4 - 10 October 2001
Issue No.554
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 - 10 October 2001 Issue No.554 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
A leading question
Why does the world hate America? The question, posed by CBS to Abdel-Moneim Said*, dictates its own answers
Barely a week after the devastating terrorist attacks against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon I was contacted by the CBS TV Network and asked if I would give be interviewed on its popular evening news show, 60 Minutes.
I thought, and not unreasonably, that the interview would focus on the Arab stance, or the Egyptian, towards the appalling attacks. I duly went to the Cairo hotel where the interview would be recorded, and was taken aback to be told that the subject of the programme would be Why the World Hates America?
That the programme makers should want to address the issue is perhaps not that surprising. That they should have done so in such stark terms, however, was. And how is one expected to begin to tackle such an issue, and for an audience that believes itself to be citizens of a country that has only ever done good?
Oddly, I used to believe that Americans were very similar to Arabs. Both tend to believe that they are beyond criticism, that they preach only good, and condemn only evil.
What the soul searching that inevitably followed the events of 11 September has indicated, however, is the urgent necessity of contemplating the reasons that lie behind not only Americans feeling the need to ask why the world hates them, but why Arabs ask, and have asked for some time now, why they are hated by the West.
For some Americans, perhaps, it did not need the spur of the terrorist atrocity for them to consider the question. All along they had suspected that they were subject to a kind of envy that bordered on hatred. I remember, in the late seventies, asking Americans why they supposed they were the target of so much criticism in France. And the answer, almost always given, was that the French would never forgive America for liberating them from German occupation twice within a century. That answer not only reflected arrogance, but disclosed, too, a purely negative reading of the motives of others. Indeed, it was less an answer to the problem posed by the question, but an amplification of the problem itself.
Perhaps Americans believed that the negative feelings many harboured against them had disappeared forever following the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent acceleration of global capital and globalisation, appeared to validate the rightness of America. So much so that when some Third World intellectuals criticised the globalisation process as Americanisation, Americans choose to accept this as a badge of honour. Such criticisms were, in any case, remarkably easy to swallow, given that those who would endlessly advertise their mistrust of America raced to visit it. Nor were the Arabs an exception. Just think how parents struggle to find places for their children in the American universities of Cairo and Beirut.
The list of grievances from around the world may well have been long, but then was it not also the case that America was invited to solve a motley assortment of international conflicts around the globe, from the Balkans to Kashmir, from Africa to the Middle East. This being the case, Americans could also easily develop the impression that others were angry not because of what they were actually doing in particular situations, such as extending unlimited help to Israel, but because they were not doing enough in other places to satisfy the world's endless clamouring for the services of its only policeman.
There has been every reason, then, for the US to mislead itself. And no, it really has never occurred to the majority of Americans to question why their country has been subject to growing negative feelings. America is, after all, the world's biggest granter of aid. It is the world's largest donor nation, and has led many international relief operations, not least in Afghanistan.
Although America somehow realises that its aid to Israel fuels Arab anger, it rather supposed that extending a little bit of money to the PA, and maybe to some other Arab countries, would somehow tip the balance of public opinion back in its favour.
Such thoughts, though, proved naive when Americans woke up on a black morning to ask: Why does the world hate America? A more pertinent question, though, would be: Why are people willing to sacrifice their lives to destroy the World Trade Center? It at least has the virtue of some precision, and does not pre-judge the issue in a hand wringing way. For truth be told, the world does not hate America. Its longest standing ally, the UK, does not. NATO member states do not. Countries that perceive they have shared values with America -- Japan and Australia, for instance -- do not. And in the rest of the world, across the continents, the position is far more ambivalent than the question posed presupposes. People at once admire and dislike America, and it is perfectly possible for a single individual to harbour both these responses.
The question posed by 60 Minutes was obviously formulated in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, when the nation was in trauma. And that trauma tended towards an assumption that it, America, was too good for the world, and that the rest of the world was too evil to appreciate American favours.
Yet the mixed feelings harboured towards the US are no different to the mixed feelings harboured towards all empires throughout history. Hatred is mixed with admiration, anger coupled with a desire to communicate.
The ambivalence felt by Arabs towards the West is born of the conviction that the West is simply setting traps for them, that the West has determined that they are invariably the perpetrators of crimes and not the victims, that they are, somehow, irretrievably bad. Surprisingly, though, given the strength of the belief held by many Arabs that they are hated by the West, opinion polls tend to show this is not really the case.
Immediately after the attacks, Reuters and the Arab American Institute conducted a public opinion survey, the findings of which were made public on 17 September. According to the survey 84 per cent of respondents said they believed America was in a state of war with a small group of terrorists who " might be Muslims", while only eight per cent believed that America to be in a state of war against Islam.
When asked whether Islam was a religion that called for fanaticism, 42 per cent disagreed, while 38 agreed. 62 per cent of respondents said they liked Arab-Americans, while 12 per cent said they did not. Even when the question was extended to cover Arabs as a whole, 45 per cent said they bore no grudge, while 33 per cent opted for the opposite. As for Muslim Americans, only 19 per cent of respondents had negative perceptions.
Should the poll be reversed, and Arabs asked about Americans, the results would, I suspect, be remarkably similar. Yet each party, its seems, accepts only absolute approval, and believes anything less is unjustified.
Thus, American television coverage of regional responses to the attacks foregrounded the jubilation of a few Palestinians while ignoring President Arafat's blood donation and the minutes of silence observed by the Palestinian pupils in mourning for the American victims. When Ed Bradley, interviewing me for 60 Minutes, asked about the reason behind the Palestinians' jubilant demonstrations, I responded by asking him why he had not chosen a question about the response of Arafat and the school pupils. " Right," he nodded.
High time, I think, for us all to ask the right questions.
* The writer is director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page