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Chrys
McVey, OP By very strange circumstances, I was on five-month leave from Pakistan and in California on 11 September when the whole country shut down. Returning to Pakistan early January led me to reflect on the experience from two perspectives. And having written that, I realise that this is something I am continually doing. Like every expatriate — and especially an American in Pakistan — one feels neither here nor there. I am reminded again and again that I am a foreigner in Pakistan yet it is when I am in the States, as an American, that I feel more a foreigner. I was able to share in the American response: initial disbelief and shock, followed by anger and the inevitable question, asked by President Bush, ‘Why do they hate us?’. The question was prompted not only by the attacks but by TV images of Palestinian children dancing in the streets, and of crowds in Pakistan, bearing pictures of Osama Bin Laden, celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers. After the first week or two, there were — at least in Southern California — some interesting reactions. Stores were sold out of American flags, and every car seemed to be flying one. The flag was no longer an embarrassment to liberals but reclaimed from Republican lapels and car bumpers to become instead a symbol of unity and solidarity. Bookstores also reported that copies of the Qur’an were close to being sold out. But there were also isolated violent reactions. One of the first victims in California was, ironically, an Egyptian Christian shopkeeper, and Newsweek reports that in the last six months, hate crimes against Arab and Muslim-Americans have increased 300% (Arab-Americans are 77% Christian). At the same time, there was, on the part of many people, an attempt to understand how such a thing could happen. For those willing to learn, newspapers and TV offered daily tuition in Islam and Muslims in the US. In churches throughout the country there were interfaith prayer services where, for the first time, people met and prayed with Muslims, and realised there were over six million more of them who were US citizens. The ‘distance’ I brought with me, plus the experience of living over 40 years in a Muslim country, made me very suspicious of US administration goals in response to the attack. Like many others during September and early October, I was not bold enough to voice these reservations or criticise too loudly actions taken: after the killing of anywhere from two to six thousand innocent people in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with the heroic example of NY firefighters and police, and the whole country in mourning, it was no climate in which to appear ‘unpatriotic’. The American response The desire to learn, to understand, does not seem to characterise the US administration. In September, the whole world was ‘American’, finding it easier to relate to a US become suddenly vulnerable. This good will was squandered by the end of October with the demonisation and dehumanisation of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the bombings in Afghanistan and five thousand civilians killed by so-called ‘surgical strikes’ and their deaths described as ‘collateral damage’. The Pentagon’s release of pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba provoked international concern over treatment contrary to the Geneva Convention.
‘If thought corrupts language’, said Orwell, ‘language can also corrupt thought’. A simplistic response to a very complex situation thus led to words like ‘Infinite Justice’, a new ‘Crusade’, a ‘Global War on Terrorism’ — and more recently, an ‘axis of evil’. There is a section of the media (mostly Murdoch controlled) that panders to the worst in us, taking its cue from Washington. The New York Post (15 March), for example, praised the president for his ‘soldierly restraint’ and for ‘develop[ing] a fierce, but methodical, global campaign against terror’. What this means is ‘tracking down Bin Laden and killing him’, along with ‘killing every last Al-Qaeda member we can find, anywhere in the world, utterly destroying their organisation.… Kill what [Osama] has built and we kill his heart even before we finish off the rest of his body'. So much for ‘restraint’. And I would not be first to be reminded of the poet Auden’s lines from September 1, 1939: ‘I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return’. What is most alarming is a report in the Los Angeles Times (9 March) of ‘contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria’ in a classified Pentagon report presented to members of Congress on 8 January. The title of the paper is, ‘Nuclear Posture Review’. Further reports indicate that Dr Strangelove is alive and well at the Pentagon. The US government announced in March that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379 billion, of which $50 billion will pay for its ‘war on terrorism’. There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for ‘military operations’ — invasions of other countries. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to ‘think the unthinkable’. And Vice-President Cheney has said that the US is considering military action against ‘40 to 50 countries’ and warns that the new war may last 50 years or more. The no less frightening Richard Perle, another Bush advisor, explained: ‘There will be no stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there.