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 ussia, Eastern Europe, and most of South
and Central America and Asia have accepted the demise of Communism
and caudillos alike. Most states of the world have conceded
that dumas, politburos, and the Praetorian Guard do not give people
hope or freedom, and so are beginning to entertain free elections
and unbridled speech. Similarly, people in the real world recognize
that widespread poverty more often is state-induced than a result
of racism, colonialism, or global exploitation. Mature nations have
learned that Communism proved no paradise, but instead left millions
of corpses in its wake and dearth as its legacy. Even China seems
determined to adopt free markets — while fighting a desperate, and
probably hopeless, rear-guard action against liberty and democracy.
The world has always had its share of religious zealots and crackpot
fundamentalists, but most states now acknowledge the truth that
God did not intend to directly govern man.
So, outside
of the university economics, English, and anthropology departments
— and similar fundamentalist churches — we know that there is no
solution for starvation, continual violence, and chronic chaos other
than the adoption of consensual government, open economies, personal
freedom, and secular rationalism. Everywhere at the millennium,
the human community agrees that fascism, theocracy, Communism, tribalism,
statism, and fundamentalism lead nowhere but to misery — everywhere,
that is, except the Islamic world of the Middle East.
Iraq is a hooligan
state, Algeria chaos incarnate. Iran is run by a fraudulent theocracy;
Afghanistan preferred a more lunatic brand. Syria and Libya have
fancy murderous dictatorships, while the tribes and monarchies of
the Gulf embrace fundamentalism at home, blondes and booze abroad.
Sudan, Somalia, and Lebanon remain as chaotic as Yemen and Egypt
are bankrupt. Morocco is sort of trying. All this tragedy is proof
enough that it did not take Israel to ensure that Jordan, Palestine,
and Gaza would be as unfree as they are broke.
Rather than
looking to itself — by emancipating women, holding free elections,
opening markets, drafting constitutions, outlawing polygamy, curbing
fundamentalism, insisting on secular education, and ending tribalism
— the Islamic world has more often cursed others. And, consequently,
a musician has been welcomed into town — one not conversant with
the true tune of salvation, but arriving as a sinister player, whose
narcotic chords of resentment have captivated the Muslim world and
so tragically led it, singing as it went, right over the precipice
of disaster.
Bin Laden's
mesmerizing jingle of a sinister Israel and conspiratorial America
has stampeded an entire culture. At the vanguard of the enthralled
were the terrorists and the piper's own al Qaeda gangsters. Thanks
to bin Laden's insane and cowardly attack on the world's sole superpower,
his cells have been rounded up in nearly every European country;
their Middle East nests are burning; and hundreds themselves have
been torched or blown to bits. Bullets or bars await them and any
other self-loathing killer in the Muslim world who believes the
West — not his own conduct and culture — brought him his misery.
The siren song of bin Laden has done more to destroy terrorism than
has any cruise missile or Interpol operative in the last decade.
Close behind
the terrorists in the shuffling, spellbound multitude was the purportedly
formidable Taliban, who bragged and postured all the way to the
abyss — not so much a religious order as a crass guild of bloody
incompetents that hijacked an entire country through bribes, random
assassination, and old-fashioned terror. These vicious bureaucrats
believed their irrelevancy, remoteness, and sheer lunacy might make
their cruelty relatively unimportant and therefore safe from retribution,
until bin Laden, the mad minstrel, seduced them — with dollars and
half-baked schemes of grandeur — to countenance one hit job too
many. And so the Taliban also followed at his heels, screeching
and threatening right over the cliff and into the nothingness below.
Next in line
in the entranced swarm was the puffed-up Muslim street — the millions
of illiterate and unemployed in Islamabad, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza,
and the West Bank who sadly cannot vote, cannot read, and cannot
talk freely without the nod of a mullah or a government thug. When
news broke that thousands of Americans were butchered, skyscrapers
toppled, the Pentagon afire, and jets blown apart, they too joined
the ranks of the piper's pack. For three months the world has recoiled
in both horror and embarrassment as thousands of the ignorant have
cheered on their mass murderer, hawked his posters, and rushed into
the bazaar to shake their fists and wave their pathetic, misspelled
banners and kindergarten scribblings. Europe, the Americas, Russia,
India, and even China have all stared in disbelief at their trance
— and rightly or wrongly decided that these are rather crazy, dangerous
folk, better left alone in their lockstep march to paradise than
allowed to visit or emigrate to the more sober nations of world.
No Israeli, no rogue CIA agent, no Christian or Hindu fundamentalist
could have done so much damage to the global image of the Islamic
populace as Mr. bin Laden, whom the Muslim masses so mindlessly
follow — indeed elbowing each other to be first over the edge.
