A long break? Unfortunately, work got in the way. Besides, this new entry required—I don’t know?—a bit of thoughtfulness. I realize that, in the midst of the violence in Tripoli and the changing tactics of terror that are bringing the seeds of conflict to the heart of Sunni Beirut, there might be more interest in insights that address the immediate crisis, but, if you bear with me, you might find my contribution not entirely unhelpful.
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I need to dwell a little longer on, stretch a little more, this life of raw deals that we Arabs have been living, this choice we are constantly forced to make between evils. Had this dilemma remained squarely ours, today’s debate would echo yesterday’s. But there is a contagion making its rounds as of late—and not in these already afflicted parts.
As recently as September 10, 2001, Arabs like me who abhor that space between rocks and hard places would seek and find comfort somewhere in the perspectives of informed Western observers who knew enough about us to extract the repressed colors from a predicament dyed heavy for us in black and white. Even when they were very near they stood far enough to distinguish between issues fake and real. They could identify with the Arabs’ plight without buying into the professed credentials of its presumed defenders. They gave primacy to context when they met an apparent fact, and allowed nuance, however inconvenient, to intrude on absolute convictions.
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But the ease with which we, terminally beleaguered Arabs, choose sides is attracting converts from well outside the usual circle of acolytes. In the aftermath of a tragic September 11 that devastated lives, brought consequence agonizingly close to cause and let loose the demons of a very disturbed politics, out there in the West hysteria is harassing sound judgment the way it chased it away in my East. Islam has become the villain, the West a hero, civilizations are colliding and Western enlightenment itself is fighting for its life. The brightest of minds, with such unseemly haste, have joined the fight, long-cherished principles have been dumped and old nemeses have become the best of chums. Clearly panicky and besieged, they have fallen into the worst of our routines: Their political persuasions, pumped-up on noblesse oblige and high on rage, are planting themselves like bouncers at the door of every discourse and arbitrarily picking their way through the facts desperately trying to enter the argument.
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Still, truth be told, you cannot dismiss chagrin when it travels beyond its customary fringe quarters; when it is eloquent and only reluctantly hate filled; when it works so hard to justify and qualify if only to digest its own intolerance more easily. Similarly, you cannot embrace it simply because it cuts you all the slack you want, converts every fishy excuse of yours into a respectable reason and takes your obvious fibs for incontrovertible facts.
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You cannot ignore Martin Amis, one of England’s literary talents and a recovering liberal, when, in a three-part essay in the British Observer back in September 2006, he pronounces the Age of Horrorism, spawned by a maniacal Islamism, upon us. You cannot walk away from his words, which mystify precisely because they come from his pen. As an acquaintance of mine wrote after she read his piece, “Why would a man with his pulsating intellect, a man who seems to know enough and know it well write as if he knows nothing at all?”
And then it dawned on her:
As I read through Amis’s opening act, I quickly realized how forbidding the terrene of Islamism can be to the uninitiated…Before September 11, the West, he tells us, "had no views whatever on Islam," that, before the cruel indecency of that day, Islamism’s immediacy for the West was "…unforeseeable, altogether unknowable." These are confessions that tempt a rueful nod. After all, before September 11, grotesque or not, political Islam spread its poison way over here and therefore invited little Western attention and merited even less of its thought. Before September 11, to the deciders in much of the West, in an even larger slice of the East, and, yes, in Israel, Islamism seemed like an ugly enough of a good idea, a homegrown pit-bull that could harass unwelcome intruders and keep genuine moderation and secularism in check. Before September 11, it was for the East to painfully live through and climb up the steep learning curve about Islamism. --
How can I, then, not feel sympathy for Amis as he takes his first steps into the mind and purpose of Mohammad Atta; into the frightening message from that murderous day in a Madrid train station, that blood-dipped seventh of July in London? How can I not feel sympathy for him as he stumbles through the madness that is suicide-bombing Iraq into non-existence; through Palestinian suicide bombings that have sent a noble cause scampering to the moral low ground; through the blue burka and the black niqab that symbolize Islamism’s dire promise to us Muslim women; through the societies of "half-orphans" conceived by Muslim men given to polygamy and temporary legal pleasure? How can I not feel sympathy for Amis as he sits mortified through the rushes of an "anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualistic, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti rational…" Islam?...
