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September
28, 2001
The Necessity of
Skepticism
Backlash and Backtrack
By Edward Said
For the seven million Americans who
are Muslims (only two million of them Arab) and have lived through
the catastrophe and backlash of 11 September, it's been a harrowing,
especially unpleasant time. In addition to the fact that there
have been several Arab and Muslim innocent casualties of the
atrocities, there is an almost palpable air of hatred directed
at the group as a whole that has taken many forms. George W Bush
immediately seemed to align America and God with each other,
declaring war on the "folks" -- who are now, as he
says, wanted dead or alive -- who perpetrated the horrible deeds.
And this means, as no one needs any further reminding, that Osama
Bin Laden, the elusive Muslim fanatic who represents Islam to
the vast majority of Americans, has taken centre stage. TV and
radio have run file pictures and potted accounts of the shadowy
(former playboy, they say) extremist almost incessantly, as they
have of the Palestinian women and children caught "celebrating"
America's tragedy.
Pundits and hosts refer non-stop
to "our" war with Islam, and words like "jihad"
and "terror" have aggravated the understandable fear
and anger that seem widespread all over the country. Two people
(one a Sikh) have already been killed by enraged citizens who
seem to have been encouraged by remarks like Defence Department
official Paul Wolfowitz's to literally think in terms of "ending
countries" and nuking our enemies. Hundreds of Muslim and
Arab shopkeepers, students, hijab-ed women and ordinary citizens
have had insults hurled at them, while posters and graffiti announcing
their imminent death spring up all over the place. The director
of the leading Arab-American organisation told me this morning
that he averages 10 messages an hour of insult, threat, bloodcurdling
verbal attack. A Gallup poll released yesterday states that 49
per cent of the American people said yes (49 per cent no) to
the idea that Arabs, including those who are American citizens,
should carry special identification; 58 per cent demand (41 per
cent don't) that Arabs, including those who are Americans, should
undergo special, more intense security checks in general.
Then, the official bellicosity
slowly diminishes as George W discovers that his allies are not
quite as unrestrained as he is, as (undoubtedly) some of his
advisers, chief among them the altogether more sensible-seeming
Colin Powell, suggest that invading Afghanistan is not quite
as simple as sending in the Texas militias might have been, even
as the enormously confused reality forced on him and his staff
dissipates the simple Manichean imagery of good versus evil that
he has been maintaining on behalf of his people. A noticeable
de-escalation sets in, even though reports of police and FBI
harassment of Arabs and Muslim continue to flood in. Bush visits
a Washington mosque; he calls on community leaders and the Congress
to damp down hate speech; he starts trying to make at least rhetorical
distinctions between "our" Arab and Muslim friends
(the usual ones -- Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) and the still
undisclosed terrorists. In his speech to the joint session of
Congress, Bush did say that the US is not at war with Islam,
but said regrettably nothing about the rising wave of both incidents
and rhetoric that has assailed Muslims, Arabs and people resembling
Middle Easterners all across the country. Powell here and there
expresses displeasure with Israel and Sharon for exploiting the
crisis by oppressing Palestinians still more, but the general
impression is that US policy is still on the same course it has
always been on -- only now a huge war seems to be in the making.
But there is little positive
knowledge of the Arabs and Islam in the public sphere to fall
back on and balance the extremely negative images that float
around: the stereotypes of lustful, vengeful, violent, irrational,
fanatical people persist anyway. Palestine as a cause has not
yet gripped the imagination here, especially not after the Durban
conference. Even my own university, justly famous for its intellectual
diversity and the heterogeneity of its students and staff, rarely
offers a course on the Qur'an. Philip Hitti's History of the
Arabs, by far the best modern, one-volume book in English on
the subject, is out of print. Most of what is available is polemical
and adversarial: the Arabs and Islam are occasions for controversy,
not cultural and religious subjects like others. Film and TV
are packed with horrendously unattractive, bloody- minded Arab
terrorists; they were there, alas, before the terrorists of the
World Trade Center and Pentagon hijacked the planes and turned
them into instruments of a mass slaughter that reeks of criminal
pathology much more than of any religion.
There seems to be a minor campaign
in the print media to hammer home the thesis that "we are
all Israelis now," and that what has occasionally occurred
in the way of Palestinian suicide bombs is more or less exactly
the same as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In the
process, of course, Palestinian dispossession and oppression
are simply erased from memory; also erased are the many Palestinian
condemnations of suicide bombing, including my own. The overall
result is that any attempt to place the horrors of what occurred
on 11 September in a context that includes US actions and rhetoric
is either attacked or dismissed as somehow condoning the terrorist
bombardment.
Intellectually, morally, politically
such an attitude is disastrous since the equation between understanding
and condoning is profoundly wrong, and very far from being true.
What most Americans find difficult to believe is that in the
Middle East and Arab world US actions as a state -- unconditional
support for Israel, the sanctions against Iraq that have spared
Saddam Hussein and condemned hundreds of thousands of innocent
Iraqis to death, disease, malnutrition, the bombing of Sudan,
the US "green light" for Israel's 1982 invasion of
Lebanon (during which almost 20,000 civilians lost their lives,
in addition to the massacres of Sabra and Shatila), the use of
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf generally as a private US fiefdom,
the support of repressive Arab and Islamic regimes -- are deeply
resented and, not incorrectly, are seen as being done in the
name of the American people. There is an enormous gap between
what the average American citizen is aware of and the often unjust
and heartless policies that, whether or not he/she is conscious
of them, are undertaken abroad. Every US veto of a UN Security
resolution condemning Israel for settlements, the bombing of
civilians, and so forth, may be brushed aside by, say, the residents
of Iowa or Nebraska as unimportant events and probably correct,
whereas to an Egyptian, Palestinian or Lebanese citizen these
things are wounding in the extreme, and remembered very precisely.
