Why They Don't Hate Us

Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil

Mark LeVine

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780744735
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is the Muslim world really a seething mass of anti-Western hatred, or is the true situation more complicated than that? In this important and ambitious new work, Mark Levine presents a vivid and compelling picture of the human face behind the veil of the 'Axis of Evil' and sets out an alternative roadmap for better relations between the West and the Muslim world. Going beyond the stereotypes and below the media radar, this book explains why, contrary to the popular perception, 'they' don't hate 'us' – or at least, not yet.

PART 1

Who Are They, Where’d They Come From, and Why They Don’t Hate Us – Yet?

Figure 2 The poor in Morocco consume the images, if not the products, of globalization, July 2002

1 From Evil to Empathy: The Orient Beats Back the Axis of Arrogance

Introduction: Four Scenes

Scene One: The Marrakesh Express

Riding the air-conditioned train back to Rabat from Marrakesh on a hot July day it’s hard to understand what the authors of the recently released, widely acclaimed Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) were thinking. The much celebrated 2002 report is the latest in decades – indeed centuries – of reports, dossiers, books, and exposés aiming to understand why the Arab and larger Muslim worlds have not attained levels of democracy and development similar to those of their neighbors to the West. And along with the 9/11 Commission Report of two years later, the AHDR has become a foundational text for understanding why they seem to hate us for their failures.

This being rush hour the passengers are largely well-dressed young women chatting on cell phones; the lead story in today’s paper is the Spanish military occupation of the tiny disputed Island of Leila (just 100m off the Moroccan coast), which has led Moroccans to wonder which of the two is the modern, civilized, and peace-loving European country. The newly purchased books in my backpack offer various takes on how globalization is impacting the Middle East and what Arabs and Muslims can do about it. The landscape alternates between beautiful country and urban slums, both similarly dotted with countless satellite dishes.

Together the scene challenges the central argument of the report and untold predecessors (and indeed the entire history of US and Western policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds): that it is Arabs and Muslims themselves, their institutions, structures, and cultures, who are primarily responsible for the innumerable problems plaguing their societies, and that only a combination of Western tutelage, reforms, and even intervention can reverse this sad state of affairs. As I leaf through a Sufi magazine on the train I’m reminded once again of just how far removed mainstream policy-making, news coverage, and scholarship is from the realities of life in the Middle East and North Africa. Especially since September 11, 2001.

Scene Two: Nablus, Palestine or Freetown, Sierra Leone?

I’m sitting at a new hotel café in the casbah (old city) of Nablus with a colleague of mine and his best student, assessing the role of violence in the three years of the second intifada. My colleague, a British-educated Palestinian sociologist, and his student, a twenty-year-old woman dressed in conservative Muslim attire who’s hoping to go to the United States or Europe for graduate school, are explaining how the Palestinian experience of both globalization and occupation has produced a unique situation, one which has had an as yet underappreciated impact on the dynamics of the conflict. As if on cue, as we delved deeper into this subject and finished off another plate of hummus (Palestinian hummus is by far the best in the world) four Palestinian youngsters, aged between twelve and seventeen years old, burst into the restaurant brandishing a Kalashnikov and other weapons, screaming at the manager to close and at the customers to leave in honor of the previous night’s “martyr” at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces.

I have seen plenty of Palestinians with guns in my travels in the Occupied Territories, but never anyone as young as these without any supervision or control by an adult, or at least a trained militant. I have rarely felt unsafe in Palestine, even as an American Jew, because I speak Arabic, and have friends in most of the places I visit and enough experience to avoid – and where necessary, talk my way out of – potentially dangerous situations. But this was different, not just because of the look the young man with the gun gave me and the fact that his finger was literally on the trigger (not to the side as anyone with a minimum of military training would do), but because of the feeling of anarchy that enveloped me during this brief incident, a sensation I’d never experienced in the Occupied Territories before.

As the group moved on and we got up to leave, the youngest boy, about twelve, and carrying nothing more threatening than a belt, ran back in and said sheepishly to the manager, “Shukran! (thank you),” before disappearing into the street. Once in the street we saw them again and quickly hopped in a taxi as they wandered around the old city looking for anyone not obeying their orders.

