Why do they Hate Us?
(Friends, This is the text of a talk I gave at a town meeting today in Boynton Middle School. --Asma)
Town Meeting: September 23, 2001
Several years ago, many of us came together right here, to talk about the possibility of another war, and several years ago I stood right here and read a piece called ‘Should the US go to war with Iraq?’
I find it not just ironic but deeply upsetting that today, from the same spot, I will be asking if the US should go to war, this time with large segments of what we misleadingly call "the" Muslim world
I say misleadingly because the Muslims live in the same world as everyone else and just like other religious groups, the world’s 1 billion Muslims belong to different races, cultures, and ethnicities, not to say differing religious and political persuasions.
And yet there is a tendency to think of us as one homogenous whole which then leads so many people to regard the actions of 20 men as somehow constituting a "Muslim" response to the US.
The fact is that the vast majority of Muslims has condemned the actions of these 20 men.
I think the expectation is that I will talk about US-Muslim relations so as to provide some context for understanding the attacks of September 11th and the proposed US response to them.
The US has had more than half a century of close encounters with Muslim countries, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims have known each other for some 1400 years; if in all this time we haven’t learned anything about each other, I doubt that a 10 minute history lesson from me will suffice.
Still, I want to make some general points about US relationships with not only Muslim countries but the world at large.
In the Sunday, August 19th edition of the New York Times there is an article by Tim Weiner (Making the Rules in the World between War and Peace) that begins with the following quote:
"We are facing an implacable enemy. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. We must destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. [And citizens must learn to] understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."
The year, says Weiner, was 1954 and this was a top secret memo to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I will let you draw your own conclusions about what it is that differentiates "us" from our enemies if we believe that acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply in our dealings with others, or why, in the face of such a view of others, they should not come to hate us.
Let me refer to an even earlier secret memorandum, written in 1941 by the Council on Foreign Relations, in the beginning stages of WWII.
This memorandum noted that the US economy "is geared to the export of certain manufactured and agricultural products, and the import of numerous raw materials and foodstuffs"; in order to avoid "possible stresses" and ‘major readjustments’ to this system, the US would need to establish control over a "Grand Area" once the war ended.
This Grand areas, in the words of L.S. Stavrianos, "consisted of virtually the entire world outside German-dominated Europe" and in particular, the ME with its rich oil resources.
Even if we did not have any examples of how US policies have played out in practice, these two documents are enough in themselves to tell us (a) what it is that the US wants (control over the world) and (b) how it intends to go about getting what it wants (by any means necessary).
Wanting control over the world is nothing new; as we know, all empires have had it as their goal; it’s not even unusual to have as the philosophical basis of one’s policy the idea that the ends justifies the means, a dictum we have been taught to associate only with our enemies.
What is perhaps new is that the West and the US still want to be loved as they go about the business of making the world subservient to themselves by any means necessary, for how else can one explain the plaintive question, asked endlessly, "why do they hate us?"
There are many competing accounts of why they hate us; the establishment one, of course, is because they are jealous of us and the freedoms we enjoy.
But if you’re interested in some real reasons look at the list Stephen Shalom has put together (in Z magazine) which runs into several pages and which, he says, actually "minimizes the grievances against the US in the [Middle East] because it excludes more generalized long-standing policies."
As Stephen Zunes also reminds us ("US Policy Toward Political Islam"; Alternet.org)
The US is ‘increasingly identified with the political, social, and economic forces that are responsible for [the misery of the oppressed, underrepresented and poor segments of the population]" who experience not "individual liberty, the rule of law, and economic prosperity, but …the worst traits of American culture, including materialism, militarism, and racism."
Putting things into a historical perspective, Zunes speaks of Western hostility to Muslims dating from the time of the Crusades; which is why President Bush’s use of this word today can hardly be considered innocuous. Of course, whether or not it is a judicious use I leave it to you to decide given that the Crusades, after all, failed, as a professor of medieval studies has pointed out.
Zunes also refers to the ongoing bombing and sanctions against Iraq; US support for Israeli brutalities against the Palestinians; its overthrow of moderate regimes from Iran to the Sudan and its support of dictators, hard-liners, and extremists all of whom oppress their own people.
And then we have the gall to ask "why do they hate us?!"
This is not only a naïve and ultimately dishonest question, but, having asked it, we also answer it ourselves, and also dishonestly because we ignore the reasons that many people oppose the US.