In other words, there is a
dialectic between specific US actions on the one hand and consequent
attitudes towards America on the other hand that has literally
very little to do with jealousy or hatred of America's prosperity,
freedom, and all-round success in the world. On the contrary,
every Arab or Muslim that I have ever spoken to expressed mystification
as to why so extraordinarily rich and admirable a place as America
(and so likeable a group of individuals as Americans) has behaved
internationally with such callous obliviousness of lesser peoples.
Surely also, many Arabs and Muslims are aware of the hold on
US policy of the pro-Israeli lobby and the dreadful racism and
fulminations of pro-Israeli publications like The New Republic
or Commentary, to say nothing of bloodthirsty columnists like
Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, George Will, Norman Podhoretz,
and A M Rosenthal, whose columns regularly express hatred and
hostility towards Arabs and Muslims. These are usually to be
found in the mainstream media (e.g., the editorial pages of The
Washington Post) where everyone can read them as such, rather
than being buried in the back pages of marginal publications.
So we are living through a
period of turbulent, volatile emotion and deep apprehension,
with the promise of more violence and terrorism dominating consciousness,
especially in New York and Washington, where the terrible atrocities
of 11 September are still very much alive in the public awareness.
I certainly feel it, as does everyone around me.
But what is nevertheless encouraging,
despite the appalling general media performance, is the slow
emergence of dissent, petitions for peaceful resolution and action,
a gradually spreading, if still very spotty, relatively small
demand for alternatives to more bombing and destruction. This
kind of thoughtfulness has been very remarkable, in my opinion.
First of all, there have been very widely expressed concerns
about what may be the erosion of civil liberties and individual
privacy as the government demands, and seems to be getting, the
powers to wire-tap telephones, to arrest and detain Middle Eastern
people on suspicion of terrorism, and generally to induce a state
of alarm, suspicion, and mobilisation that could amount to paranoia
resembling McCarthyism. Depending on how one reads it, the American
habit of flying the flag everywhere can seem patriotic of course,
but patriotism can also lead to intolerance, hate crimes, and
all sorts of unpleasant collective passion. Numerous commentators
have warned about this and, as I said earlier, even the president
in his speech said that "we" are not at war with Islam
or Muslim people. But the danger is there, and has been duly
noted by other commentators, I am happy to say.
Second, there have been many
calls and meetings to address the whole matter of military action,
which according to a recent poll, 92 per cent of the American
people seem to want. Because, however, the administration hasn't
exactly specified what the aims of this war are ("eradicating
terrorism" is more metaphysical than it is actual), nor
the means, nor the plan, there is considerable uncertainty as
to where we may be going militarily. But generally speaking the
rhetoric has become less apocalyptic and religious -- the idea
of a crusade has disappeared almost completely -- and more focused
on what might be necessary beyond general words like "sacrifice"
and "a long war, unlike any others."
In universities, colleges,
churches and meeting-houses there are a great many debates on
what the country should be doing in response; I have even heard
that families of the innocent victims have said in public that
they do not believe military revenge is an appropriate response.
The point is that there is considerable reflection at large as
to what the US should be doing, but I am sorry to report that
the time for a critical examination of US policies in the Middle
East and Islamic worlds has not yet arrived. I hope that it will.
If only more Americans and
others can grasp that the main long-range hope for the world
is this community of conscience and understanding, that whether
in the protection of constitutional rights, or in reaching out
to the innocent victims of American power (as in Iraq), or in
relying on understanding and rational analysis "we"
can do a great deal better than we have so far done. Of course
this won't lead directly to changed policies on Palestine, or
a less skewed defence budget, or more enlightened environmental
and energy attitudes: but where else but in this sort of decent
back-tracking is there room for hope? Perhaps this constituency
may grow in the United States, but speaking as a Palestinian,
I must also hope that a similar constituency should be emerging
in the Arab and Muslim world. We must start thinking about ourselves
as responsible for the poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression
that have come to dominate our societies, evils that we have
allowed to grow despite our complaints about Zionism and imperialism.
How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up
for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in
the Islamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced
the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the
West? How many of us have denounced all suicidal missions as
immoral and wrong, even though we have suffered the ravages of
colonial settlers and inhuman collective punishment? We can no
longer hide behind the injustices done to us, anymore than we
can passively bewail the American support for our unpopular leaders.
A new secular Arab politics must now make itself known, without
for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness)
of people willing to kill indiscriminately. There can be no more
ambiguity on that score.
I have been arguing for years
that our main weapons as Arabs today are not military but moral,
and that one reason why, unlike the struggle against apartheid
in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle for self- determination
against Israeli oppression has not caught the world's imagination
is that we cannot seem to be clear about our goals and our methods,
and we have not stated unambiguously enough that our purpose
is coexistence and inclusion, not exclusivism and a return to
some idyllic and mythical past. The time has come for us to be
forthright and to start immediately to examine, re-examine and
reflect on our own policies as so many Americans and Europeans
are now doing. We should expect no less of ourselves than we
should of others. Would that all people took the time to try
to see where our leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason.
Scepticism and re-evaluation are necessities,
not luxuries. CP
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