10 January 2002
I’d like to ask if anyone here is an Enemy of Islam. Does anyone know anyone who is an Enemy of Islam?
Well, there are a lot of people out there in the non-industrial world who think that we here are the Enemies of Islam and, to say the least, they are willing to get nasty about it.
Even with the bombing of Afghanistan, the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre was a huge success for the Al Quaeda. They have made a spectacular statement of what they can do and have impressed their constituency with their capacity to strike at the heart of the Enemies of Islam. It rather reminds me of General Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo at the start of American’s involvement in the Second World War. Nearly all the pilots and planes were lost, but the effect on American morale was spectacular.
This perceived success of the September 11th terrorists is just the sort of thing that will embolden others who have a grudge against us. Reducing Afghanistan to rubble won’t change their minds or lessen their anger against us. They will simply get more sneaky, more tightly organised, and find ways to get at us that are more insidious.
Since this is a discussion about the Third World, Islam and non-Western Things, allow me to drop a couple of esoteric quotes from the Buddha and Kung Fu-tsu (aka Confucius).
When asked how violence between people could be ended, the Buddha said that things simply needed to called by their correct name. What that means is that if we are honest and truthful about what something really is, then we will be able to see the qualities to avoid and those to cultivate. Evil will disguise itself as a metaphor and dignify itself with false qualities. It is just a matter of using words correctly.
Kung Fu-tzu, when asked how to deal with rebellions in the Chinese provinces said, "Gather the administrators together and teach them how to write more clearly." The government wants happy subjects. They want us to prosper and be stable. If this is not the case, it is because those who communicate the wishes of the government have failed to express it’s true intention. Likewise if the government fails to understand the problems of the people, it is because they have not been clearly communicated. They must learn to use words better.
The American understanding of the Third World and Islam is a prime example of failed communication. The very words we use, like Third World and Islamic Community, are nearly meaningless when a stable definition is sought. In many ways, such words and phrases extinguish the truth about the people involved. They are shortcuts to avoid the complex realities in which the people in those places live with.
The Third World includes the world’s poorest and richest nations. It spans all kinds of geography, all racial groups, thousands of languages, and all religions.
So what does the word "Islam" means to us? Is there any confidence here that if we all wrote a definition down on a napkin that three of them would match? And how confident are we that those definitions would even be accurate?
We are stuck with these words, however. This is not the time to reinvent a significant part of the English language just so we can be absolutely accurate. My point is that the sloppy use of words leads to a fog of misunderstanding. Our news media, our government, and our schools have all been agents in the spreading this unintended misinformation. The complexity of billions of lives and hundreds of cultures are suddenly distilled into a few pat phrases that required little intellectual effort on our part to appreciate.
Part One
It seems that America suddenly woke up on September 11th to find that a lot of people on the planet were hopping mad at us. Besides those extremists who are willing to fling themselves (and a lot of unwilling fellow travellers) at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, we have been treated to scenes in a number of countries where thousands of people were jubilant sympathisers with an act whose inhumanity is hard to comprehend. No one in the USA can now go about their daily life without thinking that the impossible won’t happen. It has happened. And many of us are just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In the weeks following the September 11th both broadcast and print media blasted the questions, "Why do they do this?" and "Why are they angry?" Amazingly, it seems to have come as a surprise to many Americans that there are people so agitated with us that they are willing to come after us with our own airliners, killing themselves in the process. Oddly, we had forgotten that they also blow themselves up on small boats in the Persian Gulf while nearly succeeding in sinking our naval vessels, they detonate bombs in our airplanes over Scotland, they attack our embassies in Africa, they take our citizen hostage in the Middle East and on cruise ships, and they otherwise commit acts of ultimate sacrifice and courage to make a point that, up to September 11th, the American people had either missed or ignored.
Rather than dwell on old clichés about terrorists being someone else’s freedom fighters and argue the legitimacy of non-governmental destructive organisations, I’d like to argue for a solution to this mess. I think there is a way to have a diversified and peaceful world. Attempts to blame my optimism on me being from a generation of tree-huggers, Peace Corps-enlisters, and StarTrek addicts won’t work. My solution is to do what every global mega-corporations does to avoid problems and ensure happy customer relations, especially in times of crisis. They manage their corporate image. It is time we started to manage our national image. It is also time to drop the Cold War polarization of complex things into camps of Good and Bad and restructure how our government organises its foreign relations resources.
