The US, Arabs, Muslims; by Edward Said [fwd]

"Thoughts About America" by Edward Said (published in Al-Ahram Weekly 
online 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002, 
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/575/op2.htm


I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel 
that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the 
United States at this moment provides us with an especially 
unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite 
specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official 
statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of 
the United States, everything else about the current situation argues 
the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been 
picked up for questioning 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 special attention during airport security checks. 
There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour 
against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even 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 endlessly repetitious 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 of the war on terrorism in 
Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the 
projected attack to "end" Iraq. There are US forces already in 
several countries with important Muslim populations like the 
Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against Iraq continues, and 
Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of the Palestinian 
people, all with what seems like great public approval in the United 
States.


While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is 
more than what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have 
come to deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of 
America as being involved in a "just war" against something 
unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war 
that has assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive 
immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. 
The historical realities are different: America is an immigrant 
republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws passed not 
by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated native 
Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an
American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from 
somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not 
provide for different levels of Americanness, nor for approved or 
disapproved forms of "American behaviour," including things that have 
come to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. 
That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech 
and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted 
former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the 
importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce 
such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes 
proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and 
himself. The Constitution expressly separates church and state.


There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and 
his compliant Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole 
sections of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, 
instituted legal procedures that give individuals no recourse either 
to a proper defence or a fair trial, that allow secret searches, 
eavesdropping, detention without limit, and, given the treatment of 
the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US executive branch 
to abduct prisoners, detain them indefinitely, decide unilaterally 
whether or not they are prisoners of war and whether or not the 
Geneva Conventions apply to them -- which is not a decision to be 
taken by individual countries. Moreover, as Congressman Dennis 
Kucinich
(Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speech given on 17 February, 
the president and his men were not authorised to declare war 
(Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or 
reason, were not authorised to increase military spending to over 
$400 billion per year, were not authorised to repeal the Bill of 
Rights. Furthermore, he added -- the first such statement by a 
prominent, publicly elected official -- "we did not ask that the 
blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged 
with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan." I strongly 
recommend that Rep. Kucinich's speech, which was made with the best 
of American principles and values in mind, be published in full in 
Arabic so that people
in our part of the world can understand that America is not a 
monolith for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but in fact 
contains many voices and currents of opinion which this government is 
trying to silence or make irrelevant.


The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled 
and unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has 
made no secret of the fact that it does not need coordination with or 
approval of others in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and 
women around Bush believe are its interests. So far as the Middle 
East is concerned, it does seem that since 11 September there has 
been almost an Israelisation of US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon 
and his associates have cynically exploited the single-minded 
attention to "terrorism" by George Bush and have used that as a cover 
for their continued failed policy against the Palestinians. The point 
here is that Israel is not the US and, mercifully, the US is not
Israel: thus, even though Israel commands Bush's support for the 
moment, Israel is a small country whose continued survival as an 
ethnocentric state in the midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not 
just on an expedient if not infinite dependence on the US, but rather 
on accommodation with its environment, not the other way round. That 
is why I think Sharon's policy
has finally been revealed to a significant number of Israelis as 
suicidal, and why more and more Israelis are taking the reserve 
officers' position against serving the military occupation as a model 
for their approach and resistance. This is the best thing to have 
emerged from the Intifada. It proves that Palestinian courage and 
defiance in resisting occupation have
finally brought fruit.


What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been 
escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush 
and his people identify themselves (as in the very name of the 
military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, 
purity, the good, and manifest destiny, its external enemies with an 
equally absolute evil. Anyone reading
the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain that people 
outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of 
US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create 
enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much 
regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness 
of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions. What does it 
mean to defeat "evil terrorism" in a world like ours? It cannot mean 
eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite and strangely 
pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world map to suit the 
US, substituting people we think are "good guys" for evil creatures 
like Saddam Hussein. The radical simplicity of all this is attractive 
to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is either purely theoretical 
or who, because they sit behind desks in the Pentagon, tend to see 
the world as a distant target for the US's very real and virtually 
unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known 
evil state and you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 
aircraft carriers, and dozens of submarines, plus a million and a 
half people under arms, all of them willing to serve their country 
idealistically in the pursuit of what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep 
referring to as evil, the chances are that you will be willing to
use all that power sometime, somewhere, especially if the 
administration keeps asking for (and getting) billions of dollars to 
be added to the already swollen defence budget.


>From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with 
few exceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in this 
country have tolerated the Bush programme, tolerated and in some 
flagrant cases, tried to go beyond 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 by politics, not by huge general absolutes like good and 
evil, with America always on the side of good, its enemies on the 
side of evil. When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs 
that they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything he says 
is the
slightest tone of self-criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities 
of 11 September entitle him to preach at others, as if only the US 
had suffered such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in 
the world were not worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large 
moral conclusions from.


