I WAS WRONG!!!!
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Chimbu,
Incredibly pleased you started this thread and utterly delighted at the quality of the debate from all sides.
I was wondering if any of you might care to comment on the thought that the internal pressures and woes of Islam itself are the real and deep rooted cause of what we see today.
The history of Islam is genuinely riveting reading in every possible sphere but around a 150 years or so ago its work in science, medicine and just plain questioning/reforming itself seems to stop. Within a generation or two the Western colonial/industrialised nations have carved up the maps into their vision of the world and the pot has seemed to simmer since then.
This thread has so far illuminated many of the attitudes and policies outside of Islam as being of huge influence. I'd like to suggest that if all were removed from the equation and expunged from history we would see very similar boiling stresses within the Islamic world.
It's always very easy to ignore real problems within a culture by attacking external ones. Something we're all prone to do.
Incredibly pleased you started this thread and utterly delighted at the quality of the debate from all sides.
I was wondering if any of you might care to comment on the thought that the internal pressures and woes of Islam itself are the real and deep rooted cause of what we see today.
The history of Islam is genuinely riveting reading in every possible sphere but around a 150 years or so ago its work in science, medicine and just plain questioning/reforming itself seems to stop. Within a generation or two the Western colonial/industrialised nations have carved up the maps into their vision of the world and the pot has seemed to simmer since then.
This thread has so far illuminated many of the attitudes and policies outside of Islam as being of huge influence. I'd like to suggest that if all were removed from the equation and expunged from history we would see very similar boiling stresses within the Islamic world.
It's always very easy to ignore real problems within a culture by attacking external ones. Something we're all prone to do.
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Towers, you’ve struck on a very valid point. The parallels between Islam over the last century and the Catholic Church in the times of Galileo and the Inquisition are striking – ie, the hierarchies in both were/are in the main reactionary old men who feel/felt threatened by a (for them frightening and rapidly changing social environment.
]
Let’s drop the “is/was’s” and stick with the “was” for clarity from here on, but the two tenses apply.
Both groups were made up in the main of reactionary old men who used religion to maintain the status quo. Both were more politicians than clerics, but used the power of the Church more politically than for the protection of souls. And among both were men who felt that power was slipping from the pulpit to an educated class outside the church/mosque.
Both groups also had committed young men at their disposal. Young men who, in the name of their religion, would do terrible things, believing, many of them quite sincerely, that the end justified the means, however terrible those means might be. For the Catholics, it was the Dominicans and their Inquisition, for the Muslims, it is the young zealots among the ‘fundamentalists’.
It may not be totally co-incidental that probably the two best examples of Christian, church and/or state-sponsored excess were against Muslims – the Crusades, which were little more than a series of unspeakably barbaric Viking raids on what was arguably a far more advanced and genteel civilisation. (We in the West don’t remember the Crusades in any detail, and our ‘histories’ of them until recently at least, glossed over the often truly gruesome behaviour of the ‘Christian’ armies. Let me assure anyone who isn’t aware of it, most Muslims today know all those details intimately – they are taught them in the mosque, recited by storytellers in every coffee shop.)
The second example were the Moors in Spain. For most Westerners, their total knowledge of the Christians’ removal of the Moors from Spain would have come from Charlton Heston starring in El Cid (and many younger people probably haven’t even seen that). The Moors had been established in Spain for hundreds of years, had been responsible for much of the most beautiful architecture you see there to this day. But when the Christian armies eventually defeated them, they carried out an ethnic cleansing of far more barbarity than anything the Serbs have been able to inflict on the (surprise, surprise!) - Muslims - in Jugoslavia over the last ten years. It was total – they killed or expelled EVERY Muslim (and Jew) from Spain. We in the West don’t remember this. The Muslims (and many Jews) do.
Which brings me to the really uncomfortable bit. As barbaric as the Christians undoubtedly were, the Muslims weren’t without fault either. Hollywood, along with the liberal leftist media and many of similar leanings in our universities have tried to portray a clear cut ‘good guy /bad guy’ scenario in any recent war. This is utter rubbish. Each side in any conflict has its good and its bad points, in many cases, almost in equal measure. Some will say that WW2 was an exception to this rule, but even that’s debatable - ask your average elderly German or Japanese and I’m sure few, if they were being totally honest with you, could not voice many arguments in favour of the often excessive actions of their government and be able to cite horrible excesses by the Allies (in their eyes, and possibly accurately) that we’ve probably never heard of.
The facts are, both the Germans and the Japanese governments did what they thought they had to do for national survival, and if some of those things are totally anathema to us in the West today, they weren’t necessarily so to the people doing them at official behest at the time. Pearl Harbour? The Americans and British had just cut off Japan’s oil supplies and credits. It was literally fight NOW or sink into oblivion for Japan, and the only real decision to be made was whether to take the ‘quickie’ option - attack south to secure the Dutch and British oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, or take the longer term view and go into Sibera in support of their German allies.
(It might come as a HUGE surprise to many Americans that the war in the Pacific did NOT start with Pearl Harbour and nor did the Japanese plan of attack centre on Pearl Harbour. It was very much a sideshow to the invasion of Malaya, that was carefully timed to start on the overnight (the Sunday night/Monday morning) of Dec 7th/8th.. The International Dateline always confuses people into thinking that the Japanese did not attack Malaya and the Philippines until the next day.) The invasion of Malaya (through landings in Thailand) was well under way as the bombers approached Pearl Harbour.