Let me point to a domestic example of how this works. There are American terrorists who are also passionate believers in a political cause. After the Oklahoma City bombings I certainly had second thoughts about parking next to a Ryder rental truck for many weeks. The internal American terrorists failed to succeed because they had no popular support. Their delusion of public empathy with their campaign against the supposed tyranny of our federal government was their undoing. There was no public support. There was only horror and shock. There will always be misguided passionate people who feel violence is a viable alternative in accomplishing political and social change. But without popular support, those few disturbed people are irrelevant and soon defeated. Our problem with the Third World is that the misguided passionate people have popular support. They are relevant and they are not about to be defeated until we rethink how we can better present ourselves to our neighbours. The terrorists we abhor are organised and well funded. They are not, as CNN would have us believe, mere boys and the ignorant coerced blindly into being cannon fodder for mindless destruction. They are a multinational organisation run by bright and passionate people who are appallingly dangerous in their intellectual resources, who in their own context are morally courageous, and they wholly committed to a cause they believe to be divinely sanctioned. Their numbers are not declining. Their effectiveness is not diminishing.
Part Two
It is time to wake up and be what we are: an imperial power with unchallenged global domination. There is no debate about our strength and our global reach. But we cannot win the respect we need by just being feared. It is time to act like (for lack of non-sexist metaphor) the Midwestern Dad at the head of the long table passing the potatoes and pot-roast while resolving sibling squabbles in a wise, balanced, and just way.
We need to assume an image that others will respect, not just our friends. All we do as a government in international aide, and all of our citizen’s voluntary work overseas, is simply not doing the job that needs to be done. That is reality. It’s not working. We need to make a direct appeal and put forward a message that our audience will understand and appreciate in the right way.
In the last 24 hours the US embassy in Dubai contacted the pan-Islamic broadcast company Al Jazeera to get Americans who aren’t in our government on the air to explain our points of view as a people. It is a good effort in the right direction. Better late than never. But it is an exception to the rule that we don’t generally market ourselves effectively. And being reactive in problem solving is always far more costly than being proactive.
The cost of keeping the US Navy in the Persian Gulf for a single day would spatter the Third World with non-controversial native-language schoolbooks, pens and pencils, and world maps. The cost of stationing the ill-fated Marines in Lebanon during the Reagan administration could have supported a radio-based classroom that would have reached the entire Arabic-speaking world. The list could go on and on with hypothetical trade-offs between reactive military expenses and pro-active public relations work thinly disguised as culturally relevant pro bono programmes. But we need to start doing the marketing , like any wise corporation, and we also need to advertise to the broadest possible audience that we have done something of unquestionable good.
To say the least, we have a severe public relations problem out there. We know that, in reality, we are not Agents of Evil nor out to crush Islam or any other belief system (other than communism and that’s another story). But anyone who deals with the public knows, reality is unimportant. Perceptions and impressions are always triumphant over rationale and facts. The perception of many hundreds of millions of people around the world is that the United States (and by immediate association, Corporate America) oppresses people, poisons cultures, and is wholly hypocritical in the denial to Third World peoples of the very liberties and freedoms American claims to champion.
In parallel with the American government is the US-driven globalisation of the world economy, which much of the world sees as another way that the American monster is taking away the very livelihood and dignity of billions non-Caucasian of people. Globalisation, in the eyes of many, will put the Third World in utter dependence on a system as prone to failure as the giving the Irish peasantry a utter dependence on potatoes was in the 1830’s. Everything American is being associated with greed and a lust for power that cannot be sated. In the eyes of a growingly radicalised global underclass, Americans steal the Third World people’s resources and their labour and give them back next to nothing in return. Osama bin Ladin declared his personal war on every American that paid taxes. This is very telling. We are in a cultural war that has less and less to do with the actions of government than it does with the fundamental perceptions of our American values and standards.
