‘Making sense of the Middle East today.’ The first of a series of four talks following my research and recent trips to Turkey and Syria.
I would like to begin with a quote. In fact I shall be quoting individuals fairly frequently in these talks – be they historical celebrities, Imams, Rabbis, journalists, poets, or, for example, just cynical old Abd AlKadir from the coffee house in Aleppo, or bright, very modern, young Burca from Ankara. I want you to hear from the ordinary Christians, Muslims, secularists and atheists to whom I listened and with whom I spoke, as much as from scholars and pundits.
I want you to get not just a bit of a flavour but a revealing taste of how Arabs, Turks, and Persians – I mention all three because their histories have overlapped and influenced each others, often considerably -- perceive Westerners, their allies, instruments, or cat’s-paws – and here we would have to include Israel and even, in the view of many, the United Nations – in order that you may better understand why the Middle East and Arabic speaking North Africa has been a region of such internal complexity and controversy, and why, I would want to argue, its indigenous peoples have every reason today to be at the same time suspicious and fearful of the West, yet also, somewhat paradoxically, envious and, despite our track record of exploitation, hypocrisy and broken promises, even hopeful of a change at last in Western attitudes.
I can of course give you only a limited and personal appreciation of things – a sifting of my own reading, conversations, and experience. But, if nothing else, I hope that it will give you an insight and, I trust, the desire to question not only what you read and see in the media but also your own preconceptions and prejudices. I am conscious that such is a somewhat weighty task and that my knowledge is imperfect: but I do believe that my sources, across the board and from top to bottom, provide me with sufficient information on which to make informed judgements. For this reason I fully expect to upset some of you at some point during these talks; and for this I can only apologise in advance. That said, I do very much hope that those whom I have upset – and those I have not – will want to take me on in the ‘Question Time’ at the end of each session.
We will also have a break for 10 minutes in the middle so that you may grab a drink, chat, use our very smart new loo, walk in the churchyard, or formulate your many perceptive and incisive comments and questions.
We begin then with some history – but, first, a quote.
‘After decades of collusion with despots we guaranteed that even reasonable people with reasonable grievances would regroup at the mosque and the madrasa.’
If we want to make any sense of the Middle East today, we must begin with its history; and we cannot make sense of the region without realising too that it has been in many ways a region at odds and often at war with itself as much as with the West. I have chosen some of those key periods, events, individuals and documents that have created the perceptions as well as the misunderstandings I encountered in my research and visits. Sadly, pressure of time this evening requires that I be highly selective.
From an Arab perspective first then, the era of early Islam – its first five centuries - is a source of great pride to all Arabs as a bygone age when the Arabs were a dominant power in the world. This of course resonates in particular with Islamists, who argue that the Arabs were greatest when they adhered most closely to their Muslim faith. Modern Arabs, especially those of a more secular or at least less zealously religious disposition, would want to argue that the Arab cultural renaissance or ‘nahda’ of the 19thC and the subsequent modernising reforms of the 20thC are more relevant to the present day. Egypt founded the world’s third oldest film industry, while from Cairo to Baghdad and from Beirut to Casablanca, painters, poets, musicians, playwrights, novelists and others of this renaissance shaped a new era: society changed, education changed, and women emerged from behind the veil.
The resurgence of fundamentalist Islam, however, has in a number of countries arrested and reversed the developments made by that renaissance and those reforms. And so in those countries, political, religious, and cultural views which question or offend a fundamentalist perspective on life meet with antagonism and repression.
As one journalist put it to an American friend, ‘In Iran we have freedom of expression: it’s just that we don’t have freedom after expression.’
Again, in certain countries today we see, with women, the return of the veil. Though this demands explanation; there is more to it than meets the eye. In some instances it is forced upon them; but in others, even amongst educated young women in secular states such as Turkey and Syria, you will encounter it as a choice, freely made, as a statement against the deficiencies and ills of Western – especially American – culture and commerce, which they view as inimical and detrimental to family and community life. Our Western cult of individualism, pandered to, as it is, by powerful big business, is anathema to ordinary, traditional Arab, Turkish, and Persian life. As one young teacher of English, educated partly in New York, put it to me,
'I have seen it over there and I do not want it here in my country.’
