[The Montana Professor 15.1, Fall 2004 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
Henry Gonshak. Photo by Hayden Ausland.
In the first part of this article, published in the Spring 2004 issue of The Montana Professor, I related the dismay I felt, as a liberal academic, over how so many of my liberal colleagues had rationalized (or, in some cases, actually defended) the terrorism on 9/11 as an understandable response to U.S. foreign policy in the developing world, while opposing military retaliation for the worst attack ever on American soil. I also expressed my pained bewilderment that so few of my fellow liberals shared the sense of renewed patriotism and national solidarity I (like most Americans) experienced so strongly in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The article went on to fault the left for focusing almost exclusively on America's misdeeds in the Middle East, rather than balancing such attacks with equal criticism of the despotism of Arab regimes, even though this despotism (especially against women) clashes directly with the cherished liberal principle of human equality.
In this second installment, I will discuss in much greater detail why I find the reaction of much of the Euro-American left to America's war on terrorism (and also to Israel's conflict with the Palestinians) so dissatisfying. I will support my position by examining influential left-wing texts that deny any legitimacy to the U.S. war on terror, such as Noam Chomsky's 9/11 and Ziauddin Sardar and Meryll Wyn Davies's Why Do People Hate America? In my conclusion, I will sketch out what might be a better liberal response to the danger posed by Islamic terrorism than what is currently being offered by the left. In short, the essay is a liberal self-critique, based on the belief that the 9/11 attacks demand a reassessment of some traditional liberal foreign policies.
While so far few liberals have attempted such a critique, one exception is Paul Berman in his recent book Terror and Liberalism. But Terror and Liberalism is disappointing--a short but rambling work which exhibits some shocking lapses in scholarly rigor. For example, Berman writes at length about the influential radical Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb, in particular Qutb's 30-volume magnum opus, In the Shade of the Qur'an. However, admitting the difficulty of finding copies of Qutb's major work in English translation, Berman notes in passing that "trolling the Islamic bookstores of Brooklyn, I have come across volumes 1, 4 and 30" (64). How, though, can Berman fairly assess Qutb's opus when, out of thirty volumes, he has only read the three he happened to stumble across? Even worse is Berman's failure to re-evaluate substantively liberal political theory in light of 9/11. The best he can manage on this score is simply to insist that "a war against terror...can be fought even by people who cannot abide George W. Bush" (208).
Let me stress: my criticisms of the left do not imply an endorsement of Bush's handling of Iraq. I opposed the invasion, because I doubted that Saddam posed an imminent threat to American national security, and feared that involvement in Iraq would distract the U.S. from the more urgent task of combating al-Qaeda and other transnational Islamic terrorists. However, now that we are in Iraq, I believe we have no choice but to stay the course by trying to maintain a discreet but viable presence for as long as necessary. How could America liberate Iraq from tyranny only to let it collapse into chaos?
Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist turned radical polemicist and activist, is a left-wing icon. Chomsky's slim volume, 9/11, is a collection of interviews (most conducted by European journalists) that were held in the days and weeks immediately following September 11. Published by the obscure Seven Stories Press, and largely ignored by mainstream book reviewers, 9/11 nonetheless landed on The New York Times bestseller list.
The thesis of 9/11 is implied by the photograph on the back-cover. In the foreground are two helmeted American soldiers in green fatigues (seen from behind, and so faceless) turned toward a more distant trio of New York City cops--the entire group dwarfed by an imposing marble façade, atop which is inscribed the word "Manhattan." Above the façade's arch hangs a huge American flag. No doubt the photo was snapped soon after the World Trade Center attack, when military and law enforcement personnel were naturally congregating in lower Manhattan. But framed in this way and linked with Chomsky's text, the photo makes New York (and, by extension, America) look like a police state.
Indeed, the thrust of 9/11 is that the real "terrorists" in the world today are not al-Qaeda or Hezbollah or Hamas but rather the United States--a "terrorist state" that has been threatening the rest of the world for centuries (though Chomsky focuses mostly on recent American history). To his credit, Chomsky does point out darker aspects of U.S. foreign policy that have received too little attention, such as our fondness during the Cold War for backing friendly right-wing despots in Latin America. Generally, though, Chomsky makes his case for American "state terrorism" by casting every U.S. action abroad in the worst possible light--twisting or simply ignoring conflicting evidence. Too often, the term "anti-Americanism" is wielded as a club by conservatives to silence any critic of American foreign policy. But in Chomsky's case the shoe fits.
Chomsky explains the 9/11 attacks as the result of what others have called "blowback," an understandable, perhaps inevitable act of retaliation carried out by the victims of American "state terrorism" in the developing world. "During the past several hundred years," he tells one interviewer, "the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population...conquered half of Mexico...and, in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. This is a dramatic change" (60).
