Israel needs more than military aid. Clinton also assured his audience that the US will continue to support-loan guarantees for the "settlement of 600,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union." This is perhaps the most intractable problem in the Middle East conflict, and one of the main causes of tension, since many Russian emigres are given inducements (and military training) to settle in West Bank areas, in and around Palestinian towns. But in the official conceptualization of this issue, when people who live there resist in any way, they do so because they are inherently "terrorists," not because of any machinations of state power. This contradiction is worth a closer look. Rabin used the word "terrorist," and its by product "terror," more than "peace" in his speeches like the one at the AIPAC conference. Bernard Nietschmann attempts to provide clarification of the utility of language used to describe conflict and war. [44] He concludes that most wars and conflicts in the world today are of the state-versus-nation variety, and in most cases the state is able to frame the nation they are trying to subdue as "terrorists" or "extremists." Those states, in many cases clients of larger states like the US, are generally supported by the major Western corporate news media. Nietschmann believes that a term like "terrorist" is in most cases a non-word in the struggle for normative issues: the aggressors have always provided the definitions of words used to explain their actions. [45] As we have seen above, words provide the climate for actions.
Especially useful is the assertion that "terrorist" is basically a non- word, because it is always used from a position of power to describe those who struggle against the status quo, or the emerging neo-colonial world order. (One could add to this the term "fundamentalist," which came into vogue after the Islamic Revolution in Iran; similarly, the French use "integriste.") State terminology defines struggles and these terminologies are used to undermine nations that want to have their own vision. More often than not, the nations under state domination are indigenous peoples- Native Americans, Palestinians, South Africans, Australian Aboriginals- who were displaced by European invaders.
Nietschmann reminds his fellow Western political scientists that state systems set up boundaries and that all peoples within those boundaries become subjects. The present historical moment does tell us that states result in hierarchy and violence, that lines on a map make the world, that history has become the history of lines. States define land masses, and most defy logic. The state system serves transnational corporations, which need to bc able to deal with a head man. In addition to facilitating transfer of goods, states also allow use of force within their borders. Usually, the violence is explained as a police action against terrorists, who are portrayed as acting out of some kind of irrational, religious fanaticism. Occasionally, states will even cross borders into another state to attack "terrorists" without actually declaring war on that state, as in repeated Israeli invasions of southern Lebanon, or the recent Turkish incursions into northern Iraq.
There are parallels to this discussion in US history. When Mexicans resisted US expansion in the 19th century, they were called "bandits." Texans had a policy to shoot on sight any bandits, and sometimes marched as far as Mexico City to root out banditry. However, the "war against banditry" was accompanied by a systematic process of enclosure and depopulation, followed by mass ranch ownership. Within 2 years, over a million acres were conquered, while the "bandits" were relegated to the realm of American popular culture. Similar stories could be told about racism toward Native Americans. Returning to Berkhofer's discussion of whites stereotyping Native Americans, he notes that warlike images of Indians prevailed when Indians were a threat to US interests, and that the nostalgic images prevailed when they were seen as a vanishing race. When the US was involved with military action against Haiti around the turn of the century, American newspapers featured stories about stereotypical Haitians, drawing upon a previously constructed repertoire of images and tales of cannibalism and barbarous voodoo rituals.
Nietschmann's distinction between "state" and "nation" is useful, but it suffers from some glaring omissions, particularly in his list of nation/state conflicts. Israeli incursions into Lebanon since the early 1970s are not mentioned, nor is Indian domination over Kashmir. While the Timorese struggle against the Indonesian state is stressed, the struggle of the Achenese is ignored. These Muslim peoples have been struggling against oppression and domination since the 19th century, first against Dutch imperialism and later against its Indonesian surrogate state. Can the Shi'ites of Iraq and Bahrain (where they are oppressed majorities) and in Saudi Arabia (where they are an oppressed minority) be classified as "nations"? Or are religious distinctions not acceptable? There are other shortcomings in this short work on a long topic, but the overall point is instructive.
Conventional American public discourse utilizes images of Islamic resistant movements as intolerant and predisposed toward violence. While many contemporary movements do have a strong anti-Western sentiment, it is often qualified and in any case is a fairly recent phenomenon. If Arabs and Muslims are extremists in anything, I believe that it is in the patience and tolerance they have shown toward persistent Western interventions until very recently. Islamic movements have much more important characteristics than intolerance and violence. A central concept is social justice. In the West, where it is fashionable to be anti-social under the pretense that socialism is obsolete, it is easy to overlook calls for social justice and fixate instead on violent struggle. But seeing social movements only in terms of violence, real or imagined, is seeing them only in terms that are important to a narrow set of strategic interests.