Ironically, she and her friends would happily shop in the smart Western brand name Istanbul shops and drink their coffee in the growing number of Starbucks rather than at the local coffee houses; but none of this, they were adamant, to the detriment of family and community life, to which they demonstrated a compelling and exemplary sense of responsibility. But the facts is that Islamism, increasingly from the 1980s - remember 1979 marked the fall of the Shah and the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini - even given the recent pro-democracy revolutions, is on the up. As Eugene Rogan says in his authoritative, sympathetic, and very readable history of the Arab world published only in 2009 – to which I am much indebted for a number of aspects of the historical perspective in these talks
‘In any free and fair election in the Arab world today, I believe the Islamists would win hands down.’
That said, the Islamists themselves – as we shall see next week when we consider ‘The Extremists’ - vary considerably from the very conservative to, relatively speaking, the startlingly modern.
The fact is that Western policymakers need to pay far more attention to history if they hope to remedy the ills that afflict the Arab world today and which impinge so much on the West. For example, over the centuries, Western leaders have tried to present their invasions of the Arab world as ‘liberations’ rather than, in reality, as advancing their geostrategic interests. Napolean was one, for example, who failed to persuade. Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, entering Baghdad in March 1917, was another, who had this to say.
‘Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’
The subsequent Iraqi revolt of 1920 was suppressed by the British, and with great violence. Iraq was then placed under direct British imperial rule for the next twelve years, and under informal British control until the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958.
The French too were just as intransigent in Syria until 1945. Freya Stark, a 1st World War nurse, philosopher and anti-fascist campaigner, writes this concerning the French mandate in Syria.
‘It is ridiculous to call this a ‘mandate’ for I believe there is not a Frenchman in the country who intends these people ever to govern themselves.’
By the time George W Bush was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003 to liberate its people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the Arabs had heard it all before: the wolf of occupation dressed in the lamb’s fleece of liberation. It is bad enough to invade a people without also insulting their intelligence.
Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi reflected widespread anger when he threw his shoes at George W. in 2008. ‘This is a farewell kiss, you dog!’ he shouted, throwing the first. And with the second, ‘and this is from the widows, the orphans, and those you killed in Iraq.’ He became a hero overnight in the Middle East for telling the most powerful man in the world that the Iraqis knew the difference between liberation and occupation. His outburst revealed a profound sense of anger and frustration: first, because the Iraqis had not been able to rid themselves of a tyrant like Saddam on their own; and, secondly, because they were unable to prevent foreigners from invading Iraq for their own ends.
The Lebanese journalist, Samir Kassir, assassinated by the Syrians in his booby-trapped Alfa Romeo in 2005 for speaking out against Syrian political machinations in Lebanon, had said this. ‘The Arab people are haunted by a sense of powerlessness...powerlessness to suppress the feeling that you are no more than a lowly pawn on the global chessboard, even as the game is being played in your own backyard.’
The Arabs had first come to be ruled by an external power in the sixteenth century with the Ottoman conquest. The European powers and then the two superpowers of the cold war followed them; after this it was just America on her own. And if there was one thing I found that united the peoples and the religions and the minorities and the majorities in Turkey and Syria when I visited them last year, it was this; the near-universal suspicion and hatred of the USA. Fortunately for us, Britain is seen now more as a supportive but somewhat ineffective poodle, and the ordinary people of Turkey and Syria were always keen to distinguish between ‘politicians’ and ‘ordinary people like you and me.’
Now of course one of the reasons why the Middle East has had so many problems is that there have always been divisions of one sort or another within the occupied countries themselves, and there were always those who profited greatly from the occupations or took advantage of them to settle old tribal, family, or personal feuds. But on balance, at the root of the worst and most of the region’s problems was undoubtedly the West; first, England and France primarily, then America and Russia, and then America on her own, the new unipolar age beginning with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 - Remember the USSR had collapsed in the same year, leaving America in uncontested pole position - Saddam Hussain having been given the green light, believe it or not, by the American ambassador in Baghdad himself. Why he did so is a very good question. Let’s move north for a few moments to Turkey.
Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, sits at a crossroads between Europe and Asia, and until the founding of the new Turkish republic following the forced abdication of the last Sultan Vahideddin in 1922 was a meeting place and melting pot of cultures, of social, military, religious, and above all economic to-ings and fro-ings over the centuries, that made the Mediterranean, of which Constantinople for so many centuries was its beating heart and El Dorado (City of Gold), a world of shared vocabularies, a great zone of civilization, through commerce, inter-marriage, architecture, cuisine, etc; and equally such shared but rather less civilized entrepreneurial escapades as piracy.
So in the 16thC, one of the most successful periods in the history of piracy, we could find North African Muslims, Christian Britons, with perhaps a sprinkling of Persian Zoroastrians pillaging as far as the English Channel, Ireland, and even Iceland – not in competition but as shipmates. Again, more recent studies of the Renaissance demonstrate the influence of the Ottoman empire, and not only that the Ottomans were influenced by it. In Renaissance Europe, popular legend had it that the Ottomans were the descendents of the Trojans who had re-emerged from the depths of Asia to inflict revenge on the Greeks by conquering Constantinople. Having taken the city and with thousands of Christian soldiers in his army, the Sultan, Mehmed II, indulged the legend by writing to Pope Nicholas V, describing his conquest as ‘Hector’s revenge’.
In the mid 16thC large numbers of Christians in the Balkans and elsewhere were converting to Islam because of the success of the Ottomans; many Europeans, in something of a mixing up of historical origins, believed the Ottoman Sultan to be the descendent of the Roman Emperor. We should not be surprised that so many changed their allegiance and even their faith from this period: it was quite simply a matter of survival. An illustration of this can be found in a letter concerning the mid 17thC frontier zone of Livno, a zone where the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian powers collided.
The practice of blood brotherhood had developed whereby two warriors would make a pact to ransom each other in the event of capture. The letter reads as follows. ’They make a pact saying ’your religion is mine and my religion is yours’; they lick each other’s blood and the Infidel and the Muslim become brothers in religion.
This is not acknowledged in Islam or Christianity but this heresy is quite common in these frontier regions.’ This I think illustrates a truth about so many in the Middle East at that time: that, whatever the accident of history that made them by reason of family, tribe, or country either Christian or Muslim, they just wanted to survive and to have a life; and that, without my being unjustly cynical, a particular religion was and probably still is, for many, a social or tribal label, their understanding of God often sincere but vague, their hope that God, be he the Christian or the Muslim God, will understand and forgive their change of allegiance for the sake of their family’s survival.
None of that of course can in any way detract from the reality of the terrible persecutions carried out over the centuries and in which the persecuted were not even allowed the opportunity to change their minds.
From 1683 when the Ottomans failed to take Vienna and were driven off leaving their coffee and coffee pots behind them, the Europeans’ former grudging admiration and fear of the Turk begins to give place to, first, contempt, and then curiosity. They, we, develop a sense of superiority, one with all the arrogant prejudices of the Enlightenment. But some in Europe still maintain a grudging admiration. Voltaire writes this of the ruling elites. ‘They are invincibly attached to their religion; they hate, they disdain the Christians. They regard them as idolaters yet they suffer their presence and protect them in their empire; and in the capital they inhabit a vast quarter where they are permitted to hold processions which are preceded by four Janissaries who march in front.’ Voltaire also commended them for having no aristocracy and for not being allowed to duel. And we should remember that it was the Ottoman Sultan who gave a home in Istanbul from 1492 not only to Muslims but also to the Jews being persecuted and expelled by Isabella of Spain under the Inquisition. More additions then to the melting pot of Istanbul.
As Europe begins to make its incredible industrial advances, so the Ottoman Empire begins to stagnate, becoming increasingly tangled up in European great power plays but, more importantly, prey to them. Deeply conservative by nature and determined to hold on to their privileged positions, the ruling clerical and administrative elites cause the empire to fall further and further behind the advancing Europeans.
