Middle-Eastern matters

The current issue of Harper's (purchase-only) has a fascinating and well-written cover story by Ken Silverstein about Islamic democracy movements in the Middle East--primarily the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hezbollah. When writing about the latter, Silverstein uses interviews and material gathered in a piece he originally wrote but never published in November 2006. As he explains:

After submitting my story, though, I ran up against insurmountable editorial obstacles. It was clear that I was deemed to have written a story that was too favorable to Hezbollah, even though any article seeking to examine its popularity would, by necessity, require some focus on the group's more attractive aspects. [...] The primary problem, it soon became clear, was fear of offending supporters of Israel. At one point I was told that editorial changes were needed to "inoculate" the newspaper from criticism, and although who the critics might be was never spelled out, the answer seemed fairly obvious. I was also told in one memo that "we should avoid taking sides," which apparently meant omitting inconvenient historical facts. [...] "Perspective is everything," I replied in an email to the editors. "If my name was Mostafa Naser and I grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, I seriously doubt I would be an ardent Zionist. If we can't even acknowledge that Arabs have a legitimate point of view -- and acknowledge what the numbers show -- we caricature them as nothing more than a bunch of irrational Jew haters." [...] After days of unfruitful negotiations, and a final edit that in my view gutted the story, I decided to pull the piece rather than "inoculate" it to the point of dishonesty.

Silverstein doesn't say anything about the editorial process of his current piece, or why it did not require the same "inoculation," but the whole sequence is striking and disheartening. If an independent, progressive magazine like Harper's self-censors itself to such a degree, think of the news that most Americans receive on a daily basis from the major media. Despite the bleatings from right-wing outlets (not to mention their calls for internment for "treasonous" journalists), the American media is profoundly biased against Arabs--at best they are simply dismissive or know-nothing when it comes to a group like Hezbollah, at worst just a mouthpiece for the Administration's war on terror rhetoric. Thus when Beirut Daily Star editor Rami Khouri spoke at the University earlier this year, he had to speak to us basically as "Buddhist mental retards," to use a recent phrase, in explaining Hezbollah's social and political context, as if it might be difficult for us to wrap our fragile American minds around the idea that Hezbollah is not just a terrorist group. (Silverstein gives props to Khouri in his Washington Babylon blog and links to a piece by Khouri about this year's US-Islamic World Forum at the Doha talks, where Khouri again dresses down American politicians for being the simple-minded babies they are.)

The thing to note especially as a mature, rational adult is that to understand Hezbollah is not therefore to endorse them. Aside from their undeniable courage in not allowing Lebanon to be completely destroyed over the years (and I do not mean just in the summer 2006 conflict with Israel), Hezbollah has little or nothing to be admired in their domestic political program. They are a reactionary religious group, the complete political dominance of which, while perhaps allowing some economic reforms, would in all likelihood roll back social, intellectual, and religious freedoms. So they are not part of the "global left," whatever Judith Butler says. However, neither are they simply "terrorists," which is all the government wants us to know about them. Furthermore, they really do represent the interests of much of Lebanon's Shiite population, and they are legitimate members of Parliament. To seek to destroy them (as we similarly do with Hamas) reveals a profound inconsistency between the theory and actual practice of the "Bush Doctrine" of spreading democracy. Silverstein's piece does an excellent job of explaining such phenomena.

The only other thing I will say is that despite all the accusations from the right (not to mention the "decent" left!) that leftists don't pay attention to human rights violations when they are committed by reactionary Islamic regimes, no one raises complaints about political prisoners in Middle Eastern countries, especially ones that belong to Islamic movements. Thus, much clamor has justly arisen in the blogosphere about the imprisonment of the Egyptian blogger Abd al-Karim Nabil Suleiman, but nobody says much about the over 200 members of the Muslim Brotherhood imprisoned by Mubarak's police state. I urge everyone to sign the online petition that is circulating about Suleiman, but do note that these sorts of double standards are practiced all the time. Moreover, far from revealing hypocrisy, pressure on the United States government from the left to reform its own policies and press for reforms in Israel and Egypt makes perfect sense because these are nations that the U.S. actually talks to and includes among its allies, whereas we have basically no leverage on the policies of, to take a very relevant example, Iran. Sometimes I am simply astounded at the bad faith accusations and hairshirt-wearing apologetics of "leftists" like the Euston Manifesto signees, who mobilize the rhetoric of women's and homosexuals' rights and general "Enlightenment" chest-beating to argue for war in Iraq and Iran. Whereas I would think that campaigning in your own back yard, against your government's policies, which are supposed to represent your interests, would be the best and most effective place to start. Sheesh.

Edit: Speaking of the whole "Why do you criticize America and Israel more than Islamic terrorism?" song and dance, I just now remembered that we recently saw this tactic from that fink Joe Lieberman, who said at an AIPAC conference:

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism. There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran. And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies. Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we're in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says 'yes,' their reflex reaction is to say 'no.' That is unacceptable.

John Podhoretz at the National Review Corner blog said "this is why they hate Joe Lieberman," referring to his liberal critics, but then Ramesh Ponnuru of all people made just the point I made above: "One could make another defense of liberalism here: that liberal denunciations of our government's policies are more likely to change that policy than liberal denunciations of our enemies will change their behavior." A thousand times yes.