The Necessity Of Skepticism

For the seven million Americans who are Muslims (only twomillion of them Arab) and have lived through the catastrophe and backlash of 11September, it's been a harrowing, especially unpleasant time. In addition to thefact that there have been several Arab and Muslim innocent casualties of theatrocities, there is an almost palpable air of hatred directed at the group as awhole that has taken many forms. George W Bush immediately seemed to alignAmerica and God with each other, declaring war on the "folks" -- whoare 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, theelusive Muslim fanatic who represents Islam to the vast majority of Americans,has taken centre stage. TV and radio have run file pictures and potted accountsof the shadowy (former playboy, they say) extremist almost incessantly, as theyhave of the Palestinian women and children caught "celebrating"America's tragedy.

Pundits and hosts refer non-stop to "our" war withIslam, and words like "jihad" and "terror" have aggravatedthe understandable fear and anger that seem widespread all over the country. Twopeople (one a Sikh) have already been killed by enraged citizens who seem tohave been encouraged by remarks like Defence Department official PaulWolfowitz's to literally think in terms of "ending countries" andnuking our enemies. Hundreds of Muslim and Arab shopkeepers, students, hijab-edwomen and ordinary citizens have had insults hurled at them, while posters andgraffiti announcing their imminent death spring up all over the place. Thedirector of the leading Arab-American organisation told me this morning that heaverages 10 messages an hour of insult, threat, bloodcurdling verbal attack. AGallup poll released yesterday states that 49 per cent of the American peoplesaid yes (49 per cent no) to the idea that Arabs, including those who areAmerican citizens, should carry special identification; 58 per cent demand (41per cent don't) that Arabs, including those who are Americans, should undergospecial, more intense security checks in general.

Then, the official bellicosity slowly diminishes as George Wdiscovers that his allies are not quite as unrestrained as he is, as(undoubtedly) some of his advisers, chief among them the altogether moresensible-seeming Colin Powell, suggest that invading Afghanistan is not quite assimple as sending in the Texas militias might have been, even as the enormouslyconfused reality forced on him and his staff dissipates the simple Manicheanimagery of good versus evil that he has been maintaining on behalf of hispeople. A noticeable de-escalation sets in, even though reports of police andFBI harassment of Arabs and Muslim continue to flood in. Bush visits aWashington mosque; he calls on community leaders and the Congress to damp downhate speech; he starts trying to make at least rhetorical distinctions between"our" Arab and Muslim friends (the usual ones -- Jordan, Egypt, SaudiArabia) and the still undisclosed terrorists. In his speech to the joint sessionof Congress, Bush did say that the US is not at war with Islam, but saidregrettably nothing about the rising wave of both incidents and rhetoric thathas assailed Muslims, Arabs and people resembling Middle Easterners all acrossthe country. Powell here and there expresses displeasure with Israel and Sharonfor exploiting the crisis by oppressing Palestinians still more, but the generalimpression 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 inthe public sphere to fall back on and balance the extremely negative images thatfloat around: the stereotypes of lustful, vengeful, violent, irrational,fanatical people persist anyway. Palestine as a cause has not yet gripped theimagination here, especially not after the Durban conference. Even my ownuniversity, justly famous for its intellectual diversity and the heterogeneityof its students and staff, rarely offers a course on the Qur'an. Philip Hitti'sHistory of the Arabs, by far the best modern, one-volume book in English on thesubject, is out of print. Most of what is available is polemical andadversarial: the Arabs and Islam are occasions for controversy, not cultural andreligious subjects like others. Film and TV are packed with horrendouslyunattractive, bloody- minded Arab terrorists; they were there, alas, before theterrorists of the World Trade Center and Pentagon hijacked the planes and turnedthem into instruments of a mass slaughter that reeks of criminal pathology muchmore than of any religion.

There seems to be a minor campaign in the print media to hammerhome the thesis that "we are all Israelis now," and that what hasoccasionally occurred in the way of Palestinian suicide bombs is more or lessexactly the same as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In the process,of course, Palestinian dispossession and oppression are simply erased frommemory; also erased are the many Palestinian condemnations of suicide bombing,including my own. The overall result is that any attempt to place the horrors ofwhat occurred on 11 September in a context that includes US actions and rhetoricis either attacked or dismissed as somehow condoning the terrorist bombardment.

