Thoughts About America

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that heor she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at thismoment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation andwidespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasionalofficial statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies ofthe United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exactopposite.

Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up forquestioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for specialattention during airport security checks. There have been many reportedinstances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic oreven reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention.

And of course, the media have run far too many "experts" and"commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlesslyrepetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history,society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm ofthe war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the casewith the projected attack to "end" Iraq. There are US forces alreadyin several countries with important Muslim populations like the Philippines andSomalia, the buildup against Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadisticcollective punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like greatpublic approval in the United States.

While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more thanwhat Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply resentthe notion that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a"just war" against something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bushand his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role of either silent witnessesor defensive immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed residence in theUS. The historical realities are different: America is an immigrant republic andhas always been one. It is a nation of laws passed not by God but by itscitizens.

Except for the mostly exterminated native Americans, the originalIndians, everyone who now lives here as an American citizen originally came tothese shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. TheConstitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor forapproved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour," includingthings that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American"statements or attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want toregulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregrettedformer rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance ofreligion in America, he is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenryor to speak for everyone when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhereabout God and America and himself. The Constitution expressly separates churchand state.

There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and hiscompliant Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections ofthe First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal procedures thatgive individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or a fair trial, thatallow secret searches, eavesdropping, detention without limit, and, given thetreatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US executive branchto abduct prisoners, detain them indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether ornot they are prisoners of war and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply tothem -- which is not a decision to be taken by individual countries.

Moreover,as Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speechgiven on 17 February, the president and his men were not authorised to declarewar (Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or reason, werenot authorised to increase military spending to over $400 billion per year, werenot authorised to repeal the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he added -- the firstsuch statement by a prominent, publicly elected official -- "we did not askthat the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged withthe blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan." I strongly recommend thatRep. Kucinich's speech, which was made with the best of American principles andvalues in mind, be published in full in Arabic so that people in our part of theworld can understand that America is not a monolith for the use of George Bushand Dick Cheney, but in fact contains many voices and currents of opinion whichthis government is trying to silence or make irrelevant.

The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled andunprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no secret ofthe fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of others in thepursuit of what a small circle of men and women around Bush believe are itsinterests. So far as the Middle East is concerned, it does seem that since 11September there has been almost an Israelisation of US policy: and in effectAriel Sharon and his associates have cynically exploited the single-mindedattention to "terrorism" by George Bush and have used that as a coverfor their continued failed policy against the Palestinians.

The point here isthat Israel is not the US and, mercifully, the US is not Israel: thus, eventhough Israel commands Bush's support for the moment, Israel is a small countrywhose continued survival as an ethnocentric state in the midst of anArab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient if not infinite dependence onthe US, but rather on accommodation with its environment, not the other wayround. That is why I think Sharon's policy has finally been revealed to asignificant number of Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis aretaking the reserve officers' position against serving the military occupation asa model for their approach and resistance. This is the best thing to haveemerged from the Intifada. It proves that Palestinian courage and defiance inresisting occupation have finally brought fruit.

What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been escalatingtowards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his peopleidentify themselves (as in the very name of the military campaign, OperationEnduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny,its external enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the worldpress in the past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the US are bothmystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itselfthe right to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars onthem without much regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim,concreteness of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions.

What doesit mean to defeat "evil terrorism" in a world like ours? It cannotmean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite and strangelypointless task; nor can it mean changing the world map to suit the US,substituting people we think are "good guys" for evil creatures likeSaddam Hussein. The radical simplicity of all this is attractive to Washingtonbureaucrats whose domain is either purely theoretical or who, because they sitbehind desks in the Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant target for theUS's very real and virtually unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles awayfrom any known evil state and you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19aircraft carriers, and dozens of submarines, plus a million and a half peopleunder arms, all of them willing to serve their country idealistically in thepursuit of what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep referring to as evil, the chancesare that you will be willing to use all that power sometime, somewhere,especially if the administration keeps asking for (and getting) billions ofdollars to be added to the already swollen defence budget.

From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with fewexceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in this country havetolerated the Bush programme, tolerated and in some flagrant cases, tried to gobeyond it, toward more self- righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery,more specious argument. What they will not accept is that the world we live in,the historical world of nations and peoples, is moved and can be understood bypolitics, not by huge general absolutes like good and evil, with America alwayson the side of good, its enemies on the side of evil. When Thomas Friedmantiresomely sermonises to Arabs that they have to be more self-critical, missingin anything he says is the slightest tone of self - criticism. Somehow, hethinks, the atrocities of 11 September entitle him to preach at others, as ifonly the US had suffered such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere inthe world were not worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moralconclusions from.