Enough of the history lessons. The facts are that when two cultures clash – and despite all the protestations by the Western politicians to the contrary, that is exactly the way the Muslim world sees the coming ‘war against terrorism’, as a direct attack on Islam by the West – one side is usually forced to give ground, usually very unwillingly and only after a humiliating defeat, politically or at arms. No matter how unjust the West’s position might be because of past sins and omissions, if the West loses this coming fight, life as we in the West know it is over for many of us, for should they ‘win’, the Islamic world will not, repeat not, be as accommodating to non-believers as the West has been to people who have different in beliefs or customs.
In closing, it’s probably worth reminding ourselves here who created modern day ‘state-sponsored terrorism’. It was none other Winston Spencer Churchill and a beleaguered Britain, who, when unable to meet the might of the German army on the battlefield, equipped and trained people in Occupied Europe to ‘resist’ the German invaders. We called the ‘The Resistance’. The Germans – (and the vast majority of the French people, until they saw which way the wind was blowing) – called them ( ….. )?
You guessed it - ‘terrorists’.
Just as the British called George Washington and his ‘American’ colonial revolutionaries.
]
Let’s drop the “is/was’s” and stick with the “was” for clarity from here on, but the two tenses apply.
Both groups were made up in the main of reactionary old men who used religion to maintain the status quo. Both were more politicians than clerics, but used the power of the Church more politically than for the protection of souls. And among both were men who felt that power was slipping from the pulpit to an educated class outside the church/mosque.
Both groups also had committed young men at their disposal. Young men who, in the name of their religion, would do terrible things, believing, many of them quite sincerely, that the end justified the means, however terrible those means might be. For the Catholics, it was the Dominicans and their Inquisition, for the Muslims, it is the young zealots among the ‘fundamentalists’.
It may not be totally co-incidental that probably the two best examples of Christian, church and/or state-sponsored excess were against Muslims – the Crusades, which were little more than a series of unspeakably barbaric Viking raids on what was arguably a far more advanced and genteel civilisation. (We in the West don’t remember the Crusades in any detail, and our ‘histories’ of them until recently at least, glossed over the often truly gruesome behaviour of the ‘Christian’ armies. Let me assure anyone who isn’t aware of it, most Muslims today know all those details intimately – they are taught them in the mosque, recited by storytellers in every coffee shop.)
The second example were the Moors in Spain. For most Westerners, their total knowledge of the Christians’ removal of the Moors from Spain would have come from Charlton Heston starring in El Cid (and many younger people probably haven’t even seen that). The Moors had been established in Spain for hundreds of years, had been responsible for much of the most beautiful architecture you see there to this day. But when the Christian armies eventually defeated them, they carried out an ethnic cleansing of far more barbarity than anything the Serbs have been able to inflict on the (surprise, surprise!) - Muslims - in Jugoslavia over the last ten years. It was total – they killed or expelled EVERY Muslim (and Jew) from Spain. We in the West don’t remember this. The Muslims (and many Jews) do.
Which brings me to the really uncomfortable bit. As barbaric as the Christians undoubtedly were, the Muslims weren’t without fault either. Hollywood, along with the liberal leftist media and many of similar leanings in our universities have tried to portray a clear cut ‘good guy /bad guy’ scenario in any recent war. This is utter rubbish. Each side in any conflict has its good and its bad points, in many cases, almost in equal measure. Some will say that WW2 was an exception to this rule, but even that’s debatable - ask your average elderly German or Japanese and I’m sure few, if they were being totally honest with you, could not voice many arguments in favour of the often excessive actions of their government and be able to cite horrible excesses by the Allies (in their eyes, and possibly accurately) that we’ve probably never heard of.
The facts are, both the Germans and the Japanese governments did what they thought they had to do for national survival, and if some of those things are totally anathema to us in the West today, they weren’t necessarily so to the people doing them at official behest at the time. Pearl Harbour? The Americans and British had just cut off Japan’s oil supplies and credits. It was literally fight NOW or sink into oblivion for Japan, and the only real decision to be made was whether to take the ‘quickie’ option - attack south to secure the Dutch and British oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, or take the longer term view and go into Sibera in support of their German allies.
(It might come as a HUGE surprise to many Americans that the war in the Pacific did NOT start with Pearl Harbour and nor did the Japanese plan of attack centre on Pearl Harbour. It was very much a sideshow to the invasion of Malaya, that was carefully timed to start on the overnight (the Sunday night/Monday morning) of Dec 7th/8th.. The International Dateline always confuses people into thinking that the Japanese did not attack Malaya and the Philippines until the next day.) The invasion of Malaya (through landings in Thailand) was well under way as the bombers approached Pearl Harbour.
Enough of the history lessons. The facts are that when two cultures clash – and despite all the protestations by the Western politicians to the contrary, that is exactly the way the Muslim world sees the coming ‘war against terrorism’, as a direct attack on Islam by the West – one side is usually forced to give ground, usually very unwillingly and only after a humiliating defeat, politically or at arms. No matter how unjust the West’s position might be because of past sins and omissions, if the West loses this coming fight, life as we in the West know it is over for many of us, for should they ‘win’, the Islamic world will not, repeat not, be as accommodating to non-believers as the West has been to people who have different in beliefs or customs.
In closing, it’s probably worth reminding ourselves here who created modern day ‘state-sponsored terrorism’. It was none other Winston Spencer Churchill and a beleaguered Britain, who, when unable to meet the might of the German army on the battlefield, equipped and trained people in Occupied Europe to ‘resist’ the German invaders. We called the ‘The Resistance’. The Germans – (and the vast majority of the French people, until they saw which way the wind was blowing) – called them ( ….. )?
You guessed it - ‘terrorists’.
Just as the British called George Washington and his ‘American’ colonial revolutionaries.
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So hard to know what one should think.