Intellectually, morally, politically such an attitude isdisastrous since the equation between understanding and condoning is profoundlywrong, and very far from being true. What most Americans find difficult tobelieve is that in the Middle East and Arab world US actions as a state --unconditional support for Israel, the sanctions against Iraq that have sparedSaddam Hussein and condemned hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis to death,disease, malnutrition, the bombing of Sudan, the US "green light" forIsrael's 1982 invasion of Lebanon (during which almost 20,000 civilians losttheir lives, in addition to the massacres of Sabra and Shatila), the use ofSaudi Arabia and the Gulf generally as a private US fiefdom, the support ofrepressive 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 enormousgap between what the average American citizen is aware of and the often unjustand heartless policies that, whether or not he/she is conscious of them, areundertaken abroad. Every US veto of a UN Security resolution condemning Israelfor settlements, the bombing of civilians, and so forth, may be brushed asideby, say, the residents of Iowa or Nebraska as unimportant events and probablycorrect, whereas to an Egyptian, Palestinian or Lebanese citizen these thingsare wounding in the extreme, and remembered very precisely.

In other words, there is a dialectic between specific US actionson the one hand and consequent attitudes towards America on the other hand thathas 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 orMuslim that I have ever spoken to expressed mystification as to why soextraordinarily rich and admirable a place as America (and so likeable a groupof individuals as Americans) has behaved internationally with such callousobliviousness of lesser peoples. Surely also, many Arabs and Muslims are awareof the hold on US policy of the pro-Israeli lobby and the dreadful racism andfulminations of pro-Israeli publications like The New Republic or Commentary, tosay nothing of bloodthirsty columnists like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire,George Will, Norman Podhoretz, and A M Rosenthal, whose columns regularlyexpress hatred and hostility towards Arabs and Muslims. These are usually to befound 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 pagesof marginal publications.

So we are living through a period of turbulent, volatile emotionand deep apprehension, with the promise of more violence and terrorismdominating consciousness, especially in New York and Washington, where theterrible atrocities of 11 September are still very much alive in the publicawareness. I certainly feel it, as does everyone around me.

But what is nevertheless encouraging, despite the appallinggeneral media performance, is the slow emergence of dissent, petitions forpeaceful resolution and action, a gradually spreading, if still very spotty,relatively small demand for alternatives to more bombing and destruction. Thiskind 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 ofcivil liberties and individual privacy as the government demands, and seems tobe getting, the powers to wire-tap telephones, to arrest and detain MiddleEastern people on suspicion of terrorism, and generally to induce a state ofalarm, suspicion, and mobilisation that could amount to paranoia resemblingMcCarthyism. Depending on how one reads it, the American habit of flying theflag everywhere can seem patriotic of course, but patriotism can also lead tointolerance, hate crimes, and all sorts of unpleasant collective passion.Numerous commentators have warned about this and, as I said earlier, even thepresident in his speech said that "we" are not at war with Islam orMuslim people. But the danger is there, and has been duly noted by othercommentators, I am happy to say.

Second, there have been many calls and meetings to address thewhole matter of military action, which according to a recent poll, 92 per centof the American people seem to want. Because, however, the administration hasn'texactly specified what the aims of this war are ("eradicatingterrorism" is more metaphysical than it is actual), nor the means, nor theplan, 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 onwhat might be necessary beyond general words like "sacrifice" and"a long war, unlike any others."

In universities, colleges, churches and meeting-houses there area great many debates on what the country should be doing in response; I haveeven heard that families of the innocent victims have said in public that theydo not believe military revenge is an appropriate response. The point is thatthere is considerable reflection at large as to what the US should be doing, butI am sorry to report that the time for a critical examination of US policies inthe Middle East and Islamic worlds has not yet arrived. I hope that it will.

If only more Americans and others can grasp that the mainlong-range hope for the world is this community of conscience and understanding,that whether in the protection of constitutional rights, or in reaching out tothe innocent victims of American power (as in Iraq), or in relying onunderstanding and rational analysis "we" can do a great deal betterthan we have so far done. Of course this won't lead directly to changed policieson Palestine, or a less skewed defence budget, or more enlightened environmentaland energy attitudes: but where else but in this sort of decent back-tracking isthere room for hope? Perhaps this constituency may grow in the United States,but speaking as a Palestinian, I must also hope that a similar constituencyshould be emerging in the Arab and Muslim world.

We must start thinking about ourselves as responsible for thepoverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression that have come to dominate oursocieties, evils that we have allowed to grow despite our complaints aboutZionism and imperialism. How many of us, for example, have openly and honestlystood up for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in theIslamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulationof Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? How many of us havedenounced all suicidal missions as immoral and wrong, even though we havesuffered the ravages of colonial settlers and inhuman collective punishment? Wecan no longer hide behind the injustices done to us, anymore than we canpassively bewail the American support for our unpopular leaders. A new secularArab politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning orsupporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to killindiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score.

I have been arguing for years that our main weapons as Arabstoday are not military but moral, and that one reason why, unlike the struggleagainst apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle forself-determination against Israeli oppression has not caught the world'simagination 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 andinclusion, not exclusivism and a return to some idyllic and mythical past. Thetime 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 Europeansare 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 betaking us, and for what reason. Scepticism and re-evaluation are necessities,not luxuries.

(By arrangement with Zmag)