uncomfortable truths

I’ve been reading Fouad Ajami’s The Foreigner’s Gift. I was struck by how simply he expressed a reality that no one writes about:

It was not an isolated band of misguided young men who came America’s way on 9/11. They emerged out of the Arab world’s dominant culture and malignancies. There were the financiers who subsidized the terrorism. There were the intellectuals who winked at the terrorism and justified it. There were the preachers — from Arabia to Amsterdam and Finsbury Park — who gave it religious sanction and cover. And there were the Arab rulers whose authoritarian orders produced the terrorism and who looked away from it so long as it targeted foreign shores.

The “Arab world’s dominant culture and malignancies” that Ajami references were summed up by Fahed al-Fanek, writing in Al-Ra’i [partially state-owned, pro-government, in Amman, Jordan], who summed up the first (UN-sponsored) Arab Human Development report in 2002 [emphasis mine]:

The team [UN director of the Arab regional office Rima Khalaf] chose and led [to created the report] was 100-percent Arab in order to avoid accusations of bias against the Arabs or of focusing on negative points in an attempt to distort the image of the Arabs in the world, according to the conspiracy theory.

But, despite that, the report was a bombshell nonetheless, though the only thing that would surprise those who are familiar with the situation in the Arab world is its nondiplomatic language and criticism, and naming of the faults. Arab societies are paralyzed because of the absence of political freedoms, the persecution of women, and isolation from the world and new ideas.

…

The Arab development report hangs out the Arabs’ dirty washing before the world and offers a wealth of information that mars the image of the Arabs in the world, but unfortunately the information is correct. Perhaps the most Arab regimes will do after reading it is to pressure Kofi Annan to move Rima Khalaf and ask her to pack her bags and return to her home in Amman.

Well, the heroic and unsung Dr. Khalaf hung on till early 2006, but the intractable problems of the Arab world remain, it seems, intractable. Certainly, no one discusses them. At least not that I’m aware of.

And it’s because of incidents like the one described by Sir Harry Evans in “Narcissism on Stilts.”

Something … happened at this year’s Hay-on-Wye festival, sponsored by the Guardian, where a five-person panel discussed “Are there are any limits to free speech?” One of the Muslim panelists said if anyone offended his religion, he would strike him. A lawyer, Anthony Julius, responded that Jews had lived as minorities under two powerful hegemonies, Christian and Muslim, and had been obliged to learn how to deal nonviolently with offense caused to them by the sacred scriptures of both. He started by referring to an anti-Semitic passage in the New Testament — which passed without comment. But when he began to list the passages in the Koran that denigrate Jews, describing them as monkeys and pigs, the panelists went ballistic. One of them, Madeline Bunting of the Guardian, put her hand over the microphone and said words to the effect, “I am not going to sit here and listen to any criticisms of Muslims.” She was cheered, and not one of the journalists in the audience from right or left uttered a word about free speech — not hate speech, mind you, but free speech of a moderate nature.

I tip my hat to Sir Harry, whom I’ve written about before, for his ringing defense of freedom of speech. I wish his op-ed had appeared in the NYT or the WaPo.