Like most grandiose claims, Chomsky's works best on the level of sweeping generalization, which is where it remains. Certainly, America (like most world powers through history) has been responsible for mistreatment of indigenous minorities and peoples abroad. Still, it is hard to imagine that Mohammed Atta, as he steered that American Airlines jet into the Twin Towers, felt he was striking a blow on behalf of the Sioux massacred at Wounded Knee, or the Mexicans deprived of their land by rapacious Texans. And when Chomsky depicts 9/11 as an act of self-defense by the Third World's U.S.-plagued masses, he ignores the fact that the attack was masterminded by a Saudi billionaire who enlisted mostly middle and upper-class henchmen. Nor does Chomsky have any explanation for why anti-American terrorism has erupted almost exclusively in the Muslim world. Is it because he believes U.S. imperialists have behaved better toward Africans and Asians? Most importantly, just what guilt does Chomsky believe the stockbroker or secretary or fireman killed on 9/11 bears for our government's foreign policies? Even if we assume that Americans share collective responsibility for the history of U.S. imperialism, what guilt was borne by the 548 victims of the Trade Center attack who were foreign nationals? Reading 9/11, it is easy to forget that the attack was directed against a civilian target.
Turning to the Afghan invasion, Chomsky criticizes even U.S. actions that appear beyond reproach. For example, he scoffs at the military's decision to provide food to starving Afghans, dismissing the "much-heralded U.S. air drop" as merely "a propaganda tool...exploiting humanitarian aid for cynical...purposes" (62). Although the food drop was partly an act of public relations, I doubt many hungry Afghans fed by American supplies felt irate at being used as "propaganda tools." It is no mean feat to criticize a country for feeding the people it's attacking. How many past invading armies have done the same?
Chomsky's rhetorical style in 9/11 is also revealing. When, for example, he criticizes NATO's invasion of Kosovo, he states that "whether the Kosovo intervention indeed was 'humanitarian'...is a matter of fact: passionate declaration does not suffice" (74). In other words, Chomsky considers his view that Kosovo was not a humanitarian campaign a "fact," no matter how "passionately" some claim otherwise. No deconstructionist, Chomsky not only believes that facts are facts; he believes that his opinions are facts, too.
A few sentences later, declaring that America's "official government reasons" for entering Kosova were "quite different" from humanitarian concerns, Chomsky adds "but that's a separate matter, which I've written about in some detail elsewhere" (74). This technique is employed throughout the book: Chomsky makes a controversial claim and then, rather than supporting or even explaining it, he directs the reader to some unidentified writing of his where the claim is presumably backed up. But how many readers, among the millions who purchased 9/11, actually bothered to track down all Chomsky's unidentified writings? How many, instead, simply accepted his unsupported and debatable assertions on faith?
When Chomsky does attempt balance, the tokenism is often absurdly transparent. For instance, Michael Albert (in one of many powder-puff questions lobbed by the book's consistently fawning interviewers) asks if Chomsky thinks that, post-9/11, "social activists...should...curb our enthusiasms, as some have claimed, or is this, instead, a time for renewed and enlarged efforts?" Chomsky replies:
It depends what these activists are trying to achieve. If their goal is to escalate further the cycle of violence and to increase the likelihood of further atrocities like that of September 11...then they should certainly curb their analysis and criticisms, refuse to think, and cut back their involvement in...very serious issues.... The same advice is warranted if they want to help the most reactionary...elements in the political-economic power system to implement plans that will be of great harm to the general population here and in much of the world, and may even threaten human survival. If, on the contrary, the goal of social activists is to...advance hopes for freedom, human rights, and democracy, then they should follow the opposite course. (64)
One can picture Albert, in response, scratching his head and musing, "Hmm, let's see, as an activist I can either 'advance hopes for freedom, human rights and democracy,' or I can directly contribute to the extermination of the human race. Let me think it over, Noam."
In short, Chomsky's politics have a deeply authoritarian cast. This is not a man who sees the world as a complicated place where many differing points-of-view may have validity. As noted earlier, Chomsky is not always wrong. American foreign policy in the Middle East (in particular our history of propping up repressive but pro-Western Arab regimes) probably did play a role in fomenting Islamic terrorism. But because Chomsky harbors such a fanatically anti-American agenda and refuses to tolerate even reasonable disagreements, it is impossible to know whether to believe him or not.
In Liberalism and Terror, Paul Berman draws a connection between Chomsky's political and linguistic ideas:
A single thought underlies Chomsky's linguistic theory.... Man's nature can be calculated according to a very small number of factors, which can be analyzed rationally. No shadow of the mysterious falls across the nature of man.... The fundamentals of language, in Chomsky's theory, are a genetic fact.... Chomsky looks at language and at international affairs in the same light. He sees a possibility of accounting for every last quirk of human behavior by invoking a tiny number of factors.... That was why, when the 9/11 attacks took place, he did not need to collect his thoughts.... The notion that, in large parts of the world, a mass movement of radical Islamists had arisen, devoted to mad hatreds and conspiracy theories...was, from Chomsky's perspective, not even worth discussing. (65)
While Berman may misrepresent Chomsky's linguistic theories (which have made an important contribution to the field), he is surely right about Chomsky's politics. 9/11 appeals to the kind of reader who wishes--without bothering with a lot of tedious thinking and research--to style himself a rebel who has seen through the media's "lies" and discovered "what's really happening." Such readers are basically left-wing versions of Rush Limbaugh's "ditto heads." It is bad enough that so many ordinary Americans flocked to buy 9/11, but that so many academics did, too, is even more disturbing.