At this point I have to say something about us as a people. Who we are as a people and what we value is not a problem. We in this room know that the values we have as Americans are as cherished as they were hard-won. Regardless of imperfections, possible improvements, and the need for growth, we have a way of life that works for us and is attractive to a lot of other people. However, the point of this presentation is not about our internal concerns. It is about the perceptions of the outside world, what they think about us, and what we can do to better adjust to a new political environment.
A significant problem is --- the satisfaction we have in being Americans. Generally, with the exception of Hispanic Americans, the only time that we as a culture encounter another culture is when we have been at war. This lack of direct long-term contact makes it difficult for us to put ourselves in the mindset of others, especially if the others reside in places outside the Western experience. I can assure you that no one else in the world thinks like Americans.
By virtue of our isolation, both geographically and in the world’s power pyramid, we don’t see is how truly odd and exceptional we are as both a country and a culture. We are a country cooked up from untried ideas that people in the 18th Century read in books and hoped to attain by virtue of their separation from Europe. In spite of a dramatic expansion over a huge continent and equally dramatic rise to world leader, exasperatingly few Americans have sense of history at all.
We have exceptionally few problematic neighbours who impose their will on us or force us to change our attitudes. Very importantly, our internal ethnic divisions are not geographically based. While rabidly adverse to nearly all forms of taxation, we are staggeringly generous and compassionate when crisis demands action, eclipsing all other countries in charitable giving. Unlike the proportional representation and true multi-party states found in the rest of the First World, our electoral system, in which a majority of the American population chooses to not participate, results in only winners and losers and government by a minority not aligned with popular opinion is commonplace. We even elect presidents who come in second in the popular vote! And, we are the only industrialised country where a majority of the population believes in God and goes to church regularly. There is no other country remotely like ours. We are full of all the contradictions, paradoxes, and self-imposed angst that one would expect of a democracy truly run by a complex people with diverse interests. All these qualities are a product of our distinct and unique historical journey from the 17th Century to the present day. Nobody else is like us because they simply cannot be like us. They have not had the same historical experiences. And yet, oddly, the tendency among average Americans is to believe our way of thinking is universal, globally rational, and generally envied and aspired to for self-evident reasons.
I can tell you from years of personal experience that should you live in another culture for a few years (and no cheating in picking Canada), you will find that most of the things you’d think we all have in common, like "family" and "authority" and "friend" all have very different meanings and parameters than what we’re used to. Common sense, which again you’d think would be a universal, ceases to be what we think it should be in a lot of places. Obvious moral and ethical lines suddenly seem to be far less crisply defined, if not contradictory. Warm and fuzzy pop-phrases like "global community" and "world village" are comically irrelevant in the cold wind of differing cultural realities and a deeper understanding of cultural roots.
You can be quite sure that anyone from a non-Western culture living in that culture would be locked up in an institution for psychiatric observation, if not involuntary therapy, if they chronically thought and acted as we typical Westerners do. The American problems with the Third World begin with the assumption that what is rational and desirable to us is rational and desirable to them. Nothing could be further from the truth. And, frankly, it really rubs people the wrong way that we do that.
Part Three
In concrete terms, the anger of the Third World and the Islamic Community against us comes largely from the perception of hypocrisy in our political and military actions. Their perceptions are that we install repressive governments and arm them to repress their citizens in an effort to either out manoeuvre the Soviet Union or to safeguard strategic supplies we are dependent upon. In their eyes, we act as if the masses of ordinary people living under American-supported bullies were wholly unimportant and the rules of democracy and liberty we so love are suspended for them. And, in their minds, should it be acceptable for the USA to bomb countries without warning, killing innocent people in failed attempts to exact either revenge or act on dubious intelligence data, as we did in Libya and Sudan? And why don’t the Palestinian people matter to Americans other than when they become, as we call them, terrorists? I am certainly not in harmony with the tone of these opinions and questions, but they are the outlook of a lot of people who have to answer questions that arise from the information they have at hand.
In less-than-concrete terms, our culture is a nightmare for many mature societies where values are tightly knit and social relationships are strictly defined. Just like American society fights against the insidious drugs trade, unable to stop neither the supply nor the demand, our addictive and exciting culture casts a shadow onto other societies and undermines the basic family values and standards in a way that drives ordinary people nuts.
