the following: “I happen to think the White House made the right call on the question of Palestinian elections — even in retrospect, even knowing that Hamas won.” A couple of days ago, he called these administration officials “morons” for having supported the very same elections that he now condemns. I know it’s best to just hurry past the contradictions, especially when they involve the reshuffling of positions in order to condemn the Bush administration. But it is too enjoyable to avoid the conclusion that here, Yglesias is calling himself names.
This last point gets at a key issue: it is at least my impression that if anyone had said that democracy couldn’t work in Iraq because of cultural factors particular to Arabs a decade ago, they’d have been called racists by the same people who heap abuse on Bush for being so stupid as to think that democracy can work in the Arab world.
Also, don’t miss Michael Totten’s own photo-essay on Gaza: The Story of Gaza.
Palestinian Suffering: Who’s Responsible?
PALESTINIAN SUFFERING
Few people have suffered more constant misery and daily oppression in the last 50 years than the Palestinians. The key issue, however, concerns not the amount — although it has obviously been grossly exaggerated — but the source of that suffering. There are wildly varying accounts of who is to blame. Our purpose here is not to assess how much blame to assign – that everyone must do on their own – but to list the major contributors to Palestinian suffering, and what is the nature of that contribution. We welcome comment, further examples, suggestions, links, reflections, additions.
ISRAEL:
The most obvious source of Palestinian suffering is the Israelis. According to the dominant Palestinian “victim” narrative, the Zionists came into the region, took their land, and, when war broke out in 1948, drove almost a million of them from their homes and relegated those who remained to second-class citizenship. The dominant Israeli narrative has argued that they came as civilians, purchasing property, developing the economy, clearing malaria-infested swamps. Israelis claim that most of the refugees were created by the Arab armies that sought to destroy Israel and urged the Arab inhabitants to leave. Arabs, whose own leaders openly declared their intention to massacre Israelis, naturally believed that the Israelis would do the same to them.
Recently Israeli “new” or “post-Zionist” historians have questioned the Israeli version, arguing that there were concerted efforts to drive out Arab populations, as well as some actual massacres of Arab civilians. This revisionist work has received sharp criticism from historians who argue that these writers have misrepresented, even distorted the contents of the archives on which they base their work. (That Israeli historians would distort history to criticize their own country may strike some as bizarre if not inexplicable, but such a move combines both hyper-self-criticism with therapeutic history: If we apologize, maybe they’ll stop hating us.) Not surprisingly, the Palestinian reaction to Israeli post-Zionism has been more favorable: it confirms their domineering cognitive egocentrism.
Since the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, over 2 million Palestinians have come under the military rule of Israel; and since the two uprisings of 1987-92 and 2000-4?, the hostilities have produced a particularly onerous situation, in which Palestinian suffering most obviously derives from Israeli actions – curfews, check-points and shut-downs. To those who do not know the history of the conflict, the image of the Palestinian David throwing rocks and the Israeli Goliath in his tanks and planes seems not only accurate but poetically ironic.
Book cover for The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid
Most observers who, consciously or unconsciously accept the way that Arab and Palestinian leadership have framed the struggle in terms of zero-sum outcomes, stop here. This is the foundation of both the Politically-Correct and the Post-Colonial Paradigms (PCP1 & 2). For the politically correct, who would not dream of challenging the Arab mind-set, there is no need to go further. Indeed some, exceptionally self-critical Israelis go still farther in the same direction: It is the Arabs who have sought peace and the Israelis who have rebuffed them. Obviously, Israeli victories mean Palestinian defeats; obviously Israeli presence means Palestinian displacements; obviously Israeli independence is a Palestinian Naqba. Obviously Israel and its ally America are the greatest contributors to Palestinian suffering. And were this the only way to conceive of the conflict, such a narrative might well be true.
But from the perspective of progressive, positive-sum interactions and the civil society such interactions foster, this can hardly be the whole story. On the contrary, when Zionists first came to Palestine the population was under a million. Today it pushes 10 million. Modern civil society and the culture of abundance that it produces can create many new opportunities for all involved. This need not have been a zero-sum conflict, and while some Zionists, observing the growing dominion of al Husseini, argued for kicking Arabs out, many more continued to argue for a productive collaboration. So we now turn to the other sources of Palestinian suffering, those who have either forced or encouraged the Palestinians to see it only as a zero-sum game, and to see the Israelis only through the lens of Domineering Cognitive Egocentrism (DCE).
ARAB POLITICAL CULTURE:
The contribution of Arab political culture to the suffering of Palestinians is less evident to those who do not know the history of the conflict. Arab political culture before Zionism was among the most autocratic and exploitative of the many “traditional” political cultures: With Turkish administrators, wealthy Arab landlords living in Egypt, and Bedouin tribes raiding whenever they could, the plight of the Palestinian peasant had involved plenty of suffering. That kind of suffering continues endemically throughout the Arab world today, regardless of whether the populace lives in an oil-rich state or not. It is characteristic of prime-divider societies.
