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Some Thoughts, in Bullet Form
Thursday, May 3, 2007

No pun intended in the title, of course. I don't have time to blog much and for that I apologize, but I thought maybe I could instead tease you with a share of the observations I have been making to myself these past few weeks (or days, I lost track).

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posted by Angry Anarchist @ 5/03/2007 10:07:00 PM, ,



Prestige
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The university I attend boasts of being a prestigious institution of higher education (yada yada), receiving whoppy sums delivered by hand by our beloved resident U.S ambassador, Jeffrey Feltman... The library had different tables and chairs last year, which were not shabby to be honest. But last semester, they did a complete makeover and replaced the wooden chairs and tables with IKEA-style fancy tables, revolving chairs, and couches. Now, you can see USAID stickers on all the furniture in the library, from shelves to desks to tables, not to forget computers...

Moving on to the library collection; the stacks are finally open to the students (no one stops you with a "hey you, where do you think you're going?!" when you are about to take the stairs or elevator). I mean, finally they had some sort of revelation it seems, and decided that this was the right way to go; that if I want to take a book out, I would not just do so based on the title and waste my time asking for it only to go through it and discover that it is not relevant to my research. I would instead take my list of shelfmarks and look through the books by myself. I think it would be logical to assume that students are adults and can return the books they don't need, immediately after looking through them, to their correct location. Or even if not, at least place it on an empty shelf on each row specifically reserved for books that people check out but decide not to take out and at the same time do not remember where they took it from in the row... But this doesn't exist. At any rate, the stacks are now open to all. But here again, there is another complication (for which this prestigious center of research and higher education cannot figure out a solution) -- since the stacks were never meant to be opened, there never was a marking of which letters are on which floor. And despite the fact that the stacks are now open, there still isn't such an identification. Instead, you have to hand the person at the circulation desk all your book shelfmarks and he or she will tell you which floor each book is on. Good luck writing that down...!

So after inquiring at the circulation desk, up we go. By the way, by the time the elevator heeds your call, you would have abandoned the idea of sparing your calories and would have taken the stairs instead. So you labor through the floors (good luck climbing 4 floors). And then finally you arrive at your destination. There is a person sitting on a desk on each floor, who, upon your entry, often hurries to you, and makes the (if you are a graduate student) offensive offer, "let me get that for you", trying to pull the paper out of your hand. But you resist, pull the paper from his hand, saying "no thank you very much, I can get it by myself. It's not rocket science, you know."

If you have something to find in the reference section, you go down to the basement, you look around you and are afraid to touch the books because you've had the traumatic experience of someone rushing at you before, in front of everyone, and telling you that he will give you whatever book you want "just don't touch a thing". But then you see there is no one there, and you still don't want to touch the books lest it trigger God's wrath, and so you go to the electronic resources people nearby, and you are 10 meters away from the guy sitting there, he looks at you and says, "sorry we are electronic resources people here, can't help you." Wait a minute, I wasn't holding a sign that read "I need help on a reference book", was I? But what can you do, so you walk away, and for the first time since that doomed traumatic day, you dare to touch the reference books. You find it, and then realize that you need a photocopying card because you can't take the books in the reference section out of the library. You go upstairs to the card vending machine, it says you need a 5,000 Lira note (the old big print not the tiny Monopoly-style version). Fabulous. You have a 10,000 note, and you gather your hopes and go to the circulation desk, ask the circulation people if they have change. No they don't. So what can I do? I need to photocopy this (not for me, for a professor -- w shu hal professor wlo). The girl says, "you get a 5,000 and get a photocopy card". Ha ha. Very funny. But then it's your lucky day, and the guy asks you who the professor is, and you tell him, and he says, fine, take the book out for 10 minutes, but you have to give me your ID. Thank God for wasta.

So you go home that day, all happy and satisfied. After having something to eat and taking a nap, you decide it's time to do some research on the e-journals databases. Let us say, on Syrian foreign policy. You start with one database, works fine, and if you are a multitasker like me, you simultaneously search on a second one, and then a third one. The third one returns some interesting hits, and you say, let me get that article. You click on "view as PDF", it takes you to a log in page. Ahh. You try and try and try, but it is of no use. You think, maybe it's my internet, and decide to try it the next day at work. You go to work the next day, you try it, but to no avail. You need username and password. You curse the electronic resources people. You get on the library website, and find an "ask a librarian" link, you write a note explaining that the database is not working. You click submit, and it gives you an error. You try again and again, but again to no avail. So you go back to the library page and look up the names of library staff, and find the one in charge of electronic databases. You write a very angry letter (in the spirit of Angry Anarchist), and send it. A week later, you get an e-mail. A confirmation e-mail from your contact person: "There seems to be a problem with the database." Oh... I didn't know...

Of all the thousands of students and faculty, no one had noticed that there is a problem with the database? What do these people do, daydream all day long? Or is attending the so-called "prestigious" university nothing more than an investment for these people?? May I inform you about Solidere??!

While I am at it, let me have this out of my system once and for all -- I meant to post a rant I wrote a while back, but didn't because it was very nasty. I've cut out the nastiness, and will make do with posting a conversation I had with someone:

X: You have to work with me.
Me: No, I do not have to.
X: Yes, according to the rules and procedures, we decide what you will work on, and with whom.
Me: What rules and procedures? I would like to see those rules and procedures in written form.
X: Um, there is none in written form, but it's nevertheless a policy.
Me: A policy, eh?
X: Yup.
Me: I was not aware of the existence of such a policy. You have to let people know what your policies are if you haven't given them a written notice, before they sign the contract.
X: So why did you sign the contract without asking?
Me: Excuse me? I signed the contract, I did not sign a set of non-existent policies which are only figments of your imagination.
X: But you signed the contract without asking.

After another 30 minutes of back-and-forth:
Me: Look, bottom line, you cannot force me to work with you.
X: You are interfering in my business, that is not up to you!
Me: Oh yes, very much up to me, what will you do, force me? Drag me from home?
X: You are being selfish and undemocratic.
Me: First, what does democracy have to do with this? Second, who said I believe in democracy?
X: What do you believe in, then, dictatorship?
Me: Ha ha ha ... no, I do not believe in anything. Anyway if you are a university functioning under institutions, then these institutions have rules, or are expected to have rules, and you apply those rules. You don't apply non-existent rules.

And didn't you know? Just because Honorable Jeffrey Feltman has handed the president of this very prestigious university a big fat cheque, apparently means, for one American professor, that those who oppose U.S policies are ungrateful. Apparently it's a take-all or leave-all world. Ahh those Americans.

Another funny occurrence involving me and a professor:

X: I'm working on a research paper on Hezb Allah. That's another project that you might be able to help me on.
Me: Ohhh, you are...
X: Yes, but I understand if you don't want to work on it.
Me: Why wouldn't I?
X: Because you know, I mean, Hezb Allah.......
Me: Uh... so? I don't have a problem with Hezb Allah. Besides, what does that have to do with research?
X: Ahh, I should've known. Leftists support Hezb Allah because they (leftists) are anti-American.
Me: What? ...

