Cover
story Analysts of conflict offer view from the other side
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
For some, videos and photos of
Palestinians dancing for joy at the news of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United
States, of children pumping their fists while radicals fire machine guns into
the air, are already among the icons of Americas national tragedy. They
are burned into our consciousness like the twisted remains of the World Trade
Center.
Watching these pictures, many Americans understandably felt a
tightening of the stomach, a quickening of the pulse -- and an instinct to
strike back. (CNN denied charges that the photos have been recycled from the
Gulf War, and even Palestinian sources conceded that such celebrations had
indeed taken place.)
It is easy enough, in the psychology of grief, to move from
attributing such reactions to a handful of young radicals, to all Palestinians,
to their supporters in the Arab world, to Islam in general.
Mainstream media offered few correctives. Revulsion to the attacks
in the Islamic world was largely obscured. A day after the attacks, thousands
of Palestinians in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon prayed in sorrow and
offered blood for relief efforts, but few television cameras carried images of
those events.
No one broadcast what happened on Sept. 12 in Beirut, where the
chief imams of the citys Sunni, Shiite and Druz communities went to the
American embassy to express their grief and their rejection of violence. Few
newspapers reprinted the fatwa of Imam Hussein Fadal-Alla, a spiritual leader
of Hezbollah, condemning the attacks and declaring the perpetrators
deaths to be suicides rather than martyrdoms -- in Islamic terms, equivalent to
saying the terrorists went not to Heaven, but to Hell.
In the end, however, perhaps those celebratory images needed to be
played out on our screens, despite their distorting effect. The anti-American
anger a handful of Palestinians displayed is not a marginal phenomenon. There
is a wide sense in the Islamic world today that the West, above all the United
States, is an enemy.
That attitude, experts say, is terrorisms incubator.
What explains it? President George Bush and members of his
administration have suggested that terrorists hate America because of its
values. At a Sept. 16 memorial Mass for victims and their families in Rome,
Ambassador to the Holy See James Nicholson put the point this way:
We have helped others around the world to attain freedom,
justice and democracy. We are a beacon of freedom, and the perpetrators of hate
honed in on that beacon.
These are, of course, soothing words for a heartsick nation. But
soon we will need to ask if they measure up as hardheaded analysis. Is the
United States really reviled because it promotes freedom and democracy?
Or is there another way of reading our standing in the world, one
that might better account for the climate in which the desire to commit the
barbarities of Sept. 11 grew?
To try to understand how the United States looks through another
set of eyes is not to endorse that view. Determining the truth in any
perspective is a task for sober discernment. It is precisely sobriety, however,
that tends to be eclipsed when war clouds gather.
With that in mind, NCR set out to try to understand the
case against the United States in Islamic fundamentalist circles.
A split personality
The first thing experts will tell you is that if you are looking
for a typical Islamic view, forget it. The diversity is staggering.
There are 750 million Muslims in the world, some 500 million of them
non-Arabs.
Islamic culture and politics in the Central Asian republics of the
former Soviet Union is very different from that in the Middle East, according
to Missionaries of Africa Fr. Justo Lacunza-Balda, director of the Pontifical
Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies in Rome. And that, in turn, contrasts
with other Asian forms of Islam such as that found in Indonesia. Even the
Shiite scholars at Berkeley have a different vision than the Sunis at the
University of Chicago, Lacunza-Balda said, laughing.
Lacunza-Balda knows, though, that the current climate is not a
laughing matter. Now, when visitors arrive at the institute he runs on Via di
Trastevere in Rome, they find its identifying signs painted over. In the
contemporary climate, its not smart to advertise an affiliation with
Arabs and Islam on your front door.
When one speaks about attitudes or currents within Islam, it must
be clear that for every generalization there are likely millions of
exceptions.
Jesuit Fr. Daniel Madigan, an expert on Islam who has traveled
widely in the Arab world, said he finds a split personality with
regard to America and the West.
Just about anybody you can think of in the Arab world would
quite happily go and live in the United States, Madigan said in his
office at Romes Gregorian University. Yet there is also a sense
that there is something profoundly inimical about it, a belief that the U.S. as
a global actor is anti-Islam.
What are the roots of that view?
R. Scott Appleby, director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, sees three elements: resentment of
the U.S. presence in the Middle East, perceptions that the United States is
hypocritical -- that its actions belie its professed beliefs; and contempt
among conservative Muslims for Western culture.