Noam Chomsky's laudatory blurb ("contains valuable insight") adorns the cover of Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies's Why Do People Hate America? (which, like 9/11, was an international best-seller). Chomsky's approval is unsurprising, since these two British authors, while tackling some different issues, fully share Chomsky's anti-Americanism. Basically, the answer Sardar and Davies give to the question posed in the book's title is...because they should./1/
The extremism fueling Sardar and Davies's anti-Americanism is revealed through their love of hyperbolic comparisons. In Part I of this article, I discussed Samuel Huntington's influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Here is Sardar and Davies's commentary on Huntington's thesis that the West and Islam are locked in a civilizational clash: "[Although Huntington's view] is...a long way from Mein Kampf...a Muslim browser in the store who came across this statement might be forgiven for feeling a distinct chill in the air" (50). Quick, someone tell Harvard there is another Adolph Hitler teaching in its Government Department!
Unlike Chomsky, who focuses exclusively on U.S. policies, Sardar and Davies dwell extensively on the alleged evils wreaked by the globalization of American popular culture. The authors are especially apoplectic over the ubiquity of the American hamburger. In the chapter "American Hamburgers and Other Viruses," they assert that "the most pervasive form of cultural terrorism [is] McDonaldization" (53). No doubt most people in the developing word would be better off (both physically and emotionally) dining on their native cuisines than gulping down a greasy Big Mac. But the authors fail to draw any distinction between, say, building a McDonalds in Addis Ababa (employing local workers, who are probably thrilled to have the jobs), and Belgian King Leopold enslaving the Congolese in order to fill his royal coffers with looted ivory.
Of course, by "McDonaldization" the authors mean much more than the global scourge of the Golden Arches. "The 'biological terrorism' of the...hamburger culture," they intone, "has reduced the cultural geography of the world to a totalising American space, killing the languages, architecture, film industries, television programming, music and art of the developing world" (132). Missing from this doomsday vision of American "cultural terrorism" engulfing the globe is any sense of how multicultural America actually is, how much our culture has been shaped by immigrants and indigenous minority cultures. One obvious example is the fact that almost all America's native musical forms are African-American in origin: jazz, blues, gospel, rock and roll, disco, rap, hip-hop. Similarly, Asians, Hispanics, Jews and women have all influenced American pop culture, as have gays. (Think "Queer Eye on the Straight Guy.") In the 21st century, as America grows steadily less white and Christian, the multiculturalization of American popular culture will only increase.
Nor do Sardar and Davies consider how local cultures alter Western imports to fit native traditions. For example, at the McDonalds in Manilla, you can purchase a "Rice McDo," which consists of a seaweed patty between two rice cakes. In short, by seeing globalization as unidirectional, simply spreading from America across the world, the authors ignore how often globalization also works the other way around.
Toward the end of Why Do People Hate America? Sardar and Davies abruptly admit that "hating America often come[s] wrapped in equal amounts of love" (59). Now that is true: the rest of the world both hates and loves America, fears our imperialism yet admires our democratic values, sees us a modern version of Sodom yet is dying to get a green card and move to LA. But after raising this genuine insight, the authors drop it like a hot potato, as if terrified that such nuances would blunt the edge of their polemic. In the very next paragraph, they are back to their old absolutism, declaring that "there are hardly any universals left in our postmodern times, but loathing for America is about as close as we can get to a universal sentiment" (58).
Anti-Americanism, by the conservative French intellectual Jean-Francois Revel, contains some cogent rebuttals to the standard anti-globalization arguments raised in Why Do People Hate America. For example, while Sardar and Davies, with their trademark subtlety, call the fact that an increasing number of people around the world speak English a "linguistic holocaust," Revel points out that English, by becoming a global lingua franca, has greatly facilitated international communication. Most provocatively, Revel argues that, contrary to left-wing claims, globalization actually benefits the developing world, which "is asking for...freer access to the world's best markets for their products.... In other words, they want more globalization, not less" (35). His claim that "when the world's average per capita income rises, incomes in the poorest countries rise by the same proportion" ignores the extent to which Third World debt stifles economic growth (50). But Revel's central point rings true: "barriers are what diminish and sterilize cultures, whereas commingling is what fructifies and inspires them" (113). Whether advocated by the Euro-American left or radical Islamists, any ideologies urging those in the developing world to reject modernity and flee into the past doom progress in the region.
Along with anti-Americanism and anti-globalization, another stance that is de rigueur for Western leftists is anti-Zionism--categorical condemnation of Israel, along with equally unqualified support for the Palestinians. In The Return of Anti-Semitism, Gabriel Schoenfeld argues that much Israel-bashing, often extended to attacks on Diaspora Jewry, really represents the return of one of humanity's oldest and most pernicious prejudices in a new "acceptable" form.
Many leftists argue that U.S. support for Israel inspired the 9/11 attacks by inciting justifiable anti-American rage in the Islamic world. But this argument ignores how hard America has worked to further the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. For example, at the 2000 Camp David Accords, President Clinton actively backed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer to Yasser Arafat of a Palestinian state in almost all the West Bank and Gaza, with a Palestinian capitol in East Jerusalem--an offer Arafat rejected without even making a counterproposal to continue the negotiating process. As for September 11, Revel observes that the attack "was conceived...well before...Ariel Sharon's coming to power.... [As well], the first terrorist attack against the World Trade Center [in 1993] occurred just as the peace process envisioning the creation of a Palestinian state had begun in Oslo" (75).
