Orientalist Neocon thinking: Justifying war & murder

Posted on 05 August 2008. Tags: Edward Said, Orientalism

There are the books written by Muslims awakening from the yolk of colonialism, rhetorical books written by Muslim authors full of venom and feelings of deprivation, who explain away all Muslim faults by blaming all problems on others. Then there are books written by Muslim, the Westernized Muslim apologist intellectuals who blame everything on Muslims themselves. The other types of books on Muslims and Islam are written by the “Orientalists” amongst us, Western authors who have for decades defined the “Orient”, it’s geography, it’s nomenclature (Occident and Orient, Middle East, Far East, South Asia etc.).Once in a while there comes an author, who can go to the root causes of issues and really describe tissues and come up with visions. Orientalism takes a deadly turn again!

Dr. Edward Said was one such author. Much maligned in the press, he has been called many names, however his name stands out as one of the foremost writers who has changed many lives and he has surely transfigured the landscape of American literature and Columbia, where he was a profession. One thing that his “Orientalist” detractors could not do was to ignore him or his thinking. This is what Dr. Edward Said says about he Orientalism: …………

Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological historical and philological texts, it is an elaboration not only of the basic geographical distinction (the word is made up of unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also a whole series of ‘interests’ which by such means as scholarly discovery, phological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world it is above all, a discourse lat is my no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with power political as with political (as in colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do).

Indeed my real argument with Orinetalism is –and does not simply represent– a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient that it does with ‘our’ world. (Edward Said Reader): Orientalism Page 78 Therefore, I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires–British, French, and American–in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.

What interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail, as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the (to him) indisputable truth that the Occidentals are superior to Orientals, but profoundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the wide space opened by that truth. One need only remember that Lane’s Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians is a classical historical and anthropological observation because it its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not because of its simple reflection of racial superiority to understand what I am saying here. Edward Said Reader. Orientalism Page 81

One aspect of electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified and the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of the “mysterious Orient”. This is nowhere more true than in the ways by which the Near East is grasped. Three things have contributed to making even the simplest perceptions of the Arabs and Islam into highly politicized almost raucous matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; two the struggle between Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its affects upon American Jews as well as upon both liberal culture and the population at large; three the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam. Edward Said Reader. Orientalism Page 92

Out of the various strategies employed by the Modern Orientalists is to exaggerate the problem, scare the people, list unrelated points, and join the dots in a manner that it serves their purpose of creates a rationale for their thesis or action items. Today the major Orientalists of our time are Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle and Samuel Huntington among many others employed by the American Enterprise Institute and the coalition of Right wing politicians and religious extremist groups. The siege mentality then leads of the orientalist analysis of the root-cause which leads to intellectual responses that are draconian. Mr. Allan Dershowitz, a leading civil rights attorney in the United States, has responded to 9/11 in a manner that would be inconceivable in this land of Liberty. Jefferson probably turned in his grave when he read Dr. Dershowitz’s book “Shouting Fire”.

While catering to his Liberal roots, he defends freedom of expression, the rights to believe and disbelieve and favors the eventual abolishment of capital punishment. However taking advantage of the “open hunting season on Muslims”, amazingly he makes an exception for pre-emptive targeted assassination of suicide terrorists. He surprises all when he argues persuasively that the lack of restrictions on undercover police scams is a serious problem and he advocates the creation of a scam warrant, similar to search and wiretap warrants, as a remedy. To the chagrin to all the civil and decent Americans, he amazingly argues for a torture warrant applicable when coercion of confession can pre-empt terrorist plans and save lives. The main thesis of his book is that he argues that judicial review should be used primarily as a check and balance in defense of minority rights against the excesses of untrammeled democratic majoritarian rule or what others have defined as “mobocracy”. In defence of civil rights he argues that unaccountable warrantless surveillance authorized by the attorney general is a major breach of separation of powers and results in politically motivated violations of privacy. In this post 9/11 era Mr. Desrshowtiz finds all of the listed sources of law as fatally flawed or inadequate. Being the most liberal lawyer in America who has defended many people, Dershowtz is always on the left of most issues, except the tone that involves Muslims. Here in the book he espouses Racial Profiling and Torture Warrents. In this case Mr. Dershowitz defines human rights as human injustice prophylactics. This monograph is not an apology for Islam or Muslims.

THE APOCALYPTICAL VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF AMERICA IS BASED UPON AN EXAGGERATED VISION OF THREATS: Samuel Huntington is one of the Orientalists that many care to talk about to in this book. Some claim that Samuel Huntington has been misunderstood and his questions about one possible future of mankind has been hijacked by the vested interests, to scare the world into finding an excuse for Islam Bashing. Some claim that Mr. Huntington was himself surprised by the amount of controversy created by his article published in the Foreign Affairs journal in the summer of 1993 called “Clash of Civilizations?” He says. Given the interest in, misrepresentation of, and controversy over the article, it seemed desirable for me to explore further the issues it raised. One constructive way of posing a question is to state an hypothesis. The article, which had a generally ignored question mark in its title, was an effort to do that. This book is intended to provide a fuller, deeper, and more thoroughly documented answer to the question.

