[in remembrance of Professor Edward Said and Sabra and Shatila]
[rush transcript I contributed for Democracy Now!]
The Bush administration is continuing in its efforts to convince Arab and Muslim states to support its plans for wide-ranging military action against the Taliban, using a combination of threats, diplomacy and the lure of military and economic aid. But there’s still little reflection on the social, political and economic basis of the resentment that US power has engendered, not just in the Middle East and Central Asia but around the world. There’s been even less discussion of what a just relationship with Arab and Muslim states might look like, or how the US might get there, ideas that seem lost in the Bush administration’s single-minded preparation for a war we still know almost nothing about.
We’re joined on the telephone right now by Edward Said. He’s a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and author of many books including Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and his memoir Out Of Place. He’s also considered a leading voice for Palestinian self-determination. Welcome to the War and Peace Report, Professor Said.
Edward Said: Thank you, Amy.
Amy: Thomas Friedman writes in his column in today’s New York Times: “I understand that this particular act of terrorism we just experienced is something so much more frightening than what Beirut’s residents had to deal with.” He ends his column with the reflection, “I went to the ballgame Friday night, took in Dvorak's New World symphony at the Kennedy Centre on Saturday, took my girls out to breakfast in Washington Sunday morning, then flew to the University of Michigan. Heck, I even went out yesterday and bought some stock. What a great country. I wonder what Osama bin Laden did in his cave in Afghanistan yesterday?” Professor Said, can you comment and help us unpack some of the assumptions in these words?
Edward Said: Well, I think in the first place, you know, speaking as a New Yorker, and somebody who has lived here, really the major part of his life, I mean I feel I’m second to none in feelings of horror and sorrow and disorientation as a result of what happened. But there’s no need, I think, to take this out of history and out of time and turn the agony of New York into sort of a unique event of all time. I mean I’m a man of two worlds, really. I mean my entire family went through the siege of Beirut by the Israeli army, when in the course of three months, 20,000 people in a country of roughly two and a half million people were killed by the Israeli army--basically people living with no protection, no anti-aircraft, [no] guns, no missiles, nothing to protect the onslaught of Israeli F15s and helicopter gunships and missiles and rockets and all the rest of it.
So, you know, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I mean, suffering under such horror is equal, it seems to me, in every part of the world. And what is implicit in a lot of what Friedman writes is that the Arabs and Muslims are to be talked down to, that somehow their experiences are not as valid or somehow not as valuable as those of the so-called West. I mean I say “so-called,” because the West is really a very nebulous idea. Most Lebanese think of themselves perhaps as part of the West. So, it’s typical to make, to draw distinction of that sort.
The other is that the experiences, much as one hates them and despises them. The experiences that produce the kind of mad mindset of which Osama Bin Laden has become the embodiment with are the tip of the iceberg. You know, I mean I myself don’t understand what would drive a person to suicide and to the kind of mass murder that these bombers did on September the 11th, but certainly the feeling of resentment and human dismissal which a lot of people in the Arab and Islamic world feel is very, very real, not because of some fantasy about America; most of them, in fact, are very interested and fascinated and indeed like America. Their children come here--I’m talking about the intellectuals of whom, of course, Osama and his people are examples, and not The Wretched of the Earth. They’re not people who live in refugee camps, either educated or the middle class people, who have gone bananas as a result of the tremendous pressure on them..on their minds of what they perceive as American contempt and dismissal of them as human beings, their religion and their culture.
It’s very difficult for a Muslim today in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia or in Egypt not to make connections between the agonies of Chechnya, the agonies of the Palestinians, the contempt with which Islam is regularly discussed and treated in the media, the way in which the United States has, for the last ten years, more or less single-handedly, been inflicting a regime of horrendous, genocidal sanctions against the people of Iraq, and [not] to see all of this as a product of one power which can get away with it. And when the disaster strikes as it did last week horribly and maleficently in the worst and most barbaric way, of course—to see this as a kind of a retribution and to see it as a kind of, you know, sort of just desserts and not feel the kind of compassion and self-suffering that most people would ordinarily feel, partly, they think, because none of that compassion and fellow-feeling and fellow-suffering has been manifested toward them.
