As the US President Barack Obama finally mustered the courage to confront the latest waves of extremism in the Middle East, Fareed Zakaria, a well-connected opinion-maker in Washington, D.C. wondered why, 13 years after 9/11, “they still hate us”. It was the kind of question that added sensationalism to ignorance, as it overlooked the core concerns that each and every human being on Earth confronted, namely to live free and fight oppression.
Zakaria reflected on his September 2001 Newsweek essay in which he first asked “Why do they hate us?” as he watched the latest televised acts of barbarism coming out of Raqqa and other remote locations. Upon re-reading his own work, he apparently tried to figure out what he learned and, towards that end, focused on three key findings. According to his latest Washington Post diatribe, the phenomenon was not just about Al Qaida, nor a Muslim challenge, but the result of Arab political decay.
In so far as Al Qaida devised, promoted, and applied its credo — to combat perceived injustices in Muslim societies — one could argue that extremist acts of violence were “not the isolated behaviour of a handful of nihilists”, though Zakaria’s leap that “there is a broader culture that has been complicit or at least unwilling to combat it”, is plain wrong. Seasoned analysts who deciphered the phenomenon concluded that foreign military incursions in the Muslim world germinated into the hatred we now see and, more important, the loathing that some display towards a Jew, a Christian, or a Hindu, is no different from the animosity displayed towards fellow Muslims. To be honest with himself, Zakaria must own up to the “blowback” concept, and clearly state that political leaders who blamed Al Qaida for being against freedom, did so out of convenience, not persuasion. Al Qaida operatives may well be extremists but it is facile to conclude that they hate us for being free since, presumably, their quest is similar.
The more troubling Zakaria assertion, that this is an Arab problem because “jihad and even Islamic fundamentalism have not done well in Indonesia — the largest Muslim country in the world” or “India, which is right next door to Ayman Al Zawahiri’s headquarters in Pakistan”, is equally dishonest. While Indonesians or Indians may not find solace in Al Zawahiri’s calls — of course, it remains to be determined how New Delhi will react to his latest project to create an Al Qaida branch on the subcontinent— what Zakaria does not have the audacity to write is that most non-Arabs do not identify themselves with the Palestinians, whereas Arabs, those from North Africa, the Levant as well as the Gulf, Muslims and Christians alike, commiserate with the Palestinians in the core conflict.
For nearly a century, and without fail, Arabs maintained that the primary source of instability was the fate that befell Palestinians and for just as long the world chose to ignore their pleas. Backing Israel unconditionally with massive financial, military and diplomatic support because it allegedly promoted Western interests during the Cold War and, less honestly, because it was the only democratising country in the region, were specific choices made by most global leaders. Being even-handed seldom crossed their minds nor, it seems, that of Zakaria.
There will be those who will assert that Shiites and Sunnis have been slaughtering each other for centuries and will continue doing so with or without a settlement with Israel. Pessimists will even insist that few, if any, Arab governments displayed any lasting love for Palestinians and that all refused to absorb refugees although Arab assistance cannot be overlooked. What critics conveniently miss are the many casualties that resulted from wars and, even worse, the constant humiliation suffered by Palestinians under occupation or those who stayed in Israel after 1948. For if Arab states were reluctant to absorb Palestinian refugees, Israel’s decisions to expel hundreds of thousands, redraw maps, eradicate entire villages, and otherwise re-write someone else’s history, did not stand as the behaviour of a democratic society.
Zakaria’s final point, that the world is now witnessing Arab political decay is far more serious because fanaticism and jihad are the results of “political stagnation”, which is allegedly strangulated by the weight of religion.
By the turn of the century, Zakaria insists, “almost every part of the world had seen significant political progress — Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, even Africa had held many free and fair elections”, whereas “the Arab world remained a desert”. What he does not say is that Arab populations represent less than five per cent of global inhabitants, and that their economies represent but a tiny portion of international trade, dominated as it is by petroleum production. Still, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE recorded sharp improvements in recent decades, though their relatively small populations, limited productivity. One hoped that Egypt or Algeria, for example, would rise to the occasion, even if Riyadh is now part of the G20 and its economy is making great strides though much more is necessary to catapult it towards new heights.
Dependent Arab economies will require carefully planned jolt to permit the creation of wealth but that is easier said than done and can only occur over the long-term.
There is much more in Zakaria’s essay, including various assertions that dictatorships and extremist regimes left little room for opposition forces, or that so-called secular governments — such as the Iraqi and Syria Ba‘ath systems — or the military (i.e. Egypt and Algeria), held on to power far longer than necessary. He concludes that Arab states remained fragile and that, in the absence of relatively stable societies, no civil institutions existed to pick-up the slack.In short, Arabs failed to identify with their separate nationalisms — Iraqi,Syrian, etc — that, according to Zakaria, was the reason why they resorted to “Shiite, Sunni, Kurd and Arab”.
In graduate school, Zakaria’s mentor apparently once explained that “the key is not the kind of government one had [communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial], but the degree of government”, which Samuel Huntington professed to have understood and that his student now retained. One hoped that Zakaria would have learned from another great teacher, Cicero, who quoted Quintus Ennius [the father of Roman poetry] in one of his more important speeches, saying: “People hate the man they fear — and whomever they hate, they want to see dead”.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the forthcoming Iffat Al Thunayan: An Arabian Queen, London: Sussex Academic Press, 2015.
