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Al Qa’eda was always a fringe group with no roots in the Arab world<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1520/who-cares-about-osama> Nir Rosen clip - A flight from Istanbul to New York the day after Usama Bin Ladin was assassinated is an inopportune time to write about what it all means, but I would be thinking about little else anyway between the security checks, the turbulence and the guy at customs asking me what I was just doing in Iraq. Last night thousands of Americans took to the street waving flags to revel in what was both righteous justice and jingoism. That same day hundreds of thousands of communists, leftists and workers took to the streets of Istanbul and Ankara to commemorate May Day and demand more rights. Some sang an old communist guerilla song about taking to the mountains to fight. Some saluted martyred student socialist leaders from the 1970s. Others shouted “long live the worker’s struggle!” and “hunger, poverty and us, this is your capitalist system.” While taking isolated chance incidents in different countries to make deductions can make one sound like Thomas Friedman, to me the two demonstrations symbolized two different trajectories the East and the West are taking. On the one hand throughout the Middle East in what is being called an awakening, leaderless popular movements take to the streets to demand secular and leftist notions of universal rights, undermining dictatorships favored by the US, religious extremists opposed to the US as well as American hegemony. It turns out Arabs understand democracy better than we do in the stagnant west, they proved that leaders rule only with the consent of the governed and if the people demand their rights they cannot be stopped. On the other hand America, a nation in economic and political decline but perpetual war, was engrossed in right wing conspiracy theories about where President Obama was born only to receive a nationalist fillip by an assassination ten years and trillions of dollars in the making. For the last ten years American foreign policy has been dominated by war with Muslims out of fear of a phantom threat. My own career has been entirely a result of these wars. Bin Ladin’s thousands of innocent victims will be happy to learn of his belated demise, but the industry the September 11 attacks spawned may come to miss him. Following those attacks Americans engaged in little introspection about its relationship with the third world and what it had done to provoke such resentment. Instead the nation embraced a self righteous narrative about a Muslim world that hated us for our freedoms and had to be taught a lesson, (“suck on this,” as Thomas Friedman explained). Americans sought revenge in Afghanistan and Iraq, they backed dictators and warlords, they abandoned the pretense of international law, declaring a global war, dispensing with civil liberties. America’s wars in the Muslim world killed tens of thousands of innocents. And still Americans clung to belief that they were the good guys fighting for freedom. The exaggerated American reaction to the killing of one man makes it seem as if a war was won, or a powerful enemy defeated, inflating the importance of one aging extremist hiding in Pakistan. Thanks to an industry of overnight experts and celebrity pundits al Qaeda was viewed as a social movement with roots in the Arab world. They advocated a battle of ideas as if al Qaeda was a dominant phenomenon and not a marginal group of a few hundred men out of one billion Muslims. Others justified American support for compliant dictators because democracy in the Arab world would lead to religious extremists taking over. These so called experts mixed only with elites in the Arab world and all they knew of al Qaeda was translations of pro-jihadist websites or videos. They did not spend time living and working with normal people to know what their real concerns were. They viewed Muslims as robots programmed only by Islam without the same mundane concerns and aspirations as the rest of us. Some supported “deradicalization” programs so they could put install new programs into the robots’ minds. They worried about challenging al Qaeda’s narrative. They worried that if the U.S. acknowledged its war in Afghanistan was pointless and pulled out then “what would Bin Ladin say?” They spent more time watching al Qaeda videos than any Arab I ever met and worried about Bin Ladin’s victory video. full - http://nirrosen.tumblr.com/post/5232614788/my-article-on-the-bin-laden-killing ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
