Via Mad Minerva we have this reminder that Moslem rage against the West goes back a long time:
Perhaps the single most consistent theme in the anti-Western protests and incidents that we so often term "Muslim rage" is our perennial struggle to understand them. "Why do they hate us?" is a question we've been asking for a long time. Judging by some of the protest signs dotting Africa and Asia last week, demanding Western respect for Islam and its adherents, it might be a question that many Muslims ask of us, too. None of this is to advance a specific theory for last week's protests or the anger behind them, but rather to place them within the much longer history of offense and outrage between the Western and Muslim worlds, a generations-old mutual misapprehension that has long defied the sorts of easy answers that we might be tempted to reach for today.
Obviously, my first thought when confronted with this long history of Moslem rage at the West was that George W. Bush is a lot older than he looks. Let's see his birth certificate, eh?
One of these days we have to stop wondering why they hate us, as if we should do something to end those reasons. We need to ask "why do they hate?"
Remember, even though jihadis are able to draw on a long history of reasons to hate America--including somehow blaming us for the Crusades (a two-fer in idiocy since we weren't aroung then and the Crusades were a counter-attack to liberate lands conquered by Moslems)--we have quite the record of helping Moslems and we can't seem to get any credit for it:
Remember the source of premodern Islamic anger. Why did the Zawahiri brothers, or the late bin Laden, or the Islamist of the week hate the West, and in particular the United States?
It surely is not, as their apologists plead, because of our “foreign policy.” We are enlightened compared to what Putin did in Chechnya or how Chinese treated their Muslim minorities. You, readers, know the American record better than do I: we graciously accepted Muslim refugees, even ingrates like Mohamed Morsi or the 9/11 mass murderers. We fed Somalis; helped to remove Gaddafi; freed Kuwaitis; liberated Afghans (twice); birthed Iraqi democracy; bombed Christians to save Muslim Kosovars and Bosnians; fund Jordanians, Egyptians, and Palestinians; and so on.
Instead, the wrath of the Muslim Street is elemental and existential (read The Al Qaeda Reader to fathom all the twenty or so excuses given by bin Laden for his hatred of the U.S.). It can be explained in terms something like this: Islamists have convinced the Arab masses that their present mess (so easily fathomed in a globalized world in second-by-second, instantaneous comparisons with other cultures — via cell phones, the Internet, DVDs, and cable television) is not their own fault.
Discussions of the pernicious effects of endemic tribalism, misogyny, statism, anti-Semitism, fundamentalism, religious intolerance, xenophobia, and anti-modernism are taboo. So there is never serious reflection about self-induced pathologies that keep fostering a Saddam Hussein, Muslim Brotherhood, and Ba’ath Party, or the preconditions that throughout much of the 20th century made the Arab world so susceptible to Hitlerism, then Soviet communism, then Baathism, then Western authoritarianism, then authoritarianism, and, then, or rather always back to, Islamic radicalism. The Middle East is not fascist, communist, Baathist, pan-Arabist, or Islamist, so much as it is screwed-up-ist and blame-them-ist.
If all these -isms did not exist, we would have to invent them and others as well to find scapegoats for self-induced misery. The Islamist explains to the illiterate masses that they are poor and angry because, despite their renewed zealotry and supposed ancient majesty, the evil Westerners have, quite unfairly, all the power, wealth, and influence — and yet don’t deserve it, given their godlessness, decadence, and corruption. Westerners obtained their preeminence through “crimes” like Zionism, colonialism, imperialism, etc., at a stage of Islamic vulnerability, when Muslim sellouts betrayed the Prophet and joined the enemy. And thus true believers, by sheer force of religious fervor, can slap down these Westerners, as was true in the ancient past. Presto — go torch an embassy and empower me as you leader!
That exegesis for millions in Cairo is far more comforting advice than something a bit more mundane like “treat women equally” or “look at the world empirically” or “take apart your cell phone and see how it works.”
The entire essay is excellent. Do read it all.
Indeed, not long after the original 9/11 terror attacks, I was dumbfounded that our record of helping Moslems didn't stop jihadi rage:
Me, I don't think there is a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Islam is probably no more intolerant than Christianity was until a couple centuries ago. I am loathe to condemn an entire religion and culture (ours is better, but I wouldn't force them into our way, except when they move here: see Mark Steyn for a good piece on cultural—not ethnic—superiority) because some nuts are gunning for us. We just need to kill the nuts. But I am tired of people trying to make me "understand" why the Islamic world hates us and why I should somehow "understand" the rage that led to September 11th. I'm all for understanding the enemy. But I won't try to understand in order to rationalize it. Let's just stomp who we have to stomp and when they complain, we'll say, "You know, we just haven't gotten over that Islamic invasion of France, way back when. You'll just have to understand our just rage." Ok, I'm not still upset over the France thing, but the Barbary Wars? Now that still inspires just rage. I bet Islamic academics and university students overseas will hold teach-ins to explore our anger, right?
I refused to play the "why do they hate us" game over the first 9/11 and I refuse to play that game after the latest 9/11 attack.
I mean, grievance-wise, why isn't Russia the number one target of jihadis?
We're not the problem. The jihadis are the problem. And a society that doesn't reject and thoroughly despise the blame game the jihadis play is the deeper problem.
Yet there is hope for that society even in Egypt where the embassy riots began.
As frustrating as it is, we have no choice but to work the problem unless we want every September 11th to be a day to strike us and for our people to ask "why do they hate?"
UPDATE: If there are seeds of hope in Egypt, the ground is not as fertile as we would like:
Egypt's general prosecutor issued arrest warrants Tuesday for seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor and referred them to trial on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that has sparked riots across the Muslim world.
The case is largely symbolic since the seven men and one woman are believed to be outside of Egypt and unlikely to travel to the country to face the charges.
Great. Just great.
