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[Gość: Yidele]

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Monday, February 25, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

Since September 11, we have heard mostly slander and lies about the West from
radical Islamic fundamentalists in their defense of the terrorists. But the
Middle Eastern mainstream--diplomats, intellectuals and journalists--has also
bombarded the American public with an array of unflattering images and texts,
suggesting that the extremists' anti-Americanism may not be an eccentricity of
the ignorant but rather a representative slice of the views of millions.

Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz reportedly announced from
his Cairo home that America's bombing of the Taliban was "just as despicable a
crime" as the September 11 attacks--as if the terrorists' unprovoked mass
murder of civilians were the moral equivalent of selected air strikes against
enemy soldiers in wartime. Americans, reluctant to answer back their Middle
Eastern critics for fear of charges of "Islamophobia" or "Arab smearing," have
let such accusations go largely unchecked.

Two striking themes--one overt, one implied--characterize most Arab invective:
first, that there is some sort of equivalence--political, cultural and military-
-between the West and the Muslim world; and second, that America has been
exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and reveal
that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by pillars of utter ignorance.





Few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins or history of
democracy, a word that, along with its family (constitution, freedom and
citizen), has no history in the Arab vocabulary, or indeed any philological
pedigree in any language other than Greek and Latin and their modern European
offspring. Consensual government is not the norm of human politics but a rare
and precious idea, not imposed or bequeathed but usually purchased with the
blood of heroes and patriots, whether in classical Athens, revolutionary
America or more recently Eastern Europe. Democracy's lifeblood is secularism
and religious tolerance, coupled with free speech and economic liberty.
Afghan tribal councils, without written constitutions, are better than tyranny,
surely; but they do not make consensual government. Nor do the Palestinian
parliament and advisory bodies in Kuwait. None of these faux assemblies are
elected by an unbound citizenry, free to criticize (much less recall, impeach
or depose) their heads of state by legal means, or even to speak openly to
journalists about the failings of their own government. Plato remarked of such
superficial government-by-deliberation that even thieves divvy up the loot by
give-and-take, suggesting that the human tendency to parley is natural but is
not the same as the formal machinery of democratic government.

Our own cultural elites, either out of timidity or sometimes ignorance of the
uniqueness of our own political institutions, seldom make such distinctions.
But the differences are critical, because they lie unnoticed at the heart of
the crisis in the Muslim world, and they explain our own tenuous relations with
the regimes in the Gulf and the Middle East. Israel does not really know to
what degree the Palestinian authorities have a real constituency, because the
people of the West Bank themselves do not know either--inasmuch as they cannot
debate one another on domestic television or campaign on the streets for
alternate policies. Yasser Arafat assumed power by Western fiat; when he
finally was allowed to hold real and periodic elections in his homeland, he
simply perpetuated autocracy--as corrupt as it is brutal.





By the same token, we are surprised at the duplicity of the Gulf States in
defusing internal dissent by redirecting it against Americans, forgetting that
such is the way of all dictators, who, should they lose office, do not face the
golden years of Jimmy Carter's busy house-building or Bill Clinton's self-
absorbed angst. Either they dodge the mob's bullets or scurry to a fortified
compound on the French coast a day ahead of the posse. The royal family of
Saudi Arabia cannot act out of principle, because no principle other than force
put and keeps them in power. All the official jets, snazzy embassies and
expensive press agents cannot hide that these illegitimate rulers are not in
the political sense Western at all.
How sad that intellectuals of the Arab world--themselves given freedom only
when they emigrate to the United States or Europe--profess support for
democratic reform from Berkeley or Cambridge but secretly fear that, back home,
truly free elections would usher in folk like the Iranian imams, who, in the
manner of the Nazis in 1933, would thereupon destroy the very machinery that
elected them. The fact is that democracy does not spring fully formed from the
head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon--the formal icing on a pre-existing
cake of egalitarianism, economic opportunity, religious tolerance and constant
self-criticism. The former cannot appear in the Muslim world until gallant men
and women insist upon the latter--and therein demolish the antidemocratic and
medieval forces of tribalism, authoritarian traditionalism and Islamic
fundamentalism.

