[Reader-list] Edward Said on September 11

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

FROM:	chaks at comn.usm.my 
TO: docuwallahs at yahoogroups.com
SUBJECT: Edward Said in The Observer
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:38:36 +0800
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Edward Said
Sunday September 16, 2001
The Observer

Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser 
degree Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown 
assailants, terror missions without political message, senseless 
destruction.
For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and 
sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a 
long time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much 
carnage has so
cruelly imposed on so many.

New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally 
rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure, has 
rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and 
with extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled the city's heroic 
police, fire and emergency services to admirable effect and, alas, 
with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice of caution 
against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab and 
Muslim communities, the first to express the commonsense of anguish, 
the first to press everyone to try to resume life after the 
shattering blows.

Would that that were all. The national television reporting has of 
course brought the horror of those dreadful winged juggernauts into 
every household, unremittingly, insistently, not always edifyingly. 
Most
commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the expected and the 
predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible loss, anger, 
outrage, a sense of  violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance 
and un-restrained retribution. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief 
and patriotism, every politician and accredited pundit or expert has 
dutifully repeated how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not 
stop until terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against 
terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what 
concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion 
that the Middle East and Islam are what 'we' are up against, and that 
terrorism must be destroyed.

What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying 
to understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement 
in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long 
kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the 
average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping 
giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some 
sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's 
name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in 
effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might 
have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and 
hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective 
passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily 
resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is 
going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, 
pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly 
reconfigured
geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. 
Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with 
future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.

Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not 
more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, 
not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the 
official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its 
sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous 
repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the 
possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have 
real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a 
hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of 
concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of 
the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US 
support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian 
territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American 
catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of 
the Palestinians. Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these 
things by flinging about words like 'terrorism' and 'freedom' 
whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid 
material interests, the influence of the oil, defence and Zionist 
lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and 
an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that 
takes new forms every day.

Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still more critical 
sense of the actuality. There has been terror of course, and nearly 
every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. 
This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the others, 
Zionism included. And yet bombing defenceless civilians with F-16s 
and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more 
conventional nationalist terror.

What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and 
political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away 
from history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness has 
to try to
make itself felt, whether in the US or in the Middle East. No cause, 
no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, 
most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of 
such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without 
having a real mandate to do so.

Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't 
a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This 
diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations even though 
some of their
adherents have futiley tried to draw boundaries around themselves and 
pin their creeds down neatly. Yet history is far more complex and 
contradictory than to be represented by demagogues who are much less 
representative than either their followers or opponents claim. The 
trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists is that today their 
primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a willingness 
to kill and be killed, seem all too easily attached to technological 
sophistication and what appear to be
gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New York and 
Washington suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated 
men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that 
stresses education, mass mobilisation and patient organisation in the 
service of a cause, the poor and the desperate are often conned into 
the magical thinking and quick bloody solutions that such appalling 
models pro vide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap.

On the other hand, immense military and economic power are no 
guarantee of wisdom or moral vision. Sceptical and humane voices have 
been largely unheard in the present crisis, as 'America' girds itself 
for a long war to be fought somewhere out there, along with allies 
who have been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and for 
imprecise ends. We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds 
that separate people from each other and re-examine the labels, 
reconsider the limited resources available, decide to share our fates 
with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose 
cries and creeds.

'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow 
blindly. Some will run behind them, but for future generations to 
condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as 
a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of 
injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and 
mutual enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary. 
Demonisation of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of 
decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in 
injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or 
put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more 
worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale 
violence and suffering.
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