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…Because the monster is within Islam, the search for the external fiends that feed it, although duly noted by Amis, becomes a kind of appeasement. Because of its terrifying methods, of the promiscuity of its rage, Western transgressions and Israeli wickedness, although regrettable, become implicitly rational—a tolerable kind of malevolence. Death that comes in trickles from cluster bombs, death that comes in planeloads of reasonable justification or savvy rhetoric, death that eats its way slowly into its victim’s life, maybe be malevolent but it is certainly way short of "maximum." And moral equivalence in this apocalyptic conflict, relevant though it remains for Amis, does not in any way narrow the "vast and obvious" moral advantage of the West and does not render it any less superior.
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I read and I marvel and I think this is all so sad and so neat…
Indeed! The Age of Horrorism, the way Amis cannot help but see it, is with us and it is horrific in its deathly beliefs, gruesome in its means. However, although my friend is right to feel sympathy for Amis even as she points up the intellectual—and, yes--moral lethargy that send large sections of his article into a deep snore, I am still wondering to myself, How is this any less silly than the paranoiac nonsense thrown on us daily over here? It’s like looking at ourselves in the mirror. We are told that, unlike us, the West, traumatized though it may be, is endowed with liberal traditions and democratic practices entrenched enough to help it withstand and eventually overcome the witch-hunt mentality and jingoism that befall a people in times of crisis. We are told that, unlike ours, the West’s core—its center if you prefer—is elastic enough to let its illuminati run wild on the edge of sensibility before pulling them back, tamed, into the fold. Lovely! It seems to me that we have all the excuses we need for wholesale acquiescence in intimidated, cowering thought. What are the West’s?
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But, as I have just mentioned, this is not only about Amis and others like him who thoughtlessly sprinted to one extreme in search of incondite explanations for and defenses against a disturbingly aggressive strain of Islamic fundamentalism. This is equally about those who woke up on September 12, 2001, no less aware of our rich humanity than they were before Osama became a household name, and no less sensitive to our distress from a medley of incestuous wrongs: from colonialism; from an unforgivably callous American policy; from Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and people; from Israel’s pernicious meddling way past its borders; from our failure in building nations; from the ubiquity of authoritarianism in our region; from the pervasiveness of parochialism among our people; from our free fall to the bottom of that list of developing countries still struggling with illiteracy, shattered potential, lost youth, women’s rights, human right…you name it. I am actually lamenting those Western observers who (with the best of intentions, I am sure) have taken Amis’s jitters and turned them on their head: Incensed by the intellectual upheaval that has seen the defection of the dearest of colleagues and alarmed by a scandalously boorish American interventionism in collusion with unspeakably merciless Israeli practices, they are finding the light in the darkest of forces competing with them.
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If backdrops and diversity, the vibrancy of life itself, were kept out of Amis’s hyperventilating, dark screed on Islam and the East, blind empathy and schmaltzy romanticism have smothered every nuance in the pseudo-Chomskian harangues defending these. If, for Amis, Liz Cheney (of all people) is a heroine and her supposed fight for Muslim women’s liberation is the one thing that counts, for many on the other team, the champ is Hezbollah and its so-called resistance to American and Israeli plans is the one thing that matters. A history rich with super power machinations; the vile nature and atrocious track record of oppressive regimes, the virulent ideologies and questionable agendas of extremist movements; the cynicism and shared interests that make secret friends of ostensible enemies--all these, as guideposts to motives, as paths to context, have fallen by the wayside for both groups as they, like a merry-go-round, rotate obsessively around their one-and-only issue: the terrifying specter of Islamism for this crowd, the unbearable sight of America and Israel for that.
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Even those miserable labels, which were dragged into this chaos already exhausted from too much abuse and bankrupt because of too many thefts, have been indiscriminately deployed in the service of every warring faction across this divide. Moderate, radical, reformist, patriot, crony, terrorist, traitor, defeatist, stooge are embossed like stamps of approvals on supporters or fired like bullets at dissenters in confrontations and spats that are seeing new faces fighting it out with very old hands.
