Monday, December 29, 2003
William Pfaff, writing from Paris in today's Boston Globe shows us that the spirit of Edward Said lives on with his message that we don't understand the Islamic world, so we better not even try. Sadly, for some reason the op-ed piece entitled "West is an interloper in Islamic struggle" is not available in the online edition of the Globe.
For an amusing take on Pfaff's anti-Americanism, see the TimesWatch entry, Come Back, Paul Krugman--All Is Forgiven. Pfaff has the distinction of being one of the three people on the planet (I'm just assuming there must be two others) who thinks Saddam's capture bodes ill for Bush's re-election.
Anyway, in the Globe piece Pfaff starts with the proposal that a survey in the Netherlands showed that 26 percent of of Protestants and 29 percent of Catholics questioned "could not give a coherent answer about the origin or significance of Christmas." The message is a bit muddy, but the point is taken - we Westerners are ignorant about our own religion (well, at least 26-29 percent of us), so how can we ever be expected to understand the Islamic world?
Fortunately, we have Mr. Pfaff to explain it to us. You see, all you need to know is two things. Think "humiliation" and "it's our fault."
The forms of militant Islamic fundamentalism - Al Qaeda recruitment, fighting the jihad in Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine - are protests against the power and seeming omnipotence of the Western world and, particularly, the United States.
Then follows the predictable laundry-list of "humiliations" the Arab-Islamic world has suffered, which includes the bit that prompted this post, wherein Pfaff simultaneously discovers a new country and dismisses a couple of millenia of non-Arab residence:
Nothing like a bit of historical revision to add some spice to your humiliation salad. Were it not for that bit of colonialist land-grabbing, the Neverland of Arab Palestine would be a utopia today. Never mind that there was no such political entity, and that others had also been living there along-side the Arabs.
The conclusion? The "Islamic World" is doing its reform on its own, thank you very much, and we can only cause more trouble, because that's all we ever do. That follows logically, after all, once you believe everything is the West's fault, you must believe, even absent evidence, that better days would following naturally for our absence.
Indifferent to its own religious history and historical culture, it has substituted a shallow and commercial secularism that Islamic fundamentalism furiously rejects but is unlikely to defeat.
In all of this, the United States is a detonator of explosions primed by cultural and political frustration. It imagines that it brings progress, but all it has brought so far is a deepening chaos.
Interestingly, there is a second example of op-ed indiotarianism in today's Globe entitled "Entering 2004, America wears a very different face," by Georgie Ann Geyer. This one is a hysterical piece of nonsense in the "Bush = unilateralism" genus. Sample:
But once America struck Iraq in March - a faraway country without the raison d'etat - everything changed. America had shucked away all the rules of combat, all the rules of war, all the international structures it had meticulously built over decades since World Wat II...
Well, you get it, it pretty much goes on like that.
I'm assuming there's some technical or legal reason why these two pieces were left off the online edition, and not the mere fact that the Globe knew their low quality would result in their having the shit fisked out of them in the world of the electronic media. After all, the position of internet drive-by victim is already filled in the persons of James Carroll and Derrick Z. Jackson.
BTW, speaking of Derrick Z. Jackson, congrats to him for concluding an otherwise decent column (Against the war, for the soldiers) with an unfortunate turn of phrase that seems to revive the "baby killer" meme. This Globe letter writer has a very good response.