I recount this little incident, so minor in comparison with the level of violence Palestinians and Israelis live with daily, because it – indeed, the Occupied Territories as a whole – represents everything that’s dangerous about globalization, especially after September 11: the gradual disintegration of social authority and the unmooring of communal identities in countries unable to keep up with “turbo-capitalism”; the whirlpool of desperation and nihilism that is slowly tearing apart “failed” states and societies across the “Global South”;¹ and the unilateral power of the United States to engage in, support or ignore oppressive policies and even brutal occupations against the will of the world community. In short, Palestine could soon resemble Sierra Leone, with a state that has been effectively dismantled by external and internal political forces; a workforce that has seen jobs and wages decimated by regional and global economic processes;² and a “weapons–petrodollar coalition” that manipulates the conflict to ensure a more or less permanent state of manageable hostilities, from which seemingly endless profits can be siphoned.

Scene Three: Independence Day in Baghdad

It’s half a year later, and I’m in Baghdad. March 19, 2004 to be exact: the one-year anniversary of the US-led invasion and occupation of the country. I had traveled to Iraq specifically on this date not just to do research on the situation in the country one year after the invasion, but also to experience an anti-occupation demonstration where the occupation actually is taking place, rather than NY or LA, where the moribund anti-war movement seems incapable of organizing much more than politically tired demonstrations that have little impact on the larger public. In fact, I was supposed to be in the middle of a hundred or more European activists who had organized a “caravan” to Iraq in solidarity with Iraqis. What I got instead was about two thousand extremely religious and angry Iraqi men, chanting “Oh Jews, remember the battle of Khaybar [the battle where Muhammad defeated the Jews as recounted in the Qur’an]; Muhammad’s army is returning!” And that was the nicest thing they chanted. Needless to say, I stayed on the sidelines, actually on the roof of a building overlooking the street.

The caravan, sadly, was canceled due to the chaos enveloping the country. While 100,000 New Yorkers marched against the occupation, only one-fiftieth that number were willing to risk their lives, Sunnis and Shi‘a together (to march) in Baghdad. And with good reason. Only two weeks before over sixty Shi‘ites were killed in a suicide bombing at the Qadhamiyya mosque where this march started. Two nights before, a hotel around the block from mine was blasted out of existence with such force it blew out all the windows on my hotel’s first three floors. Within a few weeks of the anniversary most international peace activists had fled Iraq, as even Iraqi religious leaders who supported their presence couldn’t guarantee their safety.

Figure 3 Marching to anti-US and anti-Jewish chants, Baghdad, March 19, 2004

What I didn’t realize in Nablus but had become clear by the time I left Baghdad was that the chaos in both cities, in both countries, was not just a by-product of the occupations suffered by Palestinians and Iraqis. Rather, chaos has become crucial to the success of the occupations and the strategic goals motivating them, in good measure because of the profits and repression it facilitates and even enables.

Scene Four: Indonesia Comes to Irvine

There are only a few days left to go before the start of “Operation Shock and Awe” and I have just spoken at yet another anti-war rally against Iraq at my university, UC Irvine. Perhaps two hundred students sat on the steps in front of the Administration Building and heard their fellow students denounce the war, and me, the resident all-things-Middle Eastern professor, try to explain why just opposing war on Iraq is not going to solve anything. I explained that even in the decade of “peace” after the first Gulf War at least five thousand Iraqis have died every month – that’s 500,000 mostly children and old people. And they would continue to die each month even if “we” managed to stop President Bush’s drive to finish his father’s war.

My aim was to get students to face the moral quandary at the center of the anti-war movement: in a political context where there seem to be only two alternative policies, ineffective yet never-ending sanctions that kill thousands of innocent people each month (not to mention the untold number killed by Hussein), or a US-sponsored invasion that could kill tens of thousands immediately – but, I thought, might put an end to the mass deaths from starvation and disease – which is the more moral choice? What I could not imagine then, and was incensed to learn when I traveled through Iraq, is that the numbers did not improve after the war. In fact they were so bad that the US-run Ministry of Health stopped publishing most health statistics. How could I know, as the chief resident anesthesiologist of Qadamiyyah Hospital would tell me fifty-four weeks later in utter exasperation, that trying to convince the American-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority to do something about the dire health situation in Iraq would be like “banging your head against a wall”?³