Napolean’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 produces an alliance between the British fleet and Ahmed Pasha, the Ottoman Governor of Egypt, resulting in Napolean’s retreat and defeat the following year at the Battle of the Nile. Nelson is decorated by the Sultan for services rendered to the Sublime State – a decoration he was wearing at his death at Trafalgar – and is given a purse of 2000 sequins for his sailors wounded in action. One cannot help but chuckle at some of the ‘pot calling the kettle black’ descriptions in the jingoistic histories of this period. Ahmed Cevdet Pasha for the Ottomans writes this in his history which, for those of you who have ever had to deal with them in business or politics, may well strike a familiar chord. ‘Ottoman diplomats learned their duplicity from the French. Our ministers were deceived so often by their lies that they learned to deceive and used this newly acquired skill on the French themselves. Often they would use sarcastic language and dupe the French.’ Hurrah for them!
I9thC European imperialism and colonialism begins to see the world increasingly in racial terms and in a spirit of triumphalism. Cevdet Pasha again on international treaty obligations. ‘These arrangements always change with the conditions of the times. In the final analysis, all relations between states are determined by pure self-interest and mutual suspicion.’
From the early 19thC the Ottomans begin, somewhat late in the day and against much domestic opposition, to realise that they simply must reform in order to survive, and so European institutions begin to be emulated in a series of quite profound changes, the period called the ‘TANZIMAAT’. The biggest problem in European eyes however was the lack of equality in their empire for Christian subjects. Again, given that Catholic emancipation here, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the American Civil War, and the Dreyfus Affair in France were still to come, equality and justice could hardly be seen to be the real reasons for European interference in Ottoman domestic political affairs. No, a combination of commercial opportunity and European romanticism, I believe, were certainly two of the principal motives for supporting the European nationalist separatist struggles of the 19thC. The Greek war of independence was seen by European Romantics as ‘a struggle between the descendents of Pericles and the Turkish barbarians.’ Gladstone, remember, referred to the Turks as ‘The great anti-human species of humanity’. But it is often conveniently forgotten that millions of Muslims were massacred in the Balkans; it was by no means just the Turks who had blood on their hands.
Edith Burton writes this. ‘When a Moslem kills a Moslem it does not count. When a Christian kills a Moslem it is a righteous act. When a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgement better not talked about. It is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we have a full blown atrocity.’
Most Europeans had a very approximate knowledge of the region, its culture, mores, and history, largely informed, if it was informed at all, by that wonderful story book ‘The Arabian Nights’.
Moving on, from 1897 and the Basel Conference, we encounter the unrelenting rise of Zionism; Jewish intellectual and political leaders from this point on begin to follow in the arrogant and condescending footsteps of the European powers who persecuted them, not only painting a picture of their own racial, political, and intellectual superiority over the native Arab Palestinians but also asserting their moral right to a homeland. All refuted any idea that the Balfour Declaration was a statement enabling an equal right of Jews and Arabs to Palestine on both sides of the Jordan river, even citing the British Colonial Office who were pressing for a duty to the Arabs, as anti-Jewish and even anti-British! Essentially they were asking the British government to choose between world Jewry, with Israel as an outpost of European life and mores, and the simple, backward, unreliable Palestinian Arabs.
The American King-Crane Commission of 1919 sent to discover the political aspirations of the local populations in Greater Syria, Iraq, and Palestine was an embarrassment at the Paris Peace Conference, their report shelved until after the countries of the former Ottoman Empire had been shared out, as previously agreed, by the European victors.
