who hates who and why?
Dec. 9th, 2004 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerMy friend Nick passed along this link:
>I expected this to be a screed. Rather, it's an intriguing, but disturbing, new way of looking at US-
>Israeli-Arab relations. Well, new to me anyway. The idea should be obvious but it had never occurred
>to me before.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/9792
I responded:
I agree on a number of points, but I think the auhor is missing some things.
1. Arabs don't pay as much attention to those other Muslims' issues because they *don't* feel the grievances of other *Muslims* as much as they do the grievances of other *Arabs*, of which includes Palestinians but not most of those other groups. Turks, especially, are likely to be hated and reviled throughout the Arab world because they were overlords for so long.
That's changed somewhat with the pan-Islamicism of the radical movement. Chechens, Bosnians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Americans, Australians, and all sorts of flavours of Arabs have been working together. But that's still the fringe, not the man in the street.
2. The elites are (IMO) likely to speak out loudly on the injustice of the Palestine issue because it's a great way to distract attention from the fact that they do basically zip about improving their own countries, in whihc the man in the street has very little control over government.
And because the man in the street is powerless, he's often happy to be given causes to rail against. If you don't feel as if you have any control, it's convenient to be able to build a worldview in which dark, powerful, and malign foreign influcences control and manipulate the evetns to prevent you and yours from getting justice.
3. I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that "no one knows what the silent majority really thinks" in one breath and then make wild generalizations like "When the Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica 10 years ago, not a ripple disturbed the serene calm of Muslim opinion". Not to mention that, as far as I know, that's simply an inaccurate statement. There was (and remains today) from what I've heard, a deep and bitter resentment in the Muslim world toward the West for their feeble and ineffective attempts to stem the tide of Serbian aggression through Chamberlain-esque pronouncements rather than active intervention.
4. As far as Thailand goes, that conflict has beenactive, AFAIK, for only a couple of years. Comparing that to 50 years of growing outrage over Palestine is kind of weak.
I don't have the author's experience in talking to individual Muslims (let alone his personal background of growing up in pre-Khomeini Iran), but I do read bits of the Arab press from time to time, a few Muslim blogs, and the general commentary that goes along with the war between the US and AQ. And all of those sources tend to disagree strongly with the author's contention that Muslims don't know and don't care about other Muslim-related conflicts.
As far as his contention that Muslims hate Israel because they're allied to the US, not the US because they're allied to Israel, that overlooks most of the history of the conflict. The US didn't take away half of Palestine and give it to foreigners from Europe and Russia (Britain did that, with the complicity of the UN and only distant involvement from the US). The US didn't chase the Palestinians out of their half of the Mandate. The US didn't massacre Palestinian villagers during 1948, didn't send commando squads to attack Palestinian town in Jordan in the 1950s, didn't send proxy troops into Lebanese refugee camps to kill hundreds of people. The US didn't defeat Arab armies in three wars, didn't blow up Iraq's nuclear reactor, didn't (until the current war) arrest Arabs and hold them without trial, torture them, seize their land and crops, assassinate their leaders, kill women and children as "collateral damage". The head of the US Air Force hasn't given a press interview in which he said that dropping 1,000 pound bomb into an apartment building filled with uninvolved civilians was an acceptable way to assassinate one enemy leader and that he didn't understand what the fuss was about and would discharge any pilot who refused such a mission.
Israel can claim the credit for all of those things; yes, the US has helped Israel do many of them, mostly indirectly, but we would have been unlikely to do them ourselves if Israel were not there.
>I expected this to be a screed. Rather, it's an intriguing, but disturbing, new way of looking at US-
>Israeli-Arab relations. Well, new to me anyway. The idea should be obvious but it had never occurred
>to me before.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/9792
I responded:
I agree on a number of points, but I think the auhor is missing some things.
1. Arabs don't pay as much attention to those other Muslims' issues because they *don't* feel the grievances of other *Muslims* as much as they do the grievances of other *Arabs*, of which includes Palestinians but not most of those other groups. Turks, especially, are likely to be hated and reviled throughout the Arab world because they were overlords for so long.
That's changed somewhat with the pan-Islamicism of the radical movement. Chechens, Bosnians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Americans, Australians, and all sorts of flavours of Arabs have been working together. But that's still the fringe, not the man in the street.