Taking the article in the Gulf News cited above, it's a strident if not unreasonable view of the situation in Israel. Taking another article in the same issue through the link one finds (the one by Rasha Hassan entitled Arab Perspective):
"There have been reports that 4,000 Jews working in the World Trade Centre (WTC) were absent from work on the day of the incident. This astonishing fact raises several questions about the identity of the perpetrators of the attack, says Fadhila. " which immediately makes me recoil from anything else that author may have to say. Should I then reject all Arab opinions as intellectually on the level of propagating conspiracy theories about the Elders of Zion? Obviously not.
Okay, so what's to be done. It's so hard even for a lefty such as I to say "no retaliation" if for no other reason than a fear of the terrorists being otherwise encouraged. Yes, it can't be an indiscriminate attack on Afghanistan, even though many there may feel no such acceptance of my right as a westerner to exist. Yes, a solution to Palestine/Israel must be sought. The last (Barak) Israeli position was yes to the west bank/gaza strip and a divided jerusalem, but rejected by (Arafat) Palestinians who wanted the right of return to Israeli land of all of Palestinian descent plus return of property. Maybe a compromise can be reached, but 2 million returnees would be a strain, on the psyche if nothing else.
Yes, there must be some sort of post WW III "Marshal Plan" to address the poverty imbalance that affects much of the third world.
But this isn't about money. At heart maybe I don't know what it's about, and that question should be asked more loudly. The deepest fear is that it's simply about my tribe against yours, which is not something that can be settled in a civilised manner. Then what?
Taking the article in the Gulf News cited above, it's a strident if not unreasonable view of the situation in Israel. Taking another article in the same issue through the link one finds (the one by Rasha Hassan entitled Arab Perspective):
"There have been reports that 4,000 Jews working in the World Trade Centre (WTC) were absent from work on the day of the incident. This astonishing fact raises several questions about the identity of the perpetrators of the attack, says Fadhila. " which immediately makes me recoil from anything else that author may have to say. Should I then reject all Arab opinions as intellectually on the level of propagating conspiracy theories about the Elders of Zion? Obviously not.
Okay, so what's to be done. It's so hard even for a lefty such as I to say "no retaliation" if for no other reason than a fear of the terrorists being otherwise encouraged. Yes, it can't be an indiscriminate attack on Afghanistan, even though many there may feel no such acceptance of my right as a westerner to exist. Yes, a solution to Palestine/Israel must be sought. The last (Barak) Israeli position was yes to the west bank/gaza strip and a divided jerusalem, but rejected by (Arafat) Palestinians who wanted the right of return to Israeli land of all of Palestinian descent plus return of property. Maybe a compromise can be reached, but 2 million returnees would be a strain, on the psyche if nothing else.
Yes, there must be some sort of post WW III "Marshal Plan" to address the poverty imbalance that affects much of the third world.
But this isn't about money. At heart maybe I don't know what it's about, and that question should be asked more loudly. The deepest fear is that it's simply about my tribe against yours, which is not something that can be settled in a civilised manner. Then what?
Fellow Aussies,
Through this whole tragedy and the resulting conflict we are about to witness, I wonder just how much attention the Australian government and/or military is giving to the immediate threat posed to us by the world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia.
If America launches some sort of attack on targets in Afghanistan, and this appears more and more likely each day, then the Taliban have said that they will have no choice but to declare a "jihad" on America and it's allies.
Whilst the government of Indonesia has supported the US (evident through the visit to Washington by Megawati) it is the actions of the fundamentalist and unpredictable minority in that country which worry me. It was reported on CNN today that a group of Indonesians entered a large International Hotel in Jakarta and warned American guests to leave (or something along those lines...if someone has the actual story that would be great.)
Surely here in Australia, being behind the US 100% and only a stone's through away, we are extremely vulnerable to any attacks by terrorists based in Indonesia. While we're on the topic, surely there is a number of fundamentalist Muslims living within our own country. While the number is likely to be very small, these people perhaps present more of a threat, simply because they can move throughout our country almost undetected, as did those responsible for the attacks in the US.
What I am trying to say is that we are definitely not immmune from these terrorists attacks and in the event of a "jihad", we become a very real target. Maybe those cutbacks on defence spending year after year wasn't such a good idea at all.
TL
Through this whole tragedy and the resulting conflict we are about to witness, I wonder just how much attention the Australian government and/or military is giving to the immediate threat posed to us by the world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia.
If America launches some sort of attack on targets in Afghanistan, and this appears more and more likely each day, then the Taliban have said that they will have no choice but to declare a "jihad" on America and it's allies.
Whilst the government of Indonesia has supported the US (evident through the visit to Washington by Megawati) it is the actions of the fundamentalist and unpredictable minority in that country which worry me. It was reported on CNN today that a group of Indonesians entered a large International Hotel in Jakarta and warned American guests to leave (or something along those lines...if someone has the actual story that would be great.)
Surely here in Australia, being behind the US 100% and only a stone's through away, we are extremely vulnerable to any attacks by terrorists based in Indonesia. While we're on the topic, surely there is a number of fundamentalist Muslims living within our own country. While the number is likely to be very small, these people perhaps present more of a threat, simply because they can move throughout our country almost undetected, as did those responsible for the attacks in the US.
What I am trying to say is that we are definitely not immmune from these terrorists attacks and in the event of a "jihad", we become a very real target. Maybe those cutbacks on defence spending year after year wasn't such a good idea at all.
TL
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Well said TL. An attitude like yours will prevent you getting killed, unlike Dr Hibberts point #3 in his post above. Better watch your @rse Hibbs!