How much easier for nonvoters of the Arab world to vent frustration at the
West, as if, in some Machiavellian plot, a democratic America, Israel and
Europe have conspired to prevent Muslims from adopting the Western invention of
democracy! Democracy is hardly a Western secret to be closely guarded and kept
from the mujahideen. Islam is welcome to it, with the blessing and subsidy of
the West. Yes, we must promote democracy abroad in the Muslim world; but only
they, not we, can ensure its success.





The catastrophe of the Muslim world is also explicable in its failure to grasp
the nature of Western success, which springs neither from luck nor resources,
genes nor geography. Like Third World Marxists of the 1960s, who put blame for
their own self-inflicted misery upon corporations, colonialism and racism--
anything other than the absence of real markets and a free society--the Islamic
intelligentsia recognizes the Muslim world's inferiority vis-à-vis the West,
but it then seeks to fault others for its own self-created fiasco. Government
spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the cultural
relativists and discredited Marxists and have the courage to say that they are
poor because their populations are nearly half illiterate, that their
governments are not free, that their economies are not open, and that their
fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression and cultural
exchange.
Tragically, the immediate prospects for improvement are dismal, inasmuch as the
war against terrorism has further isolated the Middle East. Travel, foreign
education and academic exchanges--the only sources of future hope for the Arab
world--have screeched to a halt. All the conferences in Cairo about Western
bias and media distortion cannot hide this self-inflicted catastrophe--and the
growing ostracism and suspicion of Middle Easterners in the West.

But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is easier for
millions of Muslims than admitting the truth. Billions of barrels of oil, large
populations, the Suez Canal, the fertility of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates
valleys, invaluable geopolitical locations and a host of other natural
advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past now yield an
excess of misery, rather than the riches of resource-poor Hong Kong or
Switzerland. How could it be otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to
obtain a building permit in Cairo, when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in
Baghdad, and when Saudi Arabia turns out more gra

[Gość: Yidele]

How could it be otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a
building permit in Cairo, when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad, and
when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic studies than in medicine
or engineering?

To tackle illiteracy, gratuitous state-sanctioned killing, and the economic
sclerosis that comes from corruption and state control would require the
courage and self-examination of Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, even of
China. Instead, wedded to the old bromides that the West causes their misery,
that fundamentalist Islam and crackpot mullahs have had no role in their
disasters, that the subjugation of women is a "different" rather than a foul
(and economically foolish) custom, Muslim intellectuals have railed these past
few months about the creation of Israel half a century ago, and they have sat
either silent or amused while the mob in their streets chants in praise of a
mass murderer. Meanwhile millions of Muslims tragically stay sick and hungry in
silence.





Has the Muslim world gone mad in its threats and ultimatums? Throughout this
war, Muslims have saturated us with overt and with insidious warnings. If
America retaliated to the mass murder of its citizens, the Arab world would
turn on us; if we bombed during Ramadan, we would incur lasting hatred; if we
continued in our mission to avenge our dead, not an American would be safe in
the Middle East.
More disturbing even than the screaming street demonstrations have been the
polite admonitions of corrupt grandees like Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia or editor Abdul Rahman al Rashed of Saudi Arabia's state-owned Al Sharq
al Awsat. Don't they see the impotence and absurdity of their veiled threats,
backed neither by military force nor cultural dynamism? Don't they realize that
nothing is more fatal to the security of a state than the divide between what
it threatens and what it can deliver?

There is an abyss between such rhetoric and the world we actually live in, an
abyss called power. Out of politeness, we needn't crow over the relative
military capability of one billion Muslims and 300 million Americans; but we
should remember that the lethal, 2,500-year Western way of war is the
reflection of very different ideas about personal freedom, civic militarism,
individuality on the battlefield, military technology, logistics, decisive
battle, group discipline, civilian audit and the dissemination and
proliferation of knowledge.

Values and traditions--not guns, germs and steel--explain why a tiny Greece of
50,000 square miles crushed a Persia 20 times larger; why Rome, not Carthage,
created world government; why Cortés was in Tenochtitlàn, and Montezuma not in
Barcelona; why gunpowder in its home in China was a pastime for the elite
while, when stolen and brought to Europe, it became a deadly and ever evolving
weapon of the masses. Even at the nadir of Western power in the medieval ages,
a Europe divided by religion and fragmented into feudal states could still send
thousands of thugs into the Holy Land, while a supposedly ascendant Islam had
neither the ships nor the skill nor the logistics to wage jihad in Scotland or
Brittany.

