[Reader-list] "Just war" signature campaign and Said's response

[Chella Rajan]

Some of you may have seen the sanctimonious signature campaign
supporting the war against terrorism by a prominent group of scholars
inspired by Michael Walzer's notion of a "just war"
http://www.propositionsonline.com/html/fighting_for.html  (Walzer is a
signatory).

This is Edward Said's response, which appeared recently in Al-Ahram:

Thoughts about America
Al-Ahram Weekly Online
28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that
he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States
at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of
alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For
despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims
and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about
the current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab
and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many
cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim
name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport
security checks. There have been many reported instances of
discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even
reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome
attention. And of course, the media have run far too many "experts" and
"commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly
repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our
history, society and culture that the media itself has become little
more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere,
as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to "end" Iraq.
There are US forces already in several countries with important Muslim
populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against Iraq
continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of the
Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in
the United States. 

While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more
than what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to
deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as
being involved in a "just war" against something unilaterally labeled as
terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role
of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should be
grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are
different: America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It
is a nation of laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for
the mostly exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone
who now lives here as an American citizen originally came to these
shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. The
Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor
for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour," including
things that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements
or attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to
regulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the
unregretted former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on
the importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce
such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes
proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and himself.
The Constitution expressly separates church and state. 

...

A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought
of a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all
the major French, German, Italian and other continental papers but which
did not appear in the US at all, except on the Internet where few people
took notice of it. This declaration took the form of a pompous sermon
about the American war against evil and terrorism being "just" and in
keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed
interpreters of our country. Paid for and sponsored by something called
the Institute for American Values, whose main (and financially well-
endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of families, "fathering"
and "mothering," and God, the declaration was signed by Samuel
Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others,
but basically written by a conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke
Elshtain. Its main arguments about a "just" war were inspired by
Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the
pro-Israel lobby in this country, and whose role is to justify
everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist principles. In
signing this declaration, Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism
and, like Sharon, allies himself with an interpretation (and a
questionable one at that) of America as a righteous warrior against
terror and evil, the more to make it appear that Israel and the US are
similar countries with similar aims. 

Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state
of its citizens but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most
assuredly only the state of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the
courage to state boldly that in supporting Israel he is supporting a
state structured by ethno-religious principles, which (with typical
hypocrisy) he would oppose in the United States if this country were
declared to be white and Christian. 

Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is really
addressed to "our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to understand that
America's war is not against Islam but against those who oppose all
sorts of principles, which it would be hard to disagree with. Who could
oppose the principle that all human beings are equal, that killing in
the name of God is a bad thing, that freedom of conscience is excellent,
and that "the basic subject of society is the human person, and the
legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the
conditions for human flourishing"? In what follows, however, America
turns out to be the aggrieved party and, even though some of its
mistakes in policy are acknowledged very briefly (and without mentioning
anything specific in detail), it is depicted as hewing to principles
unique to the United States, such as that all people possess inherent
moral dignity and status, that universal moral truths exist and are
available to everyone, or that civility is important where there is
disagreement, and that freedom of conscience and religion are a
reflection of basic human dignity and are universally recognised. Fine.
For although the authors of this sermon say it is often the case that
such great principles are contravened, no sustained attempt is made to
say where and when those contraventions actually occur (as they do all
the time), or whether they have been more contravened than followed, or
anything as concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer and his
colleagues set forth a list of how many American "murders" have occurred
at Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in
1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow making a list of
that kind is worth making for these militant defenders of America,
whereas the murder of Arabs and Muslims -- including the hundreds of
thousands killed with American weapons by Israel with US support, or the
hundreds of thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions against the
innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither mentioned nor
tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by
Israel, with American complicity and even cooperation, and where is the
nobility and moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian children
are killed, millions besieged, and millions more kept as stateless
refugees? Or for that matter, the millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia,
Turkey, and Indonesia with American support and acquiescence? 

All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by
American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a
statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against
the arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold
war declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with
those Islamists who have argued that "our" war is with the West and with
America. Speaking as someone with a claim on America and the Arabs, I
find this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it
pretends to the elucidation of principles and the declaration of values,
it is in fact exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in
blinding readers with a patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as
it overrides real politics, real history, and real moral issues. Despite
its vulgar trafficking in great "principles and values," it does none of
that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed to cow
foreign readers into submission. I have a feeling that this document
wasn't published here for two reasons: one is that it would be so
severely criticised by American readers that it would be laughed out of
court and two, that it was designed as part of a recently announced,
extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of
the war effort, and therefore intended for foreign consumption. 

Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?" augurs
a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. For
when the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of
the world align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that
power's case instead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine
communication and understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the
intellectual war against communism, which we now know brought far too
many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of
intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether different
role. Subsidised and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially,
which went as far as providing for the subvention of magazines like
Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as
artistic exhibitions), those militantly unreflective and uncritical
intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought to the whole
notion of intellectual honesty and complicity a new and disastrous
dimension. For along with that effort went also the domestic campaign to
stifle debate, intimidate critics, and restrict thought. For many
Americans, like myself, this is a shameful episode in our history, and
we must be on our guard against and resist its return. 


http://web1.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/575/op2.htm