2. The elites are (IMO) likely to speak out loudly on the injustice of the Palestine issue because it's a great way to distract attention from the fact that they do basically zip about improving their own countries, in whihc the man in the street has very little control over government.
And because the man in the street is powerless, he's often happy to be given causes to rail against. If you don't feel as if you have any control, it's convenient to be able to build a worldview in which dark, powerful, and malign foreign influcences control and manipulate the evetns to prevent you and yours from getting justice.
3. I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that "no one knows what the silent majority really thinks" in one breath and then make wild generalizations like "When the Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica 10 years ago, not a ripple disturbed the serene calm of Muslim opinion". Not to mention that, as far as I know, that's simply an inaccurate statement. There was (and remains today) from what I've heard, a deep and bitter resentment in the Muslim world toward the West for their feeble and ineffective attempts to stem the tide of Serbian aggression through Chamberlain-esque pronouncements rather than active intervention.
4. As far as Thailand goes, that conflict has beenactive, AFAIK, for only a couple of years. Comparing that to 50 years of growing outrage over Palestine is kind of weak.
I don't have the author's experience in talking to individual Muslims (let alone his personal background of growing up in pre-Khomeini Iran), but I do read bits of the Arab press from time to time, a few Muslim blogs, and the general commentary that goes along with the war between the US and AQ. And all of those sources tend to disagree strongly with the author's contention that Muslims don't know and don't care about other Muslim-related conflicts.
As far as his contention that Muslims hate Israel because they're allied to the US, not the US because they're allied to Israel, that overlooks most of the history of the conflict. The US didn't take away half of Palestine and give it to foreigners from Europe and Russia (Britain did that, with the complicity of the UN and only distant involvement from the US). The US didn't chase the Palestinians out of their half of the Mandate. The US didn't massacre Palestinian villagers during 1948, didn't send commando squads to attack Palestinian town in Jordan in the 1950s, didn't send proxy troops into Lebanese refugee camps to kill hundreds of people. The US didn't defeat Arab armies in three wars, didn't blow up Iraq's nuclear reactor, didn't (until the current war) arrest Arabs and hold them without trial, torture them, seize their land and crops, assassinate their leaders, kill women and children as "collateral damage". The head of the US Air Force hasn't given a press interview in which he said that dropping 1,000 pound bomb into an apartment building filled with uninvolved civilians was an acceptable way to assassinate one enemy leader and that he didn't understand what the fuss was about and would discharge any pilot who refused such a mission.
Israel can claim the credit for all of those things; yes, the US has helped Israel do many of them, mostly indirectly, but we would have been unlikely to do them ourselves if Israel were not there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 09:26 pm (UTC)http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/i/ihatepeoplelesliebricusse.shtml
"I hate people! I hate people!
People are despicable creatures
Loathesome inexplicable creatures
Good-for-nothing kickable creatures
I hate people! I abhor them!
When I see the indolent classes
Sitting on their indolent asses
Gulping ale from indolent glasses
I hate people! I detest them! I deplore them! ..."
no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 04:15 am (UTC)Complicated situation all around, I say.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 04:26 am (UTC)Complicated situation all around, I say.
Agreed.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 04:32 am (UTC)Same deal in 1967, and 1973. Attacks from outside with a surprise win for Israel. Surprise, remember! They weren't favored numerically, or in terms of materiel.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 04:40 am (UTC)The Arabs did not drive the Palsetinians out of their homes. Some fled because they didn't want to be in the middle of a war zone; others were driven out by the ISRAELIS. Others were, sadly, massacred, also by the Israelis.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 05:00 am (UTC)And I think one is likely to find a little more reliable information in books than on websites. The latter are generally just propaganda factories (on both sides).
I'd suggest reading Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall (in which, IIRC, he quotes no less than Theodore Herzl saying that, basically, the Arabs have to be removed from Palestine, either by driving them out or by, well, making them disappear). The volume of the Cambridge Middle East Studies series that Shlaim and Eugene Rogan edited is also a good source. Benny Morris's Righteous Victims is also worth a read, as are Sachar's A History of Israel, and The Palestinian People by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal. David Shipler's Arab and Jew is an excellent book (no surprise it won a Pulitzer), and the quite recent How Israel Lost: The Four Questions by Richard Ben Cramer is more informal, but also more chilling and depressing, a view of Israel by another Pulitzer Prize winner (Cramer, an American Jew, won his for his reporting on Israel, a country he loves deeply).