Much is made of 500 years of Ottoman dominance over a feuding Orthodox,
Christian and Protestant West; but the sultans were powerful largely to the
degree that they crafted alliances with a distrustful France and the warring
Italian city-states, copied the Arsenal at Venice, turned out replicas of
Italian and German canon, and moved their capital to European Constantinople.
Moreover, their "dominance" amounted only to a rough naval parity with the West
on the old Roman Mediterranean; they never came close to the conquest of the
heart of Western Europe.

Europeans, not Ottomans, colonized central and southern Africa, Asia and the
Pacific and the Americas--and not merely because of their Atlantic ports or
ocean ships but rather because of their longstanding attitudes and traditions
about scientific inquiry, secular thought, free markets and individual
ingenuity and spontaneity. To be sure, military power is not a referendum on
morality--Pizarro's record in Peru makes as grim reading as the Germans' in
central Africa; it is, rather, a reflection of the amoral dynamism that fuels
ships and soldiers.

We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not because of
greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more ores or better weather, but
because of our culture. When it comes to war, one billion people and the
world's oil are not nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the
House of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O'Rilley and the G.I. Bill. Between
Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and Saddam on his balcony
reviewing his troops, between the Greeks arguing and debating before they rowed
out with Themistocles and the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of
the Gulf War, lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest
of the world copies its weapons, uniforms and military organization from us,
not vice versa.





Many Middle Easterners have performed a great media charade throughout this
war. They publish newspapers and televise the news, and thereby give the
appearance of being modern and Western. But their reporters and anchormen are
by no means journalists by Western standards of free and truthful inquiry.
Whereas CNN makes a point of talking to the victims of collateral damage in
Kabul, al-Jazeera would never interview the mothers of Israeli teenagers blown
apart by Palestinian bombs. Nor does any Egyptian or Syrian television station
welcome freewheeling debates or "Meet the Press"-style talk shows permitting
criticism of the government or the national religion. Instead, they quibble
over their own degrees of anti-Americanism and obfuscate the internal
contradictions of Islam. The chief dailies in Algiers, Tehran and Kuwait City
look like Pravda of old. The entire Islamic media is a simulacrum of the West,
lacking the life-giving spirit of debate and self-criticism.
As a result, when Americans see a cavalcade of talking Middle Eastern heads nod
and blurt out the party line--that Israel is evil, that the United States is
naive and misled, that Muslims are victims, that the West may soon have to
reckon with Islamic anger--they assume the talk is orchestrated and therefore
worth listening to only for what it teaches about how authoritarian governments
can coerce and corrupt journalists and intellectuals.

A novelist who writes whatever he pleases anywhere in the Muslim world is more
likely to receive a fatwa and a mob at his courtyard than a prize for literary
courage, as Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie have learned. No wonder a code of
silence pervades the Islamic world. No wonder, too, that Islam is far more
ignorant of us than we of it. And no wonder that the Muslims haven't a clue
that, while their current furor is scripted, whipped up and mercurial, ours is
far deeper and more lasting.

Every Western intellectual knows Edward Said's much-hyped theory
of "Orientalism," a purely mythical construct of how Western bias has
misunderstood and distorted the Eastern "Other." In truth, the real problem
is "Westernism"--the fatally erroneous idea in the Middle East that its
propaganda-spewing Potemkin television stations give it a genuine understanding
of the nature of America, an understanding Middle Easterners believe is
deepened by the presence in their midst of a few McDonald's franchises and
hired U.S. public-relations firms.

That error--which mistakes ignorance for insight--helps explain why Osama bin
Laden so grossly miscalculated the devastating magnitude of our response to
September 11. In reality, the most p

[Gość: Yidele]

That error--which mistakes ignorance for insight--helps explain why Osama bin
Laden so grossly miscalculated the devastating magnitude of our response to
September 11. In reality, the most parochial American knows more about the
repressive nature of the Gulf States than the most sophisticated and well-
traveled sheikh understands about the cultural underpinnings of this country,
including the freedom of speech and inquiry that is missing in the Islamic
press.