There still are some very basic errors in his book that he cared not to fix. For example, his depiction of the cold war (Map 1.2) of the so-called non-aligned nations is totally wrong and bogus. He forgets about CENTO, and SEATO, showing Pakistan as a non-aligned country. He forgets that the U2s used to fly out the American Badabare Air force base near Peshawar Pakistan. He also fails to show the alignment between the United States and Suharto of Indonesia, hardly a non-aligned country. Additionally Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were totally US client states and should have been categorized as such. The Baghdad pact with Iraq was renamed as CENTO and included Pakistan, Iraq and the UK and the US. If these errors had been corrected the “theory” of The West versus the rest falls apart, because many many Muslim nations were and are still aligned with the USA. Mr. Huntington’s book, “The Clash of Civilizations” has created a bonanza for the think tank industry of America and Huntington shall be remembered in History with as much respect and his books and writings with as much fondness as those of Senator McCarthy. This new Green McArthyinsm as propounded by Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Richard Perle and Daniel Pipes has reverberated in the corridors of Washington, just like the Red McArthyism of yesteryear-caused havoc in the lives of hundreds of law-abiding patriotic American citizens. Today’s Dr. Crane knows this bigotry well, and will be devoting volumes to responding to the open hunting season on Muslims. In this book Dr. Crane traces this Green McCarthyism and its advocates the “newcons” through the past few decades. His list of the think tanks is not complete but he does describe the major ones.

There is only one human civilization. The American civilization is a microcosm of that human civilization. Our country is the greatest country on earth that has offered more freedom to it’s citizens than any in the history of mankind. Many reject Samuel Huntington’s theory of clash of civilizations; however, and we wish to list ways of improving our American civilization. Bernard Lewis has written volumes on “What went wrong with Islam” blaming, Islamists, poverty, anti-Semitism and bad religion hijacked by “evil doers”. If the words Islam, or Muslim were taken out of the Lewis monographs, all his points of references however would be equally valid for the anti-Americanism in Greece, Mexico, Russia, China, India, France, Argentina, Sri Lanka and Liechtenstein. For example, all his assertions on Islam would be equally valid for the suicide bombers in Sri Lanka and the insurgency that has killed thousands of innocent civilians there. Similarly, his thesis would equally be valid in Northern Ireland spawning another book “What went wrong with Buddhism” accompanied by “What went wrong with Protestantism/Catholicism. Similarly, Mr. Lewis could also write a book on what went wrong with Africans in Rwanda or South African, mainly Christian countries. Mr. Lewis however only targets Muslims and what went wrong with Islam, ignoring the global tide of negativity towards certain actions of America. The language is reminiscent of the language used by the crusades.

This is what Richard Fletcher says in “Cross and the Crescent”: The crusading ideal, then remained powerful in later medieval Christendom, whether its fruits were defeat at Nicopolis or victory at Granada. “Cross and the Crescent”: Richard Fletcher Page 143

This crusading ideal lives on in many contemporary writings. Richard Perle, in his latest onslaught on Muslims “An end to Evil-How to win the war on terror” offers another apoplectic vision of America: Page 147: “The War against extremist Islam is as much an ideological war as the cold war ever was. And despite all our successes on the battleground, the ideological struggle against extremist Islam is one we are losing-that is, when we bother to wage at all…

……………” The future of extremist Islam will be decided Muslims themselves, by reference to their own values and their own interests. We do have it in our power, though, to encourage a reassessment of our interests—-and to promote more enlightened versions of those values than those that seem to predominate now. Page 42:

President Bush was right to insist that the United States has no quarrel with Islam. But while Americans have no proper quarrel with Islam, a radical strain within Islam has declared war on us. This seems to a reverberation of what has gone on for centuries, Richard Fletcher in his book “The Cross and the Crescent” writes the following: Yet Bede, monk, biblical scholar and and historian of the coming of Christianity to the English, who lived, worked and in 735 died in the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria. Yet Bede know what needed to be known of the Saracens. In a work od biblical commentary completed in 716, he could describe them as ‘enemies of the Church’. Four years later, commenting on the Ishmael reference of Genesis 16, he quoted St. Herome on the Saracens and went on to say: But now is ‘his had against all and the hands of all against him’ to such an extent that they opress the whole of Africa with their domination and, odious and hostile to all, they control the greater part of Asia, and even parts of Europe too. The Cross and the Crescent, by Richard Feltcher Page 18

