Love of the Land: Reading Like a Middle Easterner

Reading Like a Middle Easterner

Where we see coincidences in U.S. news coverage of the Middle East, locals see conspiracies—and sometimes they’re right


Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
10 March '10

Postmodernists long ago disabused us of the idea that texts have stable, fixed meanings. French literary critics like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes introduced a vision of the text as a tricky, shape-shifting improvisation; their American disciples like Stanley Fish proposed that these texts only acquire meaning through the efforts of interpretive communities. The relevance of academic critical esoterica to America’s ever-shifting Middle East policies—and how they are understood by Middle Easterners and manipulated by Middle Eastern regimes—may not seem immediately clear. But bear with me.

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the biggest threat to America’s national security comes not from Iran but al-Qaida. “Most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks,” Clinton said, referring to “the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected to al-Qaida.”

What Clinton meant certainly seems straightforward enough. Transnational, nonstate Sunni jihadi networks like al-Qaida are responsible for not only 9/11 but also attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have dispatched at least one suicide attacker, the Detroit Christmas bomber Omar Faruq Abdulmuttalab, and apparently have plans to send more. While it is arguable whether a shadowy network of terrorists led by a man who may or may not be alive is more dangerous than an Iranian regime with terrorist assets throughout the Middle East and a nascent nuclear program, Clinton’s assertion is hardly ridiculous. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that we could still sit down and strike a Grand Bargain with the Islamic Republic, whereas we don’t even have a working phone number for al-Qaida.

For the interpretive community that forms itself around the products disseminated by the American media—that is, for New York Times readers, Washington Post readers, and the CNN audience—Washington’s apparent about-face is due to the desire of the current White House to do the exact opposite of its unpopular predecessor. But a Middle Easterner hears something else.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Reading Like a Middle Easterner

Love of the Land: “Outsmarting” the Terrorists by Being Incredibly Stupid?

“Outsmarting” the Terrorists by Being Incredibly Stupid?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
06 January '10

Here’s my usual disclaimer: I would love to be able to stop criticizing the Obama Administration but it keeps saying and doing things that shock and surprise me or—if you want to put it this way—live up to my worst expectations.

I’m sitting on a U.S. army base briefing officers along with a high-ranking State Department official who works on the Middle East. At one point, he gets a quaver in his voice and starts talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict making quite clear which side he’s on. Sounding scared he says: “While a lot of problems in the world can bring trouble only the Arab-Israeli conflict can get you and your families killed.”

The officers look disgusted. He is fitting precisely their stereotype of a cowardly diplomat. Abandon Israel and save your life and that of your children, is his message. Oh, and this is after September 11 which makes the statement even more ridiculous.

This kind of blatant cowardice is usually better concealed. It more often occurs in regard to intellectuals facing challenges like the “Danish cartoons.” But it is glimpsed at times in a sort of strategic fearfulness, a refusal to do what’s in one’s interest lest someone might get mad about it.

John Brennan is the president’s advisor on counter-terrorism and may be the dumbest of all Obama’s foreign policy appointments. Brennan is apparently ex-CIA and he has yet to persuade me that he has any understanding whatsoever about terrorism. He’s the guy who said that Hizballah wasn’t a terrorist group because it ran candidates for parliament and had lawyers among its members.

Now in a television interview, he stated that the Guantanamo prison should be closed because al-Qaida has used its existence in order to make propaganda.

A few hours later, President Barack Obama repeated this talking point in the course of discussing reinforced controls on airplane passengers:

"We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaida," Obama said. "In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

What? Is his understanding really so minimal that he thinks the formation of a revolutionary movement to seize power in Iraq and overthrow the Saudi government took place because the United States maintained a prison in Cuba? Is this man who proclaims himself the great understander of other cultures so ethnocentric that he thinks, so to speak, that “everything is about us?”

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: “Outsmarting” the Terrorists by Being Incredibly Stupid?