But it is important to take cognisance of its findings and the attitudes and aspirations it recorded if we are to understand the antipathy still felt towards Europe today and used as ammunition against us. The resolution presented to the Commission by the Syrians and Amir Faysal, their new king, revealed, comments Rogan in his history, ‘a surprising degree of knowledge on the part of the drafters about international affairs; the text was replete with quotes from President Wilson and the Covenant of the League of Nations as well as references to the conflicting promises of Britain’s wartime diplomacy and the aims of Zionism. King and Crane claimed the resolution was the most important document of their mission.’ He continues, ‘The Syrians demanded complete political independence within geographic boundaries separating it from Turkey, Iraq, Najd, Hijaz, and Egypt, and to be ruled as a constitutional monarchy. They rejected the mandate principal arguing that the Arabs were no less gifted than the Bulgarians, Serbians, Greeks, and Romanians, all of whom had secured full independence from the Ottomans without such European tutelage. They condemned the secret treaties of Sykes-Picot and rejected the aims of Zionism as inimical to their national interests. ‘We oppose’, they said, ‘the pretensions of the Zionists to create a Jewish commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration to any part of our country; for we do not acknowledge their title but consider them a grave peril to our people from the national, economic, and political points of view.’ ‘King and Crane, from their conversations with Jewish representatives, also concluded that the Zionists were looking forward to the complete dispossession of Palestine by non-Jewish inhabitants by ‘various forms of purchase’ or ‘by other means’.
Much has been written about the self-contradictory Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement – the drawing of lines in the sand across Turk, Persians, and Arab lands. I would simply ask you to imagine this: an arbitrary line drawn through the middle of Brenchley High Street, on one side of which the system of governance was Chinese, on the other, Indian. How would you feel as a long-standing English native of Brenchley? The betrayal of Arab aspirations and the withdrawal of our support is not only one of the most dishonourable acts of any British government that century but one of the most damaging to future British relations and interests in the region. The British Colonial Office warned against it and acted honourably; but to no avail.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, 1919-1922 sees the Turkish War of Independence against Europe, the Greeks, and the Armenians. In 1922 the Sultanate is abolished by Attaturk and in 1924 the Caliphate also. (Why do I turn again to Turkey? Well, not just because I went there but because it is Turkey where you will find today the fastest growing antipathy to America and to Western acculturisation: joining the EU is very much on the back-burner and, until the recent revolts, much closer ties with Syria and even Iran were considered by increasing numbers of Turks to be the best way forward for their country.)
What really riled the Turks in their new young nation state was the European desire to ‘protect’ the Christians from the ‘uncivilised’ Muslims in Turkey. Islam was seen in the West as an obstacle to progress. Books were written; for example, ‘A Study in English Turcophobia’ and ‘The Crescent verses the Cross’. Now of course there was a good deal of pot calling the kettle black in these literary exchanges, with Turkish writers conveniently failing to mention the shortcomings of their own country’s mistreatment of minorities; but we can readily see why the new young Turkish republic, endeavouring through Attaturk’s new republican ideas to create a new Turkish identity and loyalty based on nation and state, found such European interference completely unacceptable. In 1923 Great Britain demands of the League of Nations the protection of minorities. This is seen by the Turks as an intrusion into their domestic politics and religion. (Islam was still to play a defining role in the political identity of Turkey but, as we shall see in a later talk, the notion of Turkish Islam was somewhat different from that found in Arab or Persian countries.)
In the late 1920s one Suleiman Nazif publishes in Istanbul what he entitles ‘An Open Letter to Jesus’. In it he criticizes the European powers for using ‘violence, exploitation, and plunder to subjugate large areas of the world in the 19thC in the name of ‘civilisation’. Now we have to remember here that Islam is very much and for very many of its adherents a complete way of life in which religion and politics combine. Christianity, they assume and many still assume today, is the same; though, interestingly, during the first Crusades, the Muslims did not call the Crusaders ‘Crusaders’ but ‘Franks’ – they readily discerned the difference, for the Franks were mercenaries whose purpose was plunder rather than piety. Christians had, after all at that time, unhindered passage to religious sites in the Holy Land. But of course the cross very soon became a most useful rallying cry.