One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectualsconcentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the muchgreater suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or anair force, or a proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering at thehands of Israel continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort of moralblindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the comparative evidence ofsinner and sinned against (to use a moralistic language that I normally avoidand detest) is very much the order of the day, and it must be the criticalintellectual's job not to fall into -- indeed, actively to campaign againstfalling into -- the trap. It is not enough to say blandly that all humansuffering is equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's own miseries: it isfar more important to see what the strongest party does, and to question ratherthan justify that. The intellectual's is a voice in opposition to and criticalof great power, which is consistently in need of a restraining and clarifyingconscience and a comparative perspective, so that the victim will not, as isoften the case, be blamed and real power encouraged to do its will.

A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of adeclaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the majorFrench, German, Italian and other continental papers but which did not appear inthe US at all, except on the Internet where few people took notice of it. Thisdeclaration took the form of a pompous sermon about the American war againstevil and terrorism being "just" and in keeping with American values,as defined by these self-appointed interpreters of our country. Paid for andsponsored by something called the Institute for American Values, whose main (andfinancially well- endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of families,"fathering" and "mothering," and God, the declaration wassigned by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan amongmany others, but basically written by a conservative feminist academic, JeanBethke Elshtain. Its main arguments about a "just" war were inspiredby Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with thepro-Israel lobby in this country, and whose role is to justify everything Israeldoes by recourse to vaguely leftist principles. In signing this declaration,Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism and, like Sharon, allies himselfwith an interpretation (and a questionable one at that) of America as arighteous warrior against terror and evil, the more to make it appear thatIsrael and the US are similar countries with similar aims.

Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state of itscitizens but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly onlythe state of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to stateboldly that in supporting Israel he is supporting a state structured byethno-religious principles, which (with typical hypocrisy) he would oppose inthe United States if this country were declared to be white and Christian.

Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is reallyaddressed to "our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to understand thatAmerica's war is not against Islam but against those who oppose all sorts ofprinciples, which it would be hard to disagree with. Who could oppose theprinciple that all human beings are equal, that killing in the name of God is abad thing, that freedom of conscience is excellent, and that "the basicsubject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government isto protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing"? Inwhat follows, however, America turns out to be the aggrieved party and, eventhough some of its mistakes in policy are acknowledged very briefly (and withoutmentioning anything specific in detail), it is depicted as hewing to principlesunique to the United States, such as that all people possess inherent moraldignity and status, that universal moral truths exist and are available toeveryone, or that civility is important where there is disagreement, and thatfreedom of conscience and religion are a reflection of basic human dignity andare universally recognised.

Fine. For although the authors of this sermon say itis often the case that such great principles are contravened, no sustainedattempt is made to say where and when those contraventions actually occur (asthey do all the time), or whether they have been more contravened than followed,or anything as concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer and hiscolleagues set forth a list of how many American "murders" haveoccurred at Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow making a list of that kindis worth making for these militant defenders of America, whereas the murder ofArabs and Muslims -- including the hundreds of thousands killed with Americanweapons by Israel with US support, or the hundreds of thousands killed by US-maintained sanctions against the innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need beneither mentioned nor tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliatingPalestinians by Israel, with American complicity and even cooperation, and whereis the nobility and moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian childrenare killed, millions besieged, and millions more kept as stateless refugees? Orfor that matter, the millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesiawith American support and acquiescence?

All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed byAmerican intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a statementof real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the arrogant useof power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the USin full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with those Islamists who have arguedthat "our" war is with the West and with America.

Speaking as someonewith a claim on America and the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking rhetoricprofoundly objectionable. While it pretends to the elucidation of principles andthe declaration of values, it is in fact exactly the opposite, an exercise in notknowing, in blinding readers with a patriotic rhetoric that encouragesignorance as it overrides real politics, real history, and real moral issues.Despite its vulgar trafficking in great "principles and values," itdoes none of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed to cowforeign readers into submission.

I have a feeling that this document wasn'tpublished here for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely criticisedby American readers that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it wasdesigned as part of a recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon schemeto put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and therefore intended forforeign consumption.

Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?"augurs a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. Forwhen the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the worldalign themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's caseinstead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication andunderstanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual war againstcommunism, which we now know brought far too many compromises, collaborationsand fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists who should have playedan altogether different role.

Subsidised and underwritten by the government (theCIA especially, which went as far as providing for the subvention of magazineslike Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts aswell as artistic exhibitions), those militantly unreflective and uncriticalintellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought to the whole notion ofintellectual honesty and complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For alongwith that effort went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidatecritics, and restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this is ashameful episode in our history, and we must be on our guard against and resistits return.