There is this notion in both the West and in the Islamic world that these two forces cannot get along and are destined to continue what began as the Crusades (there were nine of them) a millennium ago. After nearly four hundred years of being pummeled and invaded by Muslim warriors – literally pushing the Pope out of Rome and conquering large sections of continental Europe – Europeans responded with lesser attacks in the Holy Land from 1095 through 1291. While there were long-lasting cultural and economic impacts on the relationship between east and west, the Islamic forces rose again with the Ottomans, who rose in 1299 until doused in 1922 because they picked the wrong side of WWI. In their their heyday – the 16thand 17th century – the Ottomans rocked the world like no European power could.
Still, while our ancestors were burning books in the Dark Ages, Muslim scholars were preserving them in their great libraries as they busied themselves inventing algebra (an Arabic word) based on Arabic numerals (ever try and multiply Roman numerals?) and creating new strides in medicine and modern geography (and mapping). When the Ottoman’s faded in the late 18th and 19th centuries, as European powers effectively controlled vast stretches of Ottoman holdings in Africa and the Middle East, their began an era of Muslim humiliation and erosion of power that reduced them in the eyes of many in the West as primitive tribes of ignorant nomads. It was not until the discovery of oil in strategic parts of the Middle East that Arab prelates began a long process of trying to buy respect.
For Arab peasants and working class, the promise of a better lifestyle clearly shown in Western film and television never materialized. It was siphoned off by what was seen as mega-wealthy monarchs and corrupt leaders, many of the latter supported by U.S. military aid in exchange for siding with the U.S. and its anti-Soviet policies. We were loved in the Middle East once… When I was a boy, as the step-son of a U.S. diplomat stationed in Beirut, Lebanon, I was treated better by local Sunni and Shiite Muslims than I have ever been treated anywhere on earth. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, local Beirutis, wearing black armbands, mourned and wailed in the streets, shedding tears and collapsing into deep sadness… quite a bit different from the cheering one often sees in Arab streets at American deaths today.
The disenfranchised Arab masses, betrayed by their Western-supported leaders, were sitting ducks for Muslim radicals preaching violence now for eternal joy in the hereafter. Islam made that recruiting easy, since on death, most pious Muslims then have to wait an indeterminate time until the big Judgment Day for all mankind; only those who die in the service of Allah (holy war – Jihad) go directly to heaven. Most Arabs had nothing to lose, since the path promised by the West was clearly never going to materialize. The violent insertion of Israel into the Middle East only gave leaders in search of a cause a rallying cry to muster even more anti-incumbent and anti-Western violence.
But there is a change in the wind; Muslims were not born to hate the West. Our support for grassroots rebellion in the Middle East – against these malevolent dictators – has moved the needle slightly in some lands… more in others. The pro-Western sentiments in the Libyan stronghold of Benghazi cannot be underestimated. What a contrast to our reception in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As one taxi-driver told a reporter, in halting English, for the New York Times (May 28th): “ ‘America No. 1’. Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated hereabouts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Muslim country — even those with 100,000 American troops [stationed in other Muslim nations, mostly waging war] — in probably half a century or more. People smile and go out of their way to say hello to them, and are almost shockingly courteous. It is that oddest of oddities, an Arab war zone where foreign joggers are regarded, not with hostility or even that sympathetic puzzlement reserved for the insane, but with a friendly wave or a toot on the horn.
“Here, even taxi drivers do not rip off foreign visitors, and when a taxi cannot be found, some passing driver will soon volunteer a ride, and will be likely to refuse any offer of payment. A big problem for non-Arabic speaking journalists who visit is trying to find a translator who will accept payment for his or her services. The rebels’ press office has signed up all the English translators it could find, and ordered them to work for free.” How much more effective is a policy of helping the true struggles of the oppressed sons and daughters of a brutal dictatorship than waging wars on our own account in distant lands that we can never win or hold? And how much latent hope is there in a world where people are just… well… people? Somewhere out there are Arabs who like us, they really like us.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it is most interesting to watch which American Middle Eastern policies really work.
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