I love prestige. Don't you?

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posted by Angry Anarchist @ 4/10/2007 07:12:00 PM, ,



Explaining my obsession
Saturday, April 7, 2007

Sorry, but I have to bore you with yet another post on Fouad Ajami and his clones Bernard Lewis and Martin Kramer. Or how does it go? Ajami and Kramer are clones of Bernard Lewis? Or what?

Actually, I will stick to Ajami and dump Lewis and Kramer this time around (I promise to post on both of them in the very very near future). True, Lewis makes me chuckle, so does Kramer (yes, it's photoshopped; yes, he is obsessed with Muslims), but not as much as Ajami does, so I owe it to Ajami.

I will let his words explain my obsession with the man. Clearly, he is one of a kind. Or the 3rd of the same kind: Bernard Lewis and Kramer being the other 2. I would not call him a "careerist" as Martin Kramer -- of all people! -- calls Ali Abunimah, while singing hymns of praise to Lewis and Ajami... Ajami is in a league of his own -- or maybe the league is co-owned by Lewis and Kramer. The article I will now post for your enjoyment appeared in October 2003, along with a few photos attached to it, with captions equally laughable as the article itself.

Oh, and this is not a late April fool's joke! He really did write what you will read below, and the photo (I was tempted into coloring the flag for effect) is one of 5-6 photos featured with the article.

"Bon appétit"...

The falseness of anti-Americanism

"America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. It is in Karachi and Paris, in Jakarta and Brussels. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism, a cover and an apology for the spell the United States casts over distant peoples and places. In the burning grounds of the Muslim world and on its periphery, U.S. embassies and their fate in recent years bear witness to a duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The embassies targeted by the masters of terror and by the diehards are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden, seductive country. If only the crowd in Tehran offering its tired rhythmic chant "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really meant it! It is of visas and green cards and houses with lawns and of the glamorous world of Los Angeles, far away from the mullahs and their cultural tyranny, that the crowd really dreams. The frenzy with which radical Islamists battle against deportation orders from U.S. soil-dreading the prospect of returning to Amman and Beirut and Cairo-reveals the lie of anti-Americanism that blows through Muslim lands.

The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip, and its hipness. Tune into a talk show on the stridently anti-American satellite channel Al-Jazeera, and you'll behold a parody of American ways and techniques unfolding on the television screen. That reporter in the flak jacket, irreverent and cool against the Kabul or Baghdad background, borrows a form perfected in the country whose sins and follies that reporter has come to chronicle.

In Doha, Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably Sunni Islam's most influential cleric, at Omar ibn al-Khattab Mosque, a short distance away from the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, delivers a khutba, a Friday sermon. The date is June 13, 2003. The cleric's big theme of the day is the arrogance of the United States and the cruelty of the war it unleashed on Iraq. This cleric, Egyptian born, political to his fingertips, and in full mastery of his craft and of the sensibility of his followers, is particularly agitated in his sermon. Surgery and a period of recovery have kept him away from his pulpit for three months, during which time there has been a big war in the Arab world that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with stunning speed and effectiveness. The United States was "acting like a god on earth," al-Qaradawi told the faithful. In Iraq, the United States had appointed itself judge and jury. The invading power may have used the language of liberation and enlightenment, but this invasion of Iraq was a 21st-century version of what had befallen Baghdad in the middle years of the 13th century, in 1258 to be exact, when Baghdad, the city of learning and culture, was sacked by the Mongols.

The preacher had his themes, but a great deal of the United States had gone into the preacher's art: Consider his Web site, Qaradawi.net, where the faithful can click and read his fatwas (religious edicts)-the Arabic interwoven with HTML text-about all matters of modern life, from living in non-Islamic lands to the permissibility of buying houses on mortgage to the follies of Arab rulers who have surrendered to U.S. power. Or what about his way with television? He is a star of the medium, and Al-Jazeera carried an immensely popular program of his. That art form owes a debt, no doubt, to the American "televangelists," as nothing in the sheik's traditional education at Al Azhar University in Cairo prepared him for this wired, portable religion. And then there are the preacher's children: One of his daughters had made her way to the University of Texas where she received a master's degree in biology, a son had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and yet another son had embarked on that quintessential American degree, an MBA at the American University in Cairo. Al-Qaradawi embodies anti-Americanism as the flip side of Americanization.

A New Orthodoxy

Of late, pollsters have come bearing news and numbers of anti-Americanism the world over. The reports are one dimensional and filled with panic. This past June, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published a survey of public opinion in 20 countries and the Palestinian territories that indicated a growing animus toward the United States. In the same month, the BBC came forth with a similar survey that included 10 countries and the United States. On the surface of it, anti-Americanism is a river overflowing its banks. In Indonesia, the United States is deemed more dangerous than al Qaeda. In Jordan, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil, the United States is thought to be more dangerous than Iran, the "rogue state" of the mullahs.

There is no need to go so far away from home only to count the cats in Zanzibar. These responses to the United States are neither surprising nor profound. The pollsters, and those who have been brandishing their findings, see in these results some verdict on the United States itself-and on the performance abroad of the Bush presidency-but the findings could be read as a crude, admittedly limited, measure of the foul temper in some unsettled places. The pollsters have flaunted spreadsheets to legitimize a popular legend: It is not Americans that people abroad hate, but the United States! Yet it was Americans who fell to terrorism on September 11, 2001, and it is of Americans and their deeds, and the kind of social and political order they maintain, that sordid tales are told in Karachi and Athens and Cairo and Paris. You can't profess kindness toward Americans while attributing the darkest of motives to their homeland.

The Pew pollsters ignored Greece, where hatred of the United States is now a defining feature of political life. The United States offended Greece by rescuing Bosnians and Kosovars. Then, the same Greeks who hailed the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica in 1995 and the mass slaughter of the Muslims there were quick to summon up outrage over the U.S. military campaign in Iraq. In one Greek public opinion survey, Americans were ranked among Albanians, Gypsies, and Turks as the most despised peoples.

Takis Michas, a courageous Greek writer with an eye for his country's temperament, traces this new anti-Americanism to the Orthodox Church itself. A narrative of virtuous and embattled solitude and alienation from Western Christendom has always been integral to the Greek psyche; a fusion of church and nation is natural to the Greek worldview. In the 1990s, the Yugoslav wars gave this sentiment a free run. The church sanctioned and fed the belief that the United States was Satan, bent on destroying the "True Faith," Michas explains, and shoring up Turkey and the Muslims in the Balkans. A neo-Orthodox ideology took hold, slicing through faith and simplifying history. Where the Balkan churches-be they the Bulgars or the Serbs-had been formed in rebellion against the hegemony of the Greek priesthood, the new history made a fetish of the fidelity of Greece to its Orthodox "brethren." Greek paramilitary units fought alongside Bosnian Serbs as part of the Drina Corps under the command of indicted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic. The Greek flag was hoisted over the ruins of Srebenica's Orthodox church when the doomed city fell. Serbian war crimes elicited no sense of outrage in Greece; quite to the contrary, sympathy for Serbia and the identification with its war aims and methods were limitless.