… If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now’. Their words, according to journalist John Pilger, ‘evoke George Orwell’s great prophetic work 1984. In the novel, three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is truth’. And the American public is falling for this ‘newspeak’. John Kavanaugh, SJ, cites a recent Washington Post / ABC News poll where 88% of the people polled support the way the president is handling the campaign against terrorism. 84% think the war is going well and almost 75% support sending US troops to the Philippines and Yemen as well as taking action against Iraq to force Saddam Hussein from power. ‘The almost lock-step uniformity of opinion provides’, he writes, ‘a dangerously uncritical "blank cheque" to those who would drop bombs on other human beings. This is particularly distressing at a time when almost all the information given to the American people is controlled and edited by the very forces prosecuting the present war against what we term "evil" itself’. Orwellian, indeed, ambiguous and deceptive, but even more, a Lewis Carroll world where ‘words mean just what’ the US administration ‘chooses them to mean’. The chairman of the jingoistic, war-mongering Fox News, Roger Alies, clearly subscribes to this: ‘What we say is terrorists, terrorism, is evil, and America doesn’t engage in it, and these guys do’. He also, quite clearly, is unfamiliar with recent American history: with its role in toppling democratically elected leaders, its record as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists, its disregard for World Court decisions (most notably the condemnation of the US blockade of Nicaragua during the Reagan years), its repudiation of international treaties and refusal to vote for the international tribunal for war crimes. All of the actions taken after 11 September were ‘justified’ by the terrorist attacks. But this initial angry response, writes one commentator, ‘is quite inadequate to deal with the magnitude and novelty of the attack. Men and women who have managed to distance themselves from the knee-jerk quality of the response undertaken are aware of the complexity of the causes of the incident and by the need for a reflective answer that will owe more to deep practical and social analysis than to movie westerns’. Instead of a ‘reflective answer’, we were introduced last October to the USA Patriot Act and the introduction of military tribunals. At that time John Ashcroft, the attorney general, said that civil-rights activists who question or oppose the legislation were giving aid and comfort to the terrorists — a phrase not heard since it was used against Vietnam War protestors. Since 11 September, the federal government has given law enforcement unprecedented powers to tap phones and read e-mail, to enter and search someone’s home without his knowledge, made it easier to detain non-citizens suspected of activity that endangers national security, and helped foster an atmosphere of self-censorship. This was summed up shortly after the attacks by White House spokesman, Ari Fleisher, who warned Americans to ‘watch what they say’. After decades of steady advances in civil liberties, the government’s actions mark a historical shift. Those most affected are foreigners, particularly Middle Easterners. The shift, according to the Los Angeles Times (10 March), is all the more striking because before September non-citizens had been enjoying their greatest period of freedom in US history, the result of a series of US Supreme Court decisions. In one of those decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote last summer that once immigrants enter the United States, they are protected by the Constitution ‘whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary or permanent’. This changed drastically after the terrorist attacks. Ashcroft ordered the detention of more than 1000 foreigners suspected of being a security threat or believed to have information about the hijackers. Many have had little or no access to lawyers and family. Over 300 still remain in detention for immigration violations and another 100 or more are held on criminal charges, mostly minor. An undisclosed number are being held as material witnesses. Human Rights Watch complained in February that the US ‘continues to refuse to disclose basic information’ about imprisoned foreigners. Because of the complexity of the causes, there is an urgent need for some reflection. Besides being critical of the simplistic US response to terror, we need to make some connections in order to understand Muslim anger. We also need to examine some other, possibly hidden, motives at work in the US response. And we need to discover what the appropriate Christian response might be in a world that changed after 11 September. Some connections Little thought, at the beginning, seemed to be given to why these two targets: the World Trade Center in NY and the Pentagon outside Washington, symbols of American domination of world markets and of the uses of American military power. I recently read a few lines from one of Robinson Jeffers’s early poems that I found oracular and that ought to strike a chord today: ‘The war that we have carefully / for years provoked / Catches us unprepared, amazed / and indignant.’ Jeffers was writing about the war with Japan. A connection largely unnoticed on 12 March, six months after the NY and DC attacks, was the anniversary of the 1945 US incendiary bombings of Tokyo in which over 100,000 civilians were killed. The latest issue of Concilium contains a declaration on the events of last September. ‘Men and women inspired by their Christian faith... [are] concerned with the mindsets and the structures that are able to promote justice or injustice, that encourage either mutual regard or violent contempt for what is labeled as "other" to one’s own group...’