Regarding the Iraq invasion, many on the left claim that Bush's Jewish advisors (including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle) urged the president to topple Saddam in order to help Israel dominate the Middle East. Writing in The Nation, Jason Vest alleged that "American Zionists [using] Zionist dollars [who see] no difference between U.S. and Israeli national...interests [have sent] dozens of their members...to powerful government posts in order to wage a relentless campaign for war with Iraq" (Schoenfeld 125). (This conspiracy theory also has been alleged by some paleoconservatives, such as Pat Buchanan.)
The charge that Jews harbor "dual loyalties"--feigning allegiance to host countries while secretly conspiring with "international Jewry"--is an age-old anti-Semitic myth found most notoriously in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In an intriguing historical aside, Schoenfeld notes that American Jews were also blamed for trying to manipulate the U.S. into entering WWI. In this conspiracy theory (pay attention, please), Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution because they thought the overthrow of the Tsar would empower Germany, which, in turn, would force America to enter the war on the Allied side. In its latest version, the belief that American Jews pushed the U.S. into Iraq in order to aid Israel overlooks the fact that all the Jewish Bush advisors cited are second-tier officials. (Perle no longer even holds an official post in the Bush administration.) Of course, the top Bush appointees who backed the Iraq invasion--Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice--are all (like Bush himself) Christians. At most, Bush may have felt that helping a close ally like Israel by toppling Saddam (who was paying the equivalent of $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers) was an added reason to invade.
According to Schoenfeld, much venomous Israel-bashing often comes from prominent European and American intellectuals. For example, writing in Spain's leading newspaper, El Pais, the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago avowed:
Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of Greater Israel...contaminated by the monstrous and rooted "certitude" that there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathological exclusivist racism are justified...trained in the idea that any suffering which has been inflicted...on everyone else...will always be inferior to what they themselves suffered in the Holocaust...Jews in and outside Israel want us to renounce the most elemental critical judgement and...transform ourselves into a docile echo of their will. (Schoenfeld 99)
While it is a universally accepted principle that every people has a right to self-determination, when the Jews (taught by the Holocaust the perils of statelessness) wish to found a homeland, Saramago accuses them of "pathological exclusivist racism." The Portugese writer appears to forget that it was European anti-Semitism which created the need for the establishment of Israel in the first place by annihilating European Jewry. Or perhaps he does not quite forget: one wonders if Saramago's fury at Jews who remind Gentiles of the Holocaust is actually driven by a craving to shed once and for all European guilt over the genocide by excoriating the Jewish state. After all, if contemporary Jews are so awful, why should anyone feel too concerned about the misfortunes of their ancestors at the hands of Europeans? Moreover, when the novelist claims that Jews are "contaminated by the monstrous...'certitude' [that] there exists a people chosen by God," he clearly condemns Judaism itself. If this is not anti-Semitism posing as anti-Zionism, what is?
As with almost all occupations, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is undeniably harsh. But left-wing attacks against Israeli brutality in the West Bank and Gaza are rarely balanced by indictments of the comparable (indeed often far worse) atrocities perpetrated by Arab regimes. In The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis cites a telling example of this double-standard. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli Defense Forces under the command of Ariel Sharon tacitly permitted a Lebanese Christian militia allied with Israel to massacre between 700 and 800 Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila--an act of revenge for the assassination of the Lebanese Christian president, Bashir Gemayel. Although it should have done more, the Israeli Knesset did conduct a formal inquiry into the atrocity, resulting in the demand for Sharon's resignation. Despite this governmental crackdown, the massacres, Lewis reports, "evoked powerful and widespread condemnation of Israel which continues to this day" (109). In part due to Sharon's culpability for Sabra and Shatila, the current Israeli prime minister is especially reviled by Western leftists, who at rallies chant such slogans as "Sharon and Hitler are the same. Only difference is the name" (Schoenfeld 129).
However, Lewis points out that these same leftists have been largely silent about another barbarity which occurred only a few months before Sabra and Shatila--namely, the massacre in the Syrian city of Hama. In response to the city's alleged radical Muslim agitation, Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad sent in his military, which used tanks, artillery, and bombers to reduce Hama to rubble. According to Amnesty International, between 10,000 and 25,000 of the city's residents were killed. Not only has the Syrian government never admitted blame for the slaughter, but today at the entrance to Hama stands a huge statue of a smiling President Asad, arms outstretched in welcome. Why hasn't the Euro-American left decried the Hama massacre as fervently as it has the one in Sabra and Shatila? Why do leftists compare Sharon to Hitler but not the late Asad, who actually bears a closer resemblance to the Fuhrer? Does the left only care about Arab victims when they are killed by Israelis, not other Arabs?
It is hard to imagine such questions ever have occurred to the group of left-wing faculty members at American universities (including several Ivy League schools) who recently launched a "Divest from Israel" petition drive, demanding that their institutions sell off investments in companies that do business with Israel, because of, the petition reads, "the appalling record of human-rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government" (Schoenfeld 122). Hundreds of American academics have signed, even though, as Schoenfeld points out, "there are...dozens...of countries around the world whose human rights records are worse than Israel's by several orders of magnitude...[among them] Saudi Arabia and...China...that host major corporations whose stocks are held [by] American universities." Schoenfeld concludes: "To target the Jewish state as if it were somehow the most flagrant human rights transgressor in the world...is...unadorned bigotry" (123). Although more temperately, Harvard's current president, Lawrence Summers, agrees, stating in response to Harvard's own divestment campaign that "serious and thoughtful people [on this campus] are advocating and taking actions which are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent" (123).
