Slackman flacks for troofers

In his Memo from Cairo today, the NYT’s Michael Slackman writes about Egyptian attitudes towards 9/11.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

The premise of the article is that the United States hasn’t done a sufficient job of making its case to the Muslim world. But that ignores that the United States isn’t alone in this battle for hearts and minds.

Slackman then lectures:

Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it then capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.

Slackman is doing the talking here. “Experts” provide him with suitable cover to claim that this isn’t his own opinion. But this is a common device in “journalism.” If you want to say something, there’s always an “expert” who’ll say the same thing and “confirm” that you’re correct.

Perhaps, though, there are other forces. From a State Department blog:

Conspiracy thinking has grown, especially since the September 11 attacks, says Mohamed Abdel Salam, Head of the Regional Security and Arms Control Program at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt. His article, “The Modes of Arab Conspiracy Theories,” says “markedly non-scientific modes of thought prevail throughout the Arab world,” one form being conspiracy theories.

My Right Word makes a similar observation (the one quoted above comes from an Arab source):

But that’s what I and many others have been sounding out for years (okay, in my case, decades). There is something called a mindset. There is nothing racist in this. It is a fact. And the MiddleEast/Arab mindset is such that logic and rationality play much less a role in political education and wisdom than in other regions.

he also refers to Bernard Lewis:

Well, I can’t subscribe to it since the terrorists themselves claim to be acting in the name of Islam. There was one Muslim leader who said, not long ago, that it is wrong to speak about Muslim terrorism, because if a man commits an act of terrorism, he’s not a Muslim. That’s very nice, but that could also be interpreted as meaning that if a Muslim commits it, it doesn’t count as terrorism.

When a large part of the Muslim world was under foreign rule, then you might say that terrorism was a result of imperialism, of imperial rule and occupation. But at the present time, almost the whole of the Muslim world has achieved its independence. They can no longer blame others for what goes wrong. They have to confront the realities of their own lives at home. A few places remain disputed, like Chechnya and Israel and some others, but these are relatively minor if you’re talking about the Islamic world as a whole.

Lewis also points out that the entrenched tyrants of the Muslim world have a reason to resent the invasion of Iraq: the current Iraqi government is an imperfectly functioning democracy. If the government in Iraq is successful, it will signal to the rest of the Arab/Muslim world that change is possible. Not that Lewis expects quick political change, but he believes it possible over the long term.

Slackman also doesn’t acknowledge the role the official (and unofficial) media in the Arab world plays in perpetuating these myths.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories that are so prevalent in the Arab world result not from a rational assessment of the situation. (Amazingly Slackman’s article never mentions that Egypt is the second largest recipient of American aid; that the United States and the West, continually provide the Palestinians with much more money than the Arab/Muslim world does.)

The Arab world thinks its grievances are real. But instead of shining a light on reality and asking why these grievances persist in resistance to fact and reason, Slackman lectures the West that we ought to understand and accommodate the mindset.

Opinion Dominion writes about the 9/11 “truthers”:

In short, they encourage conspiracy belief in the Middle East, and that cannot possibly help achieve peace there.

Unfortunately articles like Slackman’s effectively legitimize and entrench these beliefs, making them even harder to dispel. So that’s how the New York Times celebrates the 7th anniversary of 9/11, by making the ideology that led to the terror more sympathetic to its Western audience.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

About Soccerdad

I'm a government bureaucrat with delusions of literacy.
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4 Responses to Slackman flacks for troofers

  1. JDF says:

    I was very disturbed by the article in the NY Times. I worked at the WTC and was there on 9/11 as were many other Jews. Sometimes bigotry and pure idiocy like this can be blamed on just those things — bigotry and idiocy. Would the reporter have looked for lessons, deeper meaning and the need to pay closer attention with regard to other forms of hatred in the world? Would we care why members of the Ku Klux Klan (or like-minded people) feel the way they do and what we can do about better understanding such low-lifes?

  2. Michael Lonie says:

    The Arabs’ idea of a “fair broker” in the Arab-Israel war is one that would help them destroy Israel and commit genocide on Israel’s Jewish population. Anything less than that counts as biased towards Israel. When Muslims say “Peace in the Middle East” they mean the destruction of Israael and the genocide of the Jews. When they whine for “American evenhandedness” they mean we should help them do this, or even do it for them (since the Arabs don’t seem up to the job).

    Middle Easterners are prone to conspiracy theories, the more lunatic they are the better they like them. Daniel Pipes’ book “The Hidden Hand” covers this subject. Are we supposed to frame American policy to satisfy lunatics who will believe evil of us no matter what we do? And the lunacy is spreading to the West. There is far more willingness to believe idiotic conspiracy theories among Americans now than there was in prior years. Liberals who used to laugh at people who prattled on about black helicopters and the Trilateral Commission now believe even more ludicrous lies, as the Truther movement shows. This is not good, and an indication that liberals and leftists are leading American politics and culture into a period of irrationality and extremeism. They give off the whiff of the brownshirt and, as those “anarchist” demonstartors at the Republican convention and the crackpots who vandallize cities in anti-globalization riots show, many are acting like brownshirts too.

    In the willingness to accomodate Muslim irrationality there is a strong element of fear, the fear of Muslim terrorism and other violence. The better response to such a threat is to crack down on Muslims who use violence or even threaten it or support it. When it hurts Muslims badly when they support violence they will cease to support it. When you reward violent behavior, by giving in to the demands of the violent, you will get more of it.

  3. Lefty says:

    The article seemed short and the ending felt abrupt – I wonder if a longer, better article was badly edited.

    Soccer Dad nails some of the reasons why 9/11 Trooferism is ramptant in the Arab world, but I wonder if the biggest reason is that Arabs, like everyone else, first evaluate the world through their own experience. Egyptians live in an informer-ridden police state, so a typical Egyptian has no idea how easy it is to commit terrorism in a free and open society like America. Doubts like these can metastasize into conspiracy theories…

  4. Tatterdemalian says:

    The informer-ridden police state in Egypt came about because the people wanted it, just as Russia is reversing all its democratic reforms because the people elect leaders like Putin to office. It is a flaw in the culture that makes dictators flourish, not dictators who make cultures decline.

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