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We all know what makes officialdom and counterfeit ideologues (what I call repeat offenders) everywhere so prone to made-to-fit principles and silly-putty logic that change depending on the issue or the circumstance or the identity of the protagonists and their antagonists. It is not entirely unreasonable for politics to demand from its aficionados a shameless flirtatiousness with inconsistency. In fact, such is the tendency of our human nature: to bend into pleasing shape facts that get in the way of a particularly dear belief or objective. But when such proclivities begin to manifest themselves in those on whom we depend for a measure of sanity and intelligence in momentous discussions about momentous happenings, well, then, where can we possibly go from here.
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Take the recent eruptions in Tripoli’s Nahr al Bared and Syria’s decades-old reign over Lebanon. Welcomed though Syrian hegemony might have been for a very long time by our political class and the powers that be, Syria’s deeds in this country can with total ease and absolute neutrality be described as disgraceful and just as revealing of Syria’s ill-will towards Lebanon as Israel’s own rich record is. In fact, one can very persuasively argue—and many of the best scholars and analysts have with ample evidence in their support—that the two countries, oftentimes in perfect sync, have taken turns in smacking us down. One might even suggest—if one wanted to play with fire—that Syria’s misbehavior in Lebanon was and is infinitely more offensive than Israel’s, because one anticipates the worst of treatments from an enemy but expects the best of care from a sister.
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But the story, as always, does not stop here. And not surprisingly, Islamism today serves as the best example of how labyrinthine and murky this region’s politics can be. Quite a few of those--including every self-righteous March 14th leader— who paint Syria now as a reactionary power presiding over every militant Islamic group, from the almighty Shiite Hezbollah to the Shiite-hating Jihadist Sunni bands, had in the past either actively endorsed or been perfectly indifferent to Syria’s spine-chilling activities. It is a fact that many a self-described moderate, democracy-loving Sunni chief has done his bit in cultivating a base among fanatical Sunni currents. Those of us who have not been living on lala land for the past 20 years did not need Seymour Hersh to tell us about the connection between mainstream Lebanese Sunnism and its radical fringe elements. Our Sunni bosses, from the late Rafiq (and now his son Sa’ad) Hariri to Naguib Mikati to Fathi Yakan to the Mufti himself, have been at it and in on it for a very long time. And so, contrary to March 14's blatantly self-serving contention, monsters in our backyard are not only Syrian created and sponsored. But contrary as well to Hersh’s clueless claim made recently on CNN that Syria is innocent of such relations because of its alliance with Hezbollah, which reveals astonishing ignorance about the exhaustively researched mode with which Syria pursues its interests, a considerable number of our monsters (and very specifically Fath al Islam) have, for some of their bread and butter, Syria to thank. I am not venturing an opinion here, I am stating a fact. Fanaticism may be the common denominator between all these gangs, but their paymasters are different, their loyalties may clash and their agendas may at times compete and at others meet.
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For these very sinister reasons, it is absurd to position oneself reflexively on either side of this explosive fault line. However, in this tumultuous environment of post-September 11 invasions and occupations, unholy alliances, axes of evil, dizzying flip-flops and holier-than-thou rhetoric suddenly all this background fades to black. In the aftermath of every flare-up in the current Lebanese debacle, the same two narratives make the strongest showing. For Syria’s fans or America’s detractors, America and Israel are always to blame. Syria’s treachery in Lebanon, the brutal nature of the regime itself, its proven very intimate links to many of the country’s disruptive forces and, most significantly, its very palpable anxiety about the international tribunal are at best immaterial, at worst a concoction by unpatriotic American stooges. For Syria’s detractors or America’s fans, Syria and Iran are always to blame. America’s own dubious history in Lebanon, its current regional entanglements, Israeli designs and the very shady ambitions and resumes of most of March 14's heroes are at best irrelevant, at worst propaganda by unpatriotic Iranian-Syrian operatives. And, as we used to say back in Arabic class years ago,
wa haluma jarran (and so on and so forth.)
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Nary an effort is made, except by the quietly sane and sufficiently detached, to follow the dynamic of the event itself, to identify the players with the highest stakes, to patiently way different scenario, to give fact more weight than sentiment, to read up on matters as yet neglected or unknown, to zoom out for a good look at regional intrigues and zero in on furtive mischief in our back alleys, before making up one’s mind or placing a safe bet.
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You want another example? Take Last summer’s war between Hezbollah and Israel. The rest of this segment in three days’ time—hopefully.