They’ve been treated as the enemy. The United States supports regimes like that of Saudi Arabia, for example, or the Israeli government, because it suits them; not because it’s a humane support or support for humane purposes.
And in this mind, which we have no inkling of, there’s very little interchange on any level at all, really. Connections are made and the descriptions are made for which there’s very little contradiction, but simply because the Arab and Islamic world are treated with the kind of contempt and inferiority that we feel they deserve. It’s mostly ignorance, I think. Terrible, terrible ignorance as a result of poor education in our part of the world and poor education in their part of the world.
Amy: We’re talking to Professor Edward Said of Columbia University. Others as well as Friedman of the New York Times write of the Taliban, in particular, and the Muslim world, in general, as being anti-modern, jealous of American technology and attacking the United States for its freedom.
Edward Said: Well, this is one of the most monstrous ideological fictions I’ve ever heard. It was originally started around the time, I mean it gained currency around the time of [Samuel] Huntington’s article on the Clash of Civilizations. And it comes from the work of several, very, very reactionary in my opinion and mischievously inclined, politically inclined orientalists who have argued exactly that:that the world of Islam is a basically medieval world, that it is a world that resents modernity and above all, the symbol of modernity, the United States, so on and so forth.
I mean that’s complete nonsense. In the first place, modernity in the sense of McDonald's and computers and air lines and shopping centers in the mall, etc, has come to the entire world, certainly to the Islamic world as well. And you know, it’s quite clear that on the level of culture, there’s an exchange that goes on despite the ideologues who say that the East is the East and the West is the West on both sides. I mean it’s very difficult to distinguish between the everyday life of one over the other.
But it is also the case that people in the Islamic world feel that they, for the most part, live in polities and states, in countries, ruled by unpopular regimes all of whom without any exception that I can think of in one way or another—of course, Iraq is an exception—but are supported by the United States.
I mean one mustn’t forget, in the first place, that the Mujahedeen, who preceded the Taliban, sort of the previous incarnation of the Taliban, were supported by the United States as fighters on the side of Islam against the godless communists in the Soviet Union in 1980s. And when their leaders came to Washington—I’ll never forget this as long as I live—and these beared people, to my mind, being a secular person from a part of the world that produces monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, I was horrified that Reagan greeted these people as, in fact, the moral equivalent of the founding fathers, our founding fathers.
You know, it suited the United States to coddle these people, as it has all these years, the government of Saudi Arabia because of its oil, not because of its enlightened policies. And in many people in these countries, there is a healthy secular opposition. There’s women’s movement, there’s human rights movement. So, in all respects, I think one can find not only the elements but the wide currents of modernity inside contemporary Islamic societies.
The question is that they are engaged in a political struggle with people who want to take Islam back to some earlier state. Just as in this country, we have people who want to return—well, we have [Jerry] Falwell and [Pat] Robertson and all the hundreds of thousands, millions even, of fundamentalist Christians in this country who want to return us to a puritanical and simpler society.
So that’s the war. It’s not between Islam and the West. It’s between ideas of the past that exist in the West and ideas of the past and of the correct tradition that exists in the Islamic world and indeed everywhere.
Jewish world, look at the struggle within Israel between different interpretations of Judaism. So, I would say it’s really the struggle of interpretations and not the struggle between modernity of the West and the success of America, which most people in the Arab world that I know find very attractive and somewhat at odds with America’s behavior internationally, as a major, as the only superpower on one hand. And people want to, who want to return society to its earlier, pure, less sinful state, I mean that exists everywhere.
Amy: We’re talking to Professor Edward Said and we’ll be back with him in a minute after we have a break for stations to identify themselves. Then we’re going to Peshawar and Islamabad to talk about the humanitarian disaster that is brewing right now in Afghanistan. Up to one million Afghans face starvation as Bush officials plan to bomb them. Stay with us.
(break)
Amy Goodman: We’re talking with Professor Edward Said, a comparative literature institute professor at Columbia University, who has recently written a piece about the latest that has taken place in the United States: the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. A piece called “Collective passion Can the voice of rationality be heard over the war drums?” This appeared in Al Ahram Weekly online based in Cairo. You were just talking about understanding the Muslim and the Arab world and also comparing fundamentalisms, whether it’s Muslim fundamentalism or Christian or Jewish fundamentalism. Would you like to continue on that point?
