Jonathan Spyer has hit the nail dead-on with his analysis of the Arab reaction to the shoe-thrower at President Bush’s press conference in Iraq.
This political culture sanctifies anti-Western fury, and continues, half a century after decolonization, to see the Arabs as hapless victims of the West. As a result, it gives its greatest honor and respect to those who are able to articulate a sense of furious resentment. If this can be accompanied by the successful application of political violence, then popular deification is assured.
The tremendous popularity of Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and even the non-Arab Mahmoud Ahmedinejad among broad masses of Arabs is a product of this political culture. Zeidi and his shoes will henceforth form a very tiny presence in its pantheon.
It is this political culture that is capable of producing the curious spectacle of the furious demonstrations against Bush by members of the Iraqi Shi’ite community in the past days. Much may be legitimately criticized about the conception and execution of the invasion of Iraq. But it is an empirically undeniable fact that the individual more responsible than any other for the enfranchisement and elevation to power of the Shi’ites of Iraq is George W. Bush. That is to say that the man who has established a situation in which the Iraqi Shi’ite Zeidi is able to work freely as a journalist, worship freely as a Shi’ite and vote freely as a citizen was the same one whom Zeidi chose to hurl his shoes at.
This culture of self-righteous fury carries its own penalties, Spyer says.
The probable lesson the US and its allies will take from the Iraq invasion is that ambitious projects for the reform and reshaping of the Arab world are not worth undertaking. Regional order, or something approaching it, will once more be maintained through “off shore balancing” in the form of relations with existing, imperfect but stable regimes in the region, such as the National Democratic Party regime in Egypt and the Saudi monarchy.
I think that’s a given. The majority of Americans do not want to shed American blood to rid Arab and Muslim nations of ruthless dictators. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of Americans wouldn’t think twice about the Middle East if there weren’t any oil dollars feeding the anti-American and anti-Israeli jihad. I don’t really think Americans give two craps about European problems with Muslim “youths,” either: It’s Europe’s own fault for importing a large Muslim workforce and refusing to allow them to become full citizens of their nations. In America, full citizenship is a given, once you become an American. I’m not saying we have no prejudice, and that it isn’t sometimes difficult—but Europe doesn’t understand what every American drinks in with mother’s milk: If you want to be here, and you follow the rules, then you’re an American. This is why so many people resent illegal immigrants. Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents all came through Ellis Island—what’s wrong with asking Mexicans and South Americans to immigrate legally? But I digress.
Read Spyer’s full column, especially for his conclusion. Sad, but true.
And, ironically, the guy who threw the shoe is named “Zayde”…
I wonder what Bubbie thinks!
I’m not sure if Spyer would consider it part of the same problem, but one of the chief facets of Arab Muslim culture, as I see it, and I think the one that discourages much hope for progress, is its almost absolute immunity to self-criticism.
This is one of the reasons why Western civilization is superior. God knows we have our problems but especially in the U.S., self-criticism is simply taken for granted. Same for Israel, by the way. I have told people if you want to read vitriolic but not anti-Semitic criticism of Israel, you can go to the English-language websites of the Israeli newspapers.
Self-criticism promotes change and reform. A refusal even to countenance the idea that some of your problems are self-created or amenable to your actions irrespective of what anyone else does, produces a society which will not recognize its problems, much less attempt to deal with them.
Tied in is an unusually rampant incuriosity. I keep reading claims that the entire Arab world translates fewer books into Arabic in any year than Greece translates into Greece. I don’t know if such claims are correct, but it seems clear that Arabs are not particularly interested in other cultures except as they may be seen as conspirators against Arabs, etc.
I guess it’s more a topic for another post, but this turns Edward Said’s claim of “orientalism” on its head. It would be hard to write a similar book about Arab occidentalism because there don’t seem to be many scholars among the Arabs working to explain the west to their readers…I say “explain” rather than “lambaste,” because I’m sure there’s no shortage of books about how the west has done in the Arabs.
But how many books are accessible to average readers in Arab lands that try to give a fair picture of western society and western culture? I don’t know; does anyone out there in the Merylsphere?
Alex, when you read about how few books Arabs translate into Arabic from other languages, bear in mind that among them are multiple translations of “Mein Kampf” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. These are among the most popular books in the whole Middle East. Appropriately, the Arabic translation of the phrase “Mein Kampf” is “Jihadi”.
George Bush and the Dreaded Neoncons are the best friends the Muslims, and especially the Arabs, ever had. With rare exceptions like Tony Blair and Natan Sharansky, they are the only people in the world who think the Arabs are fully adult human beings capable of governing themselves by consensual government. Everybody else, including our liberals here in the USofA, think they are a bunch of rag-headed wogs who will make a pig’s breakfast of ruling themselves and must be governed by bloody handed tyrants like Saddam if they are not to be a pain in the rear to themselves and everybody else.
Second, Bush and the Dreaded Neocons want to suppress this jihad nonsense before the jihadists provoke the rest of the world into responding in kind, with indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims in retaliation of the indiscriminate slaughter of non-Muslims by the jihadists and other Muslims. The failure to suppress jihad will mean that soon, as an Indian put it to a friend of mine right after 9/11, Kali will start to march West.
I might add that Bush’s critics blather about “the root causes of terrorism” without having a clue of what they are talking about. The actual root causes lie in the dysfunctional political culture of the Arabs, and until that is reformed we are just going to keep getting horrors out of the Arabs until the end of time. Bush identified that real root causes within a few weeks of 9/11 and tried to do something about it. Unfortunately he could only make a start, and guys like that twit who shied his shoes at Bush are helping prevent that reform. Preventing it is liable to end in massive slaughter for the Arabs. Be careful what you wish for, Arabs, you may get it. In this case wishing for jihad and failure to act on Bush’s reform agenda will being you mass death.
In the future, many in the Arab world are going to look back upon these years with vast yearning.
Once the worlds dependance on oil ends (and it will, quite possibly in our lifetime), the entire region (save Israel) will rapidly sink back into the 7th Century. While some there will enjoy that result, I rather suspect that a significant percentage of the people will have become used to modern civilization…unfortunately, it will no longer be available to them.
Meryl, the last few sentences of your paragraph were just a great statement of what our country is all about.