©2005, UrbisMedia
One hears and reads a good deal these days about how fundamentalist hate-mongering Muslims are taking over Islam, and how we must battle them and help pacific Muslims purge them from form their faith, and even expose those bent on acts of terror to authorities. Most Westerners do not understand much elided, sibilant tones of Arabic. But we do understand planes flying into buildings and bombs on buses and trains. Good Muslims (not that’s not an oxymoron) need to get hold of and deal with their image problem, and deal directly with those who are responsible for the growing equation of Islam with terrorism. But this is not an easy thing to do in most Muslim societies, which tend to be either theocracies or dictatorships, or both, and where taking a public position against extremists may make one as much of a target as the “enemy.” Most people, but no one can know for sure the proportions, remain silent, keep their heads down, and some of them are silently sympathetic with at least what motivates the terrorists, if not their tactics. It must be especially difficult for good Muslims living in Western societies.
One doesn’t hear as much about fundamentalist hate-mongering Christians and the need for true Christians to cast them from their temple and expose them for their misdeeds. I don’t recall Timothy McVeigh being automatically being referred to a Christian Terrorist McVeigh. Even recently convicted bomber and women’s clinic assassin, Eric Rudolph, is not referred to as a Christian extremist. And both might well be viewed as “freedom fighters” by those of a similar extremist bent. There is not, as far as the American press is concerned a phrase such a “Christian Terrorist,” or “Christian Extremist.” There is not much of a call for Christians to clean up their faith of their terrorists and extremists.
What? Christian terrorists? OK, I won’t go into the history of what those wearing red crosses on their tunics, or going to mass before creating mass murder, have done over the centuries. I am talking about how much of a distinction there is between a suicide bomber killing innocent people and a stealth bomber dropping laser-guided bombs at strategic targets, but not giving much a damn about “collateral damage.” The distinction is technology, not morality. When you are going about collecting your child’s body parts you have earned the right to call the person who did that a “terrorist.”
This may have much to do with the way cultures behave. Muslims may well have become inured to seeing Westerners as “Christian terrorists” the way they certainly see Israelis as ”Jewish terrorists.” They may also tend to see their own terrorists as “freedom fighters” and to see outsiders, like Israelis in Palestine, or Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan as “terrorists” (rather than “liberators”). Despite the intervening centuries this culture clash of the (American) West, and the (Middle) East is not very different than the Crusades of the 11 th and 12 th centuries. Seeing somebody as a threat or an enemy usually requires stereotyping (demonizing) them rather than trying to understand them.
It is not easy for societies to clean up their own act, especially when those in power use terror to retain power and build support for their policies by invoking what could be called “9-11 card.” We tend not to think that is done in America, but it has been. Pearl Harbor resulted in the odious policy of concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, and 9-11 is invoked strategically by the current administration like a code orange for political purposes. The other guys have their cards, especially the ones about foreign troops occupying their sacred lands and holy places. Lebensraum, Japan’s Asian Destiny, Pax Romana, whatever, their all cards in the deck of terror.
Woven in between the above lines is that there is a parallel war between these contending forces for the hearts and minds of the bystanders as well as the co-culturalists and co-religionists word wide. When Al Jeezera began broadcasting photographs of victims of collateral damage in America’s air campaign Rumsfeld himself went ballistic, raging that this was improper and suggesting that such scenes of the bodies of victims might even have been “staged.” (I am taking this from tapes of Rumsfeld’s press conferences which Al Jeezera broadcasted, with translation, as were shown in the documentary Control Room .) This was, of course, the clash between a Pentagon bent upon conducting a PR war on their terms—embedded and compromised reporters, showing mostly (remote) gun sight and bomb sight camera footage, insisting that the do not count or announce enemy body counts,” [1] and staging their own media events in the case of at least Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the falsifying the circumstances the death of Pat Tillman and we must not forget (it has been shown thousands of times) the bogus circumstances of the pulling down if Saddam’s statue. But this war is one that the American administration has been losing virtually everywhere but in the sufficient number of Red States to keep them in power. And it seems that, poll numbers indicate (as of this writing that only 38% of Americans approve of Bush’s conduct of the war) they are losing there as well. Therefore it has been incumbent upon them to mine the domestic culture war, invoking the terrors of married gays and lesbians destroying the meaning and solidarity of “marriage,” of atheists pulling the Ten Commandments out of the lobbies of public buildings, of stem cells, and of teaching in our schools that we might be descended from apes. It was enough (maybe with a little cheating on the voting here and there) to overcome the bad PR of Abu Ghraib, the renditions, the denial of rights to captives in the “global war on terror,” lately re-spun as the “global struggle against extremism.”
Would, and does, the other side do the same thing? Of course—all is fair in war, and anything unfair is to be expected in public relations.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.6.2005)
[1] On the occasion of the 21 American Marines killed in Iraq over August 1 – 3, the Pentagon somehow felt compelled to use some body count numbers, announcing that American forces had killed over 60 of the Insurgents.