Similar points surfaced repeatedly in other conversations.
The most prominent example of resentment over U.S. presence in the
Middle East is the Palestinian problem, and a widespread perception that
American foreign policy is biased in favor of Israel.
It is ridiculous to say the United States will declare war
on terrorism, but then turn its back on terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, said Mohammad Sammak, secretary general of the Islamic Summit in
Beirut. Terrorism should be considered an enemy to humanity wherever it
happens and whoever commits it.
It is a staple of Arab political rhetoric, that Israel is a
terrorist state. Where does the idea come from? One example: The
countrys current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has been implicated in
massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Lebanon in September 1982,
when Israeli-backed Lebanese militia groups slaughtered as many as 2,000
Palestinian men, women and children over three days. One witness called it
the worst single act of terrorism in modern Middle East
history.
According to a later government inquest, Sharon, who was then
minister of defense, had personal responsibility for authorizing
the killings.
It did little to help Israels image that Israeli tanks
rolled into Palestinian cities of Jenin and Jericho on Sept. 11, even as TV
screens were broadcasting images of the carnage at the World Trade Center. The
incursion was in retaliation for a Palestinian attack on an Israeli school bus
in which two people were killed.
Arab commentators accused Israel of taking advantage of distracted
world attention to launch massive reprisals.
Of course, atrocities occur on both sides of the
Israeli-Palestinian divide. Residents of Israeli cities, for example, are in
the macabre position of taking their lives in their hands whenever they board a
bus.
Madigan, however, said he believes massive U.S. support for Israel
is the biggest single factor complicating the relationship between America and
Islamic nations. The reason Israel can deny justice to Palestinians is
the $6 billion a year they get from the United States, he said.
That money makes it possible to expand the settlements, to chop up the
Western Bank with highways, and to maintain a huge standing army.
Most Muslims in the Middle East believe that, under President
George W. Bush, U.S. policy has further disadvantaged Palestinians. When
Bush came in, he seemed to many of us to turn his back on the Middle East, at
the same time the Israelis under Sharon were escalating, Sammak said.
It is a fact that there has been an increase in hatred toward American
policy.
Sammaks comments reflect a conviction, which some would call
naïve, shared by many Muslims that if the United States wished to, it
could end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost immediately.
Israel exists because the United States exists, said
Ammar De Martino, a convert to Islam and spokesperson for Italys Muslim
community. If America wanted to solve the problem, it would be
solved.
A deeper problem
Appleby stressed, however, that for many Islamists (a term for
Islamic fundamentalists), U.S. policy on the Palestinian question is the
leading example of a deeper problem.
They believe Israel is a beachhead for American hegemony in
the region, primarily for securing our interests in oil, he said.
They believe the United States conducts foreign policy not to defend the
country, but so that Americans can consume more than the rest of the world by a
large margin. This is tied into perceptions of Americans as lacking any sense
of human equality in terms of the hoarding of resources.
That perception is not built on sand. According to United Nations
statistics, Americans comprise 5 percent of the worlds population, but in
1996 we used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its
hazardous waste. An average North American consumes five times as much as an
average Mexican, 10 times as much as an average Chinese and 30 times as much as
the average person in India. Americas yearly waste alone would fill a
convoy of garbage trucks long enough to wrap around the Earth six times.
Given such realities, it becomes easier to see why radicals in
poor countries might develop an anti-American outlook.
You take the massive gap between rich and poor out of the
equation, and I doubt youd have the kind of terrorism we saw this
week, Appleby said.
Michael Hudson, former director of Georgetown Universitys
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, added that the physical presence of
American military forces on the Arabian Peninsula, considered sacred territory
by Muslims because it contains the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, is seen as
offensive.
It is no accident, experts say, that the bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 took place on the eighth anniversary of
the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990. (Though no firm
connection has been established, experts note that Sept. 11, the day of the
attacks in New York and Washington, was the date in 1922 that the British
mandate was declared for Palestine. The act triggered a series of historical
events that many Arabs blame for the creation of Israel and the failure to
recognize Palestinian independence).
Perceptions of hypocrisy
As for percentpions of hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy, critics
charge that the United States, while billing itself as a champion of democracy
and human rights, behaves quite differently in the region.
The most glaring example is the post-Gulf War sanctions in Iraq.
While some Arab nations joined, or at least cooperated with, the international
coalition formed to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, in the years since,
Muslim support for Western policy toward Iraq has evaporated.
Sanctions, according to critics, keep the infrastructure in
disrepair, consigning the nation to poverty and hunger, and produce medical
shortages contributing to the deaths of up to a half-million children.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a consequence
of the sanctions, Hudson said. For many Muslims, this is just as
horrendous as killing 5,000 people in the World Trade Center.
Adding fuel is the irony that Saddam Hussein, today presented to
the American public as an enemy, is a former U.S. client, seen by leaders as a
regional counterweight to the Islamic regime in Iran.
Similarly, Americas passion for democracy often seems to
founder in the Middle East, where its policy has often been to support
undemocratic regimes.
One frequently cited case is Algeria, where a conservative Islamic
movement called the Front for National Liberation won a first round of
balloting in December 1990. The Algerian military then cancelled the second
round and imposed martial law, which in some form continues to this day.
Although the United States has protested election irregularities
elsewhere, it was content to allow the Algerian military takeover, critics say.
In Algeria, the leaders strangled the country, said
Lacunza-Balda. There is oil in Algeria, lots of arable land, one of the
best climates in the world, plenty of potential for tourism, huge mineral
deposits and good universities.
Where has all this gone? Lacunza-Balda asked.
You think the Islamic fundamentalists are going to do worse than reduce
the place to misery?
The threat of fundamentalism is used by Arab leaders in
order to suffocate any possibility of having a sound democratic society,
Lacunza-Balda said. They use it to stifle the efforts of younger
generations to have a say, to maintain control over the masses.
The bottom line is that Islamists say theyre the real
democrats, not the United States, Appleby said.
De Martino confirmed that this is a core conviction.
In Tunisia, in Algeria, in Morocco, the U.S. is connected to
governments run by dictators who say they are Muslims but who are profoundly
anti-Islam, De Martino said. Thats not democracy, because
they have to rely on military force to stay in power, yet these governments
loudly proclaim their pro-American stance, he said.
ýIn that vein, Appleby said, critics point to the roughly
$3 billion being funneled by the United States to Egypt each year to enable
President Hosni Mubarak to fight Islamic critics in ways that democratic
nations would find intolerable: closing opposition newspapers and political
parties and jailing opponents.
I have to say that this is not total insanity being
spewed, Appleby said of critics views. There are legitimate
issues here.
Westoxication
The third factor in Applebys analysis is what one Islamic
writer has called Westoxication -- what some conservative Muslims
see as the morally corrosive impact of contemporary Western culture.
There is a general association between the West and things
like pornography, sexual promiscuity, alcohol and drugs, Appleby said.
The hardcore Islamists discipline themselves in extraordinary ways to
compensate. It accounts for not just suicide bombings, but also the asceticism
and commitment that makes them willing to give their lives over to the
cause.
Many Muslims are both attracted by and wary of American culture,
Appleby said.
Its not an accident that the most popular show on
Iranian TV before the revolution was Dallas, he said.
Theres a real ambivalence.
Madigan said another widely held, if vaguely articulated,
anti-Western instinct is a sense of frustration about how the Arab
world lost its dominion.
There is a memory of glorious days when they ruled the
world, from India to Spain, Madigan said. Islamists look back on a
time when justice and right prevailed and state power was used to enforce the
good.
In very general terms, Madigan says, there is resentment of the
West for having eclipsed the Arab world and Islam.
One point upon which experts agree is that there is nothing unique
to Islamic theology that promotes an anti-Western, or pro-violence,
outlook.
If one wants to find them, of course, there are verses in the
Quran that seem to promote a militaristic spirit. Slay the pagans
wherever you find them is one. O Prophet, make war on the
unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them
their home
shall be Hell is another.
Yet Madigan says the Quran, like all scriptural texts, does not
come with an owners manual. It can be interpreted in peaceful or
bellicose ways, depending on the interpreters inclinations.
We all have a worldview, and then we go to scripture looking
for support for that view, Madigan said.
Lacunza-Balda echoed the point.
I could build an entire theology on the basis of
Christs line about coming not to bring peace but the sword, he
said. I have heard such theologies about fighting Muslims from people who
consider themselves fantastic Christians. That doesnt mean its the
only way to read the Bible.
Its the same thing, experts say, with distant historical
memories about a lost Muslim empire. These became fodder for anti-American
sentiment only when recent events encouraged some radicals to use them that
way.
Lacunza-Balda says the turning point in Islamic-American relations
came in the 1970s with American support for the Shah in Iran and his hated
Savak secret police, and the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and the Arab
states, with the consequent occupation of Palestinian lands. Out of those
events, the United States became the enemy to fight, he said.
Where do we go?
The sense of America as a global bully is hardly confined to
Islamic public opinion. Americas wider PR problem in the global community
goes back at least to the Reagan administration, accused of defying the
International Court of Justice and basic principles of international law
through its attacks against Nicaragua. The invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the
invasion of Panama in 1989 seemed to underscore American contempt for
international norms, as did later bombings of Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan and
Serbia.
Other factors include U.S. withholding of dues to the United
Nations; refusal to sign treaties banning land mines, establishing an
international criminal court, renouncing child soldiers, and establishing a
comprehensive nuclear test ban; opposition to cheaper generic AIDS drugs; and
resistance to crackdowns on international havens for tax avoidance by the
super-wealthy.
Such moves have been unpopular in many quarters. One Serb
commentator, reacting to the Sept. 11 bombings, told the Los Angeles
Times: Every stick has two ends, and if you are beating others, you
should expect a boomerang effect.
Yet given that an American military strike is likely to fall on an
Islamic target, one has to ask above all else what the consequences might be in
the Islamic world.
If the target is Osama bin Ladens organization or the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and if the U.S. can offer convincing proof of
their culpability, experts say a quick and limited intervention could be
politically acceptable.
Im serious when I say that no Muslim I know is happy
with whats happening in Afghanistan, Sammak said. The Taliban
are in the Middle Ages, and it has nothing to do with Islam.
Sammak said his reading of Arab politics is that few people would
weep for the fate of the Taliban or bin Laden if they are responsible for the
attacks. De Martino struck a similar note. Most Muslims loathe the
Taliban because it is giving Islam precisely the negative image that its
enemies in the West want it to have.
Yet other experts said a wider war, or an assault carried out in
the absence of convincing evidence, would inflame existing anti-American
feeling.
If the retaliation is messy, if the world has not been
persuaded that these are the right guys, if the means are clumsy and
indiscriminate and lead to substantial collateral damage, Hudson said,
then you will see an enormous wave of new hostility and bitterness
against the United States. It will increase the pool of recruits for the Osama
bin Laden organizations of the region.
Madigan said he remains strangely optimistic.
As horrible as it has been, there seems a realization that
what happened is the end result of the failure of the United States to support
a just solution to the Palestinian question. A lot of people are connecting the
dots.
He is sensitive to the argument that a change in U.S. policy might
create the impression that the terrorists got what they wanted. But does
that mean you dont do the right thing because you dont want to cave
in? Madigan said. Where does that logic lead?
Not everyone will agree about what the right thing in
the Middle East is. But there is likely to be a growing consensus that America
has to rethink not just its anti-terrorism measures but its policy choices.
Journalist Robert Fisk, commenting on Palestinians reactions
to the attack, labeled it the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed
and humiliated people.
Fisk wrote, This is not the war of democracy vs. terror that
the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about
American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes, and U.S. helicopters firing
missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996, and American shells crashing into a
village called Qana, and about a Lebanese militia -- paid and uniformed by
Americas Israeli ally -- hacking and raping and murdering their way
through refugee camps.
His analysis is one-sided. Many complaints, ancient and recent,
cut in the other direction. Yet Fisk holds up the lens through which the
burning towers of the World Trade Center are seen by many in the Islamic
world.
It may be difficult in the short run for Americans to think in
these terms, to move from grief to geopolitics. What could some political
thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?
one bewildered New Yorker asked on CNN the day after the attacks.
This, though understandable, is also a shortsighted, response.
The greatest challenge now facing the United States may not be
summoning the capacity to prosecute a war against terrorism. It may be whether
we can set aside our hurt long enough to reflect before we react.
John L. Allen is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
Related Web sites |
Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
http://www.ccasonline.org/
The Joan B. Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies http://www.nd.edu/~krocinst/ |
National Catholic Reporter, September 28,
2001
|