On Canadian and European campuses, Israel-bashing by faculty and students is even more vitriolic. When, for example, Israeli Finance Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, was scheduled to speak at Montreal's McGill University (which hosts many Jewish students and teachers), student government radicals staged a riot which forced Netanyahu to cancel his appearance. In England, meanwhile, the Egyptian-born academic, Mona Baker, director of Manchester's Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, expelled from the board of a publication she edits two professors purely on the basis of their Israeli citizenship--even though one, a former director of Israel's chapter of Amnesty International, happens to be an outspoken critic of Israel's Palestinian policies. No other member of the journal's multinational board (some of whom hail from countries with truly barbarous regimes) was also dropped on the basis of citizenship.
Left-wing Israel-bashing is a phenomenon I have witnessed on my own campus. When, as part of my Montana Tech Holocaust course, I screened the film Europa, Europa, a local peace activist in attendance insisted during our subsequent discussion that we talk about how the Israelis treat the Palestinians just like the Nazis treated the Jews. Her parallel stunned me in its hyperbole and insensitivity to the actual victims of the Holocaust. I see the Israeli/Palestinian dispute as a battle between two long-persecuted peoples with equally valid claims to the same piece of land. How can the conflict possibly compare to Hitler's "Final Solution"? In truth, if the Israeli Defense Forces really were bent on exterminating the Palestinians, they would have done so long ago, given their total military superiority. But even though it is an indefensible analogy, anti-Zionists love comparing Israel to the Nazis, according to Paul Berman. When, in response to the latest intifada, the IDF stormed the West Bank town of Jenin, Palestinian claims of Israeli atrocities were later found to be fabrications by a UN commission. Nonetheless, when Berman typed in "Jenin" and "Auschwitz" on an Internet search service, he came up with 2,890 hits, and when he typed in "Jenin" and "Nazi" he came up with 8,100!
When does censure of Israel constitute outright anti-Semitism? Many Muslim diatribes against Israel are transparently anti-Semitic, with hoary, European-based anti-Semitic myths, that laid the foundation for the Holocaust, routinely invoked. Examples are legion: Mein Kampf is a best-seller in Arab countries; Egyptian state television produced a popular docudrama based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; editorials in the state-run Saudi press accuse Jews of ritually murdering Muslim babies and using their blood in Passover matzo; the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, told the delegates at a conference of Islamic nations that "the Jews rule the world by proxy"; polls show that roughly two-thirds of all Muslims believe that the 9/11 attacks were secretly masterminded by the Israeli Mossad; and on and on.
But with the Western left it is often less clear just when attacks on the Jewish state cross over into attacks on Jews and Judaism itself. Let me stress: I do not think any criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic. Certainly, there are good reasons to fault Ariel Sharon. While the prime minister had to retaliate against suicide bombers killing Israeli civilians, his iron-fist approach, by inflicting even more suffering on ordinary Palestinians, has only exacerbated the cycle of violence. However, measured criticism of Sharon's policies is worlds apart from calling him another Hitler, or comparing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. No, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but vicious, one-sided criticism surely is.
Moreover, no matter what injustices the Israeli government perpetrates, there is no excuse for hating all Jews and Judaism itself, for maintaining, as does Saramago, that the Jewish religion harbors a "pathological exclusivist racism." If you think that Sharon's building a security fence in the West Bank gives you the right to dislike your Jewish neighbor, then you are an anti-Semite.
I would also argue that today blanket anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, since such a stance denies Israel's right to exist. Admittedly, Anti-Zionism was not always anti-Semitic. When Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century, many European Jews opposed it on what seemed at the time to be reasonable grounds--secular Jews because they felt fully assimilated into their host countries, religious Jews because they believed the Jews should not return to the "promised land" until the arrival of the Messiah. And many Western non-Jews understandably feared that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably spark conflict with the Arab world. But today, with Israel over half-a-century old, anti-Zionism means, in practice, calling for the annihilation of the Jewish homeland. While a few contemporary Jews want Israel to vanish, the vast majority internationally are deeply committed to its survival.
But is it anti-Semitic, one might counter, to propose relocating Israel's Jews for their own good--since, this argument goes, Arabs will never accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst? This proposal has been made by, among others, the theologian Richard John Neuhaus, who contends that the "wish that Israel 'would cease to exist' is...not necessarily a wish to destroy the Jews, since one might at the same time hope that the minority of the world's Jews living in Israel would find a secure home elsewhere, notably in the U.S." (153). Schoenfeld responds:
It is impossible to conceive of the circumstances under which such outlandish scenarios might play themselves out.... In the 1930s and 1940s, Washington did its best to keep Jewish refugees from Nazism out.... We should confess...the likelier truth.... If Israel "would cease to exist," so, inevitably, would most of its Jews. [Such a wish] is, in effect, to wish for the mass extermination of [Israel's] Jews. (154)
It is easy to find the Israel-bashing of the Euro-American left puzzling as well as disturbing. After all, why would Western liberals reserve their most vicious attacks for the only democracy in the Middle East, the only country in the region with a free press and an impartial judiciary, the only one that enfranchises women and accepts open homosexuals, and that has proved willing to exchange for peace land won in a defensive war (even though Israel is smaller than Southwestern Montana)? And why would the left, which prides itself on its support for the oppressed, not back a Jewish state that arose out of the ashes of the Holocaust?