These gross generalizations about what rattles the sensibilities of the Islamic peoples are a small part of a greater and deeper flood of injury that is perceived to be a direct assault on a divinely ordained way of life and set of values. The volcano of Arab-Islamic discontent with America rumbled and spit lava for decades before it finally blew itself to bits on an autumn day in New York. For we who fancy ourselves historians, the roots are clearly in the 18th Century when Islamic visionaries rose to reassert their political independence and cultural identity against Europeans who were establish a new world dominance after putting an end to Islamic hegemony in the trade between Europe and China and India. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 and defeated the pride of the Ottoman Army in Cairo, the shock jarred the Moslem world into a sudden awareness of how bad things were getting.
But for most Americans the 18th Century might as well be the 3rd Century. Within our own time does anyone remember that in 1968 Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy in a perverse and failed attempt to draw the American people’s attention to the problems in Palestine? Does anyone remember why the Iranian students took American hostages in 1979? And does the name Achille Largo, hijacked in 1985, ring a bell with anyone? And how many $180-million 747’s have been taken out of service by Czech-made plastic explosives in the last 20 years?
What the extremist of Islam have repeatedly shown us is that the power to radically influence the lives of millions of others by force is no longer in the exclusive club of industrial governments. Literally anyone anywhere with sufficient motivation can command tools of remarkable violence with far more effect than an assassination can produce. This kind of democratisation of destructive capacity is still hard for us to imagine or legitimate. A superb example of this was when Ronald Regan, enraged by the actions of Arab extremists against American Marines in Beirut, angrily stated, "These people are not even part of a legitimate group or government." In other words, their lowly status outside the realm of ambassador-swapping authority made them illegitimate and negated any reason to listen to their message and understand their cause. This kind of thinking has kept Americans woefully myopic of just how bad things are out there.
This bit of introspection and self-criticism is necessary. Since we are what we are (and that isn’t about to change) it is time for us to rethink how we define our self-interest and how we defend ourselves against the ghastly expense of terrorism. Again, my suggestion is to remove the popular support for cells of radicalism through an orchestrated campaign of public relations and overt shift in our marketing policy.
Like us or not, we are now the world’s only imperial super-power. When it comes down to it, we do what we want, when we want, and how we want. Until recently, we haven’t had to worry about anyone else under the official national rank of nuclear power. Now we suddenly do have to worry, and anyone else isn’t an army or a country. It’s a whole chunk of ill-defined and disorganized humanity (distinct from governments and traditional authority) that is getting less tolerant of how they perceive our actions and more bold in how they express their dissatisfaction.
That dissatisfaction matters to us greatly. Beyond the terrorist threat, there is the fact that our American way of life is support by resources coming from the Third World. Islamic and Third World countries provide a majority of American’s vital strategic materials --- and that those materials are all transported to us through only 13 seaways that all are located in Third World. That level of dependency means a considerable vulnerability.
Part Four
Good public relations with the people inhabiting Third World places would be very much in our interest. Any effective manager in the corporate world knows that it takes both happy customers and happy suppliers to make operations both profitable and cost-effective. A company’s well-thought out plans and strategies can come to a sudden halt when the pivotal suppliers get nasty about their relationship with you. It may be a good idea to stop thinking of the Islamic people as our adversary and start thinking of them as our partners, suppliers, and customers.
Anyone in marketing will tell you that knowing your customer and their expectations is absolutely and utterly critical. In that light, what do we Americans, as a people, know about the people of Islam? The answer: next to nothing. At the level of popular awareness, we do have visual images from film and TV. Movies such as "Lawrence of Arabia" did manage to give a sense of dignity to the Arabs as they slugged it out against the evil Turks, but that film came out a very long time ago. And, both parties were Moslems. Today’s images are only of terrorists, wastelands, camels, greedy oil sheiks in gold-edged robes, and cowardly or beaten armies of conscripted soldiers running towards CNN cameras. The images are generally negative and underscored by a tone of subtle or overt hostility.