And dont forget the Indonesian islamic lunatics are still bloodey sh!ttey at Oz intervening in East Timor. Australians are labeled kaffir infidels in case you didnt know. Destroying a U.S. building in SYD or MEL would be no problem to them, and would serve there purpose of "making a statement to the world".
And dont forget the Indonesian islamic lunatics are still bloodey sh!ttey at Oz intervening in East Timor. Australians are labeled kaffir infidels in case you didnt know. Destroying a U.S. building in SYD or MEL would be no problem to them, and would serve there purpose of "making a statement to the world".
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Chimbu ... I should've realised that before reading your latest post but perhaps it was just as well I hadn't. Seems there are others who got the same impression that I got. And, having formed that view, it was always going to be difficult to shake it.
Anyway mate, now that I know where you're coming from, I have to agree with you. It doesn't mean we think any less of the USA, or indeed of the suffering that has happened there. Nor is it a criticism - indeed, could any of us have done any better, given the all the same circumstances unfolding in the precise order in which they occurred?
So, okay, the question of the day now seems to be ... "what do we do about it?". We've all seen e-mails conveying the concept of atomic bombs raining down on Afghanistan, of turning the country into a vast lake. As a way of relieving our own tensions, these have been great, but hardly realistic.
As Slash has just pointed out, Oz isn't anywhere near as secure as most of us thought it was. We walk a tightrope now, but walk it we surely must. We cannot allow the sort of carnage that was inflicted on the USA to occur ever again.
PT ... it's posts like yours that make me understand just how much modern and ancient history I never absorbed at school, or in later life. But I'm not sure that any issues can be separated out, to look at any of the possibilities within Islam itself. I have the sinking feeling that all the events of history, inside and outside of Islam have brought us to this current low-point in world history.
Anyway mate, now that I know where you're coming from, I have to agree with you. It doesn't mean we think any less of the USA, or indeed of the suffering that has happened there. Nor is it a criticism - indeed, could any of us have done any better, given the all the same circumstances unfolding in the precise order in which they occurred?
So, okay, the question of the day now seems to be ... "what do we do about it?". We've all seen e-mails conveying the concept of atomic bombs raining down on Afghanistan, of turning the country into a vast lake. As a way of relieving our own tensions, these have been great, but hardly realistic.
As Slash has just pointed out, Oz isn't anywhere near as secure as most of us thought it was. We walk a tightrope now, but walk it we surely must. We cannot allow the sort of carnage that was inflicted on the USA to occur ever again.
PT ... it's posts like yours that make me understand just how much modern and ancient history I never absorbed at school, or in later life. But I'm not sure that any issues can be separated out, to look at any of the possibilities within Islam itself. I have the sinking feeling that all the events of history, inside and outside of Islam have brought us to this current low-point in world history.
Grandpa Aerotart
Thread Starter
Wiley,TL,Slash good posts all,
As we all are beginning to realise more acutely history goes back a long way and many ethnic groups have a far longer and more detailed 'version' than the wests!
Westerners tend to have a fairly 'recent' term of reference where to the people of the 'East' a thousand years ago was last week and 200 years ago was yesterday.
Towers in the last part of the 19th century the British were fighting for empire in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Perhaps this co-incides with Islam's putting aside of more gentile persuits? The battles between Islamic tribes and the British Empire lasted right through until the 1930s.
A large force of British troops managed to fight their way through to, and capture, Kabul. The Patan tribes then laid seige to them and after a long period, and with no rescue in sight, the British agreed to surrender. The Patan had promised them safe passage back, so with wives, children and servents in tow(why did the British always take the families with them?) off they went. As soon as they were in the mountain passes the sniping started, women and children were captured raped and murdered, and if anyone of the nearly 2000 British force survived history doen't record it very well.
Savage?....only to our eyes I'm sure.
I hope fervently that this will not end up in Jihad, although I've been saying for years that IF we ever have another big war it would be fought between Islam and the rest.
Perhaps the Muslim Nations will allow the West to remove the baddies and restore peacful relations with no sanctions, free trade and each following their own belief systems unencumbered. Perhaps that's the most ignorant, arrogant, nieve and fattuos attitude the west could have as far as the Muslim Nations are concerned.
As Wiley points out 'Bad' is merely a perspective away from 'good'.
We, in the west, tend to distance ourselves from the sins of our forefathers and stoutly refuse to feel guilty about things that happened before we were 'an itch in our father's trousers', although we can be sorry! Will the Easts vastly different perspective on what is 'ancient' history and what is 'modern' history allow us that in the future?
Chuck.
[ 25 September 2001: Message edited by: Chimbu chuckles ]
As we all are beginning to realise more acutely history goes back a long way and many ethnic groups have a far longer and more detailed 'version' than the wests!
Westerners tend to have a fairly 'recent' term of reference where to the people of the 'East' a thousand years ago was last week and 200 years ago was yesterday.
Towers in the last part of the 19th century the British were fighting for empire in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Perhaps this co-incides with Islam's putting aside of more gentile persuits? The battles between Islamic tribes and the British Empire lasted right through until the 1930s.
A large force of British troops managed to fight their way through to, and capture, Kabul. The Patan tribes then laid seige to them and after a long period, and with no rescue in sight, the British agreed to surrender. The Patan had promised them safe passage back, so with wives, children and servents in tow(why did the British always take the families with them?) off they went. As soon as they were in the mountain passes the sniping started, women and children were captured raped and murdered, and if anyone of the nearly 2000 British force survived history doen't record it very well.
Savage?....only to our eyes I'm sure.
I hope fervently that this will not end up in Jihad, although I've been saying for years that IF we ever have another big war it would be fought between Islam and the rest.