Beyond the Yugoslav wars, the neo-Orthodox worldview sanctified the ethnonationalism of Greece, spinning a narrative of Hellenic persecution at the hands of the United States as the standard-bearer of the West. Greece is part of NATO and of the European Union (EU), but an old schism-that of Eastern Orthodoxy's claim against the Eatin world-has greater power and a deeper resonance. In the banal narrative of Greek anti-Americanism, this animosity emerges from U.S. support for the junta that reigned over the country from 1967 to 1974. This deeper fury enables the aggrieved to glide over the role the United States played in the defense and rehabilitation of Greece after World War II. Furthermore, it enables them to overlook the lifeline that migration offered to untold numbers of Greeks who are among the United States' most prosperous communities.

Greece loves the idea of its "Westernness"-a place and a culture where the West ends, and some other alien world (Islam) begins. But the political culture of religious nationalism has isolated Greece from the wider currents of Western liberalism. What little modern veneer is used to dress up Greece's anti-Americanism is a pretense. The malady here is, paradoxically, a Greek variant of what plays out in the world of Islam: a belligerent political culture sharpening faith as a political weapon, an abdication of political responsibility for one's own world, and a search for foreign "devils."

Lest they be trumped by their hated Greek rivals, the Turks now give voice to the same anti-Americanism. It is a peculiar sentiment among the Turks, given their pragmatism. They are not prone to the cluster of grievances that empower anti-Americanism in France or among the intelligentsia of the developing world. In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gave Turkey a dream of modernity and self-help by pointing his country westward, distancing it from the Arab-Muslim lands to its south and east. But the secular, modernist dream in Turkey has fractured, and oddly, anti-Americanism blows through the cracks from the Arab lands and from Brussels and Berlin.

The fury of the Turkish protests against the United States in the months prior to the war in Iraq exhibited a pathology all its own. It was, at times, nature imitating art: The protesters in the streets burned American flags in the apparent hope that Europeans (real Europeans, that is) would finally take Turkey and the Turks into the fold. The U.S. presence had been benign in Turkish lands, and Americans had been Turkey's staunchest advocates for coveted membership in the EU. But suddenly this relationship that served Turkey so well was no longer good enough. As the "soft" Islamists (there is no such thing, we ought to understand by now) revolted against Pax Americana, the secularists averted their gaze and let stand this new anti-Americanism. The pollsters calling on the Turks found a people in distress, their economy on the ropes, and their polity in an unfamiliar world beyond the simple certainties of Kemalism, yet without new political tools and compass. No dosage of anti-Americanism, the Turks will soon realize, will take Turkey past the gatekeepers of Europe.

We Were All Americans

The introduction of the Pew report sets the tone for the entire study. The war in Iraq, it argues, "has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans" and "further inflamed the Muslim world." The implications are clear: The United States was better off before Bush's "unilateralism." The United States, in its hubris, summoned up this anti-Americanism. Those are the political usages of this new survey.

But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. During the 1990s, no one said good things about the United States in Egypt. It was then that the Islamist children of Egypt took to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. U.S. pension funds were acquiring their assets and Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings. The United States incarcerated far too many people and executed too many criminals. All these views thrived during a decade when Americans are now told they were loved and uncontested on foreign shores.

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Americains? le monde apres le u septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.

Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class in his enmity toward the United States. On November 3, 2001, in Le Monde, the writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard permitted himself a thought of stunning cynicism. He saw the perpetrators of September 11 acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. He gave those attacks a sort of universal warrant: "How we have dreamt of this event," he wrote, "how all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed." Casting caution and false sympathy aside, Baudrillard saw the terrible attacks on the United States as an "object of desire." The terrorists had been able to draw on a "deep complicity," knowing perfectly well that they were acting out the hidden yearnings of others oppressed by the United States' order and power. To him, morality of the U.S. variety is a sham, and the terrorism directed against it is a legitimate response to the inequities of "globalization."

In his country's intellectual landscape, Baudrillard was no loner. A struggle had raged throughout the 1990s, pitting U.S.-led globalization (with its low government expenditures, a "cheap" and merciless Wall Street-Treasury Department axis keen on greater discipline in the market, and relatively long working hours on the part of labor) against France's protectionist political economy. The primacy the United States assigned to liberty waged a pitched battle against the French commitment to equity.

To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille? Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. The former Socialist foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, was given to the same anti-Americanism that moves his successor, the bombastic and vain Dominique de Villepin. It was Vedrine, it should be recalled, who in the late 1990s had dubbed the United States a "hyperpower." He had done so before the war on terrorism, before the war on Iraq. He had done it against the background of an international order more concerned with economics and markets than with military power. In contrast to his successor, Vedrine at least had the honesty to acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the way the United States wielded its power abroad, or about France's response to that primacy. France, too, he observed, might have been equally overbearing if it possessed the United States' weight and assets.

His successor gave France's resentment highly moral claims. Villepin appeared evasive, at one point, on whether he wished to see a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism indulges France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor and gives France's unwanted Muslim children a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.

The Burden of Modernity

To come bearing modernism to those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears-that is the American burden. The United States lends itself to contradictory interpretations. To the Europeans, and to the French in particular, who are enamored of their laicisme (secularism), the United States is unduly religious, almost embarrassingly so, its culture suffused with sacred symbolism. In the Islamic world, the burden is precisely the opposite: There, the United States scandalizes the devout, its message represents nothing short of an affront to the pious and a temptation to the gullible and the impressionable young. According to the June BBC survey, 78 percent of French polled identified the United States as a "religious" country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout-such is the way the United States is seen in foreign lands.

So many populations have the United States under their skin. Their rage is oddly derived from that very same attraction. Consider the Saudi realm, a place where anti-Americanism is fierce. The United States helped invent the modern Saudi world. The Arabian American Oil Company-for all practical purposes a state within a state-pulled the desert enclave out of its insularity, gave it skills, and ushered it into the 20th century. Deep inside the anti-Americanism of today's Saudi Arabia, an observer can easily discern the dependence of the Saudi elite on their U.S. connection. It is in the image of the United States' suburbs and urban sprawl that Saudi cities are designed. It is on the campuses of Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford that the ruling elite are formed and educated.

After September 11, 2001, the Saudi elite panicked that their ties to the United States might be shattered and that their world would be consigned to what they have at home. Fragments of the United States have been eagerly embraced by an influential segment of Saudi society. For many, the United States was what they encountered when they were free from home and family and age-old prohibitions. Today, an outing in Riyadh is less a journey to the desert than to the mall and to Starbucks.