For the young Turkish republic, the government could not assimilate its Christian subjects –mainly Greeks and Armenians – as its Ottoman predecessors had often done into Turkish nationalism but instead marginalised them, unfairly but expediently, because they were now seen as infected fifth- columnists. They were increasingly discriminated against or deported in the 1920s in order that they could not carry out their political goals. When considering the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917, which undoubtedly happened and to which their German allies turned a blind eye, one has to remember, in terms of political expediency, that Armenian terrorists had been battling against the Turkish population and had even tried to assassinate the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople for warning his Armenian flock, in a sermon, not to rock the boat lest they bring such terrors upon themselves. What we must realise is that the intervention of the West in the 18th and 19thCs – and we would have to add the Russians here as well – often served, in effect, to create greater discrimination and persecution of the Christians and other minorities there.
Nazif’s Letter is in the form of a monologue that puts to Jesus Christ the crimes which were committed by his followers in his name throughout centuries against other people. Nazif was perplexed why Jesus had been unmoved by these events and urged him to come back to save the world from Christian oppression. Although Turkey remained neutral during the 2WW, joined the UN in 1945 and then NATO in 1952, there has remained a deeply ingrained suspicion of America and Europe, combining with a wave of reactionary nationalism, which increased markedly with the occupation of Iraq, American support of the Kurds, the demands to admit to the Armenian genocide, and possible membership of the EU. The strings attached by the EU to consideration for membership are perceived by many Turks to be a humiliating threat to Turkish identity and customs, some Turks even referring to this as ‘Europe’s revenge for Gallipoli’.
They see the EU as ‘a Christian club’ led by those shining lights of Christendom Sarkozy and Merkel. Turkish nationalists on both the left and the right have exploited this anti-western national mood – I certainly encountered it during my visit, even among Christians! – spreading conspiracy theories, breeding the perception that the West is a security threat, and brewing a psychological climate of fear that EU membership means a loss of sovereignty and national identity. But for the West there is a catch twenty- two situation here. The greater, western-style, democracy and freedoms demanded by the EU carry in them greater opportunities for the Islamisation of Turkey; something which both the Turkish and European governments fear. Cynics would argue that the European demands for such greater democracy and freedom in Turkey were actually formulated with the considered aim of Turkey disqualifying itself from membership rather than have Europe be seen to shut the door in her face. Before the recent events in Syria, Turkey had put EU membership very much on the backburner and was courting more Middle Eastern Links. So even in a modern, secular, relatively highly westernised state there is much antipathy towards what were described to me as ‘the new Crusaders’.
Back to the Americans for a moment or two and back to Truman who, as far I can see, was the President who set the base lines and parameters within which American foreign policy towards the Middle East would henceforth play out. (Incidentally, whether or not Obama in his very recent comments about supporting democracy in the Middle East through G8 funding will be able to deliver is a moot point. Jimmy Carter tried to follow his own principles, did not make a second term, and was subsequently treated as a political pariah. But we shall consider the future in a few Sundays’ time.)
What we must understand about America is that she is the only power that has it within her power to solve the Palestine issue, which, like a cancer, has had such a deleterious effect on the region: and yet she has consistently failed to do so, thereby earning the opprobrium of almost all in the Middle East but her cats-paws. Given that she was seen in the Woodrow Wilson years as the great hope of Middle Easterners seeking their freedom and independence from European tutelage – The American King-Crane Commission of 1918 having found wholly in favour of local Arab aspirations – she has indeed fallen a long way, to the level and below that of the former European colonialists.
Truman’s own personal sensitivities and political ambitions, together with a powerful and well-organised Zionist lobby in the Whitehouse, set a harmful precedent for the future. He was Vice-President at Roosevelt’s death and desperately needed to secure the 1948 election. The Whitehouse’s expert on Palestine was a Jew who had never been to Palestine and who, it later transpired, leaked profusely to the Zionist lobby and later the state of Israel. The Zionists were very clever, stressing the similarities between the early US pioneers and the settlers in Israel. The Zionists were at odds with the State Department who argued that US policy ought to be guided by US national interests, i.e. oil, and US democratic traditions, i.e. supporting the calls for Arab nationalism, saying that the US should ‘respect the wishes of a large majority of the local inhabitants with respect to their form of government. At the present time the US has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequalled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would likely for many years to be considered a betrayer of the high principles we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the war.’
