Posted on 11/19/2001 5:56:54 AM PST by IronJack
Calls for retribution following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, from negotiation to irradiation. Those reactions in turn have resurrected the anti-war relics from their crypts, and cities resound with platitudes unspoken since the Summer of Love. The PC line, though, has remained constant throughout: Muslims are our friends. We shouldn't judge the majority by the acts of an extreme few. The turban cowboys in the Middle East are just like you and me, except they're hairier and they fly planes into buildings. But other than that …
That equivalency argument is about as watertight as Ted Kennedy's Oldsmobile. We are NOT the same. Our cultures have developed along completely different lines. We may share certain biological features with the Sons of the Desert, but those are of interest only to geneticists. If we assume that the tenuous lifestyle of the Arabs and their murderous minions will impel them to act according to Western values, then we've misjudged our enemies. You can throw sticks all day long, but your cat isn't going to fetch the same way your dog does.
One of the first steps in any war is the demonization of the enemy. That's not what I'm after here. I don't mean to suggest that our swarthy foes are any less human than we are, just that their perspective is drastically, perhaps irreconcilably, different. They have been shaped by a landscape and a religion that must have molded their vision of the human condition.
Isn't it possible that a life bereft of common comforts, essentially hopeless, could motivate its dubious possessors to hurry to the Hereafter, on the chance that it will be better than the devil they know? We in the West cling to life because each day presents opportunities for growth. Most often that growth doesn't come with the speed or in the form we'd like, but overall, we tend to be better off with each passing year, and each passing generation. Contrast that advance to the steady despair of a race of people who cook their food over camel crap, live in caves, and sustain a meager existence by herding goats, the same way 50 generations of their ancestors cooked their food, lived their lives, and sustained their meager existences.
In the face of such stasis, isn't it just possible that life accrues very little value, and that the hyperbolic promises of ethereal reward outweigh the crushing drudgery of day-to-day existence? Maybe the rush to the Afterlife is a legitimized form of cultural suicide, and the Muslim extremists are nothing more than lemmings with a few hours of flight training.
By imposing our Western values on them, aren't we guilty of cultural imperialism? Shouldn't we be recognizing the fact that not all peoples think alike? We're told that every society embraces certain universal sentiments - a wish to protect one's family and loved ones, the desire for community, hope for safety and security - but where's the evidence? That universality is nothing more than the distorted view of the world through Western eyes. Does a brutish, feral Bedouin care about the child he fathered when he raped a stranger? Does this guy form close friendships with his caravan-mates? Does he have them over to his tent on Thursdays for poker? Does he in fact band together with them for any reason other than mutual protection?
I don't envision many Talibaners getting up every morning and checking out their 401k, or taking a part- time job so they can afford a bigger camel. It isn't likely Abdul is going to go to night school so he can get the corner office, or because he wants a promotion to Senior Goon. The motivation for living - such as that motivation is - is different in such austere circles. Just as Negro slaves bore their burdens by fixing their gaze Over Jordan, maybe the hopeless future of the Middle East has bred a hyperopia out of pathological denial.
Of course, the situation in the Muslim world is self-created and self-sustained, and its sufferers are shorn of even the comfort of family. By consigning women to doormat status, the males of that society have denied themselves the psychic sustenance accorded by a loving helpmeet. They have also augmented the load of terror and brutality that the women must bear.
Where life has little to recommend it, death has an appeal it lacks in less deprived quarters. And while not everyone will race toward the Abyss, few are inclined to cling to life as viciously as those who have something to gain.
The sheer brutality of their surroundings leaves little room for ideological subtleties. Disagreements go from trivial to internecine with the exchange of a few heated words or a misdirected glance. Their culture recognizes none of the boundaries that confine disagreements among civilized people, and that tolerate differences without resorting to mass murder. I'm not pretending that Western civilization is universally governed by Emily Post; Rodney King and rap music put the lie to that conceit. But, while we occasionally shoot each other for cutting us off in traffic, we don't do it often enough to have ambulances standing by at busy intersections.
In the West, our obsession with property overrides our bestial nature. Methodists live next door to Catholics, and probably don't even know, let alone care enough to go burn each other's houses to the ground. Living beside a smoking hole only lowers your real estate values, and the heat from the inferno could damage your spirea. Besides, torching the Joneses' four-bedroom colonial violates your subdivision's covenants. You don't want to get a nasty letter from the homeowners association.
Contrast that with Beirut, where a mindless civil war has reduced a city of unsurpassed beauty to a freelance landfill. If your neighbor is a Shiite, you're expected to launch rocket-propelled grenades at him from your upstairs window. And he's supposed to run your kids down with a stolen Land Rover. We won't even talk about Afghanistan, where, at least under the Taliban, you could be tortured for carrying a cassette tape in your pocket. In any city in the US, not only can you carry the tape, you can play it in your car at a volume that will draw noise complaints from the local airport.
And we Westerners are a cynical lot. Maybe it's Watergate, maybe it's half a century of television, maybe it's echoes of the '60's when we were told that Abe Lincoln wore a fake beard and Santa Claus was a pedophile. Whatever the source, we don't believe in much anymore. So it's hard for us to accept the demands put on us by religious charlatans, especially if those demands involve getting out of the Stratolounger.
In the Middle East, where illiteracy is at feudal levels, the riches of Heaven are dangled by mullahs and other clerics. They are the Chosen Vessels, the guys who keep Allah's Little Black Book with the names and phone numbers of all those virgins. Lacking any tools to educate themselves, the masses rely on the prognostications of the learned classes, who summon a following of depressed, frustrated, and highly suggestible malcontents to do their bidding. It's like the Democrats and their soccer moms, except soccer moms are afraid of flying.
Lest we wax too arrogant over our elevated conscience, we should recall that five or six hundred years ago, the Popes could summon a similar band of disciples, and if they couldn't, some king acting on God's behalf could. Our own history was shaped as much by the sword as by the laurel. However, that is a history we outran some centuries ago, when we realized that hacking each other to bits spoiled the Rose Bowl parade. Sadly, that is a lesson certain primitives in the MuddleD East have yet to learn.
Why should they bother their heads learning to read? The mullahs will tell them everything they need to know. Just like the priests did for the illiterate serfs during what we now know as the Dark Ages.
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