Edward Said: Yes, I mean I think they—the mix of religion with politics that I found rather chilling in some of the President’s statements is a very unhealthy one, because you know, if you think you have the vision and you’re in touch with the divine that speaks through you, then, you know, there’s certainly no stopping what you do.
I mean I think that’s certainly true of Muslim fundamentalism, it’s true of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists and [it] produces the most skewed and immoral and pathological—I think that’s a right word for it—pathological politics. Whereas it would seem to me that as a great country, I mean with enormous power, it would seem to me that the United States ought to be setting the standard for universalistic norms that apply across religions and across cultures, if you like, that should govern human behavior.
There is no reason for example, why a man who was responsible, like Sharon was for the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, should not be included in the war against terrorism and why only Muslim terrorists are singled out and, of course in this case, they should be.
But you know, the idea is that there should be universal norm set by the United Nations obviously, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by which human behavior and state behavior is governed. And [there should] not these religious justifications with which you can’t argue. If you are possessed to the truth, there’s nothing that can be said to you. That’s clearly the mindset of people who believe that God has given them excellent and they should take it and drive out these inferior others who happened to be there, this sort of thing. So, I think monotheistic fundamentalism is really the same across the board. And if we want to single out one, we ought to be choosing including, not invidiously, but we ought to be including inclusively all the others as well.
Amy: Professor Said, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister is going to meet with the Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw following a 15-minute phone call between Sharon and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Sharon had earlier called off the meeting because of the remarks Straw made in an article in an Iranian newspaper, the passage which caused defense said: “One of the factors that helps breed terror is the anger that many people in the region feel at events over the years in the Palestinian territories.” Well, Downing Street said the phone call took place this morning at the request of Sharon. Straw is visiting Tehran as part of US-British effort to form international coalition that would include Iran. What do you think of this latest—well, what Straw said and also the meeting with Sharon?
Edward Said: Well, I think Straw, for the first time, you know, British official at a high level that told the truth. I mean there’s no question. There’s absolutely no question. I mean, don’t forget we live in an age of television and satellite television which has brought the Arab world together to watch the daily sufferings of Palestinians during the Intifada. I mean, in my opinion, I haven’t been there, [I have been] watching it now from the distance, there’s no question that Israel’s behavior includes the worst collective punishment that ought to qualify for terrorism, state terrorism imaginable.
I mean the idea of locking people in their house, making it impossible for them to travel, demolishing their houses, taking their land, uprooting—you know they’ve uprooted two hundred thousand trees! I mean that’s sheer sadistic cruelty, to say nothing of endless killings and what they call “targeted killings” which are, in fact, assassination of political leaders. I mean, you know, and the settlements go on and the humiliation of Palestinians at the checkpoints where they can’t move without being –without going through Israelis. I mean this has been fantastically galvanizing, I would even say polarizing, awareness amongst the Arabs everywhere who watch this every day, powerless to do anything about it.
And with the United States, more or less, continuously supply Israel with arms. I mean that, of course, doesn’t anyway justify horrendous acts, heinous acts of criminal violence, senseless destructiveness of the kind that hit our city. But it goes a long way to explaining a mood in which the United States and Israel are perceived as a malevolent and not the kind of pure and innocent creatures that perhaps they want to pretend they are.
So, I think what I’m really pleading for is a kind of secular, open and rational understanding of human behavior and not to condemn it to the realms of supernatural, say, this is, you know, evil we don’t un—you know, that comes from the devil and all. No, no, these are human beings who are acting in an unacceptable way. Their degrees, one ought to be able to analyze without, of course, condoning what to ought to be able to explain and at the same time make judgments.
But I think unless one does that and uses one’s mind and try to get past the collective passion, whether it’s in the Arab world and in the Islamic world against the Unites States or in our country, against, you know you’re just wanting to go to war without some understanding what the ground is like. I don’t mean just the geography but the moral and political and historical ground is like in the minds of others. I mean we live in one world, we don’t live in twenty seven different worlds. And once this campaign is over, we will have to go back to a world very much altered, in which I think the exchange between people becomes, I think, paramount.
