The Observer, Londonhttp://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,552764,00.html

Islam and the West are inadequate banners
The United States may too often have failed to look outside but it is
depressing how little time is spent trying to understand America

Special report: terrorism in the US
Special report: Israel and the Middle East

Edward Said
Sunday September 16, 2001
The Observer

Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser degree
Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown assailants, terror
missions without political message, senseless destruction.

For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and
sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a long
time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much carnage has so
cruelly imposed on so many.

New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally
rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure, has rapidly
attained Churchillian status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and with
extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled the city's heroic police, fire
and emergency services to admirable effect and, alas, with huge loss of
life. Giuliani's was the first voice of caution against panic and jingoistic
attacks on the city's large Arab and Muslim communities, the first to
express the commonsense of anguish, the first to press everyone to try to
resume life after the shattering blows.

Would that that were all. The national television reporting has of course
brought the horror of those dreadful winged juggernauts into every
household, unremittingly, insistently, not always edifyingly. Most
commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the expected and the predictable
in what most Americans feel: terrible loss, anger, outrage, a sense of
violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and un-restrained
retribution. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and patriotism, every
politician and accredited pundit or expert has dutifully repeated how we
shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not stop until terrorism is
exterminated. This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on
what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the
vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what 'we' are up
against, and that terrorism must be destroyed.

What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to
understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the
complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of
the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's
mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a
superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over
the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so
numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any his tory he
and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of
everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably,
then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that
uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what
is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing
its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured
geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean
symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences
and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.

Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more
drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the
former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is
synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent
support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its
inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements
and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not
based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a
narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases
of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support
for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is
now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its
military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric
in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like
'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions have
mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defence
and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East,
and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes
new forms every day.

Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still more critical sense
of the actuality. There has been terror of course, and nearly every
struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. This was as
true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the others, Zionism included. And yet
bombing defenceless civilians with F-16s and helicopter gunships has the
same structure and effect as more conventional nationalist terror.

What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and
political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away from
history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness has to try to
make itself felt, whether in the US or in the Middle East. No cause, no God,
no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most
particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions
and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to
do so.

Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't a
single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity
is true of all traditions, religions or nations even though some of their
adherents have futiley tried to draw boundaries around themselves and pin
their creeds down neatly. Yet history is far more complex and contradictory
than to be represented by demagogues who are much less representative than
either their followers or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or
moral fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of revolution and
resistance, including a willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too
easily attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be
gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New York and Washington
suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor
refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass
mobilisation and patient organisation in the service of a cause, the poor
and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick
bloody solutions that such appalling models pro vide, wrapped in lying
religious claptrap.

On the other hand, immense military and economic power are no guarantee of
wisdom or moral vision. Sceptical and humane voices have been largely
unheard in the present crisis, as 'America' girds itself for a long war to
be fought somewhere out there, along with allies who have been pressed into
service on very uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. We need to step
back from the imaginary thresholds that separate people from each other and
re-examine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, decide to
share our fates with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite the
bellicose cries and creeds.

'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly.
Some will run behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves
to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without
looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without
trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more
wilful than necessary. Demonisation of the Other is not a sufficient basis
for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror
in injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put
out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more worth the
investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering.

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