Millions in the Middle East are obsessed with Israel, whether they live in
sight of Tel Aviv or thousands of miles away. Their fury doesn't spring solely
from genuine dismay over the hundreds of Muslims Israel has killed on the West
Bank; after all, Saddam Hussein butchered hundreds of thousands of Shiites,
Kurds and Iranians, while few in Cairo or Damascus said a word. Syria's Hafez
Assad liquidated perhaps 20,000 in sight of Israel, without a single
demonstration in any Arab capital. The murder of some 100,000 Muslims in
Algeria and 40,000 in Chechnya in the last decade provoked few intellectuals in
the Middle East to call for a pan-Islamic protest. Clearly, the anger derives
not from the tragic tally of the fallen but from Islamic rage that Israelis
have defeated Muslims on the battlefield repeatedly, decisively, at will and
without modesty.
If Israel were not so successful, free and haughty--if it were beleaguered and
tottering on the verge of ruin--perhaps it would be tolerated. But in a sea of
totalitarianism and government-induced poverty, a relatively successful economy
and a stable culture arising out of scrub and desert clearly irks its less
successful neighbors. Envy, as the historian Thucydides reminds us, is a
powerful emotion and has caused not a few wars.

If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would
have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say
there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely
that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a
deep psychological wound. It isn't about lebensraum or some actual physical
threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation's culture--not its
geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves--that determines its wealth
or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare
war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business--
not the Jews--makes it poor, sick and weak.





Throughout the Muslim world, myth and ignorance surround U.S. foreign policy
toward the Middle East. Yes, we give Israel aid, but less than the combined
billions that go to the Palestinians and to Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim
countries. And it is one thing to subsidize a democratic and constitutional (if
cantankerous) ally but quite another to pay for slander from theocratic or
autocratic enemies. Though Israel has its fair share of fundamentalists and
fanatics, the country is not the creation of clerics or strongmen but of
European émigrés, who committed Israel from the start to democracy, free speech
and abundant self-critique.
Far from egging on Israel, the United States actually restrains the Israeli
military, whose organization and discipline, along with the sophisticated
Israeli arms industry, make it quite capable of annihilating nearly all its
bellicose neighbors without American aid. Should the United States withdraw
from active participation in the Middle East and let the contestants settle
their differences on the battlefield, Israel, not the Arab world, would win.
The military record of four previous conflicts does not lie. Arafat should
remember who saved him in Lebanon; it was no power in the Middle East that
brokered his exodus and parted the waves of Israeli planes and tanks for his
safe passage to the desert.

The Muslim world suffers from political amnesia, we now have learned, and so
has forgotten not only Arafat's resurrection but also American help to
beleaguered Afghans, terrified Kuwaitis, helpless Kurds and Shiites, starving
Somalis and defenseless Bosnians--direct intervention that has cost the United
States much more treasure and lives than mere economic aid for Israel ever did.
They forget; but we remember the Palestinians cheering in Nablus hours after
thousands of our innocents were incinerated in New York, the hagiographic
posters of a mass murderer in the streets of Muslim capitals, and the smug
remonstrations of Saudi prince Alwaleed to Mayor Rudy Giuliani at Ground Zero.

Saudi and Kuwaiti Westernized elites find psychological comfort in their
people's anti-American rhetoric, not out of real grievance but perhaps as
reassurance that their own appetite for all things Western doesn't constitute
rejection of their medieval religion or their 13th-century caliphate. Their
apologists in the United States dissemble when they argue that these Gulf
sheikhs are forced to master a doublespeak for foreign consumption, or that
they are better than the frightening alternative, or that they are victims of
unfair American anger that is ignorant of Wahhabi custom.

In their present relationship with the terrorists, these old-fashioned
autocrats are neutrals only in the sense that they now play the cagier role of
Franco's Spain to Hitler's Germany. They aid and abet our enemies, but never
overtly. If the United States prevails, the Saudis can proclaim that they were
always with us; should we lose a shooting war with the terrorists, the princes
can swear that their prior neutrality really constituted allegiance to radical
Islam all along.





