By looking at topics as diverse as 'Is Jackass Justifiable?', 'Open Mindedness on Independence Day' and 'Ambition, Terrorism and Empathy', Salaita explores why Arabs are marginalized, and who seeks to benefit from this. He goes on to make the case that Arabs and Muslims urgently need to be included in the conversations that people have about American geopolitics.
Part of a long tradition of politically engaged writing, and a trailblazer in the emerging genre of Arab-American writing, this book is eminently readable and relevant to our times.
By looking at topics as diverse as 'Is Jackass Justifiable?', 'Open Mindedness on Independence Day' and 'Ambition, Terrorism and Empathy', Salaita explores why Arabs are marginalized, and who seeks to benefit from this. He goes on to make the case that Arabs and Muslims urgently need to be included in the conversations that people have about American geopolitics.
Part of a long tradition of politically engaged writing, and a trailblazer in the emerging genre of Arab-American writing, this book is eminently readable and relevant to our times.
The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays
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The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays
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Overview
By looking at topics as diverse as 'Is Jackass Justifiable?', 'Open Mindedness on Independence Day' and 'Ambition, Terrorism and Empathy', Salaita explores why Arabs are marginalized, and who seeks to benefit from this. He goes on to make the case that Arabs and Muslims urgently need to be included in the conversations that people have about American geopolitics.
Part of a long tradition of politically engaged writing, and a trailblazer in the emerging genre of Arab-American writing, this book is eminently readable and relevant to our times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848135024 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 670 KB |
About the Author
Steven Salaita is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech. His other books include Anti-Arab Racism in the USA; The Holy Land in Transit; and Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics.
Read an Excerpt
The Uncultured Wars
Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought
By Steven Salaita
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Steven SalaitaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-502-4
CHAPTER 1
Anti-Arab racism, American liberals, and the new civilian terrorists
In July 2006, when a Hizbullah squadron entered into northern Israel and abducted two soldiers, killing eight others, American print and visual media reflexively described the move as an act of terrorism and deemed Hizbullah a 'terrorist organization.' The descriptors assumed a particular urgency because they created a pretext for Israel to undertake a heavy bombing campaign of Lebanon, resulting in much death and destruction. The many Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths would also come to be justified by Israel's purported battle against terrorism.
Media on both the right and the left accepted Israel and the United States' description of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization, but the veracity of that description should have been questioned. The immorality of Israel's wanton destruction does not present much of a political or ethical debate for those who would distinguish between military targets and civilian ones, or between terrorists and ordinary people. The problem is that American media repeatedly omitted either distinction, thereby transforming Israel's aggression into an act of self-defense. Such omissions were plausible because of a profound anti-Arab racism in the United States that inspires the dehumanization of Arabs and reduces complex social and cultural phenomena in the Arab World to the level of irrational barbarism.
Had commentators and audiences spent time exploring those phenomena rather than unthinkingly describing Hizbullah as terroristic, the boundaries of debate might have shifted in productive ways. Hizbullah has engaged in acts of terrorism, the most notorious being the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, but its role in Lebanon has long been more complex than that of an armed militia. It also is a legitimate political organization with a solid base of support and provides necessary social services to the Shi'a of Lebanon, the nation's poorest demographic aside from the noncitizen Palestinian refugees. Hizbullah also has cultural appeal in parts of Lebanon because it emphasizes the indigineity of its world-view by conceptualizing itself as the rightful purveyor of a native voice as against the interference of foreign powers. The organization, though, is armed and during its history has undertaken operations that can rightly be described as terrorist. This is merely one dimension of a complex mission, but it is the dimension that has come to define Hizbullah in the American imagination.
In fact, according to American media all Arab violence is terrorism. These media never delineate which criteria produce such a judgment, most likely because the criteria are only perfunctory suppositions inspired by the racist impulse to assume that Arabs never have good reason to commit violence and are thus irrational, while Americans would never be irrational enough to commit violence without good reason. The suppositions are decontextualized from relevant historical details — for example, Israel's abduction of Lebanese citizens — and are conceptualized as neutral judgments that arise from objective reasoning.
Leaving aside the issue of whether objectivity ever is possible (it is not), the supposedly neutral judgments about what constitutes terrorism reveal much about how anti-Arab racism functions implicitly and explicitly in the United States. Condemnation of terrorism seems on the surface to be a neutral act; after all, who would argue that terrorism is a good thing?
In fact, however, collapsing and equating all Arab violence as 'acts of terrorism' reveals that the condemnation of terrorism is grounded in politicized tendencies that reinforce the erstwhile precepts of white supremacy. Why, for example, are American commentators so certain that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization but withhold that designation from, say, American soldiers who commit atrocities (Abu Ghraib, Haditha) or Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who squat on stolen land and organize mobs to murder Palestinian civilians?
This question is not rhetorical. If we endeavor to provide an answer, we will encounter the American tradition of dehumanizing its geopolitical enemies, in this case by totalizing as terrorists Arabs who contravene the United States' imperial ambitions. Underlying this totalization is the assumption that Arabs are incapable of entering into modernity and that whatever demands they express through violence are necessarily reasonless whereas American violence, however ugly, always intends to serve the interests of progress. The historical record indicates that this formulation has been utilized to great effect in the American polity ever since the time of slave rebellions and the genocide of North America's indigenous populations.
The flippancy with which American media apply the word 'terrorism' to Arab populations likewise reinforces the notion that violence in the Arab World is ahistorical and therefore senseless. Arabs in turn become a people without narratives who belong to a culture incapable of rationality. These perceptions skew Americans' understanding of both the United States and the Arab World.
If, for instance, the abduction by Hizbullah of two Israeli soldiers was so confidently designated an act of terrorism, then it would appear that the operable criterion for defining terrorism — a violent action against an enemy army — is one that exemplifies the whole of American military history. Indeed, this criterion would render all militaries agents of terrorism (a point some pacifists would argue), but in this instance media applied it selectively to Hizbullah in order to validate an extant belief that its violence lacks purpose. (It has purpose, which is not to say that we must accept that purpose morally or politically.) When Americans acknowledge a purpose to Arab violence, they attribute it to religious or cultural rather than to political factors, which is to tacitly assign it the status of an inborn characteristic.
In July 2006, when Israel's destruction of Lebanon had accelerated, a variation of this discourse began to emerge: the notion that one cannot rightly distinguish between terrorists and civilians because most of the civilians in Lebanon were either in cahoots or in sympathy with Hizbullah. Zionists have periodically used such a rationale to mystify Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. American officials also have employed the same rationale to justify the mounting civilian deaths in Iraq. But at no time has the rationale become so inscribed in mainstream commentary as during Israel's war on the Lebanese people.
Perhaps the exemplar of this perspective is Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard civil libertarian. In an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times, Dershowitz dismisses Israel's brutality, asking, 'But just who is a "civilian" in the age of terrorism, when militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations?' The implication of this question is clear: all Lebanese people are potential terrorists and are therefore worthy of slaughter without Israeli or American culpability. Dershowitz perfumes this malevolent argument with cumbersome jargon, introducing his concept of 'the continuum of civilianity,' which is a fancy way of saying that Israel cannot act immorally against a population devoid of fundamental morality. Dershowitz, who implies that dead Lebanese civilians are complicit in their own deaths, synthesizes his argument in the article's final sentence: 'Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.'
Dershowitz's abhorrent moral formulation resulted from Lebanon's mounting civilian death toll and the diminishing number of Israeli casualties, which initially dominated news coverage. The ensuing shift in coverage was supplemented by a plethora of damning images circulated among alternative media, including pictures of Israeli children writing messages on soon-to-be-launched missiles, and charred and dismembered Arab children. Once Israel's targeting of civilians could no longer be denied, Dershowitz had to find a way to alter his rhetorical approach while remaining committed to Israel. He had long argued that Israel never targets civilians, but once that claim was disproved by the same media that could always be counted on to uphold it, he decided to argue instead that the civilians Israel was slaughtering weren't really civilians, an argument whose sole evidence was Dershowitz's opinion.