One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli 
intellectuals concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the 
equation the much greater suffering of a dispossessed people without 
a state, or an army, or an air force, or a proper leadership, that 
is, Palestinians whose suffering at the hands of Israel continues 
minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort
of moral blindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the 
comparative evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use a 
moralistic language that I normally avoid and detest) is very much 
the order of the day, and it must be the critical intellectual's job 
not to fall into -- indeed, actively to campaign against falling 
into -- the trap. It is not enough to say blandly that all human 
suffering is equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's own 
miseries: it is far more important to see what the strongest party 
does, and to question rather than justify that. The intellectual's is 
a voice in opposition to and critical of great power, which is 
consistently in need of a restraining and clarifying conscience and a 
comparative perspective, so that the victim will not, as is often 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 a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was 
published in all the major French, German, Italian and other 
continental papers but which did not appear in the US at all, except 
on the Internet where few people took notice of it. This declaration 
took the form of a pompous sermon about the American war against evil 
and terrorism being "just" and in keeping with American values, as 
defined by these self-appointed interpreters of our country. Paid for 
and sponsored by something called the Institute for American Values, 
whose main (and financially well-endowed) aim is to propagate ideas 
in favour of families, "fathering" and "mothering," and God, the 
declaration was signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel 
Patrick Moynihan among many others, but basically written by a 
conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Its main 
arguments about a "just" war were inspired by Professor Michael 
Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the pro-Israel lobby 
in this country, and whose role is to justify everything Israel does 
by recourse to vaguely leftist principles. In signing this 
declaration, Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism and, like 
Sharon, allies himself with an interpretation (and a questionable one 
at that) of America as a righteous warrior against terror and evil, 
the more to make it appear that Israel and the US are similar 
countries with similar aims.


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


Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is 
really addressed to "our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to 
understand that America's war is not against Islam but against those 
who oppose all sorts of principles, which it would be hard to 
disagree with. Who could oppose the principle that all human beings 
are equal, that killing in the name of God is a bad thing, that 
freedom of conscience is excellent, and that "the basic subject of 
society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government is 
to protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing"? 
In what follows, however, America turns out to be the aggrieved party 
and, even though some of its mistakes in policy are acknowledged very 
briefly (and without mentioning anything specific in detail), it is 
depicted as hewing to principles unique to the United States, such as 
that all people possess inherent moral dignity and status, that 
universal moral truths exist and are available to everyone, or that 
civility is important where there is disagreement, and that freedom 
of conscience and religion are a reflection of basic human dignity 
and are universally recognised. Fine. For although the authors of 
this sermon say it is often the case that such great principles are 
contravened, no sustained attempt is made to say where and when those 
contraventions actually occur (as they 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 his colleagues 
set forth a list of how many American "murders" have occurred at 
Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in 
1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow making a list of 
that kind is worth making for these militant defenders of America, 
whereas the murder of
Arabs and Muslims -- including the hundreds of thousands killed with 
American weapons by Israel with US support, or the hundreds of 
thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions against the innocent 
civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither mentioned nor 
tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians 
by Israel, with American complicity and
even cooperation, and where is the nobility and moral conscience of 
saying nothing as Palestinian children are killed, millions besieged, 
and millions more kept as stateless refugees? Or for that matter, the 
millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesia with 
American support and acquiescence?


All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by 
American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a 
statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism 
against the arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo in 
a new cold war declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it 
would seem, with those Islamists who have argued that "our" war is 
with the West and with America.
Speaking as someone with a claim on America and the Arabs, I find 
this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it 
pretends to the elucidation of principles and the declaration of 
values, it is in fact exactly the opposite, an exercise in not 
knowing, in blinding readers with a patriotic rhetoric that 
encourages ignorance as it overrides real politics, real history, and 
real moral issues. Despite its vulgar trafficking in 
great "principles and values," it does none of that, except to wave 
them around in a bullying way designed to cow foreign readers into 
submission. I have a feeling that this document wasn't published here 
for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely criticised by 
American readers that it would be laughed out of court and two, that 
it was designed as part of a recently announced, extremely well-
funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of the war 
effort, and therefore intended for foreign consumption.


Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?" 
augurs a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual 
discourse. For when the intellectuals of the most powerful country in 
the history of the world align themselves so flagrantly with that 
power, pressing that power's case instead of urging restraint, 
reflection, genuine communication and
understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual 
war against communism, which we now know brought far too many 
compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of 
intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether 
different role. Subsidised and underwritten by the government (the 
CIA especially, which went as far as providing for the subvention of 
magazines like Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel and 
concerts as well as artistic exhibitions), those militantly 
unreflective and uncritical intellectuals and artists in the 1950s 
and 1960s brought to the whole notion of intellectual honesty and 
complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For along with that effort 
went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics, 
and restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this is a 
shameful episode in our history, and we must be on our guard against 
and resist its return.


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