In matters of East-West relations, immigration has always been a one-way
phenomenon. Thousands flocked to Athens and Rome; few left for Parthia or
Numidia unless to colonize or exploit. People sneak into South, not North,
Korea--in the same manner that few from Hong Kong once braved gunfire to reach
Beijing (unless to invest and profit). Few Israeli laborers are going to the
West Bank to seek construction jobs. In this vein is the Muslim world's longing
for the very soil of America. Even in the crucible of war, we have discovered
that our worst critics love us in the concrete as much as they hate us in the
abstract.
For all the frothing, it seems that millions of our purported enemies wish to
visit, study or (better yet) live in the United States--and this is true not
just of Westernized professors or globetrotting tycoons but of hijackers,
terrorists, the children of the Taliban, the offspring of Iranian mullahs and
the spoiled teenage brats of our Gulf critics. The terrorists visited lap
dancers, took out frequent-flier miles, spent hours on the Internet, had cell
phones strapped to their hips and hobnobbed in Las Vegas--parasitic on a
culture not their own, fascinated with toys they could not make, and always
ashamed that their lusts grew more than they could be satisfied. Until
September 11, their ilk had been like fleas on a lazy, plump dog, gnashing
their tiny proboscises to gain bloody nourishment or inflict small welts on a
distracted host who found them not worth the scratch.

This dual loathing and attraction for things Western is characteristic of the
highest echelon of the terrorists themselves, often Western-educated, English-
speaking and hardly poor. Emblematic is the evil genius of al Qaeda, the
sinister Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He grew up in Cairo affluence, his family
enmeshed in all the Westernized institutions of Egypt.

Americans find this Middle Eastern cultural schizophrenia maddening, especially
in its inability to fathom that all the things that Muslim visitors profess to
hate--equality of the sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance,
egalitarianism, free speech and secula

[Gość: Yidele]

Americans find this Middle Eastern cultural schizophrenia maddening, especially
in its inability to fathom that all the things that Muslim visitors profess to
hate--equality of the sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance,
egalitarianism, free speech and secular rationalism--are precisely what give us
the material things that they want in the first place. CDs and sexy bare
midriffs are the fruits of a society that values freedom, unchecked inquiry and
individual expression more than the dictates of state or church; wild freedom
and wild materialism are part of the American character. So bewildered
Americans now ask themselves: Why do so many of these anti-Americans, who
profess hatred of the West and reverence for the purity of an energized Islam
or a fiery Palestine, enroll in Chico State or UCLA instead of madrassas in
Pakistan or military academies in Iraq?

The embarrassing answer would explain nearly everything, from bin Laden to the
intifada. Dads and moms who watch al-Jazeera and scream in the street at the
Great Satan really would prefer that their children have dollars, an annual CAT
scan, a good lawyer, air conditioning and Levis in American hell than be
without toilet paper, suffer from intestinal parasites, deal with the secret
police, and squint with uncorrected vision in the Islamic paradise of Cairo,
Tehran and Gaza. Such a fundamental and intolerable paradox in the very core of
a man's heart--multiplied millions of times over--is not a healthy thing either
for them or for us, as we have learned since September 11.





Most Americans recognize and honor the past achievements of Islamic
civilization and the contribution of Middle Eastern immigrants to the United
States and Europe, as well as the traditional hospitality shown visitors to the
Muslim world. And so we have long shown patience with those who hate us, and
more curiosity than real anger.
But that was then, and this is now. A two-kiloton explosion that incinerated
thousands of our citizens--planned by Middle Easterners with the indirect
financial support of purportedly allied governments, the applause of millions,
and the snickering and smiles of millions more--has had an effect that grows
not wanes.

So a neighborly bit of advice for our Islamic friends and their spokesmen
abroad: topple your pillars of ignorance and the edifice of your anti-
Americanism. Try to seek difficult answers from within to even more difficult
questions without. Do not blame others for problems that are largely self-
created or seek solutions over here when your answers are mostly at home.
Please, think hard about what you are saying and writing about the deaths of
thousands of Americans and your relationship with the United States.

America has been a friend more often than not to you. But now you are on the
verge of turning its people--who create, not follow, government--into an enemy:
a very angry and powerful enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to
come.

Pozdrawiam Czarodzieja!;-)

[Gość: Paul]

[Gość: Yidele]

Robiem co mogiem......sle uklony;-).

[Gość: Paul]