Oddly, we have happy associations with Hindu, Buddhist, and even Taoist religions --- but not Islam. When our actors and musicians indicate an alignment with these other great traditions, we think there is nothing overtly wrong with them. In fact, we often think of them as progressive for being so open-minded. With the exception of black sports idols, Allah help the pop star that embraces Islam, as the singer/song-writer Cat Stevens found out. In short, not only do we know next to nothing about our partners, we have feelings just a hair short of contempt for them.
If we know very little about modern Islamic places and peoples, then we know absolutely nothing about the history of Islam. It matters because history validates and legitimates a people’s sense of self. For the people of Islam, the depth and amazing strength of 14 centuries of history of is very much a part of their present thinking and sense of identity. The greatest anger the coming from Islamic peoples is that we don’t respect who they are, which is their history.
The history of Islam and the cultures that embrace Islam is too great a subject to cover tonight. I can tell you that the misconceptions accepted by Americans about Islam, its growth, and its importance in the development of other cultures is are little short of disinformation. Islam is one of the greatest forces in civilisation. Islam is not a religion that was spread by force. Islam is not just for Arabs and the Islamic community has deep historic roots from the Atlantic cost of Morocco to the Pacific shores of China.
In terms of culture, there are several important philosophies that differentiate the people of Islam from we Westerners. For instance, Americans, and most Western peoples, are inherently addicted to the notion of continual progress, growth, change, and positive development leading to ever-higher states of social harmony and material well-being. The future, not the past, is important to us because it holds the sure promise of things being better. Our trust in the evolving improvement of the human condition is one of the critical tenets defining the Western mentality. It is also wholly irrelevant to the basic tenets of Islam.
The Islamic belief is that the have already got what they need and change for the sake of change is wrong. They have found the success we still wait to attain. Things are as they should be because the right way to live and think is revealed by God in the Qur’an. Here we have to take a detour to explain two key concepts:
Concept One: The Qur’an is not the Islamic Bible. The belief of Islam is that God wrote it directly through His prophet, Mohammed. The Qur’an is God’s unequivocal instructions on how to live and what to believe. It is not the work of human hands. It is the literal and unambiguous word of God. Because God wrote the Qur’an himself, it is not translated from the original Arabic. God wrote in Arabic, thus translations are not for religious use by Believers.
But this does not mean that Islam is a single block of theological stability. Islam is far more fractured than the Christian or Jewish experience ever was. Islam is an assertive religion that demands personal action on the part of Believers to defend the faith as they see it. It comes as no surprise that factions and sub-factions abound.
Concept Two: The modern Christian world has lot any utility for the word Christendom. Despite being the nominal power behind the launching of the Crusades and moral justification for the suppression of the indigenous cultures of the Americas, the word and the idea is now wholly anachronistic. The Arab word umma is not an abstract thing of the past. The concept of the umma, meaning the entire world community of Believers, is a real thing. It has its own gravity that keeps the diversity of Believers in a wobbly orbit, but an orbit none the less. We lost that concept of overwhelming spiritual commonality in the Renaissance. They did not. That does not mean that Moslem doesn’t rise up against Moslem, that it’s all one happy brotherhood, or that the very word umma is not argued about endlessly. But like all things of the heart and soul, the concept of umma does not need to be justified or proven.
The reason that the concept of the umma is of key importance is that it legitimates the terrorists of Islam. They don’t need governmental approval or votes to legitimate their actions because they act in the name of the umma. Most Americans don’t understand this. We expect legitimacy to come from more solid things and not nebulous religious concepts that we dropped five centuries ago. This is a fatal flaw in our understanding of why we don’t have better public relations with the Islamic World. When we appeal to the people of Islam, it’s to separate governments. We should be appealing to the umma.
In some cases Islamic governments actively fight the notions of the umma to bestow power. The Egyptians and the Saudis, victims of Islamic terrorism themselves, are hard pressed to ensure they, and not the higher callings of serving the umma or pan-Arab nationalism, are supreme in the minds and hearts of their people. But this appeal is, clearly, not always accepted.
It is time for us to address the Islamic world on it’s own terms. By doing so we can begin a dialogue with the Moslem umma and the Third World that will undermine the support base for terrorism and save us much grief in unanticipated problems of the future. We need to do things on a grand scale, directed to the right audience, and ensure that we are credible and taken seriously.