Blogging and Dictators
Nick Cohen has some interesting comments on the alleged power of the blogosphere in relationship to the power of tyrants. They raise important questions about the potential role of the blogosphere in the 21st century.
A connected world proves no threat to tyrants
As a blogger is jailed, promises that the internet would challenge dictators have proved illusory
Nick Cohen
Sunday February 25, 2007
The ObserverEvery now and again, an established journalist goes into print to rage against the bloggers. Our old role of gatekeepers who decided what news and opinions the public should hear is crumbling under pressure from the net. The loudest wails came after American bloggers tore into the political coverage of CBS during the 2004 presidential election campaign and exposed a tendentious documentary. Jonathan Klein, a former CBS News executive, snapped: ‘You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at CBS] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pyjamas writing on the net.’
This is also what led one observer to remark that this was a “Gutenberg moment,” when a new technology of communications permitted the emergence of a body of thinkers who broke the monopoly on the public sphere enjoyed by the masters of the previous technology of communications (e.g. print vs. manuscript culture, or now, cyberspace vs. print culture).
In Praise of Envy
I recently ran across this essay by Robert Lewis, the editor-in-chief of the Arts and Opinion Journal on envy. Since I give a good deal of attention to that particular emotion as a specifically zero-sum emotion, this essay presents the “other side” of the coin — envy as spur to emulation, competition, and self-improvement. The wonderful short book by Peter Walcot, Envy and the Greeks, and the more ponderous tome by Helmut Schoek, Envy, both emphasize this elemental emotion as advantageous… up to a point.
IN PRAISE OF ENVY
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS_____________________
Not much, if anything, has been written positively about envy. It is “a stubborn weed of the mind . . . pursues a hateful end by despicable means,” observes Samuel Johnson in The Rambler. It’s “the only passion which can never lie quiet for want of irritation: its effects therefore are everywhere discoverable.” Which is another way of saying that if we were to encounter someone without envy, we would probably regard the person as a bit odd, not unlike Dostoyevsky’s other-worldly Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot.
As far as I know, no one has taken issue with the inclusion of envy as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In the last issue of Arts & Opinion, Geoff Olson points out that the “sin” is unique in that “Unlike anger, pride, lust, gluttony, greed or sloth, envy never gives the illusion of short-term pleasure. From the moment it starts, envy only brings anguish and sorrow.” He then goes on to quote Gore Vidal, a writer whom most writers in their right minds should envy: “Every time a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” I would argue that if it weren’t for envy, Vidal wouldn’t have become one of America’s most esteemed men of letters.
Envy does bring pleasure, called Schadenfreude, although granted that’s a derivative that comes when others fail, rather than the “straight-up” experience of pain when someone else succeeds. Vidal’s remark, however, is telling. It may explain how he became a great writer — as an historian my favorite of his books is Julian — but it also explains why his characters are so deftly drawn and nearly universally unattractive. Anyone with his talents, who still envies his friends (no less) is a deeply unhappy man.
Saddam Hussein and Arab Honor: NYT Tackles Arab Mentalities
A remarkable piece in the NYT on how Saddam has become a martyr in much of the Arab and Sunni Muslim world illustrates many of the mechanisms of honor-shame culture, from the power of the gesture, to the lack of concern for past guilt, to the slippery slope towards conspiracy theory.
Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
Published: January 6, 2007
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 5 — In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.
“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”
In Libya, which canceled celebrations of the feast of Id al-Adha after the execution, a government statement said a statue depicting Mr. Hussein in the gallows would be erected, along with a monument to Omar al-Mukhtar, who resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in 1931.
In Morocco and the Palestinian territories, demonstrators held aloft photographs of Mr. Hussein and condemned the United States.
Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.”
“God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.”
By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually cleansed of his past.
“Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”
Just a month ago Mr. Hussein was widely dismissed as a criminal who deserved the death penalty, even if his trial was seen as flawed. Much of the Middle East reacted with a collective shrug when he was found guilty of crimes against humanity in November.
But shortly after his execution last Saturday, a video emerged that showed Shiite guards taunting Mr. Hussein, who responded calmly but firmly to them. From then on, many across the region began looking at him as a martyr.
“The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time,” said Ahmad Mazin al-Shugairi, who hosts a television show at the Middle East Broadcasting Center that promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “The way Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to have pride too.”
This is an extremely important theme. Unfortunately, for the world in which Saddam’s crimes are dismissed in a moment because he shows such dignity, the notion of what it means to “have pride” comes down primarily to defiance. Guilt for crimes against ones own people, for example, carries no weight when put in the balance with defiance of outsiders who “humiliate” Arabs.
Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said, “The last image for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now.”
At the heart of the sudden reversal of opinion was the symbolism of the hasty execution, now framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in political theater and overseen by the American occupation.
