David Warren - on the mark again...

Sunday, March 12, 2006

The non-dialogue


A Zogby poll, out this week in the U.S., shows an unprecedented number of Americans now harbour unflattering views of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam. It is still low, compared to similar polls in Europe, but it approaches or just exceeds 50 per cent in each category. The pollster, James Zogby, who is also president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington, attributes the negative numbers -- much worse than what they were just after the terror attacks of Sept. 2001 -- to “demonization of the Arab world” by American politicians, authors, and media. I am unable to find a similar poll for Canada, but on past experience, Canadians tend to poll somewhere in the middle between Europeans and Americans.

I will not speak for the politicians, who tend more to respond to public perceptions than to shape them, but will admit that by having reported many thousand savage and barbaric acts done around the world, explicitly in the name of Allah, the media may have contributed to unfortunate perceptions of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.

Yet, as I know from inside, the media both here and in Europe go to extraordinary lengths to suppress just the sort of material that could incite ill-feeling that way. This began the morning of 9/11/01, with the non-coverage of street celebrations in Arab ethnic neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Detroit. As recently as last month, mainstream media were editing out London cartoon protesters carrying signs reading, “Behead Those Who Insult Islam”, “Europe You Will Pay”, etc.

On the other hand, there is patient, exhaustive coverage of anything that might incite anti-Western hysteria in the Islamic world. For even while the largest media outlets were refusing to show those bland Danish cartoons -- and doing so out of a pretended “respect for Islam” -- they were dredging up additional sordid photos from the Abu Ghraib outrage in 2004, and running those prominently.

I have often noted, that editorial decisions in the Western media could not be more useful to fanatical Islam if we were taking instructions directly from some Afghan cave. Ask yourself, when reading or watching, if the consistent message is not: “Fear Islam, but do not dare to criticize it.”

There is no conspiracy, however. The violent audacity of a generation of Muslim neo-jihadis happens to correspond precisely with the self-loathing of a generation of Western post-hippies. Perhaps never before, in the history of interaction between the “Dar al-Islam” (Muslim-ruled world), and the “Dar al-Harb” (the external world with which it is perpetually “at war”), have aspiring Muslim conquerors met such willing candidates for “dhimmitude”.

The definition of a “dhimmi” is one who pays the “jizyah” tax to his Muslim rulers; who, in return for this protection money, enjoys an ambiguous special status. This is, as Islamist propaganda is eager to propagate, exactly what is going on when, for instance, governments of the West send foreign aid to Muslim regimes, in the (vain) belief that this will exempt them from the next round of terror hits, or rioting. More generally, the equation of Western aid and domestic welfare payments with the “jizyah” is common in Arab media. It expresses contempt for the West, and our “so-called freedoms”.

So much of the failing “dialogue” between East and West comes down to misunderstanding each other’s terms. Take “jihad”, for example -- the duty to “struggle against everything that is against Allah”, which has been cited in each Islamic war of conquest, over the last 14 centuries. Contrary to popular belief, traditional Islam does not teach that Muslims have a duty to convert, enslave, or massacre their non-Muslim neighbours. On the contrary, the various Islamic schools agree they have a brotherly duty to “remove impediments” to conversion to Islam, including any worldly power not expressly subject to the will of Allah. The sorting out, afterwards, of who should be massacred and who not, of individual rights to booty, slaves, the enjoyment of captured women, and so forth, are spelt out by the learned jurisprudes in traditional Shariah; but these are secondary considerations.

Perhaps if Americans realized that such jihadis as Osama bin Laden are trying to do them a favour, by removing such impediments to their conversion as the existence of the government of the United States, they would not harbour such unflattering views. And perhaps, if they heard great cries of revulsion from across the Arab and Muslim world, against the innumerable acts of violence done in Allah’s name, they would realize that Islam is a “religion of peace”.