The Mirror of Fallujah No more passes and excuses for the Middle East

What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for hours.

Yet I fear that we have not seen anything new. Flip through the newspaper and the stories are as depressing as they are monotonous: bombs in Spain; fiery clerics promising death in England, even as explosive devices are uncovered in France. In-between accounts of bombings in Iraq, we get the normal murdering in Israel, and daily assassination in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, and Chechnya. Murder, dismemberment, torture—these all seem to be the acceptable tools of Islamic fundamentalism and condoned as part of justifiable Middle East rage. Sheik Yassin is called a poor crippled “holy man” who ordered the deaths of hundreds, as revered in the Arab World for his mass murder as Jerry Falwell is condemned in the West for his occasional slipshod slur about Muslims. Yet the hourly killing is perhaps not merely the wages of autocracy, but part of a larger grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display. The Taliban strung up infidels from construction cranes and watched, like Romans of old, gory stoning and decapitations in soccer stadiums built with UN largess. In the last two years, Palestinian mobs have torn apart Israeli soldiers, lynched their own, wired children with suicide bombing vests, and machine-gunned down women and children—between sickening scenes of smearing themselves with the blood of “martyrs.” Very few Arab intellectuals or holy men have condemned such viciousness.

Daniel Pearl had his head cut off on tape; an American diplomat was riddled with bullets in Jordan. Or should we turn to Lebanon and gaze at the work of Hezbollah—its posters of decapitated Israeli soldiers proudly on display? Some will interject that the Saudis are not to be forgotten—whose religious police recently allowed trapped school girls to be incinerated rather than have them leave the flaming building unescorted, engage in public amputations, and behead adulteresses. But Mr. Assad erased from memory the entire town of Hama. And why pick on Saddam Hussein, when earlier Mr. Nasser, heartthrob to the Arab masses, gassed Yemenis? The Middle-East coffee houses cry about the creation of Israel and the refugees on the West Bank only to snicker that almost 1,000,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.

And then there is the rhetoric. Where else in the world do mainstream newspapers talk of Jews as the children of pigs and apes? And how many wacky Christian or Hindu fundamentalists advocate about the mass murder of Jews or promise death to the infidel? Does a Western leader begin his peroration with “O evil infidel” or does Mr. Sharon talk of “virgins” and “blood-stained martyrs?” Conspiracy theory in the West is the domain of Montana survivalists and Chomsky-like wackos; in the Arab world it is the staple of the state-run media. This tired strophe and antistrophe of threats and retractions, and braggadocio and obsequiousness grates on the world at large. So Hamas threatens to bring the war to the United States, and then back peddles and says not really. So the Palestinians warn American diplomats that they are not welcome on the soil of the West Bank—as if any wish to return when last there they were murdered trying to extend scholarships to Palestinian students.

I am sorry, but these toxic fumes of the Dark-Ages permeate everywhere. It won’t do any more simply to repeat quite logical exegeses. Without consensual government, the poor Arab Middle East is caught in the throes of rampant unemployment, illiteracy, statism, and corruption. Thus in frustration it vents through its state-run media invective against Jews and Americans to assuage the shame and pain. Whatever.

But at some point the world is asking: “Is Mr. Assad or Hussein, the Saudi Royal Family, or a Khadafy really an aberration—all rogues who hijacked Arab countries—or are they the logical expression of a tribal patriarchal society whose frequent tolerance of barbarism is in fact reflected in its leadership? Are the citizens of Fallujah the victims of Saddam, or did folk like this find their natural identity expressed in Saddam? Postcolonial theory and victimology argue that European colonialism, Zionism, and petrodollars wrecked the Middle East. But to believe that one must see India in shambles, Latin America under blanket autocracy, and an array of suicide bombers pouring out of Mexico or Nigeria. South Korea was a moonscape of war when oil began gushing out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia; why is it now exporting cars while the latter are exporting death? Apartheid was far worse than the Shah’s modernization program; yet why did South Africa renounce nuclear weapons while the Mullahs cheated on every UN protocol they could?

No, there is something peculiar to the Middle East that worries the world. The Arab world for years has promulgated a quite successful media image as perennial victims—proud folks, suffering under a series of foreign burdens, while nobly maintaining their grace and hospitality. Middle-Eastern Studies programs in the United States and Europe published an array of mostly dishonest accounts of Western culpability, sometimes Marxist, sometimes anti-Semitic that were found to be useful intellectual architecture for the edifice of panArabism, as if Palestinians or Iraqis shared the same oppressions, the same hopes, and the same ideals as downtrodden American people of color—part of a universal “other” deserving victim status and its attendant blanket moral exculpation. But the curtain has been lifted since 9-11 and the picture we see hourly now is not pretty.