Great powers do, on rare occasion, show humility and do act in concert with their higher beliefs. One of the most moving things I can recall from my studies of the British Empire was the National Day of Mourning declared by Queen Victoria after the suppression of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The mutineers from the private army of the British East India Company inflicted several instances of appalling barbarism on British women and children living in India. But the reaction of both the regular British Army and the Army of the British East India Company was beyond civilised when revenge was exacted. When news of the acts of revenge reached Buckingham Palace it sickened the Queen and Prince Albert to the point where they declared that the nation pause and reconsider their role as Christians and rulers of other peoples. A National Day of Mourning decreed where special sermons were given in the churches of Victorian Britain and poems were read aloud in public places. There was, in 1857, no way to tell the masses of Indians about the grief and regret felt by their overlords in England.
Gestures of humility and statements of compassion need not be linked to blame or tragedy. Just like condolences offered to people who suffer loss from natural disasters, think how effective it would be today if a to declare a National Day of Condolence for the innocent killed in Afghanistan since the Soviet Invasion to the present. Would it be such a compromise of our power to let the rest of the world, especially the umma, know that we, who have our own grief, feel for their losses too? Think of the good will this would generate. Think of the credibility we would gain. And what would this cost the American taxpayer? Nothing.
And we need to learn a few lessons. Recently, an American spy-plane landed on Hainan Island off the south coast of China. It had been damaged in an encounter with a PLA Air Force jet. That encounter killed a Chinese pilot. The US pilots, seeking a choice that would not get most of the crew killed, opted to land their damaged aircraft on Hainan rather than ditch into the South China Sea. Immediately the Chinese, still stinging over the American bombing of their embassy in Yugoslavia, did what one would expect and went ballistic over American spying.
The American reaction was just as swiftly self-righteous and equally puffed up.
The Chinese government was able to bring their population’s anger to an even higher pitch by pointing out that the Americans were not even sorry that a Chinese pilot had died, regardless of whose fault the accident was. And in this, they were quite rightly indignant. The United States should have immediately expressed concerns over the lost Chinese pilot in a detached way, admitting to no fault and taking no blame, but showing compassion and concern. But that is not what we did. We wound up being the Bad Guy for not doing that and, in the end, compounding our bad relations for clearly violating Chinese territorial integrity.
Our public relations with Islamic countries, the umma, and other non-Western countries are clearly not what it could be. It seems that we never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity when it comes to presenting ourselves as we really are. Expressions of concern, statements of compassion, and the overt support of non-religious Good Works will lose us nothing.
It is imperative that we cut the local popular support for extremists. The US dependence on technology-based intelligence, rather than actual field intelligence, means that our enemies will keep going by simply circumventing our strengths. They can do this because no one will help us infiltrate and expose them. Our government does not even having sufficient linguistically qualified agents to manage minimal intelligence operations --- and has had to advertise on the Internet in an attempt to get them. We need to enlist local support for our cause. We cannot do this if we are seen as the antithesis of what the local population holds dear.
Congress plays a crucial role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. While the President, by necessity, takes the lead, the President and the Congress under our Constitution are co-equal branches of government, and the support of Congress on foreign policy is often essential to ensuring that a policy will succeed.
If the executive branch will not reconsider the stony image of "America the Indifferent", then perhaps our congressional representatives can be induced to supplement the executive’s shortcomings. Something must be done about how the rest of the world sees us. We claim the mantle of leadership, but refuse to accept the rules that other nations are willing to live by. That is going to come back to us someday in a way that we won’t like.
Currently we are ignoring the request of our allies that terrorists be tried in world courts. We state that their crimes are against all humanity. We enlist the lives of other countries soldiers in pursuit of justice. But we cannot share the justice with the other civilised nations who, too, lost many hundreds of their citizens in the destruction of World Trade Center towers and on whom we depend for cooperation in preventing further terrorism.
We cannot be the leader and yet be separate from that which we lead. As the head of the discordant global family, we really need to at least appear to take an interest in the hearts and minds of all our siblings and cousins out there. To do otherwise is to perpetuate an environment where we, the privileged and powerful, will continually be the target of Third World rage. It also misrepresents the reality of the American spirit and discredits what we believe in as a free people dedicated to liberty and self-determination.