While many of the students seemed to understand my point, I wasn’t prepared for the young Indonesian student who came up to me (and the female Muslim students standing next to me) after my talk to disagree politely but powerfully with the demonstration. She introduced herself by explaining that she was a Christian whose mother was blown up in her church by Muslim terrorists, and whose father and uncle were forced to convert to Islam or be killed. Making matters worse was the fact that once converted, her uncle took advantage of his new religion by taking a second wife, and now beats her aunt – his first wife – every day. Turning to the Muslim students she described her recent visit home, where people are “wearing Osama shirts and laughing for every non-Muslim they killed … In Indonesia nowadays, jihad is everywhere. When the US was there everything was better. There where jobs, we could walk the streets at night, we could practice our religion.”

“Yes, the US has done bad things, but it isn’t to blame for everything bad in the world. Now you are not in Indonesia but they are still killing each other, even worse. The US is kind to many countries. It never invaded other countries in an extent that the Japanese did. The only thing the US did was capitalism … Do you think that if the Arab/Muslim countries had the same power as the US they wouldn’t invade here and kill all the Christians?” she added in a follow-up email to our conversation. “I would ask the Muslim students, would you rather be a Christian living in a Muslim country or a Muslim living in the US?”

I have quoted her words at length because I think they highlight serious problems in the discourse and strategy of the anti-war movement, and with the progressive movement more generally. Yes, the student has forgotten some very important facts – that the previous regime killed half a million East Timorese Christians with the full support of the US, that the US has invaded dozens of countries in the last century, that “doing capitalism” has done quite enough damage to the world, succeeding in large part because it involved doing colonialism at the same time.

But against the force and tragedy of her life experience what point would there be to explain the links between the US and the violence she experienced or witnessed? Indeed, even if “we” are partly, or even largely, responsible for planting the seeds of the horrific violence that is threatening the soul of Islam today (and ours, as well), what does this have to do with the fanatics that killed her mother, or the local imams who sanctioned her uncle’s new marriage and wife-beating?

The issues her poignant plea raises for the global peace and justice movement are profound. Particularly for the “progressive” wing of the movement, to focus so much on the sins of America without addressing the crimes committed by countries and cultures not allied with the US, or even those of countries we’ve victimized, leaves out too many people who have been victims of all three. As important, such a narrow focus generates a perception within mainstream society that the global peace and justice movement is less interested in pursuing justice, human rights, and peace in Iraq or Palestine than in bashing the United States government.

After all, if we were interested in justice for all, wouldn’t there have been as large a coalition against the deadly sanctions regime during the last decade as against the war? Wouldn’t Muslim students at my university spend at least a few minutes a year raising consciousness about genocide and slavery in the southern Sudan, never mind the plight of Muslims in Chechnya, Kashmir, China, or the Philippines, even as they organize week long teach-ins on “55 Years of Israeli Terror”? Wouldn’t we be raising our voices against the authoritarian regimes in control of almost every country in the MENA and not just against Bush, Blair, and Sharon?

This attitude was revealed more strongly in the pre-war protests, where the “Cairo Declaration” of December 2002, mentioned in the Introduction, could find nothing worse to say about Saddam Hussein than that there were currently “restrictions on democratic development in Iraq.” (My Iraqi Kurdish Arabic professor would certainly have an interesting perspective on the meaning of “restricted” democracy in Iraq when under Hussein male members of Kurdish families were singled out for gendercide and the women for sexual slavery or worse.)

But the saddest part of my brief conversation with the Indonesian student was the complete inability of her fellow students – young head-scarf-wearing Muslim activists-students who themselves come from countries where men need little encouragement from the US to oppress and engage in violence against all sorts of “Others” – to acknowledge or respond to the incredible tragedy that has befallen her family and her country, one in which the “West” and “Islam” (if we can make such gross generalizations) both share tremendous responsibility. Sadly it seems that for too many people at all levels of the progressive movement, if it’s not a US crime, it’s not worth their time.

As problematic as the positions of the progressive wing of the anti-war movement might be, the more mainstream groups, especially Win Without War and even United For Peace and...