Imagine an Olympics in Cairo? Or an international beauty pageant in Riyadh? Perhaps an interfaith world religious congress would like to meet in Teheran? Surely we could have the World Cup in Beirut? Is there a chance to have a World Bank conference in Ramallah or Tripoli? Maybe Damascus could host a conference of the world’s neurosurgeons?

I posted this to another thread, but it applies here.

I've heard that part of the problem is with Arabic. Classical Arabic is the language of thought, of the university. The masses of people though they learn to read their dialect of Arabic cannot readily understand or read clasical Arabic. Even up until recent times, educated people in Western could read Latin and often Greek. Imagine if all important books were still published in Latin. Classical Arabic has such a hold because it's the language of the Koran.

So, many of these people are technically literate, but completely lacking in the ready access to higher literary communication. So, if you misquote Nietzsche to them they're not going to correct you. :^) A lot of them are just bootlicks for the Imams that tell them their version of the will of Allah.

Excellence again from VDH.

Question:

Why did you excerpt the second half of the article? You related to quidnunc?

FMCDH

I exerpted it to send people to his web site. I had never before read anything of his and really found his article on this matter to be powerfully articulated. (Not to mention that I couldn't believe that the Arizona Republic published it.) Thought there might be people like me unfamiliar with him who would appreciate his writings. I noticed he had written a book.

And, no, no relation to "quidnunc"? Sorry missed the inside joke. Retentive FR celebrity?

That's an interesting aspect. It reminds me a bit of studying Latin. The language was rich with verbs and vocabulary related to conquering and waging war, but noticeably lacking in other areas.

Language cannot be responsible for this level of bankruptcy in a culture, however. And what about the people who have been educated here in the US? If they are to be assets to their culture and raise the standards of their global citizenship quotient, shouldn't they be providing this "translation" that can enlighten the masses?

Instead, as pointed out by Hanson, you rarely hear of any denunciations of this radical behavior by muslim clerics living in more civilized parts of the globe. Granted, the repression of the people contributes to the lack of evolution of the language, and it becomes a viscious cycle. But how have other cultures isolated by similar language barriers, (Japan, China) overcome such obstacles to progress and sometimes in fairly short time frames?

---Language cannot be responsible for this level of bankruptcy in a culture, however. And what about the people who have been educated here in the US? If they are to be assets to their culture and raise the standards of their global citizenship quotient, shouldn't they be providing this "translation" that can enlighten the masses? ---

It is a complex problem with more than one root cause, but consider the state of Western society before the translation of the Bible into the various vernacular languages. Where were the great books in German and in English? Where were the great thoughts? Almost our entire Western revolution comes after the native tongues were raised up.

Had the Roman Catholic Church had it's way, our society might have much more in common with Islamic society today. (Yes, I'm a Lutheran.) I wonder if the current resurgence of radical Islam is not just a supernova precursor to it's eventual collapse and decline.

Had the Roman Catholic Church had it's way, our society might have much more in common with Islamic society today.

An ironically ignorant comment.

I wonder if the current resurgence of radical Islam is not just a supernova precursor to it's eventual collapse and decline.

Whether it is the end of an Islamic era or simply a cycle depends on whether we utterly defeat them and they respond with an internal reformation or whether we tire of the battle and accept their terms for withdrawal. In the latter case they will marshall their strength and heal their wounds and come back in a generation or two to do terror again.

Had the Roman Catholic Church had it's way, our society might have much more in common with Islamic society today.

Interesting insight. I have heard that the Koran has no universally accepted version. Do you know if there are several versions that contradict each other? Translations are not allowed, by explicit order in the Koran, I understand.

---Whether it is the end of an Islamic era or simply a cycle depends on whether we utterly defeat them and they respond with an internal reformation or whether we tire of the battle and accept their terms for withdrawal. In the latter case they will marshall their strength and heal their wounds and come back in a generation or two to do terror again.---

Perhaps, but if their dogma collapses they will be transformed. They might go off on a voyage of discovery and self-criticism. Language and information are the keys. I think a big part of the problem is demographics. They've had such a population explosion, so many are under 25. It's like a huge juvenal society in a way and many have bought off on this sort radical Islamic revolution.

---Interesting insight. I have heard that the Koran has no universally accepted version. Do you know if there are several versions that contradict each other? Translations are not allowed, by explicit order in the Koran, I understand.---

I don't really know, but I suspect the Koran is not really directly accessible to a majority of it's adherents. They recite from it but the imams retain this very middle ages sort of authority as to it's meaning. The Koran has a sort of magical-object character to the masses.

I wonder if the current resurgence of radical Islam is not just a supernova precursor to it's eventual collapse and decline.

It's an optimistic thought, and bolstered by logic.

A culture cannot go into 1,000 years of stagnation and stasis, reawaken with the sole objective of confrontation and fury and bloodlust against its betters, and then somehow be granted the qualities that will ensure its survival.

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