One answer is that the left's Israel-bashing is part and parcel of its America-bashing. Many Western leftists see Israel as does most of the Arab world--as an extension of American imperialism in the Middle East. In Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, Abraham Foxman (head of the Anti-Defamation League) writes, "Those who consider themselves as left-wing around the world, including in Europe and the United States, often lean toward the Palestinian side...because of their traditional antipathy to imperialism as practiced by the great Western powers, including the United States, [which] leads them to favor what they perceive as the Third World side in any international dispute" (31-32). But seeing Israel as merely an American colony in the Middle East ignores the deep religious and historical roots the Jews have in Palestine, traceable back over 2,000 years. There was an Israelite kingdom centuries before Islam even existed.
Another explanation is that the left's universalist ethos clashes with the way Jews perceive themselves as a group set apart by their special relationship with a Jewish God who bestowed a specific homeland upon his "chosen people." Indeed, Jewish particularism has been enraging Western liberals for some time. The Enlightenment thinker Voltaire, for example, tactfully called Jews the "most abominable people in the world," because he saw European Jews as stubborn tribalists, clinging to their religious "superstitions" rather than assimilating into the progressive, universalist culture allegedly embodied in the ideals of the French Revolution. Updating Voltaire, historian Tony Judt wrote in the March 2003 issue of The New York Review of Books that Zionism is an "anachronism in today's world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law" (Schoenfeld 149). Of course, in a typical double-standard, leftists who condemn Zionism as obsoletely nationalistic routinely support Palestinian nationalism.
Ironically enough, for centuries in Europe Jews were regularly condemned for not being nationalistic enough. Heeding the charges hurled by Voltaire and other Enlightenment liberals, 19th century European Jews launched their own secular Enlightenment movement (the Haskala) which similarly argued for a universalist European culture as an antidote to the strife roused by European nationalism. As a result, as Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, even though the non-nationalism of many European Jews enabled them to serve as financial and political brokers among European governments, the Jews were often attacked as rootless cosmopolitans with suspect loyalties to their host countries. Hitler offered the alleged threat posed by "International Jewry" to the "blood and soil" of German nationalism as a primary justification for the Nazi's anti-Semitic campaign. Denounced as non-nationalists at the start of the 20th century, as ultra-nationalists at the end--it seems there is nothing for which the Jews cannot be blamed.
In the same article, Judt proposes transforming all of what was formerly Palestine into a bi-national democratic state (a proposition often touted by the left). While such a proposal might initially look appealing, demographic realities (the Palestinians have a much higher birth-rate than do Israeli Jews) ensure that such a state would soon have a Palestinian majority and a steadily dwindling Jewish minority. And, given the corrupt, authoritarian and Israel-hating nature of the current Palestinian leadership, it is unlikely that this state would be truly democratic and respectful of Jewish minority rights.
According to Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, one-sided Israel-bashing also plagues the academic culture at many Middle Eastern Studies Centers, most of which were created in 1958 when Congress passed legislation establishing a host of federally-funded National Resource Centers on the Middle East. Editor of the Middle East Quarterly and a fellow at the conservative think-tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which published the book), Kramer maintains, more broadly, that Middle Eastern Studies Centers often sweepingly condemn the West while idealizing the Arab world.
Kramer largely blames the death of Middle Eastern Studies in America as a legitimate, unbiased scholarly discipline on the 1978 publication of one book: Orientalism by the late Columbia English Professor and Palestinian activist Edward Said. Orientalism surveys an array of mostly post-Enlightenment European writings about the Muslim world by scholars, novelists, poets, travel writers, politicians, and journalists. With an impartiality reminiscent of Noam Chomsky, Said concludes that "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric" (Kramer 28).
Orientalism drew on the then fledgling postmodernist theory that objectivity was a ruse promulgated by Western elites to enforce their dominance. By denying the possibility of scholarly objectivity, Said's book de-legitimized, in one stroke, the entire field of Euro-American Orientalist Studies, since any book about the Middle East written by a Westerner was, said Said, "tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact of Western domination over the East" (Kramer 29). Of course, if Orientalism was correct in claiming that scholarly detachment was a charade, then the choice for academics was between nefariously hiding or honestly admitting one's own political agenda. Here, then, was a sophisticated theoretical rationale for open, unapologetic partisanship in Middle Eastern Studies. Fortuitously appearing at the same time as '60s radicals had begun storming academe, Orientalism's academic influence was unhindered by the fact that, in Kramer's view, "Said...ignored the mass of evidence...that stood in the way of his polemical thrust [which] demonstrated that Western understanding and representation of...the Arabs and Islam had grown ever more...ambivalent, nuanced and diverse.... [Such] scholars, in particular, often took the lead in undermining anti-Oriental prejudices" (29).