In much of the predominantly Sunni Arab world, the timing of the execution in the early hours of Id al-Adha, which is among the holiest days of the Muslim year, when violence is forbidden and when even Mr. Hussein himself sometimes released prisoners, was seen as a direct insult to the Sunni world.
The contrast between the official video aired without sound on Iraqi television of Mr. Hussein being taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose around his neck and the unauthorized grainy, chaotic recording of the same scene with sound, depicting Shiite militiamen taunting Mr. Hussein with his hands tied, damning him to hell and praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, touched a sectarian nerve.
“He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left with.”
Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian media critic and director of the online radio station Ammannet.net, said: “If Saddam had media planners, he could not have planned it better than this. Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam would have gone down with such dignity.”
Writers and commentators have stopped short of eulogizing the dictator but have looked right past his bloody history as they compare Iraq’s present circumstances with Iraq under Mr. Hussein.
In Jordan, long a bastion of support for Mr. Hussein, many are lionizing him, decrying the timing of the execution and the taunts as part of a Sunni-Shiite conflict.
“Was it a coincidence that Israel, Iran and the United States all welcomed Saddam’s execution?” wrote Hamadeh Faraneh, a columnist for the daily Al Rai. “Was it also a coincidence when Saddam said bravely in front of his tormentors, ‘Long live the nation,’ and that Palestine is Arab, then uttered the declaration of faith? His last words expressed his depth and what he died for.”
Here’s an interesting read of Hussein’s religious orientation. At least as far as this writer is concerned, the religious dimension represents his true and deep self.
Another Jordanian journalist, Muhammad Abu Rumman, wrote in Al Ghad on Thursday: “For the vast majority Saddam is a martyr, even if he made mistakes in his first years of rule. He cleansed himself later by confronting the Americans and by rejecting to negotiate with them.”
Here we have a nice package of “honor-shame” themes that is as eloquent for what it doesn’t mention as it is for what it does: Saddam made “a few mistakes” at the beginning. Does that include killing large numbers of innocent civilians? Isn’t that what the Arab world is so furious about the Israelis doing? But by confronting America and refusing to negotiate, all his earlier sins are “cleansed.” This is the same kind of logic that made Yassir Arafat a hero in the Arab world, in particular his refusal to make a deal at Camp David. With a public like this, how on earth can the Arabs ever move on?
Even the pro-Saudi news media, normally critical of Mr. Hussein, chimed in with a more sentimental tone.
In the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Bilal Khubbaiz, commenting on Iranian and Israeli praise of the execution, wrote, “Saddam, as Iraq’s ruler, was an iron curtain that prevented the Iranian influence from reaching into the Arab world,” as well as “a formidable party in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Zuhayr Qusaybati, also writing in Al Hayat, said the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, “gave Saddam what he most wanted: he turned him into a martyr in the eyes of many Iraqis, who can now demand revenge.”
“The height of idiocy,” Mr. Qusaybati said, “is for the man who rules Baghdad under American protection not to realize the purpose of rushing the execution, and that the guillotine carries the signature of a Shiite figure as the flames of sectarian division do not spare Shiites or Sunnis in a country grieving for its butchered citizens.”
In Saudi Arabia, poems eulogizing Mr. Hussein have been passed around on cellphones and in e-mail messages.
“Prepare the gun that will avenge Saddam,” a poem published in a Saudi newspaper warned. “The criminal who signed the execution order without valid reason cheated us on our celebration day. How beautiful it will be when the bullet goes through the heart of him who betrayed Arabism.”
Mr. Safadi, the Jordanian editor, said: “In the public’s perception Saddam was terrible, but those people were worse. That final act has really jeopardized the future of Iraq immensely. And we all know this is a blow to the moderate camp in the Arab world.”
Reporting was contributed by Mona el-Naggar from Cairo, Nada Bakri from Beirut, Rasheed Abou al-Samh from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Suha Maayeh from Amman.
I find it interesting and telling that the multiple contributors to this article could not find one voice of dissent among all of this honor-shame group think. My guess is that a) they didn’t look, b) no one particularly wants to go public in dissent on this right now, and c) the authors, for all their commitments to “modern journalism”, share the sentiments they report. But that’s pure speculation.
What is less speculative is the evidence that “Arabism,” as the Saudi poem has it, is still alive, and well, and poisoning the lives of Arabs with as much gusto as ever. Churchill once famously remarked that “Arabs don’t mind being oppressed as long as it’s by their own.” This reaction not only illustrates the dictum, but explains the mechanism behind so self-destructive an attitude.
In any case, it seems to me that any “human rights” activist with honor and dignity should remember this response well, so that the next time some Arab waxes eloquent on the death of nine civilians due to an Israeli shell, he or she can respond: “I don’t understand. Why are these lives so precious that you cannot forgive the Israelis and insist that they are genocidal murderers, but you can forgive Hussein in an instant, despite the fact that he has killed over a million Muslims?” Or is that asking too much of human rights folks? Are they more drawn the Carter model — confront the democracies, comfort the dictators?