Dershowitz's op-ed is an example of anti-Arab racism because to assign sympathies to an entire people, whether those sympathies are flattering or demeaning, is to immure them to something of an ethnic spectacle that eradicates their agency. Moreover, the notion that all Lebanese are potential terrorists is completely indemonstrable and therefore an unjustifiable totalization. The argument reinforces a belief among most Zionists that aggression is endemic to Arabs and alien to Jews and white Americans.
Dershowitz may be the exemplar of this sort of argument, but he certainly is not its only advocate. After Israel's invasion, neoconservative media — on other issues enemies of the liberal Dershowitz — reactively blamed the imbroglio on Hizbullah (and Syria and Iran, the organization's financial sponsors and the scapegoats of neoconservative ideology). This blame was replete with the racist invective typical of neoconservative commentators, which has included calling Middle Easterners 'ragheads,' claiming that all Palestinians look like rats and have beady eyes, disparaging people with 'fan belts' and 'diapers' on their heads, and suggesting that the United States strike Mecca with nuclear weapons. (See my Anti-Arab Racism in the USA for extensive examples of neoconservative racism.)
The more noteworthy responses to the invasion arose from liberal and in some cases progressive analysts, who eschewed overt racism but allowed dogma about Arab barbarity to influence their analyses. An editorial in The Nation, for example, expressed an anti-war position but did so by assessing strategic implications rather than human traumas, exemplified by the article's synopsis on the front page of the magazine's website: '[T]he spreading violence in Lebanon and Gaza demonstrates that the collective punishment of the Palestinian and Lebanese people will only further radicalize the region.' This perspective mentions nothing of the immorality of Israel's collective punishment, emphasizing instead its dangers to the West and ignoring the scores of dead Arab civilians.
Only once in the editorial does The Nation offer moral condemnation, in the singular appearance of the word 'inhumane.' Otherwise, it recycles the canard that the Near East is populated not by civilians but by radicals perpetually on the brink of becoming even more radicalized. I would not judge this editorial to be racist, but find it disappointing that a venerable journal of progressive opinion in the United States failed to humanize what at that point had become a severely degraded population.
The New York Times recycled the same canard in an editorial in which it claimed that 'more civilian deaths in Lebanon won't make Israel safer.' A diligent reader might ask why the Times didn't suggest that more civilian deaths in Lebanon would be morally repugnant or a continued breach of international law. Ardent emphasis on strategy in the face of slaughter is only possible through a dehumanization shared by writer and audience. Monitoring corporate print media in the month following Israel's assault of Lebanon, I found no commentary that examined Hizbullah's strategy without also condemning or at least noting the immorality of targeting Israeli civilians, a result of the fact that Israeli Jews are securely humanized in the United States.
Another dubious leftist commentary appeared in The Progressive, where Ruth Conniff validated the false but widespread notion that while violence exists among both Arabs and Israelis, terrorism is exclusive to the Arabs. Conniff accomplished this validation through her unimaginative diction, assigning 'terrorist violence' to Arabs and 'military reprisals' to Israel. She also observes that 'Israelis are not all gung-ho for war,' an observation that leads readers to infer that all Arabs are. As with The Nation, it would be unfair to judge Conniff's argument as racist, but it brings to our attention the important point that some of the anti-Arab racism generated on the right finds its way subtly to political analyses on the left.