Perhaps the Muslim Nations will allow the West to remove the baddies and restore peacful relations with no sanctions, free trade and each following their own belief systems unencumbered. Perhaps that's the most ignorant, arrogant, nieve and fattuos attitude the west could have as far as the Muslim Nations are concerned.
As Wiley points out 'Bad' is merely a perspective away from 'good'.
We, in the west, tend to distance ourselves from the sins of our forefathers and stoutly refuse to feel guilty about things that happened before we were 'an itch in our father's trousers', although we can be sorry! Will the Easts vastly different perspective on what is 'ancient' history and what is 'modern' history allow us that in the future?
Chuck.
[ 25 September 2001: Message edited by: Chimbu chuckles ]
Grandpa Aerotart
Thread Starter
This posted on JB by our esteemed leader Danny Fyne. As I virtually never go over to JB and was led there by a link I thought i'd paste it here.
It's some fantastically insightful writings and certainly increased my knowledge on this most dangerous of times. You can never have enough knowledge!
Chuck.
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jews and Muslims must reject their lunatic fringes
Melanie Phillips
Islamic fundamentalism is now an indivisible entity in the public mind. At the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, terrorists declared war on western values in the name of Islam. So the faith is linked with fundamentalism and terror, graphically illustrated by the scenes of jubilation in the Muslim world at the carnage.
Some claim that such pursuit of violent conquest is intrinsic to Islam, presented as a faith of ancient barbarism. Many Muslims are desperately anxious to distance their religion from such a murderous profile. So Dr Zaki Badawi, principal of the Muslim College, has listed the Koranic precepts against murder and revenge and for the rule of law and the unity of the human race. The mainstream Muslim Council of Britain has denounced the "tiny lunatic fringe" of Muslim extremists in Britain who supported the American atrocities and dismisses them as "dangerous clowns".
Dry theology does not tell us much about what a religion is like. Better to look at how it is lived. Despite its theoretical militancy, during the centuries of the Ottoman empire Islam was extremely tolerant of its Christian and Jewish minorities. Indeed, one could say that, of the three great faiths, Christianity has been the most threatening, seeking to convert the world through mission, crusades and colonialism.
Moreover, fundamentalism has not been confined to Islam. Christianity and Judaism are also being profoundly altered by the recent rise of those who take literally the words of the sacred texts, allowing no room for modification. As Gilles Keppel has so persuasively argued in his book The Revenge of God, this was a widespread response to secularism which, in trying to suppress faith altogether, has disrupted social and moral connections and provoked disillusionment with modernity.
Moderate clerics of all faiths have a duty to draw a clear line in the sand against extremism. Jews have a duty to denounce as inimical to Jewish values the fanatics who want to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, as well as those rabbis who support them. If Islam does stand against violence, then its clerics have to make it clear that those who so defame its values can have no place within it. They should surely tell all who practise fanatical hatred that those who have told them they will go to paradise have told them a lie.
Fundamentalism does not inevitably lead to violence. Many who take sacred texts as the literal truth live lives of blameless order. But for those who seek power through violence, fundamentalism is a potent call to arms. The eminent Islamic scholar John Esposito, editor of the Oxford History of Islam, says fundamentalist Islam has a pathologically distorted vision of its own victimhood. Beleaguered by the advance of western values, it translates everything that the West does as an assault on Islam and so, since the faith permits self-defence, the West becomes a legitimate target for attack.
This is surely the root of the tragedy of Israel. Resentment at a Jewish state being imposed on Arab land became twisted into the belief that Arab self-determination, pride and honour were being trampled underfoot by America and Israel.
The reality was that the Arabs rejected the two-state solution from the start. They refused to make room for Jewish self-determination in a land to which the Jews had a strong ancestral connection. The reality was that this land was not taken by force of conquest, or because the King David hotel was blown up, but because, after the Holocaust, the United Nations decided that this was the only solution to the fact that the Jews needed a refuge from a world that did not want them and that hundreds of thousands of Jews had already settled in the Holy Land and were even a majority in Jerusalem.
That battle is still being fought. That is why a just solution to the Middle East conflict is central to the ending of Islamic terror. Sure, the animosity against the West by Muslim fanatics goes far wider and deeper. But Israel is the focus for those hated western values. It is a deadly symbol of the humiliation of Islam by America, standard-bearer of the West.
Many Muslims have come wearily to accept Israel's existence. They support a two-state solution and are enraged with Israel for policies seen to prevent that from coming about. But this itself is a distortion of reality. The Arab world, whom it has suited to use the permanent Palestinian dispossession as the most deadly form of propaganda, wants one state, not two. The right of return, the core demand of the Palestinians at the heart of the rejection of Ehud Barak's peace deal last year, would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The justification for that was on grotesque display at the Durban anti-racism conference earlier this year, where the Arab world attempted to resurrect the libel that Zionism equals racism.
This is not to say that Israel is blameless, by any means. Its attitude to its Arab minority is often appalling; Ariel Sharon's history is repellent; and the settlements are morally wrong and tactically inept and should be dismantled, not least because of the way they have poisoned Israel's values and sapped her self-belief. There is room for legitimate criticism of all these things, and more. But such critics pass beyond the pale when they say the very existence of Israel itself is synonymous with oppression, ignoring altogether the fact that Israel's excesses are overwhelmingly the outcome of 50 years of fighting a war of survival.
Acceptance of Israel's right to live in peace, along with a just solution for the Palestinians, is a litmus test for decency. That is why moderate Muslims should stand up and be counted - not just against global terrorism but also against those who want Israel destroyed and who preach anti-Jewish hatred. The Muslim Council may denounce terror in America but won't similarly denounce the suicide bombers and shootings in Israel; instead, it demonises Israel for trying to stop the violence.