Once the Eurocentric discipline of Orientalism had been razed, Kramer says, post-Orientalist professors believed "the truth would become self-evident: the Muslim world in general, and the Arabs in particular, were on an unstoppable victory march to revolution, liberation, and democracy" (61). When, instead, the Arab world remained sunk in despotism, misogyny, and economic stagnation, these scholars could not ask, unlike that model Orientalist Bernard Lewis, "What went wrong?" since the question implied an indictment both of the Arab world and of their own academic enterprise. If Kramer is right, it is unsurprising that so few Middle Eastern Studies scholars predicted the eruption of Islamic terrorism, since the phenomenon simply fell outside their strict paradigm of a burgeoning "civil society" in the Arab world.
Like Orientalism, Said's later writings on the Middle East focused largely on atrocities perpetrated by Westerners against Arabs. When it came to Arab rulers oppressing their own people, Said, like most Western leftists, routinely turned a blind eye. In, for example, a 1991 article in The London Review of Books, Said wrote that "the claim that Iraq gassed its own citizens has often been repeated. At best, this is uncertain" (Makiya 256). Said's assertion is remarkable not only because, by that time, Saddam's gassing of the Kurds had been amply documented, but also because Said was writing these words, in the Spring of 1991, during the dictator's genocidal assault on the Kurds (dubbed by Saddam the Anfal campaign) in which approximately 100,000 Kurds were killed.
Not surprisingly, Said's ceaseless attacks on Western imperialist aggression were well-received in the Arab world--by, among others, Islamic terrorists. In the 1980s, for example, the Beirut hostage-takers of Islamic Jihad gave copies of Said's Covering Islam to their Western captives, one of the few books the hostages were allowed to read. According to Kramer, the terrorists saw both Covering Islam and Orientalism as providing "proof of the innate hostility of the West toward the Muslims" (82). No, writers cannot be blamed for how some readers interpret their works, and Said did later express regret that his books inadvertently had provided fodder for Islamic terrorists. Still, why did Said not realize beforehand that his blanket indictment of the West as irredeemably racist toward Islam would strike Muslim fanatics as confirmation of their beliefs? If Orientalism and Covering Islam had balanced criticism of Western imperialism with censure of the many failures of the Muslim world, is it likely Islamic terrorists would have deemed the books required reading?
What effects have indictments like Ivory Towers on Sand had on America's Middle Eastern Studies Centers? According to a Washington Post article, "A 'Witch Hunt' on Campuses? Watchdog Groups are Targeting Scholars of Middle East Studies," many academics in the field claim that such books, along with similar attacks in right-wing journals and websites, have incited a "witch hunt" which threatens academic freedom--especially professorial freedom to criticize the U.S. war on terrorism and occupation of Iraq. As the most potentially serious threat, these professors cite the legislation Congress is now considering that would create a federal advisory board to ensure that government-funded academic programs such as Middle Eastern Studies Centers "reflect diverse perspectives and a full range of views." "It's the thin edge of the wedge," complains Professor Rashid Khalidi, first holder of the newly created Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia University. "The demand for 'balance,'" Khalidi contends, "could degenerate into a 'political correctness' test" (Washington Post Weekly, 22-28 February 2004, A15).
Since there is always a danger of xenophobia during wartime, academics in Middle Eastern Studies Centers have cause to worry that passage of this law could have a chilling effect on academic speech which challenges government policies (especially at a time when the US-Patriot Act already threatens civil liberties). On the other hand, if Kramer's depiction of contemporary Middle Eastern Studies Centers is accurate, then fair-minded government oversight to ensure that federally-funded programs cover a "diversity of views" (rather than simply bash the West) is desperately needed. Convinced, like Kramer, that Middle Eastern Studies Centers are often biased against Israel, several national Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Congress, have publicly supported the pending legislation.
Surely there is reason to fear that the holder of the Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia will honor its namesake by providing a skewed picture of conflicts in the region--especially between Israelis and Palestinians. The news that Rashid Khalidi is a former aide to Yasser Arafat is not comforting. Moreover, Columbia recently divulged that one of the donors helping fund the chair is the government of the United Arab Emirates--which, like most Arab states, is virulently anti-Israel.
The underlying reason why the left categorically rejects the U.S. war on terror, I believe, is that much contemporary left-wing thought is rooted in a cosmopolitan universalism which leads leftists to see themselves not as citizens of their own countries but as citizens of the world. As Samuel Huntington argues in his latest book, Who Are We?: The Challenge to America's National Identity, the contemporary left has become "denationalized."
In Of Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan attributes the current conflict between America and Europe to clashing world-views which Kagan explains by contrasting the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. Kant believed humanity was moving inexorably toward a "paradise" where nation-states would dissolve into a global federation that would eliminate the need for wars and other nationalistic disputes. Kagan sees the creation of the European Union as a microcosmic attempt to attain Kant's utopia. In contrast, he says, America's current status as the world's remaining superpower has forced the U.S. to adopt the philosophy of Hobbes, who believed that only a militarily powerful state can survive in a conflict-ridden world where Nature is "red in tooth and claw." "The United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world," Kagan writes, "even though in doing so it violates Europe's postmodern norms" (99). Not only Europeans but also American leftists have embraced Europe's Kantian utopianism. Pledged to universalism, the left condemns nationalism (or at least Western nationalism) in almost all forms.
