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 dward
Said has a long, silly piece in the current issue of The Nation
about how complicated the current crisis is, and how intertwined
Islamic and Western cultures are.
Said says this
hopeless intermingling was brought to mind "when information
on the September 11 terrorists started to come in: how they had
mastered all the technical details required to inflict their homicidal
evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft they
had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between 'Western'
technology and, as Berlusconi declared, `Islam's' inability to be
a part of 'modernity'?"
Well, the line
seems pretty clear — developing mass commercial aviation and
soaring skyscrapers was the West's idea; slashing the throats of
stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical
Islam's idea.
This notion
of an inescapable intermingling would be more believable if, say,
Boeing were a Palestinian company, or if e-mail had been first developed
in Syria, or if Osama bin Laden's Timex wristwatch had been manufactured
in an Afghan cave.
Alas, none
of that is the case. Indeed, in Said's essay — which Kumbaya
Watch also takes on today — there is a pathetic sense of
overcompensation, of trying to elide the fact that the Islamic world
is hopelessly behind the West, in terms not just of science and
technology, but of human rights and (to use Said's favorite word)
of justice.
This is why
Said argues that the Muslim presence in the West is threatening
because "[b]uried in the collective culture are memories of
the first great Arab-Islamic conquests." Well, maybe, but a
more immediate source of unease may be the worry that some small
murderous number of these Muslims may be conspiring in cells to
fly airplanes into our skyscrapers.
Actually, Said
does have a point about the connection between Western and Islamic
cultures, although not in the way he thinks. The Arab world has
for a long time tried to play catch up with the West, by, unfortunately,
adopting the worst of our ideas.
In his Newsweek
cover essay this week, Fareed Zakaria points out that Arab nationalists
like Nasser imported socialism to the Middle East, with disastrous
consequences. (Zakaria, by the way, takes a shot at Paul
Johnson's NR essay on Islam.)
Also, in a
brilliant column this week, John
O'Sullivan explores how radical Islam is dependent on Western
neo-Marxist and postmodern critiques of Western power as parasitical
and corrupt. In other words, insofar as Western ideas have seeped
into radical Islam, they have been the harshly anti-American ones
of intellectuals like Edward Said.
And this sophisticated
anti-Westernism, unlike airplanes and skyscrapers, is one invention
of which the West cannot be proud.
Gun
Watch
One of the stories buried by the events of September 11 was Melissa
Seckora's excellent takedown of gun scholar Michael Bellesiles in
the latest
NR. Instapundit.com
gives the piece a nice plug in today's edition, and Bellesiles is
now under investigation by Emory University, thanks to the reporting
of NR's Seckora and also that of the Boston Globe.
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