Daniel Pipes, author of “Militant Islam comes to America” reverberates similar sentiments in his writings. in a TV interview on CNN said that if “Militant Islam is the problem” then “Moderate Islam is the solution”. While Mr. Pipes makes that distinctioni and craftly avoids overtly and baltnetly maligning all Muslims. However Most Muslims and other fair minded perons consider Mr. Pipes as an islamphobe and a polemic Anti-Islamic and anit-Muslim sensational writer who capitalizes on the fear of most Americans by painitn a drastic vision of Islam and Muslims. However what the neocons are saying today is nothing new. Many Muslims looking at the Islam phobic books in bookstores say “yawn yawn” nothing new…this has been going on for centuries…..”The caravans pass, the dogs will keep barking”.

The entire Crusades were based on similar thinking “the hordes are coming, we need to destroy them”. Richard Fletcher in his new book “The Cross and the Crescent” lists narrations by authors that go back centuries. Ammianus Marcelellinus, last of the Latin historians of antiquity, writing towards the end of the fourth century, is representative. He considers the Arabs a destructive people, who would swoop down like birds of prey to seize whatever they could find. And different in their habits too, not people like us: by means pf what today would be called cultural stereotyping, he distanced the Arabs as the unpalatable other. No man ever grasps a plough-handle nor cultivates a tree, none seeks a living by tilling the soil, but they rove continually over wide extensive tracts without a home, without fixed abodes or laws…They wander so widely that a woman married in one place, gives birth in another and rears children far away…Wholly unacquainted with grain or wine, they feed on wild animals and mile and a variety of plants. Christian writers such as Ammianus contemporary St. Jerone, a near neighbour of the Arabs during his long residence at Bethleham between 386 and 420, agreed with him. And these Christians authorities knew how to explain these peculiar people. It is all there in what the Bible had to say about Ishmail, whose birth and destiny are described in Genesis 16, Ishmael would a ‘wild man, his hand against every man’s, and every mans’s hand against his; and he shall live at odds with all his kinsmen’. Here is Isidore of Seville, the great polymath and encyclopedic of lat antiquity, and a contemporary of Muhammad, summing up a Christian consensus: The Saracens live in the desert.

They are also called Ishamaelites, as the book of Genesis teaches, because they are descended from Ishmael [son of Abraham]. They are also called Hagarenes because they are descended from Hagar [Abraham's slave concubine, mother of Ishmael]. They also, as we have already said, perversely call themselves Saracens because they mendaciously boast of descent from Sarah [Abraham's legitimate wife].In this manner the Arabs could be marginalized as enemies of the human race by their tainted descent, or as we should say today by their ethnicity…..

In his book “Militant Islam comes to America” Mr. Daniel Pipes he paints a picture of America and the Western world under siege. There is noting new in his thesis. Don Quixote along with Sancho Panze led a charge against an army of “Turks” which in reality were simply windmills. While the fictional character invented by Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote was not real the perceived threat turned out be as ephemeral as the threat of the “Red Menace” of yesteryear as painted by Senator McCarthy. As a classical and almost humorous example of his paranoid, very similar to Don Quixotes charge on the windmills, Mr. Pipes in his “blog” (www.Danielpipes.org) of January 2003, finds a patriotic Muslim adoption of Muslim Crescent and star draped in an American flag as a sinister conspiracy by Muslims and thinks of the Muslim Crescent as a “pacman” ready to eat the American star (even though both the crescent and the star are draped in the colors of the American flag).

The innocent and patriotic nature of this logo was repeatedly pointed out to him along with examples that the AMC logo is very similar to the AIPAC logo. Mr. Pipes continues to see sinister a designs behind the “pacman” Crescent. Mr. Pipes acknowledges that there are a few voices of reason and moderation that are using ecumenical harmony to reach out to the West, America and Americana.

NEOCON BIGOTRY AND SUSTAINED ISLAMOPHOBIC CAMPAIGN ALONG WITH SO CALLED MUSLIM APATHY AND LACK OF REACH OUT TO MUSLIMS MAY LEAD TO ANOTHER HOLOCAUST: Many place blame for problems squarely where they belong, on the doorstep of Muslim Americans. Many have warned Muslims, that if they do not reach out to mainstream America they face increased marginalization, persecution and perhaps internment and deportation. Chastising Muslims and pointing out that Muslim Americans are not doing their part in reaching out to America, We vociferously propound dialogue as the only salvation for Muslim Americans. “Shape up or be ready to be shipped out” is the message to the new immigrants who seem to be to steeped in molasses and their old ways and too engrossed in the politics of their home countries to have either the vision or the ability to grasps the realities of the new world. He believes that America is need of “Civilizational renewal” and distinguishes between simple tolerance and being proactive and doing things with AJMA type of organizations: