Samuel Huntington's nonsense 1996 hit, The Clash of Civilizations, holds as its basic premise that the Muslim world as a monolithic whole is historically, genetically incapable of peace and that it is intrinsically opposed to a monolithic "Western world." The two are destined to fight and one must, in the end, win—us or them. Fortunately a healthy dose of debunking arrived this week.
The "clash of civilizations" is not just a myth, it is a dangerous myth that demands that the United States and Israel use military force to humiliate and conquer Muslim countries to keep them from turning Europe into "Eurabia." It buys into the apocalyptic dualism of Osama bin Laden and reinforces it—after all, when the West says that Islam is the root of all conflict and must be neutered and brought under Western control, that provides damn good justification for a Muslim to take up arms against the West.
Two important events this week will hopefully put the mad-dog theory at the base of our imperial aspirations to sleep. The first is the launch of Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera English's intended audience, as Marc Lynch points out, is not necessarily Americans (it is not yet carried by any American cable provider):
“People are too concerned about how it will do in the United states, but I don’t think it matters,” said Marc Lynch, a political science professor at Williams College and author of “Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al Jazeera and Middle East Politics Today.”
“Al Jazeera,” he said, “has this huge untapped market around the world where people have English as a first or second language.”
But it is highly important that Americans watch Al Jazeera. It represents for the first time a post-colonial literary shift in the world of cable news: instead of broadcasting a vision of the world based in New York, Washington D.C., or even London, the metropolitan centers of our empire, it is a view of the world from the "periphery." Watch the first 10 minutes of live broadcast yesterday and note where those stories are coming from: Gaza, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran. For the first time, Americans will be able to see these places not through American filters of American corporate ownership, cultural ignorance and our own self-centeredness. Not to proclaim Aljazeera as any kind of unbiased truth about the world, of course—it has its own filters, its own funders and its own cultural stereotypes to deal with.
But it tries hard to communicate laterally instead of imperially. Al Jazeera, for all its accusations of anti-American bias or anti-Israel bias, regularly interviews and features American and Israeli talking heads or cultural stories—its lineup this week includes a lengthy chat with Shimon Peres as well as an feature on an Israeli soccer team.
Says the New York Times:
In effect, Al Jazeera International intends to become for the developing world what Al Jazeera became to the Arab world: a champion of forgotten causes, a news organization willing to take the contrarian view and to risk being controversial.
“We want to be a channel that covers the untold stories,” Mr. Parsons said by telephone from Qatar. “We would be anchored in the Middle East, but we intend to cover the developing world fully.”
To do that, he said, Al Jazeera will use Asian reporters to cover Asia, and will have Africans talking about Africa, “rather than having instant experts land there and tell us a story.”
Meanwhile, in Istanbul, a city that symbolizes the absurdity of pretending there are such things as distinct "Western" and "Eastern" civilizations, the final report the High-Level Group of the Alliance of Civilizations was presented to Kofi Annan. The AoC is an initiative sponsored by the United Nations and co-sponsored by Turkey and Spain to counter extremism around the globe. But in the face of Huntington and his Washington disciples, the "guiding principles" of the AoC include respect for the "diversity of civilizations and cultures" as the "driving force of human progress. Civilizations and cultures reflect the great wealth and heritage of humankind; their nature is to overlap, interact and evolve in relationship to one another. ... The history of civilizations is in fact a history of mutual borrowing and constant cross-fertilization."
The High-Level group of "eminent persons" includes former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Louis Zapatero was responsible for launching the AoC shortly after the deadly Madrid bombings of 2004.
Imagine if our leadership had that sort of vision and courage after 9/11. The AoC was designed to try and seek genuine solutions and understanding between cultures and to end alienation and difference. As Annan said, "The problem is not the Koran or the Torah or the Bible. The problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave towards each other."
In that line, the AoC proposes a number of concrete solutions, including focusing on resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, a 50-year-battle at the heart of the world that has moved into a symbolic level for much of the globe. Spain, alongside Italy and France, today announced a new peace initiative, and they have hopes of being the "honest broker" the United States never was. The AoC, like Al Jazeera, focuses on the need to voice the concerns of the powerless:
The Alliance of Civilisations report also proposes appointing a high-level representative to work to defuse tensions at times of crisis. It warns that globalisation is contributing to the discord, with many communities experiencing it as "an assault".
"For them, the prospect of greater well-being has come at a high price, which includes cultural homogenisation, family dislocation, challenges to traditional lifestyles, and environmental degradation," the report said. People who feel they face discrimination, humiliation, or marginalisation are reacting by asserting their identity more aggressively, the report says.
The report also suggests that the repression of non-violent political opposition and the slow pace of reforms in some Muslim countries is a key factor in the rise of extremism. It calls for ruling parties in these countries to allow the full participation of peaceful political groups, whether religious or secular in nature.
Read the full report here.
Unfortunately, few leaders in America have the courage to voice these opinions, and American mainstream punditry seems to continue to focus on maintaining America as an imperial power across the globe (i.e., fixing our imperial overreach, not forswearing it). And Al Jazeera English, so far, has yet to be picked up by a single American cable carrier.
Huntington's view is as absurd as the Cold War view of the Communist monolith as an intractable foe of the West, and indeed seems to have been created by a "search and replace" function of a word processor on Cold War-era thinking. And unfortunately, much of not just George Bush's circle but indeed foreign policy wonks on both sides in Washington subscribe to it—in fact, two of the prime exponents of the idiotic cartoons of Huntington, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis, were just awarded National Arts and Humanities prizes by our president. Their advice on foreign policy in the Middle East could have been described as comically bad if the results weren't so tragic. Remember earlier this summer when we watched the Middle East burn and Newt Gingrich called it World War III?
Perhaps instead we need to be brave enough to listen to voices of those feeling the boot of our empire.
--Ethan Heitner |
Thursday, November 16, 2006 11:32 AM
