[Peace-discuss] Said _Thoughts About America_ from Al-Ahram

[Margaret E. Kosal]

Insightful commentary from the leading Palestinian-American intellectual 
and Columbia (NY) prof of English & Comp. Lit., Edward Said published in 
Al-Ahrem, the leading Egyptian newspaper ... wouldn't it be splendid if the 
New York Times would publish this piece too?

______________________________________
THOUGHTS ABOUT AMERICA
by Edward Said

AL-AHRAM WEEKLY HTTP://WWW.AHRAM.ORG.EG/WEEKLY/2002/575/OP2.HTM

Edward Said warns against the return to a shameful episode in the US's 
intellectual history

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he 
or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at 
this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of 
alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For 
despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims 
and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the 
current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and 
Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, 
detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is 
usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security 
checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour 
against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document 
in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media 
have run far too many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and 
the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and 
so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has 
become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and 
elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to "end" 
Iraq. There are US forces already in several countries with important 
Muslim populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against 
Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of 
the Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in 
the United States.

While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more than 
what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply 
resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as being 
involved in a "just war" against something unilaterally labeled as 
terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role of 
either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should be grateful to 
be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are different: 
America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of 
laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly 
exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives 
here as an American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant 
from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not 
provide for different levels of Americanness, nor for approved or 
disapproved forms of "American behaviour," including things that have come 
to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. That is the 
invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and behaviour in 
ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former rulers of 
Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance of religion in 
America, he is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenry or to 
speak for everyone when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about 
God and America and himself. The Constitution expressly separates church 
and state.

There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and his 
compliant Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections 
of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal 
procedures that give individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or 
a fair trial, that allow secret searches, eavesdropping, detention without 
limit, and, given the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that 
allow the US executive branch to abduct prisoners, detain them 
indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether or not they are prisoners of war 
and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them -- which is not a 
decision to be taken by individual countries. Moreover, as Congressman 
Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speech given on 17 
February, the president and his men were not authorised to declare war 
(Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or reason, 
were not authorised to increase military spending to over $400 billion per 
year, were not authorised to repeal the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he 
added -- the first such statement by a prominent, publicly elected official 
-- "we did not ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on 
September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in 
Afghanistan." I strongly recommend that Rep. Kucinich's speech, which was 
made with the best of American principles and values in mind, be published 
in full in Arabic so that people in our part of the world can understand 
that America is not a monolith for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney, 
but in fact contains many voices and currents of opinion which this 
government is trying to silence or make irrelevant.

The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and 
unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no 
secret of the fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of 
others in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and women around Bush 
believe are its interests. So far as the Middle East is concerned, it does 
seem that since 11 September there has been almost an Israelisation of US 
policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon and his associates have cynically 
exploited the single-minded attention to "terrorism" by George Bush and 
have used that as a cover for their continued failed policy against the 
Palestinians. The point here is that Israel is not the US and, mercifully, 
the US is not Israel: thus, even though Israel commands Bush's support for 
the moment, Israel is a small country whose continued survival as an 
ethnocentric state in the midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on 
an expedient if not infinite dependence on the US, but rather on 
accommodation with its environment, not the other way round. That is why I 
think Sharon's policy has finally been revealed to a significant number of 
Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis are taking the reserve 
officers' position against serving the military occupation as a model for 
their approach and resistance. This is the best thing to have emerged from 
the Intifada. It proves that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting 
occupation have finally brought fruit.

What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been 
escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and 
his people identify themselves (as in the very name of the military 
campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, 
and manifest destiny, its external enemies with an equally absolute evil. 
Anyone reading the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain that 
people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of 
US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies 
on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for 
accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst 
of all, the legality of such actions. What does it mean to defeat "evil 
terrorism" in a world like ours? It cannot mean eradicating everyone who 
opposes the US, an infinite and strangely pointless task; nor can it mean 
changing the world map to suit the US, substituting people we think are 
"good guys" for evil creatures like Saddam Hussein. The radical simplicity 
of all this is attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is either 
purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind desks in the Pentagon, 
tend to see the world as a distant target for the US's very real and 
virtually unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known 
evil state and you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft 
carriers, and dozens of submarines, plus a million and a half people under 
arms, all of them willing to serve their country idealistically in the 
pursuit of what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep referring to as evil, the 
chances are that you will be willing to use all that power sometime, 
somewhere, especially if the administration keeps asking for (and getting) 
billions of dollars to be added to the already swollen defence budget.

 From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with few 
exceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in this country 
have tolerated the Bush programme, tolerated and in some flagrant cases, 
tried to go beyond it, toward more self- righteous sophistry, more 
uncritical self-flattery, more specious argument. What they will not accept 
is that the world we live in, the historical world of nations and peoples, 
is moved and can be understood by politics, not by huge general absolutes 
like good and evil, with America always on the side of good, its enemies on 
the side of evil. When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs that 
they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything he says is the 
slightest tone of self- criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11 
September entitle him to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered 
such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in the world were not 
worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moral conclusions from.