Amy: And what do you think of bringing Iran into the coalition?
Edward Said: Well, I doubt that Iran will be in the coalition. In properly speaking, I think the Iranians are ..who are the sworn enemies of the Taliban..you know, there’s no love that’s lost at all between them. You know, every country acts according to its interest. And Tehran is not quite in the same position as being pressured as Saudi Arabia and emirates are who have in fact been supporting these Taliban and the Mujahidin, but originally because the US made them do it. But there’s lots of private contribution from these countries to Afghanistan. The Iranians, I think, are in quite a different position. And they may think of this as a way perhaps of improving their position with the United States. But I think entirely on their terms. I don’t think there’ll be any military actions from Iran. I think there’ll be an attempt to somehow soften the atmosphere and make possible normal relationship.
Amy: The House of Representatives voted yesterday to release half a billion dollars that the United States owes in back dues to the United Nations, ending a long running squabble at a time when the Bush administration says international cooperation is needed. What do you make of this right?
Edward Said: Well, I mean it’s obviously too little too late. I mean I’m glad they did it but we still owe, the United States still owes, we still owe a billion in back dues to the UN. Some members of the Senate and the House have made no secret of their contempt for the United Nations. They feel, I suppose many Americans, but not all, feel that we, the United States should go it alone and why should we be bound by protocols and bind the rest of humanity?
You know, maybe this is the beginning of change. And certainly the efforts on the part of the Bush administration to make this coalition to give it some kind of international, perhaps even the United Nations legitimacy is a sign of that we’re beginning to understand this, even with our great power and distance we are from the rest of the world. We are not invulnerable, we suffer as much as, we will and can suffer as much as anyone and have suffered in the case of this terrible atrocity on September the 11th.
But I think there is no hope, in my opinion, for the human community unless we rest our faith, I think, in communal organizations of which the only international, I mean the only universal one is the United Nations. And [I think] that we should be bound by the declarations and resolutions which, in many ways, we ourselves have formulated. But I mean the behavior of the United States in the United Nations has also been scandalous. Promiscuous use of veto whenever something goes against whenever, for example, Israel is criticized, to use the United Nations as we did in the case of Iraq to enter this long period of just slow genocidal torture of the Iraqi people in which you know half a million children have died needlessly.
You know, those are shown in the end, I think, a kind of contempt for the rest of the world that ill suits us as the great power with, I think, an extremely compassionate population. I think most Americans are given a chance, I think the media has not been good about this, but given a chance. We’re trying to understand what the US means in the world and what has been done in its name abroad and that most Americans are open to the suffering and miseries of others.
Amy: Finally, Saddam Hussein, where this puts Iraq? You have people like Paul Wolfowitz pushing for the bombing of Iraq, where do you think Iraq will fit in here? And the vision that you have of what actually is going to happen since that has not been made very clear at this point, how the US will conduct this so-called war?
Edward Said: Well, I think there has been a profound misunderstanding of what Iraq represents in the Arab world. [noise] I don’t think there is much love lost among Arabs [noise] for Saddam, for his regime which is known to be cruel and murderous. And I don’t know many people who were in favor of this annexation and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But you know, it’s one thing to be opposed to Saddam and another to want to destroy the country even further. I mean that seems to me be sadism. You know, there was an opportunity, as no one is tired of remembering or repeating, during the war to enter Baghdad. If that was the goal, you know, to get rid of them, get rid of them in that way rather than to starve the Iraqi people.
I think there’s a struggle going on inside the administration as to what to do about Iraq, who [which] to people, I think, like Wolfowitz, seems to be important, only because it might be at one point a threat to Israel. I see them—I mean Iraq is, by any standard, there’s not a threat to anyone now. I mean Saddam obviously is, but the country has been, you know, its infrastructure destroyed, its people are in terrible shape after years of these sanctions. So, I think wanting to destroy Iraq yet again seems to be just gratuitous violence and cruelty for no particular reason. And I doubt that it will occur, but I may be wrong.
Amy: Professor Said, I want to say thank you very much for being with us and I hope you are feeling well. Professor Said is institute professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, author of many books, among them, Orientalism and his memoir Out of Place.
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