As long time readers of this blog know I have written a number of posts about "Moderate Muslims." I have maintained that for all the problems we have had in Iraq, and however misguided and poorly executed our venture there has proven to be, the invasion of Iraq was the last best chance for avoiding the devolution of international affairs into a state of civilizational clash, where the Muslim world became implacably opposed to the West and modernity. The jury is still out on he long term success of the mission but the portents are inauspicious.
Societies under pressure tend to regress. Regressed societies tend to identify externalized enemies and enter into a dynamic spiral whereby the external embodiment of threat is treated as the enemy, which evokes/provokes demonization from the other side, and before long both camps have devolved into an "US against Them" structure from which it is extraordinarily hard to emerge without significant violence. The invasion of Iraq could have broken the positive feedback loop between Islam and the West (and may yet, if the ideal outcome is ever attained of a relatively pluralistic and relatively free and benign democracy.) Everyday that passes without a decent resolution in Iraq makes the outcome the invasion was meant to obviate more likely.
Last weekend, Ali Eteraz, who by any definition is a "Moderate Muslim" wrote an impassioned piece in which he suggested that Barack Obama has been squandering a unique opportunity:
‘Muslim’ Is Not a Smear [Updated]
Every time people that Obama is a Muslim [sic], he and his people label it a smear. Before a Jewish group in Cleveland he analogized it to getting swift-boated. He has gone to great lengths to minimize the religiosity of the Muslims he has encountered in his life as if the fact that his father was agnostic will somehow dull the underlying prejudice that Americans have against Muslims. I have a message for Senator Obama.
Dear Senator Obama: there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim. It is not a smear. It is not akin to swift-boating. There is nothing nefarious about it. There are millions of Muslims in America, contributing to its welfare just as you and the other presidential candidates aspire to do.
When people say that you are a Muslim, I don’t want to hear you or your people say that you are being smeared. It is, I repeat, not a smear to be a Muslim. Instead, I want you to say that your opponents are lying, since, after all, you are a Christian. In fact, your response should be: “I am not a Muslim, nor would it matter if I were.” The second half of that statement is crucial.
Unfortunately for Ali, "Muslim" and "Islam" are inexorably attaining the status of "smear" in the West. Recognizing why this should be so also suggests why this process will be so difficult to reverse. There are a number of intersecting and reinforcing processes which are working to demonize the Muslim world in the West, and the West in the Muslim world.
First and foremost, the West needs Arab oil. This creates an increasingly imbalanced relationship based on need and supplication. The buyers resent the sellers while the sellers denigrate the supplicants. As has happened traditionally with religions, the accrual of great wealth by Muslims has emboldened those who believe that great wealth signifies the correctness of their ideology/religion.
At the same time, despite all their new found wealth, the Arab nations are almost universally failed societies. They treat half of their people as second class citizens and treat minorities as having no value at all. Arab nations are notoriously intolerant of non-Muslims and in most nominally Islamic states, the penalty for apostasy remains death. Within expatriate communities in the West, especially where they have been poorly assimilated and have failed to fully incorporate the Western values of hard work and secularism, their intolerance has become markedly intensified in almost direct proportion to the efforts of Western elites to appease them.
The West tolerates and in fact encourages diverse political views. Within the Muslim world, and more specifically within the Arab world, there is minimal divergence of opinion tolerated. A brief vignette from Barry Rubin is instructive:
One of the things least understood by people in the West is the framework--or should I say straitjacket?--of the dominant ideology in the Arabic-speaking world in shaping thought, speech, and political alternatives. This shows up in the smallest of exchanges. But atoms, too, are very tiny yet make up all the wide variety of things in the world.
Call it AIDS (Arab Ideological Doctrine Syndrome), a disease that doesn't just threaten the Middle East, it's been a plague since the 1950s with few signs of a let-up. Here's a little example that illustrates the big picture. On February 25, Lebanese cabinet minister Marwan Hamada gave an interview to Press TV. It is a commonplace for supporters of Lebanon's government to be accused of being Western agents, an implication often repeated in the Western media referring to it as "pro-U.S."
Claiming that anyone who doesn't want to go to war with America or Israel, or opposes radical forces, or who doesn't want a radical Arab nationalist or Islamist state is an enemy agent is a common weapon used to weaken non-extremist forces. While in the West, the label "moderate" is a compliment (the "moderate" Palestinian Authority; "moderate" states); in the Arab world it is an insult, an imputation of treason.
Angered at being accused of being a Western spy (a claim often made by Hizballah toward its opponents), Hamada replied that if anyone was a spy it was Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah who is "a spy for Iran. I am not a spy for anybody."
The interviewer responded sarcastically and Hamada continued:
"I defend my country. I defend my independence, I defend my democracy, I defend my integrity, and I will not accept anybody impeding on it--even if he believes he's a saint."
What Hamada is saying is that he is a Lebanese patriot. And he does what a patriot does: fights so that Lebanon is independent of Iranian-Syrian control; so that Hizballah does not impose an Islamist state on Lebanon; so that Lebanon's interests don't suffer by being dragged into an unnecessary, damaging, unwinnable war with Israel.
Anywhere else in the world this would be a winning argument. A man who strives for his country's interests is a patriot; one who, like Nasrallah, is funded by one state seeking to take over his country (Iran) and who champions the interests of a country which did run and looted his country for decades (Syria) is a hero. Nasrallah, after all, is the official representative in Lebanon of Iran's supreme guide; Hamada represents a coalition of Lebanon's majority, Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druze.
But this is not how it works in the Middle East. Thus, to act as a Lebanese patriot is perceived as being a traitor, to Arabism, Islam, and ultimately to Lebanon itself. Like any Iraqi who rejoices in Saddam Hussein's downfall or any Palestinian really ready to make permanent peace in order to get a state, in the kingdom of the ideologically blinded, the one-eyed man is king. It is the upside-down world of the poet John Milton's Satan who said, "Evil be my good."
Thus, in Hamada's case, the interviewer retorted (or should I say "snorted"):
A spy for Iran does not offer his son to sacrifice and spill his blood on the soil of Lebanon, for the sake of Lebanon. If he was a spy for Iran, he wouldn't go and fight the Israelis since 1982."
A perfectly reasonable case can be made that the description of Islam, the Arab world, Muslims, et al, as intolerant and ideologically blinded by "Arab Ideological Doctrine Syndrome" is unfair, lacking in nuance, and inaccurate, yet the fact that few can offer convincing evidence from either the Arab or Western Media to dispute such a charge is instructive. Whether you impute bias, laziness, or incompetence, the Western Media consistently downplay the most extreme statements from Muslim spokesmen and almost completely ignore statements from true Moderates, ie those who do not support "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." At the same time, the Arabic Media treats those who support true peace ad accommodation with the West as dangerous apostates (and I mean that not only religiously but politically as well.)
The upshot is that every time there is an atrocity and the Western Media and governments omit the nationality of the perpetrators, almost everyone is now primed to suspect that the outrage was committed by Muslims. By acting as if one cannot criticize Muslims for fear of being labeled Islamophobic, the default position becomes the assumption that all Muslims are as hypersensitive and enraged as those who burn the Danish flag and threaten to behead cartoonists for the terrible "crime" of poking fun at the terrorists who use Islam as their justification for mass murder.
Sadly, Islamic governments have used the religion to justify all their excesses and have leveraged the worst aspects of the religion to externalize their problems. The constant flow of depictions of Americans and Jews oppressing Muslims around the world has been a significant source of Islamic government legitimacy, rather than what we in the West would expect, ie, that legitimacy comes from addressing the needs of the citizenry to have the right to "life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness."
The single most powerful contributor to the evolving Manichean divide between Islam and the West is the monolithic depiction of Islam in the West and in the Muslim world. Too many Islamic societies are dysfunctional and trapped in a developmentally delayed tribal orientation. In a tribe, it is the tribe, right or wrong, against everyone else. The largest tribal affiliation in the Muslim world is to the Islamic Ummah. You may hate your brother or your cousin or the next tribe or sect, but will always ally with him against the outsider. The last few years have show us in unmistakable terms that Sunni and Shia radicals may hate each other, but they hate us more and are willing to put aside their animus for the purpose of killing "the Other."
Ultimately, and with apologies to Ali, the West cannot remove the taint from "Muslim;" only Muslims can do that and in their diffidence and reluctance to delegitimize the worst among them, they end up stained with the blood of all the innocents killed in their name. It is not fair but it is how human psychology, and the world, works.
[I anticipate being misunderstood in this post by those who do not read it carefully. I am not advocating that we demonize all Muslims with "the blood of all the innocents killed in their name", I am pointing out that such demonization is inevitable. Further, such demonization can only be prevented or reversed by attaining a critical mass of Muslims, including government spokesmen, going on the record opposing the use of terror as a weapon to advance political goals. When the Arab League announces, in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, that murdering Jewish children is not an acceptable tactic and that there will be no further funding for Hamas and Hezbollah as long as they support such acts, the world will have taken a major step forward toward avoiding the Clash of Civilizations on offer. The fact is that most who read this will either scoff at the implausibilty of such a development or offer convoluted rationalizations why such developments cannot be expected as long as Israel oppresses the Palestinians. And that is all you need to know about how little the chances are that the passions in the Middle East which have led to 'Muslim' as a smear, will abate any time soon.]
Recent Comments