Fear and Loathing - The Global Cut
I have a neighbor, a retired Egyptian army officer. A very gentle individual, quite religious too with a long beard and everything. He enjoys standing around in the spring sun these days watering the garden he's working on in front of our building, maybe reading the newspaper too and playing a few rounds of backgammon when he can find himself an opponent. I hear he's quite good. He also thinks Al Qaeda could have done better with a few grammes of well-deployed anthrax as opposed to just ramming a few Boeings into some buildings. He will make such remarks, and then turn right around and get into a tickling tussle with another neighbor's 3 year old boy.
There's nothing really strange about this, and it can't really qualify as duality. This man is a reflection of his society every bit as much as the people who voted Bush into office and support a war on Iraq are reflections of theirs.
My neighbor's knowledge of Americana comes from how he sees the American people's representatives behave in his geographical back yard. Joe Six-pack, resident of Two Goats, Tennessee, knows Arabs (the default extension of Muslim) as bearded ones who are out to get him and everything he stands for.
There isn't all that much difference, really; levels of ignorance on both sides of the Atlantic are sufficiently high to support persistent mutual exchanges of invective, hatred, and terrorism (state-sponsored and otherwise). I suppose it is lack of education that keeps people from being able to look beyond their own perceptions of who started this mudfight. Joe Six-pack thinks he has an axe to grind with the bearded Arabs; he doesn't really, because you can't hate someone you don't truly know. He can't hate the people here who wish this war would just go away, along with Islamic extremists, so they can get on with trying to put some food on the table. Correspondingly, the average Egyptian erroneously thinks he hates Americans; which is really rather funny, because when they run into American tourists, they don't whip out semi-automatics; they bug them with questions about whether they've seen the Pyramids, how much those sneakers cost, and whether they'd like a tourist guide.
To paraphrase Stalin, a murder of one is tragedy; the murder of millions is a statistic. The more complex issues are, the more receptive people are to watered-down executive dehumanized summaries. Mass media is only too happy to oblige. CNN covered Hans Blix' statement before the UN Security Council and managed to omit all the bits attesting to Iraqi cooperation. In similar vein, Hezbullah operate a television channel in which policy dictates never to say `Israel'; it's called `the Zionist enemy'.
See the pattern here?
The bow and arrow as a technological accomplishment was probably one of the most regrettable inventions ever; for the first time in warfare, you no longer had to associate a face with a person you wanted to kill; a vague silhouette was enough. You didn't have to listen to them die either. What luxury. If you look at the arms industry today, most innovation is aimed at enabling people to kill more people with ever-greater degrees of detachment. That's what cruise missiles are. Any sane person would rather fire a cruise missile at a bunch of people, rather than have to go around and manually slit their throats.
Mr. Average Arab, I think, would hardly approve of zealots crashing airliners into buildings in the name of his faith if he truly grasped that the casualty figures he was hearing were real people with lives such as his, not soulless American cardboard stereotypes. When the IDF shoots an unarmed Palestinian child, there is no uproar inside Israel – it is an item on the news for 30 seconds, perhaps, and this is not sufficient to establish the victim's humanity.
You know, there's always people who make good out of a bad situation though. The Bush administration is thriving, and so is public support at the grass roots level for extremist ideology around here. These people, the extremists and the US administration, they're not thriving because they're smart or any valid reason like that; they just know people long for simpler lives and education through soundbites, and that's what people are getting.
It's easier to think in terms of `Evil (tm)' and `Good (tm)' than it is to reflect on why another human, flesh and blood like us, deserves our hatred and reciprocates this sentiment. Life is simpler that way. Not necessarily better, just simpler. It's the information age; anyone willing to brave the tsunami of information and to summarize it for us will be worshipped.
Thomas Aquinas once said ``I have learnt much from my enemies''. In this impending clash of civilizations, no one seems to be able to learn anything from or about their intellectual opponents. This is nothing less than tragic. I see Egyptian youth every day releasing massive verbal quantities of ill feeling towards the West. Wearing Chicago Bulls caps. Duality? No. Failure of education? Absolutely. Justified? Beside the point anymore. And then on the other hand you have the newly established Department for Homeland Security in the US securing a deal with European airlines to notify them in advance of any passengers bound for North America who have requested a pork-free in-flight meal.
Let's face it: we all knew deep in our hearts that it was un-American to be vegetarian.
Education has failed on both sides of this ideological divide, albeit in different manners. My personal feeling is that the main benefit of education is to enable the recipient to accumulate, process, select, and discard with greater discernment ever vaster quantities of knowledge, information, and perceptions. Where people lack the capacity to seek the facts out for themselves and would rather delegate a news anchor to do it for them and quickly, there I see failure.
I also see failure of education where I live, though around here it's a more blatant variety. And what problems lack of education have created, failure to communicate have compounded.
It's all to easy in the new world modus vivendum to forget that, as John F. Kennedy said once, we all breathe the same air. The real tragedy here, I feel, is that a country that appeared as great as the United States did is currently in the process of demonstrating that the only progress brought about in the 20th century was technological; any evolution of the human spirit was illusory. The human spirit, it would appear, remains mired in the Muslim conquests, Attila the Hun, and the Crusades. Richard the Lionhearted collects oil-wells, and Salaheldin has perfected the art of the hit and run.
As things stand, the intensity of anti-American sentiment in the streets of Cairo is incredible; poke around a bit, however, and you'll work out that the sentiment is directed at some vague concept of what America is, not at the American citizenry specifically (other than the delusional baboon they elected president). The American citizen living in Cairo is not in any real danger; I have to wonder if it might not be more dangerous to be an Egyptian in California than an American in Cairo.
There is here a cautious and very muted optimism regarding the role of Europe in restoring a certain balance to world affairs, probably no different from the same mood amongst pro-integrationist Europeans. An amusing little anecdote related to this is a cartoon which appeared in the newspapers a few days ago, depicting Jacques Chirac being nominated for chairmanship of the Arab League.
A question that is beginning to be asked, however, is worth much thought – will it take an Iraqi or Palestinian holocaust for balance to return?
My personal hope is that the current US political climate is nothing more than a McCarthy-ist revival from which it will rebound; temporary insanity, followed by catharsis. You can't help seeing the parallels when you hear Bush say things like ``You are either with us or you are with the terrorists''. Even if this is so, though, it can't avert war in Iraq, state-sponsored terror in Israel/Palestine, or further terrorist activity by Islamist militants.
Succinctly, there's not much option other than to hope for the future. And that future will not come about until people learn to recognize their own humanity in their enemies' faces.
Youssef M. Assad
LPCUWC `92 – `94
20th of February, 2003 - Cairo, Egypt
This page is copyright Youssef M. Assad 2003. This article is freely redistributable in UNMODIFIED FORM, covering both the content and credits. If anyone's publishing it, I'd like to know about it first, however.