. The declaration makes several important points that offer a balanced perspective. 11 September, for example, ‘should not conceal from our view the silent tragedies that take place daily and unnoticed by almost all the world’s media in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America.’ The September attacks ‘became a media event in which fiction and reality were dramatically moulded together while at the same time tens of thousands each day face their death ignored by the world or soon forgotten. Only those who fight against this one-sided forgetfulness have earned the right that their outrage over this new form of evil... will be taken seriously’. The declaration, while calling for the ‘longing for peace’ to be ‘converted into concrete activity for peace,’ calls attention to the fact ‘that the financial and technical prosperity and power of the West has been achieved at a high price…. The politically uncontrolled streams of money flowing world-wide often play a destabilising role in many countries. In many post-colonial countries the repression or corruption of legitimate political opposition is accepted by the major international powers and agencies, such as the IMF, in their dealing with those countries. This should not be foregotten in the current situation. The world can only change when this double standard is recognised and then met by a sustained effort to overcome the global realities of inequality and social injustice’. There are many reasons for Muslim rage against the West. For Muslims the Crusades are a present reality – which is why Bush’s use of the word last September was so terribly inept. Nostalgia for Islam’s brilliant past between the 9th and 13th centuries is another reason. After that, Muslim ‘orthodoxy’ reawakened, and held in the vise-like grip of ‘orthodoxy’, Islam choked. It was, writes Pakistani scholar, Pervez Hoodbhoy, ‘the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world’. No longer would Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars gather and work together in the Baghdad royal courts of Harun Al-Rashid. ‘The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century’. Lost glory was followed, some centuries later, by the experience of colonialism, which even after independence refused to let go. Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonialist current across the Third World, included the desire to control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with western greed was, according to Hoodbhoy, inevitable. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. After nationalising British oil-fields in Iran, Mosaddeq was overthrown by a CIA coup in 1953. Britain targeted Nasser over the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, and Soekarno of Indonesia was replaced by Suharto. Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, secular governments proved unable to defend national interests or deliver social justice and began to frustrate democracy. These failures left a vacuum which Islamic religious movements grew to fill. Khomeni in Iran, Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, Al-Nimeiry in Sudan, all instituted repressive regimes justified by their own brand of Islam. According to Hoodbhoy, ‘The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the US combined fatally with this tide in the Muslim world in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan’. With Pakistan’s Zia-ul-Haq America’s foremost ally, the CIA advertised for, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. ‘Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funneled support to the mujahideen, and Ronald Reagan feted them on the lawn of the White House, lavishing praise on "brave freedom fighters challenging the Evil Empire"’. After the Soviet collapse, the US walked away from an Afghanistan in shambles. The Taliban emerged; Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda made Afghanistan their base. ‘Other groups’, says Hoodbhoy, ‘learned from the Afghan example and took up arms in their own countries’. In a video shown shortly after the September attacks, Osama gave as the motive for his actions, the plight of the Palestinians. This was disowned the very next day by Yasser Arafat, but the fact remains that for most Muslims, the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the fact that the 1.4 million Arabs who are Israeli citizens are second-class citizens subjected to daily humiliation, has to be one of the main reasons explaining Muslim reaction to the lack of US even-handedness. Israel, for example, receives 3 billion in aid each year. I have been told that, unofficially, it is closer to 9 billion. It is not illogical to ask: What for? Or be angry — as I myself am — over Bush’s description of Sharon as ‘a man of peace’, when he is the very one who precipitated the crisis, and whose own words incriminate him: ‘If the Palestinians are not beaten, there will be no negotiations. The aim is to increase the number of losses on the other side. Only after they’ve been battered, will we be able to conduct talks’. President Bush had promised to give aid to any country willing to join him in the global war against terrorism. Sharon promptly declared Arafat a terrorist. In Pakistan, General Musharraf seemed to be between a rock and a hard place, with pressure from