Even worse, some mainstream Muslims openly call for Israel to be dismantled. In The Guardian earlier this year, Faisal Bodi said Israel should not exist. Two years ago, the so-called Muslim parliament heard a speaker express joy that the peace process had failed "thanks to our brothers in Hezbollah and Hamas", and congratulate the Swiss banks for holding out against Jewish claims relating to the "so-called Holocaust". A recent article in Q-News, a fortnightly newspaper for Muslim youth, consisted of a farrago of anti-Jewish group libels, such as that Jews think themselves more valuable than gentiles because they are the chosen people. And if anything was racist at the Durban conference, it was the Nazi-style cartoons of monstrous and rapacious Jews distributed by something called the Arab Lawyers' Union.
Because of the terror in America, British Muslims need protection from attack. They thus join British Jews against whom physical and verbal attacks, desecration of cemeteries and threatening phone calls have soared since the intifada started. If minds could only be untwisted, moderate Jews and Muslims could make common cause against the pincer movement of secularism and its unholy counterpart, fundamentalism. If only.
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The USA saved Europe from the Nazis, defeated communism and keeps the West rich. Bryan Appleyard analyses why it has become the land of the loathed
Why do they hate America?
We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama Bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming.
Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes.
"Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."
It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud - indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes.
How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam - the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them.
But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.
Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.
"People should think," David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years." Probably, I think, a bit like hell.
There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down.
The Yankophobes were too villanously stupid to get the message. Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, we see the BBC's Question Time with its hand-picked morons in the audience telling Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that "the world despises America". The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.
Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. "So out of touch," Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, "there was no sense of his feeling for people." Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush's response when asked how he was feeling: "Well, I'm a loving guy; also I've got a job to do." Jivani thinks this isn't good enough, no emotion.
Hang on; I thought the bien- pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that "loving guy" quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.
Or here's George Monbiot in The Guardian: "When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities." I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I'll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.
Or here's Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: "In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise." So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?
Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: "Now they know how the Iraqis feel." And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: "If the US's great peacetime defeat results in defeating America's overweening ego as the world's sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement." Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?
Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.
In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?
From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: "There's an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it's the US."
So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain's dominance by saying, in effect, "they may be rich but we have soul". That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we're for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate - America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.
This form of "spiritual" anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. "Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically," says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. "Not because there are so many Jews here - there weren't always - but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land."
As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I'm sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.
Judt's word "openness" is important. The fanatic - in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.
George Orwell noted in 1941: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi." Elsewhere he wrote of the "unadmitted motive" of pacifism as being "hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism".
So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home - the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi's. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.
"It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940," says Judt. "A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a lose analogy with British complexes about the US - us in decline, them over-mighty - but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious."
In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn't quite turned them off Russia.
There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins - Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.
Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. "The anxiety about American behaviour now," says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, "is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war."
Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.
Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if
just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.
With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.
The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan's absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America's Rome.
The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They're so naïve, say the chatterers, so innocent - and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.
Well, I've spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?
The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can't bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.
In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.
At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism - a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians". To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.
However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America's behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.
In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies - although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro- American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.
Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet's betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.
In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.
People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden's murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.
"Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region," says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. "This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel."
To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.
The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.
Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.
Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.
This is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.
Perhaps worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our "thinkers" are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies - most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.
"It's not for nothing they're called the chattering classes," observes Brogan.
So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn't yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn't. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.
Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.
I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much."
Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing - a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.
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[ 24 September 2001: Message edited by: Capt PPRuNe ]
It's some fantastically insightful writings and certainly increased my knowledge on this most dangerous of times. You can never have enough knowledge!
Chuck.
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Jews and Muslims must reject their lunatic fringes
Melanie Phillips
Islamic fundamentalism is now an indivisible entity in the public mind. At the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, terrorists declared war on western values in the name of Islam. So the faith is linked with fundamentalism and terror, graphically illustrated by the scenes of jubilation in the Muslim world at the carnage.
Some claim that such pursuit of violent conquest is intrinsic to Islam, presented as a faith of ancient barbarism. Many Muslims are desperately anxious to distance their religion from such a murderous profile. So Dr Zaki Badawi, principal of the Muslim College, has listed the Koranic precepts against murder and revenge and for the rule of law and the unity of the human race. The mainstream Muslim Council of Britain has denounced the "tiny lunatic fringe" of Muslim extremists in Britain who supported the American atrocities and dismisses them as "dangerous clowns".
Dry theology does not tell us much about what a religion is like. Better to look at how it is lived. Despite its theoretical militancy, during the centuries of the Ottoman empire Islam was extremely tolerant of its Christian and Jewish minorities. Indeed, one could say that, of the three great faiths, Christianity has been the most threatening, seeking to convert the world through mission, crusades and colonialism.
Moreover, fundamentalism has not been confined to Islam. Christianity and Judaism are also being profoundly altered by the recent rise of those who take literally the words of the sacred texts, allowing no room for modification. As Gilles Keppel has so persuasively argued in his book The Revenge of God, this was a widespread response to secularism which, in trying to suppress faith altogether, has disrupted social and moral connections and provoked disillusionment with modernity.
Moderate clerics of all faiths have a duty to draw a clear line in the sand against extremism. Jews have a duty to denounce as inimical to Jewish values the fanatics who want to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, as well as those rabbis who support them. If Islam does stand against violence, then its clerics have to make it clear that those who so defame its values can have no place within it. They should surely tell all who practise fanatical hatred that those who have told them they will go to paradise have told them a lie.