One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectuals 
concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the much 
greater suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or 
an air force, or a proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering 
at the hands of Israel continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort 
of moral blindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the comparative 
evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use a moralistic language that I 
normally avoid and detest) is very much the order of the day, and it must 
be the critical intellectual's job not to fall into -- indeed, actively to 
campaign against falling into -- the trap. It is not enough to say blandly 
that all human suffering is equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's 
own miseries: it is far more important to see what the strongest party 
does, and to question rather than justify that. The intellectual's is a 
voice in opposition to and critical of great power, which is consistently 
in need of a restraining and clarifying conscience and a comparative 
perspective, so that the victim will not, as is often the case, be blamed 
and real power encouraged to do its will.

A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of 
a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the 
major French, German, Italian and other continental papers but which did 
not appear in the US at all, except on the Internet where few people took 
notice of it. This declaration took the form of a pompous sermon about the 
American war against evil and terrorism being "just" and in keeping with 
American values, as defined by these self-appointed interpreters of our 
country. Paid for and sponsored by something called the Institute for 
American Values, whose main (and financially well- endowed) aim is to 
propagate ideas in favour of families, "fathering" and "mothering," and 
God, the declaration was signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others, but basically written by a 
conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Its main arguments 
about a "just" war were inspired by Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed 
socialist who is allied with the pro-Israel lobby in this country, and 
whose role is to justify everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely 
leftist principles. In signing this declaration, Walzer has given up all 
pretension to leftism and, like Sharon, allies himself with an 
interpretation (and a questionable one at that) of America as a righteous 
warrior against terror and evil, the more to make it appear that Israel and 
the US are similar countries with similar aims.

Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state of 
its citizens but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly 
only the state of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to 
state boldly that in supporting Israel he is supporting a state structured 
by ethno-religious principles, which (with typical hypocrisy) he would 
oppose in the United States if this country were declared to be white and 
Christian.

Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is really 
addressed to "our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to understand that 
America's war is not against Islam but against those who oppose all sorts 
of principles, which it would be hard to disagree with. Who could oppose 
the principle that all human beings are equal, that killing in the name of 
God is a bad thing, that freedom of conscience is excellent, and that "the 
basic subject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of 
government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for human 
flourishing"? In what follows, however, America turns out to be the 
aggrieved party and, even though some of its mistakes in policy are 
acknowledged very briefly (and without mentioning anything specific in 
detail), it is depicted as hewing to principles unique to the United 
States, such as that all people possess inherent moral dignity and status, 
that universal moral truths exist and are available to everyone, or that 
civility is important where there is disagreement, and that freedom of 
conscience and religion are a reflection of basic human dignity and are 
universally recognised. Fine. For although the authors of this sermon say 
it is often the case that such great principles are contravened, no 
sustained attempt is made to say where and when those contraventions 
actually occur (as they do all the time), or whether they have been more 
contravened than followed, or anything as concrete as that. Yet in a long 
footnote, Walzer and his colleagues set forth a list of how many American 
"murders" have occurred at Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the 
Marines in Beirut in 1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow 
making a list of that kind is worth making for these militant defenders of 
America, whereas the murder of Arabs and Muslims -- including the hundreds 
of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel with US support, or the 
hundreds of thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions against the 
innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither mentioned nor 
tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by 
Israel, with American complicity and even cooperation, and where is the 
nobility and moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian children are 
killed, millions besieged, and millions more kept as stateless refugees? Or 
for that matter, the millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and 
Indonesia with American support and acquiescence?

All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by 
American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a 
statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the 
arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war 
declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with those 
Islamists who have argued that "our" war is with the West and with America. 
Speaking as someone with a claim on America and the Arabs, I find this sort 
of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it pretends to the 
elucidation of principles and the declaration of values, it is in fact 
exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with 
a patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real 
politics, real history, and real moral issues. Despite its vulgar 
trafficking in great "principles and values," it does none of that, except 
to wave them around in a bullying way designed to cow foreign readers into 
submission. I have a feeling that this document wasn't published here for 
two reasons: one is that it would be so severely criticised by American 
readers that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it was designed 
as part of a recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to 
put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and therefore intended for 
foreign consumption.
Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?" augurs a 
new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. For when 
the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the world 
align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's case 
instead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication and 
understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual war 
against communism, which we now know brought far too many compromises, 
collaborations and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists 
who should have played an altogether different role. Subsidised and 
underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which went as far as 
providing for the subvention of magazines like Encounter, underwrote 
scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions), 
those militantly unreflective and uncritical intellectuals and artists in 
the 1950s and 1960s brought to the whole notion of intellectual honesty and 
complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For along with that effort went 
also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics, and 
restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this is a shameful 
episode in our history, and we must be on our guard against and resist its 
return.