In some cases, though, the left as represented by liberal Zionists recycles blatant anti-Arab racism, a fact evident in an op-ed published by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen in July 2006. Cohen begins his analysis by making a moral distinction between Jews and Arabs: 'Israeli conscripts or reservists do not think death and martyrdom are the same thing. No virgins await Jews in heaven.' He later invokes the age-old myth that Israel is an innocent victim of Arab hostility: 'Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood.' Cohen's usage here is intentionally passive and thus ambiguous, permitting him to avoid the inconvenient fact that Israel's unfortunate location is not a historical accident but the result of an intricately planned and brutally enforced colonial incursion. The ambiguity likewise enables Cohen to ignore the decisive issue of colonization and thus to reproduce the racist hypothesis that Arabs attack Israelis simply because they like to kill Jews. Of the well-documented propensity of Israeli Jews to kill Arabs Cohen is frightfully clear: 'The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.'
I have been using the early stages of Israel's destruction of Lebanon as a test case for the pervasiveness of anti-Arab racism because this racism, albeit continuous, tends like all types of racism to intensify when geopolitics necessitate its existence. This reality would be impossible if it weren't already an available discourse and if it weren't such an effective way to rationalize Israeli and American truculence in the Arab World and to justify the post-9/11 governmental assault on constitutional rights and civil liberties (see further David Cole, Enemy Aliens; and Elaine Hagopian, ed., Civil Rights in Peril).
The most conspicuous example of institutionalized anti-Arab racism during the early stages of Israel's destruction was a non-binding resolution blaming Arabs for the violence, which Congress passed on a vote of 410 : 8, a rare show of bipartisanship (support for Israel and for corporate greed are the only issues in the US government that consistently inspire bipartisanship). John McCain, typifying the propensity of American politicians to rationalize the murder of Arab civilians, announced that if Hizbullah is 'going to launch attacks from the Lebanese territory, then tragically the Lebanese government and people pay a price for that.' By McCain's reasoning, Palestinians would be justified in killing American civilians because Israel regularly launches attacks on them with weaponry provided by the United States. (For the record, I do not believe that Palestinians have a moral right to commit violence against American civilians, but I do believe that they have more of a moral claim to the use of such violence than do Israelis vis-à-vis Arabs. This is so based on their position as a justifiably aggrieved party.)
Anti-Arab racism isn't merely intertwined with American and Israeli atrocities. It has had a consistent presence in the United States for over a century and its modern incarnation can roughly be traced to the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Anti-Arab racism has traditionally existed on the left as well as the right (as have all forms of racism; the American left has a long history of legitimizing the same things it claims to oppose). Post-9/11 a handful of alternative media (e.g. International Socialist Review, Palestine Chronicle, Democracy Now!) have either avoided simplistic analyses or have actively challenged anti-Arab racism. Still, few forums provide space for Arabs to articulate their own challenges, a problem of accessibility that continues to affect all ethnic minorities in the United States.
Liberals and progressives, on the other hand, traditionally have been weak on the issue of anti-Arab racism, not only doing too little to challenge it but in some cases reproducing it. We can go back to another piece by Ruth Conniff for a relevant example, shifting our attention to Iraq. Conniff writes,
A neighbor of mine, back on a short leave from an 18-month tour as a National Guardsman in Iraq, expressed disgust with the Iraqis, describing them as a backward people who don't even want our help to build schools. They prefer that their kids remain ignorant, and work on the farm, he said. That alienated feeling is mutual, as Iraqis view the United States with increasing anger. It's not a hopeful atmosphere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Uncultured Wars by Steven Salaita. Copyright © 2008 Steven Salaita. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. Anti-Arab Racism, American Liberals, and the New Civilian Terrorists
2. The Indispensably Expendable
3. I Was Called up to Commit Genocide
4. Open-Mindedness on Independence Day
5. Michael Moore Does It Again
6. Ambition, Terrorism, and Empathy
7. Is Jackass Unjustifiable?
8. The Perils and Profits of Doing Comparative Work
9. What is Michael Lerner Really Talking About?
10. Immigrants Are Not Homogenous
11. Distress and Bluster at Columbia; Or, the Day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Was Invited to Academe and Promptly Emblematized Terrorism
12. The Zealots of Clandestine Faith
Conclusion