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"The Mirror of Fallujah"
Victor David Hansen is always good, but really hits his stride in this. The essence is that the emperor has no clothes. Itâs worth reading."No more passes and excuses for the Middle East" What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? .... I fear that we have not seen anything new. ...the hourly killing is perhaps not merely the wages of autocracy, but part of a larger grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display.... The Middle-East coffee houses cry about the creation of Israel and the refugees on the West Bank only to snicker that almost 1,000,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. I am sorry, but these toxic fumes of the Dark-Ages permeate everywhere. It wonât do any more simply to repeat quite logical exegeses.... No, there is something peculiar to the Middle East that worries the world. The Arab world for years has promulgated a quite successful media image as perennial victimsâproud folks, suffering under a series of foreign burdens, while nobly maintaining their grace and hospitality. .... But the curtain has been lifted since 9-11 and the picture we see hourly now is not pretty.... And then there is the asymmetry of it all. Walk in hushed tones by a mosque in Iraq, yet storm and desecrate the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank with impunity. Blow up and assassinate Westerners with unconcern; yet scream that Muslims are being questioned about immigration status in New York. Damn the West as you try to immigrate there; try to give the Middle East a fair shake while you prefer never to visit such a place. Threaten with death and fatwa any speaker or writer who âimpugnsâ Islam, demand from Western intellectuals condemnation of any Christians who speak blasphemously of the Koran. Yet it is not just the violence, the boring threats, the constant televised hatred, the temper-tantrums of fake intellectuals on televisions, the hypocrisy of anti-Western Arabs haranguing America and Europe from London or Boston, or even the pathetic shouting and fist-shaking of the ubiquitous Arab street. Rather the global village is beginning to see that the violence of the Middle East is not aberrant, but logical. Its misery is not a result of exploitation or colonialism, but self-induced. Its fundamentalism ... an altogether different and much fouler brand.... If we are to try to bring some good to the Middle East, then we must first have the intellectual courage to confess that for the most part the pathologies embedded there are not merely the work of corrupt leaders but often the very people who put them in place and allowed them to continue their ruin. Posted by: RWV 2004-04-05 |
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