An academic in Riyadh, in the midst of an anti-American tirade about all policies American, was keen to let me know that his young son, born in the United States, had suddenly declared he no longer wanted to patronize McDonald's because of the United States' support of Israel. The message was plaintive and unpersuasive; the resolve behind that "boycott" was sure to crack. A culture that casts so long a shadow is fated to be emulated and resented at the same time. The United States is destined to be in the politics-and imagination-of strangers even when the country (accurately) believes it is not implicated in the affairs of other lands.

In a hauntingly astute set of remarks made to the New Yorker in the days that followed the terrorism of September 11, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem-a free spirit at odds with the intellectual class in his country and a maverick who journeyed to Israel and wrote of his time there and of his acceptance of that country-went to the heart of the anti-American phenomenon. He was thinking of his own country's reaction to the United States, no doubt, but what he says clearly goes beyond Egypt:
People say that Americans are arrogant, but it's not true. Americans enjoy life and they are proud of their lives, and they arc boastful of their wonderful inventions that have made life so much easier and more convenient. It's very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms. . . .These are people who are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out. But modernism is frightening. It means we have to compete. It means we can't explain everything away with conspiracy theories. Bernard Shaw said it best, you know. In the preface to 'St. Joan,' he said Joan of Arc was burned not for any reason except that she was talented. Talent gives rise to jealousy in the hearts of the untalented.
This kind of envy cannot be attenuated. Jordanians, for instance, cannot be talked out of their anti-Americanism. In the BBC survey, 71 percent of Jordanians thought the United States was more dangerous to the world than al Qaeda. But Jordan has been the rare political and economic recipient of a U.S. free trade agreement, a privilege the United States shares only with a handful of nations. A new monarch, King Abdullah II, came to power, and the free trade agreement was an investment that Pax Americana made in his reign and in the moderation of his regime. But this bargain with the Hashemite dynasty has not swayed the intellectual class, nor has it made headway among the Jordanian masses. On Iraq and on matters Palestinian, for more than a generation now, Jordanians have not had a kind thing to say about the United States. In the scheme of Jordan's neighborhood, the realm is benign and forgiving, but the political life is restrictive and tight. When talking about the United States, Jordanians have often been talking to their rulers, expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of the country's public life and economic performance. A pollster venturing to Jordan must understand the country's temper, hemmed in by poverty and overshadowed by more resourceful powers all around it: Iraq to the east, Israel to the west, and Syria and Saudi Arabia over the horizon. A sense of disinheritance has always hung over Jordan. The trinity of God, country, and king puts much of the political life of the land beyond scrutiny and discussion. The anti-Americanism emanates from, and merges with, this political condition.

With modernism come the Jews. They have been its bearers and beneficiaries, and they have paid dearly for it. They have been taxed with cosmopolitanism: The historian Isaac Deutscher had it right when he said that other people have roots, but the Jews have legs. Today the Jews have a singular role in U.S. public life and culture, and anti-Americanism is tethered to anti-Semitism. In the Islamic world, and in some European circles as well, U.S. power is seen as the handmaiden of Jewish influence. Witness, for instance, the London-based Arab media's obsession with the presumed ascendancy of the neoconservatives-such as former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz-in the making of U.S. foreign policy. The neocons had been there for the rescue of the (Muslim) Bosnians and Kosovars, but the reactionaries in Muslim lands had not taken notice of that. Left to itself, the United States would be fair-minded, this Arab commentary maintains, and it would arrive at a balanced approach to the Arab-Islamic world. This narrative is nothing less than a modernized version of the worldview of that infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But it is put forth by men and women who insist on their oneness with the modern world.

A century ago, in a short-story called "Youth," the great British author Joseph Conrad captured in his incomparable way the disturbance that is heard when a modern world pushes against older cultures and disturbs their peace. In the telling, Marlowe, Conrad's literary double and voice, speaks of the frenzy of coming upon and disturbing the East. "And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig . . . ."

Today, the United States carries the disturbance of the modern to older places-to the east and to the intermediate zones in Europe. There is energy in the United States, and there is force. And there is resistance and resentment-and emulation-in older places affixed on the delicate balancing act of a younger United States not yet content to make its peace with traditional pains and limitations and tyrannies. That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moisi, recently told of a simple countryman of his who was wistful when Saddam Hussein's statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square. France opposed this war, but this Frenchman expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad, but it didn't. Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. The new history being made was a distinctly American (and British) creation. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee-I single out those towns because they are the hometowns of three soldiers who were killed in the Iraq warwho raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it.

The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States-in whole sentences of good American slang.

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posted by Angry Anarchist @ 4/07/2007 07:52:00 PM, ,



Iranian vs Israeli nukes
Thursday, March 29, 2007

Whether or not one agrees with Iran's quest for nuclear capabilities and all that it entails in terms of strategic parity vis-a-vis Israel, one must admit that the IAEA and the international community have been hypocritical in their position on Iran -- compared to their position (or rather, lack thereof) on Israel. The farthest they have gone is to call on Israel to "admit" that it possesses nuclear weapons. I mean, wouldn't it have been lovely if Iran would have faced the same amount of "pressure", and nothing more? But no, here we have a situation where people are already sounding the drums and trumpets of war, not in the least alleged "freelance" journalists, some of whom have been at the forefront of defence for Bush's Greater Middle East Initiative and alleged "democratization" agenda. And now, for the good news, this project seems to have spread like a plague, from the ruins of South Lebanon and South Beirut, all the way to Somalia, where democratization is taking form (at the same time as the Arab summit speakers heaped praises on the "interim Somali government").

But back to the topic at hand, the fine line separating the yet-to-be-acquired Iranian nuclear weapons from the decades-long possession of nuclear weapons by Israel. I was watching the proceedings of the Arab summit today, and there was emphasis on the idea of the right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. I could not help but wonder whether it was an implicit reference to the possibility of U.S (secret?) aid to Arab regimes to advance nuclear agendas and projects of their own, especially in light of repeated Egyptian (and other Arab) statements to the effect of: acquisition of nuclear technology is our "inalienable right". You may say this is far-fetched and very dangerous, and so the U.S is unlikely to embark on such a stupid (ad)venture, but this argument fails to explain U.S (direct or indirect) funding to certain religious fundamentalist groups in the region to counter the threat to its interests by certain others. Sure, this is likely to backfire, but the U.S administration has, because of its short-sightedness, invested in its short-term hegemony instead of addressing its long-term interests and presence in the region. All the better, since it hastens the eventual departure of the U.S from the region, and the decline of the American Empire, but this will come with a price, and I would say, a heavy one at that. I'm afraid the alternative in the region will not be much better. That said, in terms of the Israeli conflict, the prospects for an all-out war, I would say, would be much higher, and have a very different impact on Israel than it has ever witnessed or lived under the protective wing of the U.S. Of course, the rise of Iran is portrayed in over-hysterical terms. These apocalyptic assessments of Iranian hegemony are misleading, even if one is to consider it in the context of the absence of an Arab counter-weight (a concept which is much talked about now in policy circles). However, the implementation of such a balance is more complicated than it seems to be, and I think will be manifested in terms of one of the following two available options: 1) the rise of (fabricated) Arab nationalism as a counter to the "foreign" (i.e. Iranian) intrusion in "Arab affairs"; 2) the inter-sectarian card, which will have even more dangerous implications for Shi'ite minorities in Arab countries, and even Shi'ite majorities trapped in "enclaves" throughout the region. From what we can see, there is a cautious indecisiveness in U.S policy as to which of the two to implement, and at the moment both are being used in different places and on different occasions to a certain extent. In Lebanon, it seems the sectarian card will be a far more effective tool, given Hezbullah's immense military power and efficacy, and the failure of Jumblatt's anti-Iranian rhetoric for the most part. Anything short of the threat of a mini-Iraq will be unlikely to place restraints on Hezbullah's domestic and regional agendas and ties, and anything short of the implementation of these threats will be unlikely to create an environment of "constructive chaos" in Lebanon. For its own part, Syria seems to be the last remaining hindrance to the "Arabist" solution to the U.S's "Iranian problem", and one may safely assume that the events leading up to the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon were meant to isolate it from the last "Arab" country that it continued to have significant influence in. But the Ba'ath regime in Syria proved to be far more robust than the U.S thought it was, and I think this miscalculation stems partly from the U.S misreading of the Ba'athist strategy of state-building and regime incumbency (an interesting piece which addresses, in part, state-building in Syria, is David Waldner's State-Building and Late Development, which I must say, is a very difficult and complex read -- nevertheless, I recommend it for the institutional and political-economic perspective it advances, as opposed to the cultural-religious one advanced by the likes of Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, & co.).

At any rate, I strayed a bit from the main theme I wanted to address: the nukes controversy. When I say controversy I do not mean the controversy regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions per se, but the controversy regarding the double standards adopted in viewing the Iranian and Israeli nuclear ambitions. "Double standards" is an understatement to be sure! I have been hearing many saying that the two are incomparable because one is a "democratic" state whereas the other one is a theocratic one with a record of human rights abuses. It is true that Iran's human rights record is not clean (nor is any other state's for that matter), but the utilization of this argument to justify the incomparable nature of the two cases reeks of politicization of the discussion, and what is even worse, a complete whitewashing of Israel's human rights record, which has been far more systematic and large-scale than any other human rights abuses in post-WWII Middle East (I will not say post-colonial since colonialism is alive and kicking in the region).

Very few in fact know much about Israel's nuclear program and the manner in which it was shaped and implemented. Much of this ignorance stems from the deliberate silence of the media on this issue. I suspect that the average American who might feel threatened by the Iranian nuclear ambitions and may support a strike on nuclear facilities, is not even aware of Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, or even if aware of it, might be convinced that it is justified, since it guarantees Israel's existence. But if it does guarantee Israel's existence, and if Iran's nuclear ambitions must be curtailed exactly for that reason, what would explain the decades-long argument that the reason Israel occupied the West Bank & Gaza Strip (other than the standard myth they spread about the Arab armies having attacked Israel in 1967 and Israel having conquered these territories "fair and square") and must not give up on them due to the need for "defensible borders"? Of course the whole defensible borders argument is hilarious in and of itself. If the purpose is to defend Jews and the Jewish state, then isn't it counter-productive to move Jews into the occupied territories to form the new frontier? Wouldn't that subject those Jews (in whose defence the state claims to have expanded its borders) to the risk of murder, violence, and existential threats? What this will give rise to is a self-sustaining loop of expansion and more expansion, all the while as they claim that Israel needs "defensible borders". Will the purpose, after the occupation of the new territories, remain the defence of the pre-occupation borders, or will it shift onto the newly occupied territories and the need of the Jews there for "defensible borders"?

As for Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, a December 1986 MERIP report (no. 143), titled "Recipe for an Israeli Nuclear Arsenal", discusses the stages of Israel's development and testing of nuclear weapons. If I could post the whole thing, I would have, but some excerpts will have to do (anyone who wishes to get their hands on the whole thing -- 7 pages long -- may send me a request by email).

A Textile Factory... Built by France?
Most significant is France's dedication to Israel's nuclear project -- a fact which I am sure will make some elements in Israeli circles who feed on alleged French anti-Semitism, a claim advanced every time France does not do what they desire and expect it to do, fidget uncomfortably in their seats -- a favor paid for, one would guess, by Israel's full collaboration with the French and the British in their elaborate plans to take over the Suez canal, culminating in what became known as the "Suez war" (they were later forced to withdraw following threats by the Soviet Union -- followed by U.S pressure sparked by fears that tensions would erupt in a larger confrontation).
For public consumption, the reactor was a "textile factory." That fiction was exposed in 1960 when a US reconnaissance aircraft photographed the telltale dome characteristic of nuclear reactors. The US government demanded an explanation. Ben Gurion admitted that the reactor existed, but insisted that Israel had no intention of building a bomb. Research at Dimona was for medicine and industry only, he said. In fact, Vanunu has now revealed, France not only supplied the reactor but also helped Israel build the secret 8-story underground plant and actively collaborated with Israel on developing the atomic bomb for two years in the late 1950s.
Ambiguity and Appeasement
Even more ironic is the fact that Israel itself played the ambiguity and secrecy game and was largely appeased in that respect by the U.S (which was not uninformed about its nuclear ambitions and activities), something which it now claims, in the case of Iran, is akin to Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler.
As reports of an Israeli nuclear arsenal became more frequent, and Washington raised questions, Israel obligingly assumed an anti-nuclear posture in public. Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin in September 1975 proposed a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East. Israel repeated the proposal in 1980, and again in March 1982 at the United Nations, but it refused to submit to the application of full-scope safeguards at the Dimona plant, and its nuclear program proceeded apace.
American Complicity
There are those who claim U.S innocence from the whole affair; this is, in fact, far from true. The U.S was not a mere passive appeaser; rather, it was an active supporter and funder of Israel's nuclear program.
In 1955, a US-Israeli nuclear agreement allowed Israel to acquire a small American nuclear reactor, its first. The US paid $350,000 of the reactor's cost, and gave Israel a library of 6,500 US Atomic Energy Commission research reports on nuclear topics. Over the next five years, some 56 Israeli nuclear scientists were trained in the US, while 24 others visited Atomic Energy Commission installations here.
Nuclear Technology for Peaceful Purposes?
In the aftermath of Vanunu's exposure of Israel's nuclear arsenal, the French justified their support for Israel's nuclear program based on the idea that it could also be used for peaceful purposes, an argument that Israel -- and France -- find outrageous when used with regards to Iran's nuclear program. Indeed, this is exactly what Iran argues: that its quest for nuclear technology is entirely peaceful. While this may bring forth the argument -- based on Israel's case and its subsequent development of nuclear weapons through the abuse of the peaceful purposes argument -- that the insistence on peaceful purposes is not sufficient to justify and allow for the continuation of nuclear work, the major issue is not the conclusion that Iran should be forced to halt its activities (violently if need be), but that Israel must hand over its nuclear arsenal. Instead (and not surprisingly), the focus is misplaced, and shifted onto those who do not yet have those capabilities, rather than placed on those who do have them, and who have shown willingness to use weapons of mass destruction and perpetrate crimes, as well as impose collective punishment, against an entire population.
A week after the Vanunu story broke, Professor Francis Perrin, France's high commissioner for atomic energy from 1951-1970, admitted to the Sunday Times that France had lied about the extent of its nuclear collaboration with Israel. France built not only the Dimona reactor, he said, but also the secret underground plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium. "We knew the plutonium could be used for a bomb but we considered also that it could be used for peaceful purposes," Perrin said. In 1959, de Gaulle felt "that the French military was starting to work too closely with Israel." He ended collaboration on atomic weapons, but agreed to supply Israel with the secret plutonium plant.
Zionist Theft: Not Just Of Land
The acquisition of enriched uranium from France and other sources was highly limited, and as such there was a need to find alternative sources that would satisfy Israel's "thirst" for uranium. But there was no need to worry. Theft came in handy, as is habitual of Zionism.
In 1966, the US Atomic Energy Commission discovered that over 200 pounds of highly-enriched uranium (enough to make 13 to 20 bombs, by one estimate) was missing. It had "disappeared" sometime before or during 1965 from a private US corporation, the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania.

NUMEC, according to ABC News, had an "intimate relationship with Israel at the time." NUMEC's president, Dr. Zalman Shapiro, was a research chemist who had been involved in the Manhattan nuclear bomb project. He was also a committed Zionist. During its investigation, the Atomic Energy Commission discovered that 50 to 69 foreigners from around the world annually visited NUMEC's supposedly top-security plant with its stock of thousands of classified government research documents. One of these was Rafael Eitan, then a Mossad officer and more recently the spymaster in charge of Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former US Navy analyst convicted of spying for Israel in 1986. Others included Baruch Cinai, an Israeli metallurgist, and Ephraim Lahav, Israel's scientific attache in Washington. It turned out that Shapiro was co-owner, with the Israeli government, of a firm purportedly working on preserving foods by nuclear radiation. The firm could well have served as a conduit for sending NUMEC uranium to Israel.

At least five federal agencies -- the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, General Accounting Office and Atomic Energy Commission -- investigated, but the US government kept their reports under wraps. Eleven years later, in 1977, an environmental group, Natural Resources Defense Council, secured over 3,000 documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request which revealed that US intelligence agencies had long suspected Israel of stealing the uranium.
Zionism and Apartheid: The Fine Line Between Necessity and Morality
Collaboration with and support of apartheid in South Africa is perhaps the most embarrassing, and sadly perhaps the least publicized of all of Israel's actions. Support for apartheid was present on all levels, and transcended the official apparatus of the State of Israel, to include such organizations as the "Anti-Defamation League" (ADL), which purports to expose anti-Semitism (and anti-Zionism). I included anti-Zionism in parentheses since for ADL anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are synonymous. Zachary Lockman, in his brilliant piece "Critique from the Right: The Neo-conservative Assault on Middle East Studies", points out that
in 1993 a police raid on the ADL's San Fransisco office revealed that with the help of a member of the San Fransisco Police Department's intelligence unit who had access to police and FBI files, the ADL had for years been collecting information ... on local activists in the campaign against South Africa's apartheid regime and on many other organizations and individuals. Subsequent investigations and lawsuits revealed that some of the data on anti-apartheid organizing collected for the ADL had been made available to the South African government. Though it continued to insist it had done nothing wrong, the ADL eventually paid a substantial sum to settle a suit brought by the city of San Fransisco.
Needless to say, the file was closed through financial settlement and the affair was swept under the rug and conveniently forgotten over the years. This was not the first time Zionism had collaborated with apartheid. The fact that Israel's geographic reality restricted its ability to conduct nuclear testing necessitated the quest for an "ally", or rather, an accomplice, who would be willing to "host" such a test, in return for data, expertise and technology. This "need" is almost always -- in the rare case of any discussion on this matter -- cited as a justification for Israel's support for apartheid, which is inherently the same argument used to justify the Zionist lobby's (and Israel's) attempts at not only personal denial, but also the active pursuit of the prevention of the recognition of the Armenian Holocaust: the claim that Israel is in urgent need of "a Muslim ally", and Turkey being the only one available in the region willing to cultivate such ties with Israel, the relationship is marketed as a justified one. If there ever was a natural romance, it is the love affair between Zionism and official Turkish denial of the Armenian Holocaust.

South Africa was in fact the country that played host to Israel's nuclear testing.
On September 22, 1979, a US surveillance satellite designed to monitor nuclear explosions detected a tell-tale double flash over the South Atlantic near South Africa. When this became public a month later, President Carter appointed an advisory committee which concluded that the satellite sighting most likely was caused by a particle of matter hitting the satellite. None of the other groups which subsequently studied the flash found reason to doubt that it was a nuclear explosion. Five months later, an Israeli correspondent for CBS News reported that the flash had been an Israeli nuclear bomb test "which was conducted with the help and cooperation of the South African government." A recent study by Ronald Walters and Kenneth S. Zinn, based on 500 pages of newly-released documents from the US Naval Research Laboratory obtained by the Washington Office on Africa, indicates that the NRL concluded a nuclear explosion had occurred. Walters and Zinn believe the US has deliberately covered up its knowledge of Israeli-South African nuclear collaboration.
Morality? What's that?