By the same thinking, the left also denounces war as resulting largely from the conflicts inevitably sparked by nationalism's inherent divisiveness. After the American invasion of Afghanistan, signs sprouted in the windows of homes in the university districts of Missoula and Bozeman reading (with perfect Kantian logic), "War is obsolete." What follows from this slogan is an extreme pacifism--nurtured by the anti-war movement of the 1960s and carried on by today's left-wing intellectuals--that simply rejects any U.S. military actions abroad. Dismissing the standard distinction between "wars of choice" and "wars of necessity," pacifists perceive only wars of choice, and believe the right choice is always not to fight. Accordingly, the American response to Islamic terrorism should be solely a matter of the U.S. diplomatically redressing its past wrongs in the region.
I agree that America needs to work at improving relations with the Muslim world. But the notion that diplomacy is the answer to any dispute is based on Kant's dubious belief in the perfectability of human reason, the optimistic and secular idea that humans are rational creatures capable of level-headed negotiation and compromise if only artificial barriers (such as language) are overcome. But Kant's supreme confidence in human rationality is unrealistic. Even a cursory glance at the blood-strewn expanses of human history suggests that Hobbes may have had a point. In the case of Muslim terrorism, its Militant Islamism is unreasonable by definition, since it is based, in contrast, on metaphysical absolutes apprehended through faith and revelation rather than human reason. In short, if the rational side in a conflict considers war obsolete, while the irrational side considers war an ideal means to achieve its objectives, then the pacifists are in trouble.
In Jean Bethke Elshtain's Just War Against Terrorism: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, Elshtain defends America's war on terrorism by invoking Christian "just war" theory. Formulated by Saint Augustine, the theory maintains that a nation can justly go to war for two main reasons: in self-defense, or to stop atrocities being wreaked by other states or groups. Accordingly, while Augustine considers justice an absolute good, he does not always approve of peace, since, however well-intentioned, in practice peace can mean appeasing evil.
Adopting Augustine, Elshtain rejects the commonplace that "fighting never solves anything." On the contrary, she insists fighting may be, regrettably, the only way to stop a tyrant with whom one can never negotiate in mutual good faith. Elshtain astutely notes that "leaders charged with right authority within organized political bodies cannot withdraw from the world, of course, and thus are never pacifists" (25). In other words, no leader devoted to protecting the state against outside threats can ever embrace doctrinaire pacifism. With Islamic terrorism, the West is confronted by widespread, well-organized and unswervingly violent jihadist unreason. Sadly, the only non-suicidal response seems to be some kind of just war.
But, of course, reasonable people can disagree over what does or does not constitute a just war, and just wars can be fought many different ways, some more likely to prove successful than others. In my view, moderate liberalism's traditional commitment to diplomacy, multilateralism, and respect for international bodies can--if coupled with a commitment to fight just wars--constitute a viable foreign policy. A workable liberal response to Islamic terrorism would, I think, be two-pronged: on the one hand, fighting jihadists with whom one can never rationally negotiate, while, on the other, pursuing improved relations with the Muslim world in an attempt to curtail the appeal of militant Islam to the Muslim masses. Too many conservatives, I believe, have advocated the first half of this approach, while ignoring or downplaying the second.
In the final analysis, I remain a liberal, but I have learned, to my regret, that there are positions concerning the war on terrorism which are widely held in the liberal community that I cannot share. However, liberalism has never been a movement incapable of change. Since the full dimensions of the war on terrorism are still far from clear, we all need to keep an open mind. Personally, I can only embrace a liberalism that sees a reasonable degree of patriotism not as an evil that can and should be overcome but as a natural and healthy emotion. For all their flaws, both America and Israel have demonstrated a historical respect for equality and human rights for which we Americans and our Israeli allies should feel proud. And when our nations are faced with perilous threats, we have the right to defend ourselves./2/
Notes
For a sharp debunking of Why Do People Hate America? see Paul Trout's review in the Fall 2003 issue of The Montana Professor.[Back]
The author wishes to thank Associate Editor and Book Review Editor Paul Trout for suggesting that I write a review essay in two parts, and Editor Dick Walton for helpful criticism of earlier drafts.[Back]
*Books discussed in the two parts of this essay:[Back]
Terror and Liberalism
Paul Berman
New York: WW Norton, 2003
214 pages, $21 hc.
9/11
Noam Chomsky
New York: Steven Stories Press, 2001
125 pages, $8.95 pb.
Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World
Jean Bethke Elshtain
New York: Basic Books, 2003
240 pages, $23 hc.
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order
Robert Kagan
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
103 pages, $18 hc.
Ivory Towers in Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America
Martin Kramer
Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002
137 pages, $19.95 pb.
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
Bernard Lewis
New York: Random House, 2003
184 pages, $19.95 hc.
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World
Kanan Makiya
New York: WW Norton, 1993
367 pages, $10.95 pb.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Azar Nafisi
New York: Random House, 2003
347 pages, $23.95 hc.
Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order
John Newhouse
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
194 pages, $23 hc.
Anti-Americanism
Jean-Francois Revel, translated from the French by Diarmid Cammell
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003
176 pages, $25.95 hc.
The Return of Anti-Semitism
Gabriel Schoenfeld
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004
193 pages, $25.95 hc.
Why Do People Hate America?
Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies
New York: The Disinformation Company, 2002
231 pages, $12.95 pb.
[The Montana Professor 15.1, Fall 2004 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]