But it seems as though, by this time, Truman, his White House staff and, to be frank, most US citizens had mentally depopulated Palestine of its Arabs and replaced them with Jewish settlers. And of course then one gets into a process of self-reinforcing decision-making circles that start, are sustained, and end with the same unquestioned set of assumptions about how to relate to the problem. (Any of you who have had to address any of the many structural and strategic problems faced by the Church of England in recent years will understand exactly the point at issue here.) So, the power of domestic Zionism was one of the principal factors: personal political ambition – call it political realism, if you like - was certainly the other. This is a quote from an address to a gathering of US diplomats in 1945 just prior to the presidential elections.
‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.’ In fact he did. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were of Arab descent; but they were not organised and they had no voice because they were kept out of the White House by you know who. From this point on in US policy-making the decline in influence of the State Department is apparent. For Truman ‘the buck stops here’ meant, in practical policy terms, that ‘the boss gives orders and the bureaucrats take orders.’ Truman created in his approach and his own concerns a precedent rarely departed from in subsequent Presidents except Eisenhower in 1956 over the Suez crisis.
Very interestingly today – and I shall be considering this next time – just as younger American Jews are beginning to question very closely the ‘Israel, right or wrong’ mantra of their older generation, following, in particular, what they saw as the immorally disproportional violence of Israel’s Gaza war of 2008/9, it is now the Christian Right in America who have taken up that mantra and whom American Presidents offend at their electoral peril.
When we consider this history, which is just a glimpse, an indicator as to how the West is perceived and why, we can perhaps begin to realise just how hated today Europe and America are by some, and how sceptical are others of any talk of benevolent or disinterested assistance in the region’s problems. We can see too perhaps how it is that sometimes this hatred will be taken out on scapegoat Christians in those countries.
Galal Amin, political and social economist from the American University in Cairo, has a very strong following indeed both at home in Egypt and in other Middle Eastern countries for his analysis of what he calls ‘the new Western imperialism’ led by America. He argues that US colonialism represents the latest and most sophisticated phase of Western imperialism. He talks of US arrogance and cultural insensitivity – views and manifestations of which I certainly came across in my visits to Turkey and Syria – and turns the camera onto the American system, identifying what he suggests are four very revealing characteristics. First, that the US government pays lip service only to democratic precepts but does not act on them domestically or nationally. Secondly, that domestic politics is dominated by powerful elites with links to multinational corporations and other non-American interests. Thirdly, that American society is actually characterized by major socio-economic inequalities and racial tensions. And, fourthly, that the US public is generally uninformed about foreign countries, US policies there, and is much manipulated by the media who of course are financed by those afore-mentioned powerful elites.
Amin, being an Egyptian, is not without a sense of irony and black humour: mimicking Voltaire’s satirical description of the battle between the Bulgars and the Abares in his book ‘Candide’, he writes this about the war on terror in Afghanistan. ‘The US then began dropping bombs and sandwiches with great precision, so that the bombs would fall on the Taliban and the sandwiches on the starving children. It is true that in a few instances mistakes were made and some bombs fell on the starving children, while some sandwiches fell on the Taliban bases: but these were exceptions bound to happen in wartime, and the collateral damage caused by the stray sandwiches was held to be within acceptable limits.’
But Galal Amin’s main criticism of the US is that vested interests do not allow the US to solve the Palestinian and associated problems in the Middle East. Indeed he accused Bush of fostering ‘constructive chaos’ in the Arab and Muslim world in order to serve strategic interests. I would want to argue that in fact the three biggest losers, unless they take constructive action in the region rather than continue to make constructive chaos, will be Israel, America, and Iran, who, until the unanticipated shock of the recent Arab ‘Spring’, most benefited from the chaos they were causing and the fear it produced.
To finish this first talk, let me just remind you of the quote with which I began.
‘After decades of collusion with despots we guaranteed that even reasonable people with reasonable grievances would regroup at the mosque and the madrasa.’
Next time (Sunday June 12th) my title is ‘The Extremists – a brief analysis of Iran, Israel, Hizbollah, Al Qaida, ‘Christians United For Israel’ and other such flies in the ointment for peace.’