I became deeply interested in this line of research around the time of the Persian Gulf Oil War in 1990-91. I was amazed at how readily the government and the corporate news media were able to rally public support for that senseless and destructive war. I was sickened by the grotesqueness of the war and the way academic experts and journalists self-righteously mimicked each other's stereotypes and biases in their inhuman depictions of "bad" Arabs and Muslims, while slavishly parroting the official public relations-fueled imagery of the "good" ones. I found it absolutely incredible that the persona of Saddam Hussein could be reworked from loyal proxy, during his murderous war against Iran, to Hitlerian demon after he became too big for his American britches. I thought to myself, Americans must be brain dead if they buy this. Many did. Not content with that as the sole explanation, I set out to see how imagery could be reworked to expedite a shifting political economy. This article is largely about what I found. One of the points I have tried to make is that Western civilization maintains a shifting array of images about Islam and Muslims. These images can be called upon as needed to explain, justify or simplify complex political, social and economic problems, whether they be international or domestic.
Notes: [1] The best comprehensive discussion on the lineage of Western legal thought from the Crusades through modern legal treatment of Native Americans is Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). [2] Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979). [3] Ibid., 29. [4] Ibid., 30. [5] Ibid., 30-31. [6] For example: Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961); Hichem Djait, Europe and Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Thierry Hentsch, Imagining the Middle East (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992); Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979). [7] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979). [8] Ibid., 301 and 322. [9] Ibid., 325-326. [10] Thierry Hentsch, Imagining the Middle East (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992). [11] Martin Bernal, Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987). [12] Hentsch, op. cit., ix. [13] Ibid., x. [14] Ibid., xiv, emphasis in the original. [15] The passage appears in August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eye Witnesses and Participants (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1958). [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid., and cf. Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). [18] In Krey, op. cit., 275. [19] In Norman Daniel, Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984). [20] In D.D.R. Owen, ed., The Song of Roland: The Oxford Text (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 75. [21] In Daniel, 1984, op. cit., 70 [22] These quotes are from David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 179. Stannard provides a particularly useful overview of the relationship between sex and violence in Western colonial discourse, especially in the section on "Sex, Race, and Holy War." [23] Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World (NewYork: Anchor, 1992), 230.
[24] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). [25] Ibid., 58-59. [26] Ibid., 230. [27] In Stannard, op. cit., 253, cf. Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992) . [28] This story, including a case study of Puritan violence toward Indians, is well told by Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1976) . [29] Fuad Sha'ban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: The Roots of Orientalism in America (Durham, North Carolina: The Acorn Press, 1991), 23-26. [30] In Ibid., 20. [31] Ibid., 149. [32] Ibid., 183. [33] Henry Giroux provides a useful analysis of Aladdin and other Disney films as they relate to child development in America, in his essay "Are Disney Movies Good for Your Kids?" which can be found in the collection of essays edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kinchloe, Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), 53-67.
[34] Kellner, op. cit., 68-70. [35] For an explication of this thesis, see Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1987) . [36] Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1992), 245. [37] There is a growing genre of conspiracy literature espousing this thesis in the US, which has been recently heightened by an Israeli scholar working on a Congressional task force under President Bill Clinton, Yossef Bodansky. See in particular his book Target America: Terrorism in the U.S. Today (New York: Shapolsky, 1993). The same book with identical text is marketed outside the US under the title Target the West. [38] This was reported by Reuters on 20 April 1995. All quotes in this paragraph and the next were taken from this report. [39] This was reported in a series of news releases by the Associated Press on 20 April 1995. [40] See, for example, Crescent international 1-15 May 1995. [41] This was reported by Reuters 20 April 1995; for a fuller account of the media circus, see the July/August 1995 issue of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
[42] For a representative sample of this work, see the following: Edmund Ghareeb, ed. Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media (Washington, DC: The American-Arab Affairs Council, 1983); Jack Shaheen, The TV Arab (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984); Michael W. Suleiman, The Arabs in the Mind of America (Brattleboro, Vermont: Amana Books, 1988). [43] Herman's statements are taken from a piece he wrote in the November 1994 issue of Z Magazine. [44] Bernard Nietschmann, "The Third World War," Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987). [45] The relationship between language and politics, and especially the struggle over normative issues, is nicely detailed by Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: From Time Immemorial (London: Sage Publications, 1993). Index of articles from Al-Tawhid
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