Arabs May be Paranoid, but not THAT Paranoid: Mossad's Long Arm
Another controversy took place in 1985 with Israel's illegal acquisition of a device used for triggering atomic bombs. The whole thing was a typical middle-man deal, whereby the owner of a company illegally acquired these devices from the firm that produced them, and exported them to an Israeli firm owned by an arms dealer. The deal was exposed, and the middle-man (a man by the surname Smyth) was apprehended. The Israeli firm owner subsequently denied that these devices were ever exported to his company, and insisted that the middle-man had asked for the wrong export license. Israel then claimed it was unaware that sales of the devices were restricted and said that it had only used them in conventional weapons, and following U.S demands, returned the ones it had not yet used.
Smyth, free on $100,000 bail, disappeared with his wife in August 1985 just before his trial. In May 1986, an old acquaintance reportedly ran into Smyth while on a business trip -- in Israel.
Chamberlain Must be Turning In His Grave: Appeasement II
Israel can be compared to a spoiled kid who has successfully turned his parents into a function of his spoiled nature and his wishes and demands and actions. A kid who has his parents "on a tight leash", as the expression goes: "I will torture the street cat unless you get me a toy." The parents, not knowing what else to say or do, or just not feeling like doing anything, agree to go along, and encourage and appease him by getting him a toy. The only time that the parents retract their decision to appease is when the relatives and neighbors find out about it.
In 1975, the US reportedly agreed to supply Israel with Pershing I missiles, which are designed to carry nuclear weapons, in exchange for an Israeli pullback in the Sinai. Public disclosure of the deal led to criticism which killed it.
Israel's Nukes: A Danger to World Security
That Israel even thought of developing nuclear weapons at a time when none of its adversaries had them or had thought of acquiring them, and at a time when it had the strategic and military high ground and Western support (and continues to do so), and more importantly, that it seriously contemplated using these weapons on at least one occasion, and went as far as assembling and readying the bombs, awaiting for a trigger, is enough to conclude that its possession of nukes is a grave threat to world security and the continuation of human life in this densely-populated region. The refusal of the international community to take any action on the matter leaves one door open: nuclear balance and deterrence. Such a balance is not a new idea: it has been present between India and Pakistan for quite some time now, and even if not conducive to feelings of security, it nevertheless upholds the concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (I know many have poked fun at it, including the ever-brilliant James Morrow). One may argue that the Middle East is plagued by madmen far more than any other area of the world (I disagree, I think there are far more madmen in the West; look, after all, where they got us to) and as such nuclear proliferation is akin to suicide, but I tend to disagree with the idea that nuclear balance will lead to proliferation. I do not quite see a proliferation link. The fact that there may be madmen willing to go as far as to provide know-how to clandestine groups or other neighboring regimes to offset the rival's nuclear capabilities, is not the norm, but rather the exception, and in the absence of any effort to strip Israel of its nuclear arsenal, the proper action would not be to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuke, but to prevent the implementation of any "innovative" ideas that Israel -- or its benefactor the U.S -- may have; because that, and not, as claimed, Iran's acquisition of nukes, is what will lead to nuclear proliferation.

Special 2 in 1 Offer: American Tax Dollars and Silence
The piece I have been quoting from says it best on this special 2 in 1 offer.
The massive amounts of foreign aid that flow each year from US taxpayers to Israel's treasury give the US government great potential leverage over Israel. Yet it has failed to pressure Israel in any way to adhere to US non-proliferation policy, and has contentedly accepted Israel's assurances that it will never introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.

Even the persuasive evidence revealed by Mordechai Vanunu has failed to stir Washington. The verbal warnings the Reagan administration has issued in response to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program have been conspicuously absent when it comes to Israel. Israel's status as a nuclear ally in the region may suit US interests well. Even if Israel publicly acknowledged its nuclear arsenal, it seems unlikely that Washington would punish this defiance of non-proliferation standards. So long as the matter officially remains in the realm of suspicions and deductions, Washington can continue to blithely hand over billions of dollars in military aid to build up a strong force -- even a nuclear force in Israel, capable of intimidating the region with the ultimate threat.

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posted by Angry Anarchist @ 3/29/2007 05:50:00 PM, ,



What the U.S was thinking
Thursday, March 8, 2007

So what was the U.S thinking when it decided to invade Iraq and "liberate" the Iraqi people?
Well "it" wasn't thinking of whether or not it was the "right" thing to do (at least from a policy/political/end result perspective, ignoring for once the humanitarian aspect, which of course does not figure in the politics of the global hegemon). Contrary to what some argue, the U.S insistence on invading Iraq was not informed by scholars who had studied the Middle East. Rather, it was the exact opposite. The invasion was planned and only when it came to marketing it was there a resort to "scholars" (emphasis on quotation marks). But who exactly were those "scholars"?

For starters, Bernard Lewis, who is described as "one of the world's pre-eminent experts on the Middle East." He is the author of the famous (the word that should be used is notorious, really, but it shows the kind of "scholarship" that is valued in "the West") "The roots of Muslim rage", which I think all of you (especially so my Arab and Muslim readers) should read to get an idea of the "expertise" that is being spewed in academia, and especially so in the White [Man's] House.

Speaking of "expertise", the other day I was at T-Marbuta (a coffee shop) and I saw a girl holding a book she had bought only a few minutes before entering the shop. She was talking with her friends about how good it's supposed to be. So what book was it, you will ask? It was a book by another self-proclaimed (and hailed as an expert in some academic circles) Hezb Allah "expert", Judith Palmer Harik. On my old blog I dedicated an entire post (more than enough) to this book and its academic "merits". I recommend that if you were thinking about buying this book you would not base your decision on the write-ups on the amazon website, but rather on a very basic and short write-up as this.

But back to the point, the point about the "scholars" who allegedly informed Bush & co. on the merits of going to war against Iraq. Actually, before I continue with that, I must point out that when I was in Canada I took part in almost weekly protests against the war on Iraq. They were interesting, often violent (especially as the crowds lessened and the "protestor families", i.e. mom, dad, children, went home). They were also very diverse, and not just an "Arab protest" as some made it to be. There were activist groups from all over the spectrum, Jewish groups, and many Americans also. But the most interesting was the "Arab" component of the protest. I actually talked with many of them, and they were not only Iraqis but also Jordanians, etc. I wanted to know what it is that really pushed them to protest against the war, was it only the horror of war, or was it more than that? In other words, was there a politics behind it? I discovered that there indeed, in most cases, was. And this politics was not one of anti-Americanism (although in this case it manifested itself as such) or anti-imperialism. It was rather one that was based on sectarian affiliations. Ironically, it was the non-Iraqi components in the "Arab camp" of the protests that showed a sectarian reasoning. In fact the Iraqis I spoke to manifested a solid Iraqi nationalist perspective, and not a pro-Saddam one at that. They were very much outspoken against the crimes of Saddam, but at the same time condemned the sanctions that had resulted in millions of deaths, without weakening Saddam's grip over Iraq. Some had family in Iraq, others did not. But it was interesting to see the dynamics of the Arab politics in the 'diaspora', and how sectarian affiliation was associated with the war by the non-Iraqis, contrary to what one would have expected, especially in light of the sectarian violence plaguing Iraq today. I used to ask the Iraqi activists what they thought was the best approach to helping Iraq both from the woes brought about by Saddam and the American invasion, and they were rather unsure how to answer. They were rather torn, and did not express their positions positively, but rather negatively, in other words they did not say what they thought the best solution would be, but what would not be a solution. They were actually stuck between a rock and a hard place, and were outspoken against attempts to paint their protest of the American invasion as a pro-Saddam one, given that people (including non-Iraqi Arabs) viewed Iraq's predicament with either black or white goggles, which has become the norm all the more since 2003.

