The debate over disengaging from the Middle East continues at Outside the Beltway. Yesterday at OTB I posted my negative cross-examination of Dr. Finel and this morning I posted my negative constructive case.
Please join in over at OTB!
The debate over disengaging from the Middle East continues at Outside the Beltway. Yesterday at OTB I posted my negative cross-examination of Dr. Finel and this morning I posted my negative constructive case.
Please join in over at OTB!
“The second is that we don’t control what’s said about us in the Middle East and most people there get their information about us from sources that aren’t favorable to us for their own reasons.”
That’s the key point, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s not typically a case like, say, the old Soviet Union where the government shaped a line of propaganda about America and found ways to inject it into newspapers, history books and everything in between.
It suits the Arab and Islamic governments to keep the people furious at America and Israel. But the people also seem to crave that fury. It justifies them, somehow.
I run a number of Web sites, and I keep tabs on the traffic to them. Almost every search engine hit I get from an Islamic-majority nation involves the words “U.S. soldiers rape Iraqi women,” due to that combination of words appearing on one page of my site. Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo? What Arabic people are convinced we do every day in Iraq makes Abu Ghraib look like a Disney cartoon.
I don’t think Qutb matters all that much in that equation. The people who cheer that clown who threw his shoes at Bush are not Islamists. They may hate Islamists. But they hate us, too. You, me — us. And they’re satisfied to keep it that way.
They won’t stop hating us till they find someone or something else that satisfies the urge.
The reason that Qutb is significant is the strong sexual component in his indictment of America (a commonplace in European critiques as well). Horror is sexually based and IMO this sexual component, the government-controlled press, and ignorance work synergistically to provoke irrational horror of Americans among Muslims in the Middle East.
Young Muslim males, perhaps. Who are the most dangerous cohort. But I don’t see how our engagement or lack of it, or even whether we ever set foot in the Mideast again, can change that. I remember reading a Michael J. Totten piece from Libya where he recounts that the Lybians overwhelmingly believe as a matter of proven public fact that Americans swap wives at Christmas time. If they don’t see us, they’re horrified as their imagination fills in the blank space. If they do see us, see women treated the same as men, see our open acceptance of things that are both tempting and haram to them — they’re horrified.
Over time knowledge overrules ignorance and prosperity will remove desperation. As I see it those are really our only hopes.