Fundamentalism does not inevitably lead to violence. Many who take sacred texts as the literal truth live lives of blameless order. But for those who seek power through violence, fundamentalism is a potent call to arms. The eminent Islamic scholar John Esposito, editor of the Oxford History of Islam, says fundamentalist Islam has a pathologically distorted vision of its own victimhood. Beleaguered by the advance of western values, it translates everything that the West does as an assault on Islam and so, since the faith permits self-defence, the West becomes a legitimate target for attack.
This is surely the root of the tragedy of Israel. Resentment at a Jewish state being imposed on Arab land became twisted into the belief that Arab self-determination, pride and honour were being trampled underfoot by America and Israel.
The reality was that the Arabs rejected the two-state solution from the start. They refused to make room for Jewish self-determination in a land to which the Jews had a strong ancestral connection. The reality was that this land was not taken by force of conquest, or because the King David hotel was blown up, but because, after the Holocaust, the United Nations decided that this was the only solution to the fact that the Jews needed a refuge from a world that did not want them and that hundreds of thousands of Jews had already settled in the Holy Land and were even a majority in Jerusalem.
That battle is still being fought. That is why a just solution to the Middle East conflict is central to the ending of Islamic terror. Sure, the animosity against the West by Muslim fanatics goes far wider and deeper. But Israel is the focus for those hated western values. It is a deadly symbol of the humiliation of Islam by America, standard-bearer of the West.
Many Muslims have come wearily to accept Israel's existence. They support a two-state solution and are enraged with Israel for policies seen to prevent that from coming about. But this itself is a distortion of reality. The Arab world, whom it has suited to use the permanent Palestinian dispossession as the most deadly form of propaganda, wants one state, not two. The right of return, the core demand of the Palestinians at the heart of the rejection of Ehud Barak's peace deal last year, would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The justification for that was on grotesque display at the Durban anti-racism conference earlier this year, where the Arab world attempted to resurrect the libel that Zionism equals racism.
This is not to say that Israel is blameless, by any means. Its attitude to its Arab minority is often appalling; Ariel Sharon's history is repellent; and the settlements are morally wrong and tactically inept and should be dismantled, not least because of the way they have poisoned Israel's values and sapped her self-belief. There is room for legitimate criticism of all these things, and more. But such critics pass beyond the pale when they say the very existence of Israel itself is synonymous with oppression, ignoring altogether the fact that Israel's excesses are overwhelmingly the outcome of 50 years of fighting a war of survival.
Acceptance of Israel's right to live in peace, along with a just solution for the Palestinians, is a litmus test for decency. That is why moderate Muslims should stand up and be counted - not just against global terrorism but also against those who want Israel destroyed and who preach anti-Jewish hatred. The Muslim Council may denounce terror in America but won't similarly denounce the suicide bombers and shootings in Israel; instead, it demonises Israel for trying to stop the violence.
Even worse, some mainstream Muslims openly call for Israel to be dismantled. In The Guardian earlier this year, Faisal Bodi said Israel should not exist. Two years ago, the so-called Muslim parliament heard a speaker express joy that the peace process had failed "thanks to our brothers in Hezbollah and Hamas", and congratulate the Swiss banks for holding out against Jewish claims relating to the "so-called Holocaust". A recent article in Q-News, a fortnightly newspaper for Muslim youth, consisted of a farrago of anti-Jewish group libels, such as that Jews think themselves more valuable than gentiles because they are the chosen people. And if anything was racist at the Durban conference, it was the Nazi-style cartoons of monstrous and rapacious Jews distributed by something called the Arab Lawyers' Union.
Because of the terror in America, British Muslims need protection from attack. They thus join British Jews against whom physical and verbal attacks, desecration of cemeteries and threatening phone calls have soared since the intifada started. If minds could only be untwisted, moderate Jews and Muslims could make common cause against the pincer movement of secularism and its unholy counterpart, fundamentalism. If only.
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The USA saved Europe from the Nazis, defeated communism and keeps the West rich. Bryan Appleyard analyses why it has become the land of the loathed
Why do they hate America?
We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama Bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming.
Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes.
"Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."
It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud - indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes.
How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam - the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them.
But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.
Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.
"People should think," David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years." Probably, I think, a bit like hell.
There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down.
The Yankophobes were too villanously stupid to get the message. Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, we see the BBC's Question Time with its hand-picked morons in the audience telling Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that "the world despises America". The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.
Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. "So out of touch," Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, "there was no sense of his feeling for people." Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush's response when asked how he was feeling: "Well, I'm a loving guy; also I've got a job to do." Jivani thinks this isn't good enough, no emotion.
Hang on; I thought the bien- pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that "loving guy" quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.
Or here's George Monbiot in The Guardian: "When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities." I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I'll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.
Or here's Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: "In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise." So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?
Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: "Now they know how the Iraqis feel." And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: "If the US's great peacetime defeat results in defeating America's overweening ego as the world's sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement." Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?
Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.
In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?
From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: "There's an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it's the US."
So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain's dominance by saying, in effect, "they may be rich but we have soul". That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we're for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate - America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.
This form of "spiritual" anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. "Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically," says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. "Not because there are so many Jews here - there weren't always - but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land."
As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I'm sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.
Judt's word "openness" is important. The fanatic - in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.
George Orwell noted in 1941: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi." Elsewhere he wrote of the "unadmitted motive" of pacifism as being "hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism".
So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home - the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi's. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.
"It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940," says Judt. "A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a lose analogy with British complexes about the US - us in decline, them over-mighty - but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious."
In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn't quite turned them off Russia.
There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins - Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.
Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. "The anxiety about American behaviour now," says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, "is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war."
Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.
Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if
just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.
With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.
The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan's absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America's Rome.
The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They're so naïve, say the chatterers, so innocent - and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.
Well, I've spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?
The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can't bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.
In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.
At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism - a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians". To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.
However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America's behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.
In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies - although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro- American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.
Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet's betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.
In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.
People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden's murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.
"Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region," says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. "This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel."
To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.
The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.
Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.
Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.
This is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.
Perhaps worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our "thinkers" are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies - most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.
"It's not for nothing they're called the chattering classes," observes Brogan.
So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn't yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn't. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.
Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.
I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much."
Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing - a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.
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[ 24 September 2001: Message edited by: Capt PPRuNe ]
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Like the term 'Sneering Chatterers'. Quite appropriate. Ever get the feeling that the nations media is a tight little hothouse of like minded people who all come from a handful of journalism schools at certain universities? Schools that are run by people who stopped their mental development around 1973?
In case it hasnt been mentioned already, theres a good book called 'Islam. A very short introduction' by Malise Ruthven from Oxford University Press. Its worth the effort to read something along those lines and ignore the junk coming out of the media.
As for all the lecturing going on towards America these days, I have to say if I belonged to a country that had just lost 7000 people in an atrocity, and someone told me 'There! Now will you listen to us?', Id fold the bastard in half and stick him in a suggestion box. Every circus has its clowns.. it just amazes me why they get preference for air time and column inches. American government and American foreign policy is so complex that even many participants in US politics arent exactly sure how it works. Its like that because of built in safeguards and a willingness to tailor itself to concerns from participating communities, no matter how small. The Americans know their foreign policy has problems, and they will adjust appropriately, but expecting them to initiate major changes at short notice is like expecting a train to make a immediate right hand turn. Give them a break.
In case it hasnt been mentioned already, theres a good book called 'Islam. A very short introduction' by Malise Ruthven from Oxford University Press. Its worth the effort to read something along those lines and ignore the junk coming out of the media.
As for all the lecturing going on towards America these days, I have to say if I belonged to a country that had just lost 7000 people in an atrocity, and someone told me 'There! Now will you listen to us?', Id fold the bastard in half and stick him in a suggestion box. Every circus has its clowns.. it just amazes me why they get preference for air time and column inches. American government and American foreign policy is so complex that even many participants in US politics arent exactly sure how it works. Its like that because of built in safeguards and a willingness to tailor itself to concerns from participating communities, no matter how small. The Americans know their foreign policy has problems, and they will adjust appropriately, but expecting them to initiate major changes at short notice is like expecting a train to make a immediate right hand turn. Give them a break.
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Melanie Phillips article.
Many thanks for posting that, the fact that one person can have such a wide ranging, balanced view of the events of our times, and can relate them in such a concise manner fills me with awe, and perhaps a little jealousy. Once again many thanks for sharing those thoughts.
Many thanks for posting that, the fact that one person can have such a wide ranging, balanced view of the events of our times, and can relate them in such a concise manner fills me with awe, and perhaps a little jealousy. Once again many thanks for sharing those thoughts.
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By all means hunt down the perpertrators surgically - the yanks have the technology and now the will.
However it would also pay to tackle the terrorism thing from different angles - asymmetric warfare.
Northern Ireland. One day, in the not too distant future, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland will outnumber the Protestant. Some time after this, depending on the fortunes of the U.K., Northern Ireland will vote to become part of the Republic. Republicans - what's the rush? Loyalists - don't fight the white.
Oil. Tensions bagan increasing in Saudi in the seventies when Bin Laden and the West was getting rich from construction projects and cheap oil. It's about the West being so close to the Holy sites of Islam. There have been ongoing terrorist attacks related to this tension ever since. For many a moderate Muslim, including Bin Laden, the turning point was the Gulf War. The spin doctors say this war was about liberating Kuwait when it was all about oil. Would anyone really be surprised if the Yanks revealed in 50 years time that they did not pursue Saddam because it was useful to have an emasculated tyrant in the region to justify the West's presence in the region for a good many more years? So how can this tension be eased? Alternative energy supply.
Israel. The U.N.s instinctive solution in 1947 was for the division of the land and the internationalisation(?)of the city of Jerusalem. Outside of the anihilation of one of the players this still seems the best option. Redirect U.S. military spending on Israel to a U.N. sponsored peace keeping force.
ETA. Can't think of a solution right now.
However it would also pay to tackle the terrorism thing from different angles - asymmetric warfare.
Northern Ireland. One day, in the not too distant future, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland will outnumber the Protestant. Some time after this, depending on the fortunes of the U.K., Northern Ireland will vote to become part of the Republic. Republicans - what's the rush? Loyalists - don't fight the white.
Oil. Tensions bagan increasing in Saudi in the seventies when Bin Laden and the West was getting rich from construction projects and cheap oil. It's about the West being so close to the Holy sites of Islam. There have been ongoing terrorist attacks related to this tension ever since. For many a moderate Muslim, including Bin Laden, the turning point was the Gulf War. The spin doctors say this war was about liberating Kuwait when it was all about oil. Would anyone really be surprised if the Yanks revealed in 50 years time that they did not pursue Saddam because it was useful to have an emasculated tyrant in the region to justify the West's presence in the region for a good many more years? So how can this tension be eased? Alternative energy supply.
Israel. The U.N.s instinctive solution in 1947 was for the division of the land and the internationalisation(?)of the city of Jerusalem. Outside of the anihilation of one of the players this still seems the best option. Redirect U.S. military spending on Israel to a U.N. sponsored peace keeping force.
ETA. Can't think of a solution right now.