Quite simply, people everywhere are sick and tired of being lifers in the prison of a global political economy based in their systematic abuse, exploitation, expropriation, and degradation.
Let me be clear: I’m not blaming only the US for all the ills of the world nor am I condoning terrorism; as Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom point out "the reason it is relevant to bring up US crimes is not to justify terrorism, but to understand the terrain that breeds terrorism and terrorists."
Part of that process of understanding entails being able to ask the tough, hard questions that our policy makers are avoiding asking; consider, for instance, the questions that President Bush raised the other day in his address:
He said "Who attacked our country?'' and his answer is that radical and extremist Muslims did (initially, we heard that it was just a small gang of extremists under the leadership of bin Laden and now we hear that there are untold number of terrorist cells in over 60 countries).
Mr. Bush is right, of course. However, as Chomsky recently noted, it is not just a question of fundamentalists vs. moderates since even moderate Muslims share bin Laden’s "resentment of the US policies of supporting Israeli crimes and blocking the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement for many years while devastating Iraqi civilian society, supporting harsh and repressive anti-democratic regimes throughout the region, and imposing barriers against economic development by propping up oppressive regimes."
Hence it is not the case that killing off the extremists will resolve all our problems.
Also, while the US talks of extremists and fundamentalists as the enemy, we are allies with some radical and fundamental regimes ourselves; cases in point are Saudi Arabia, and even the Taliban before September 11th, to whom the US government gave $43 million in aid.
Now we are being told this is a fundamentalist government that oppresses its own people and that we need to wipe it out in order to save civilization!
If one wants a list of enemies, the list is a long one; since I first came to the US in 1983, the US has "bombed, invaded, supported the overthrow of the government, or supplied arms to one side in a war" (Keller) Palestine, Iraq, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan Lebanon, Libya, Grenada , Panama, and we can add China to this list since the US "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
And then Mr. Bush innocently asks "Why do they hate us?"
This is, at best, a disingenuous question and I believe that the reason we ask it is so that we don’t have to ask the question we really *should* be asking: why do *we* hate and oppress *them?*
By always posing the question as one of our being hated, we absolve ourselves of the responsibility of having to answer for our oppression of millions of people around the world; not only that, but by framing the question in this way, we put the onus of loving us on those whom we oppress.
Mr. Bush goes on to say "Americans are asking, ``How will we fight and win this war?'' His answer is that this "is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom."
Of course, this does not tell us how we will fight and win the war; it merely tells us that this is the world’s fight.
However, make no mistake about it, as Robert Fisk says, this is not the world’s fight or for the world’s freedom. "No, it is ‘our’ democracy and ‘our’ liberty and freedom that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become."
The problem, of course, lies right here: in our insolent assumption that we can remain pristinely safe in a world of terror and injustice that our own policies have helped to create.
As Mr. Bush said, "Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941"; of all the things he has said, and God knows he’s said plenty to frighten and mystify us, this should give us the most pause of all.
What kind of hubris, of arrogance, has induced us to believe that we have the right to do things on other people’s soil for 136 years that we won’t tolerate on our own?
If this is supposed to show love for our country, then Ben Franklin was right when he said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels.
Mr., Bush asked, "Americans are asking " what is expected of us?" He replies by saying that we should expect to get ready for a long drawn out war unlike any other war we’ve known before.
A half century ago, US policy makers went out in a world recovering from the throes of WWII armed with the belief that the new enemy was implacable, that acceptable norms of human conduct did not apply to it, that it had to be destroyed more effectively than it could destroy us and that US citizens would have to learn to embrace "this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."
Once before US citizens were asked to embrace a morally repugnant philosophy they had no role in creating but whose price they have had to pay today for surely, we have created the enemy we once merely defined and imagined.
I think we should expect a bit more of ourselves than preparing to repeat the same mistakes; we can begin by recognizing that:
--patriotism does not always equal war; to love one’s country can also mean believing in the possibility that one can make it better;
--security cannot always be defined in military terms and military victories don’t always bring peace and safety; if they did, how could we explain the attacks on the US today?
--the enemy is not always the outsider (consider McVeigh) and while the enemy is the terrorist not every country in which terrorists live is our enemy (otherwise how would we define the US where terrorists live in our midst unbeknownst to us);
--we cannot destroy the world in the name of civilization;
--others can only respect our humanity to the extent that we respect our own and that of others.
I will stop here because the list is a long one and I am sure you have much to add to it.