Washington on the one side and from religious extremists on the other. But the pressure from Washington was used very conveniently for him to do what he wanted to do all along: ban the extremist religious parties, demand mandatory registration of all madrissas, arrest religious political leaders, restore the joint electorate for minorities, and return privatised schools. The Christians — and westerners — paid a price for this, with attacks on a church in Bahawalpur on 28 October, that kill; the brutal killing of journalist, Daniel Pearl, in Karachi on 23 February; grenades tossed into the international church in Islamababd that left five persons dead, four of them Americans, and over 45 injured. In the last incident, on 8May, a suicide bomber in Karachi killed 16 people, 12 of whom were French technicians and engineers working for Pakistan Navy. Possible other motives at work I do not want to be cynical, or trivialise the horrors of last September, but I have seen too many references to ‘the real winners of 11 September’ — to use John Pilger’s phrase — to ignore one possible motive. The Wall Street Journal declared in 1996, when the Taliban seized power, that [they] ‘are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources’. The day the stockmarket opened after the destruction of the Twin Towers, according to Pilger, the few companies showing increased value were the giant military contractors, Alliant Tech Systems, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin (whose share value rose by a staggering 30%). Within six weeks of 11 September, the company (with its main plant in Texas) had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200 billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. I was unaware of these connections but the rest of the world suspected as much. In Thailand last November for a meeting, I saw sidewalk stalls selling T-shirts with images of Osama on the left and George Bush on the right. Above them were the words, ‘Twin Terrors’. I hadn’t the nerve to buy one, wondering how I would explain the purchase to US customs officials, who are not noted for their sense of humour! A Christian response Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales, in Writing in the Dust, meditates on 11 September, using the image of a crowd baying for the blood of an adulterous woman. Jesus wrote in the dust. His pause when faced with anger, and his wise reflection, defused the violence without compromising justice. Williams writes of the ‘terrible self-abandonment of the suicidal killer, which is like a grotesque parody of the self-abandonment of love’. The response of some people in the face of deep injury is a passionate striking out. It is, he writes, ‘an honest moment’, but it is only a moment. ‘We feel very uneasy when it seems as though there is a sustained effort to keep that level of murderous or revengeful outrage alive. ‘The point at which we need to show more footage of collapsing towers or people jumping to their death, when we raise the temperature by injunctions never to forget, that is when something rather ambiguous enters in. We are trying to manipulate and direct the chaotic emotions of victims. There may be something like a dreadful innocence about the first surge of anger; there is no innocence about the deployment of images and trying to revive it. ‘We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving them no other option. But if we have that freedom, it ought to be less likely that we reach for violence as a first resort...’. The Concilium declaration sees ‘a clear trend in interpretation to categorise entire groups, even peoples and cultures, into Good and Evil. To do this justifies a mechanism for blind revenge…. The categorical separation of the world into Good and Evil is a dangerous temptation and completely unacceptable, no matter from which side this division is undertaken'. The declaration ends with a reminder, a task, and a vision of the future that can be: ‘At a time when the first impulse of governments is to focus only on the security of their own political system, economy and citizens, Christians have to remind political leaders that the funds to pay for this extra security must not be diverted from the small amounts set aside to feed and to bring justice to the world’s poor and oppressed’. Instead of short-sighted campaigns, the declaration calls for ‘a new truly global movement which will join... continents and cultures to one another in the will for justice and in mutual respect’. This offers the ‘only real chance’ of overcoming terrorism and fostering a lasting security. Two weeks after the September attacks, the young Dominican celebrant at the 0815 mass in the cathedral of Orange, California, went down among the schoolchildren — nine-year olds that day — as he usually did. He asked them, in light of what had happened, what they thought Jesus would do. One hand immediately went up and a little boy said, ‘He would give to the Red Cross?’ We in the pews smiled at that, but the replies of the next three children brought gasps and tears. One said, ‘He would take away all the bad dreams’. Another believed that ‘He would put in the hearts of all the bad guys, love’. The third said simply, ‘He would love them, no matter what’. After that, there was nothing more to be said. It is love, ‘no matter what’, that offers the only real chance. In the end, it is the poet, who, most often, helps put things in perspective: ‘Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police / We must love one another or die’. |