We should not
forget the center and rear of the performer's frenzied host, who
were just as hypnotized — and are meeting the same fate as those
who rushed out in the front rank. The so-called moderate governments
of the Middle East, though rather coyly, listened to the sweet lyrics
of "Islam ascendant" married with the chorus of an "America
in flames." A Saudi sheik gave lectures to us at Ground Zero.
Those who were once rescued in Kuwait a decade later snickered on
60 Minutes about the American inferno. Moderates from Egypt
to the Gulf cried crocodile tears for our dead — before immediately
publicly resisting requests for financial records, travel logs,
or antiterrorism intelligence. All their hostility was packaged
with polite "but" speeches: "We do feel for the victims
of September 11, but — " (fill in with comments on either "Israel"
or "your government's foreign policy").
Yet news has
leaked out to the American people (to the embarrassment and chagrin
of our own government) that many of the Saudis were rather amused
at what happened to our innocent, and that the Palestinian elite
was not all that unhappy with the idea that thousands of Americans
had been murdered — victims whose taxes helped to pay $100 million
a year in subsidies to the West Bank kleptocracy. Consequently,
it will take millions of dollars in slick ads in Time and
the Financial Times to bring back confidence in Kuwait; thousands
of glossy infomercials of gleaming airports and highways in Saudi
Arabia to reassure us that it is civilized; and hundreds of bought-and-paid-for
retired American generals, ex-diplomats, defense contractors, and
oil men to lobby and mislead us that the real Middle East
didn't mean it at all. And still the damage wrought by bin Laden
to the "moderate governments" will not be undone.
You see, hidden
among the thronging mob — slightly embarrassed, shuffling rather
than skipping, with canes rather than jogging shoes — were the geriatric
sheiks and the unelected autocrats in ties and suits. Bobbing in
and out of the crowd, at last they really did join the hypnotized
columns, and so have hobbled right to the brink of the chasm of
no return — never realizing that the music of jihad was dooming
them, not us.
Finally, of
course, was the opportunistic rear guard, who caught only a stanza
now and then of bin Laden's mad piping. Liking much of what they
heard, they tagged along nonetheless, thinking they could fall out
before reaching the cleft. And they, too, are now going over with
the rest. These were the so-called intellectuals in Egypt, Jordan,
Palestine, and the Gulf who knew better. These novelists, newspaper
editors, lobbyists, and the other assorted glib and sophisticated
were no fundamentalists; indeed, they claimed that they knew the
West, and sometimes resided in America and Europe. Afraid to confess
openly that they also found the music of bin Laden's entertaining
too clever by half, they called the mad piper a "symptom,"
"a wake-up call," or a "barometer" — anything
other than a megalomaniac looking to murder the helpless.
So those who
brought up the rear of the hypnotized mob were not the ignorant
but the educated. When not drugged by bin Laden's melodies, they
understood the freedom, prosperity, security, and power of the West
— knew it and, of course, wanted something like it for themselves.
Worse still, they not only desired us, they knew exactly whence
our superiority arose — not from the legacy of colonialism, not
from racism, not from the Jewish state of Israel, and not from the
foreign policy of America — but from the institutions of democracy,
capitalism, and individual liberty: the very ideals of the West
that they were so attracted to, and that thus left them so angry
at their own unquenchable and yet unattainable desire.
The educated
of the Middle East hid in the dust and melee of bin Laden's entranced
throng, but joined in at the back nonetheless. Did their ears prick
up to his wafting notes out of envy — and with it, a sense of inferiority?
Or was their behavior explicable — because they merely lacked the
courage to demand of their own culture an end to fundamentalism,
polygamy, sexual apartheid, the clan, statism, and all the other
pathologies that prevent Islam from moving ahead in the modern world?
In their equivocation,
contortions, and passive-aggressive circumlocutions, the educated
too are close to going over the edge with all the rest of the piper's
zombies. Every time a novelist or journalist — whether the respected
Nobel laureate Mr. Mafhouz or Abdul Rahman al Rashed of the state-owned
Al Sharq al Awsat — announces that the American bombing of
Afghanistan was as much an act of terror as September 11, the piper
smiles and plays on. No Western chauvinist, no crazed nativist or
half-educated xenophobe has done so much to discredit the Middle
Eastern intellectual as has the snickering minstrel bin Laden.
Now the piper
is perhaps safely — for a time — holed up in his cave, while most
of his hypnotized herd has already plummeted into the gorge. The
rest of the world — Europe, the Americas, Russia, China, India,
Japan, and the Pacific — grimaces at their fate, sad at the plunge
of the deceived flock, but ever more determined not to listen to
the cacophonous songs of hate, lies, and envy that have led them
only to catastrophe.
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