 hey
danced in the streets of the West Bank towns and in Gaza when they
heard the news. They danced in parts of Lebanon. In Baghdad, state
television played a song called “Down with America” as the World Trade
Center towers collapsed. To these and their kind, the fact that many
innocent people far away were killed is cause for rejoicing. They
are possessed by hate, a simple thing that reduces everything and
everybody to a simple perspective. Our tribe good, destined for victory
— their tribe bad, destined for destruction. Us or Them.
There are
of course many millions of Arabs and Muslims, including Iraqis and
Palestinians, who do not rejoice, who repudiate this horror committed
in their name, and who hope against hope that it is not as it seems,
that Arabs and Muslims are not responsible. These are educated people,
often secular in outlook, at home in Western culture as well as
their own. They are as threatened as the rest of the civilized world
by Islamic fanaticism. Only the bravest of them, though, will dare
to say what they think, for fear of persecution and assassination.
Now and again, the fanatics threaten to overthrow the local rulers.
There follow such ghastly tests of strength as the flattening of
the town of Hama by the late Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad, and the
ongoing civil wars in Algeria and Sudan. Here too are cases of Us
or Them, though both sides are Muslim.
Democracy
is essentially a process of compromise between conflicting interests
according to mutually agreed rules. This arises from an understanding
that the alternative is a test of strength in which the strong will
send the weak to the wall with no justice. Democracy means Us and
Them. Yet nothing in the history or the culture of Arabs and Muslims
allows them to put this into any form of political practice. From
long ago they have inherited a cast-iron absolute system, in which
the ruler does as he pleases, and the rest have no redress, indeed
going to the wall. In the absence of inherent processes of compromise
at any level of society, it is not a coincidence that absolute Muslim
rulers are engaged in tests of strength everywhere with people of
other religious persuasions: Hindus in Kashmir, Christians and animists
in Africa, Bud dhists in China and Indonesia, Jews in Israel.
Hate begins
here, in the flagrant injustice and violence of daily life, in the
corruption of the rich and the mindless poverty of the poor, in
the absence of proper social mechanisms to do anything about it.
And who is responsible for this? It requires a rather special character
to be able to lay the blame for social failure where it properly
belongs, on the people who comprise one’s own society. Much easier,
more satisfying, to blame everybody except oneself. And haven’t
Westerners themselves been putting their shoulders to that wheel
by reiterating for many years that the plight of Arabs and Muslims
has nothing to do with their own conduct or culture, but only with
colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, Zionism, globalization? And
that we are, therefore, guilty for whatever they may do?
It is of course
impossible to fight so many powerful and conspiratorial isms all
at once. A sense grows in the man on the street of his utter hopelessness
and weakness in the face of this hydra of Them. He feels ashamed
of his impotence, deprived of his manhood and dignity, unable to
treat with others on the equal footing to which all mankind has
a right. There is no point telling a man that his shame is unwarranted
and likely to injure him first and foremost: He feels how it burns.
Shame is the explosive fuel of his hate.
The terrorists
took care in the selection of their targets. The World Trade Center
stood as a symbol of American success, just as the Pentagon symbolizes
American military might. These buildings serve as a projection of
the U.S. presence. The terrorists cannot make aircraft, but in their
attack on these buildings they also took care to convert American
technology into an instrument against America. You boast that you
are rich and successful, their actions declare, but we are able
to turn your vaunted superiority against you. Now it is time for
Americans to suffer in the eyes of all the shame and humiliation
oppressing Us.
They are dancing
in the West Bank towns and elsewhere because at last they feel that
America too knows the inferiority that comes from not being master
of one’s own destiny. They are dancing because at last they perceive
themselves on an equal footing with the tribal Them.
Compromise
is inconceivable, even if there were some mechanism for it, which
there isn’t. The usual range of liberal Westerners are already urging
caution and restraint, arguing that retaliation Israeli-style only
engenders more attacks. But that is to concede that we and the terrorists
are on an unequal footing, and that they really are inferiors,
children who must be humored and allowed their ways, however harmful.
The truth is that they are, and always have been, on an equal footing.
Now that they have committed an act of war, they need to be met
accordingly. A test of strength is what they demand, and a test
of strength is therefore what they must have. Anything less will
encourage them to believe that they are destined be be victorious
and to destroy the democratic tribe.
Anything less
will also condemn to civil war and worse the many Arabs and Muslims
who are certain to be victims, if ever Islamic terrorists were to
become absolute rulers in yet more countries than Iran and Afghanistan.
Democracy alone is able to supplant that sort of sterile hate and
transform Us or Them into the Us and Them that we all deserve.
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