Back to our respectable "scholars" who cheered for the Iraq war (and are now in hiding or are busy preparing the cheerleading-party for yet another of America's "necessary" wars [of libration, don't forget]), the second scholar who apparently "informed" the U.S was Fouad Ajami, whom Sa'id would have referred to, had he been alive, as the "Orientalized Oriental". I was reading a most impressive piece by Zachary Lockman the other day, titled "Critique from the Right: The Neo-conservative Assault on Middle East Studies". Lockman points out that
Ajami's pronouncements, like those of Bernard Lewis, were solicited and cited by high officials of the Bush administration. For example, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars laying out the case for war against Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, Vice President Dick Cheney declared that, "as for the reaction in the Arab street, the Middle East expert Professor Fuad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy in the same way throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans."
This is not only ironic, it is doubly and triply ironic! Notice the naming, "Veterans of Foreign Wars"; foreign wars of what? Of course, liberation, spreading "civilization", enlightening the "barbarians", and so on and so forth. This is pure Orientalism. The enlightened, civilized Americans, and why not also the Israelis, are out to spread civilization, and the latter have in fact made the desert bloom in a land without a people for a people without a land... This has "necessitated" the "removal" of the ungrateful "barbarians", who have opposed attempts to benefit them in an irrational, violent manner. Of course, these barbarians are void of feelings, loyalties, nationalism, etc. These are "complex" things that the undeveloped, irrational Arab (and why not Muslim) mind cannot comprehend. So the Arabs and Muslims should watch the "only democracy in the Middle East" (which in some speeches by U.S officials, faces stiff competition from the "fledgling" democracies in Egypt, yes, the same Egypt that has been ruled by Mubarak for, um, how many years, I lost track, and of course "the Siniora government" - previously it used to be "Lebanon") practice its democratic values of "detaining" (not kidnapping) diplomats and elected politicians (and even offer them the chance at appearing in kangaroo courts, very very civilized indeed, as opposed to "kidnapping" soldiers by Hezb Allah - that's the true face of the barbarian Arab, kidnapping soldiers, because diplomats in occupied territories and 15-year-old kids in another country's territory are detained, but soldiers are kidnapped, and the former does not seem to be a violation of sovereignty or an uncivilized act, but rather an "enlightening" act meant to spread the Israeli values, and thus no war is justified, no "smart" bombs can be quickly shipped to Lebanon or the Palestinians; quite the contrary, the aid package to besieged Israel must be increased. Yes yes.). All this while Israel devours dunam after dunam of Palestinian land, starves millions of people to death, all for the "crime" of electing Hamas in democratic elections. But wait, Israel is indeed practicing what the U.S was out to practice in Iraq: liberating the Iraqi people, first by starving them, then by bombing them, then, in case of failure, putting the blame on the ungrateful, irrational Arabs. Only difference, of course, Saddam was indeed a dictator, and a valid tool in the hands of the U.S at one time, whereas Hamas, which has been elected democratically (though I am by no means a fan of overuse/abuse of the term/concept!) has refused (thus far; I would not rule out the Fatahization of Hamas, it is very much possible, but I would say, in the long run rather than the short run) to become a puppet of the U.S at the expense of its people.

Of course, since the "Middle East expert", and the undeniable representative of the "Arab street", Basra and Baghdad included, Fouad Ajami "predicted" the aftermath of liberation, the U.S of invasion of Iraq can now be perfectly justified. That Fouad Ajami was not more than a representative of himself, is lost on the neo-conservatives. But then again, Ajami was/is not, as I said, more than a tool for the justification of already-laid plans, i.e. America's "foreign wars". In Ajami's case, he is of special use in swaying public opinion in the "media war". Is, not was, because the neo-conservatives are especially artful at concealing and even twisting their own words and "predictions", and as always, the public is more than receptive (especially given that the media is largely under the control of the neo-conservative establishment) to what it is told. The average individual, not to say American (since I do not think this is a specifically American phenomenon, although by all means it is especially acute in the U.S) does not dig, and does not care enough to dig into the immense scholarly material which debunks all the neo-conservative-imperialist, and of course Orientalist cliches about "the Arabs", "the Muslims", and the other lucky subjects of America's "foreign wars". But even then, this does not mean that the neo-conservatives (this is a loose terminology since I cannot possibly repeatedly list all the others that do not necessarily fall under the neo-conservative camp but which cooperate with it and share its objectives) are not fighting tooth and nail the academic establishment that has, especially of late (arguably in a post-Sa'idian milieu), been liberated from the one-sided, hegemonic discourse, especially on the Middle East. But again, this also does not mean that all that counters the neo-conservative agenda and discourse is void of the assumptions that Orientalists have adopted for so long. Indeed, most are full of these assumptions, to varying degrees of course. Take Lisa Anderson, of Columbia University, for example. A while back, I told a number of people that Anderson's view was typically "liberal". I was asked how it was so. What I meant to say, when I mentioned "liberal", was not a mere opposition to "liberalism" (although I am in fact opposed to liberalism), but rather a reference to the U.S "liberal" perspective and approach, which, albeit often challenging the hardcore realist perspective, does not seem to represent different ends, but only different means to the same end. In the end, "democratization" figures highly in the liberal approach, and indeed in Anderson's own writings. While I appreciate the theoretical and scholarly perspectives in democratization theory, I cannot help but view the "democratization" interest and agenda (because all scholars do have agendas, whether they are aware of it or not, whether they like to admit it or not) with a dose of skepticism, dislike, and harsh criticism. The very idea, after all, of "the Arabs" or "the Muslims" being in need of "democratization", is quite offensive. This does not, of course, mean that the Arab predicament is particularly democratic at the moment. However, the idea that people would be claiming to know better than the Arabs or Muslims themselves, what is best for them, is quite unappealing to me, and is, if not an actively Orientalist approach, nevertheless a remnant of such thinking.

On a side note, I wonder, was Dick Cheney a bit confused about the "Arabism" of Afghanistan, or was it a mere comparison of "cheerful welcome" for the liberators who had embarked on liberating the people from the same dictators that they armed and supported in previous "foreign wars", ones that they did not send soldiers to fight in, but rather used the "ungrateful" natives, or the barbaric Arabs and the "Jihadis" to do the dirty job of fighting the Soviets...)? I am not sure.

However, Cheney was indeed accurate with his comparison of Afghanistan and Iraq (albeit not in its content). The voices of cheering from Kabul, Basra, and Baghdad, must be quite deafening. You may now pay your sincerest respects for the expertise of Bernard Lewis (not so incidentally also a denier of the Armenian Holocaust) at 609-258 4280 (inquire about extension to Mr. Lewis's office), Fouad Ajami at 202-663 5677, and Daniel Pipes at 215-546 5406 or meqmef at aol dot com.

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posted by Angry Anarchist @ 3/08/2007 05:51:00 PM, ,