The latest article on the Electronic Intifada by Ali Abunimah is an unacknowledged response to arguments I have been pressing, first in my book, What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda?, and most recently in my interview with the Atlantic website. In both places, and on many other recent occasions, I have made the point that one-state advocates have been ignoring the fact that a virtual unanimity of Jewish Israelis is totally opposed to any notion of a single state (even though it’s perfectly true they are enforcing a de facto one at present), and that one-state advocacy as it has existed to date among pro-Palestinian activists has made no serious effort to appeal to Jewish Israeli interests, concerns or perspectives. The obvious corollary is that until it does so, it really doesn’t have much chance of becoming a viable political agenda, since in the end any such arrangement is clearly going to have to be voluntary.

The issue was pressed when, on twitter, Ali accused me of saying in the Atlantic interview, in effect, "the one-state solution is bad because Israeli Jews don’t want it." I responded on Prof. Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, that
this is to misread not only my analysis but the fundamental political reality, which is extremely simple: a one-state solution will be impossible as long as an overwhelming or even a solid majority of Jewish Israelis don’t want it. The added irony is that most one-state advocates have not only done nothing to try to create a message that can appeal to mainstream Israelis, they have crafted one that encourages the greatest possible fear and suspicion.

There is no doubt that this latest offering from EI is an interesting effort to take the argument a step further, and calls for a serious and thoughtful counter-response, which I offer here. This can and should be the beginning of a much more direct, serious and responsible debate on the subject, and I hope it is. I have no trouble explaining my point of view in the context of the ongoing conversation in a frank and direct manner, and I think everybody’s readers deserve the same respect.

Abunimah makes a manful effort to respond to this aspect of my multifaceted critique, without acknowledging it, but falls well short of the mark because he misses, or rather elides, too many crucial points. In my view, if he and his one-state colleagues were serious about their agenda, they would be spending their time trying to craft a rhetorical framework capable of appealing to what in the end is going to have to be their main target audience rather than writing articles that in effect argue this isn’t necessary. But that would mean essentially moving past what amounts to a very strident version of the Palestinian narrative, and taking the perspectives, interests and concerns of Jewish Israelis seriously. I just don’t think the present crop of one-state advocates on the Arab side appear remotely interested in anything of the kind. This latest article, which is called "Israeli Jews and the one-state solution," but which does not in fact spend any time or energy considering Jewish Israeli interests, perspectives or concerns and treats the entire problem as an analogy and an abstraction, only reinforces this suspicion.

Ali’s article mainly is devoted to a largely accurate recitation of the history of white resistance to ending apartheid in South Africa. Fine. It’s most instructive, but about South Africa. What he doesn’t acknowledge, however, is a crucial distinction between the two circumstances: the primary pressure faced by white South Africans was an overwhelming demographic imbalance favoring black and other South Africans. As I point out in my book, in the end this imbalance meant that the best deal white South Africans could possibly get was to secure existing rights, privileges and property that were not based on continuing legal systems of racial discrimination in exchange for in effect surrendering power to a black majority.

No such equation presents itself between Israel and the Palestinians. In this case, the occupation presents an unmanageable problem for Israelis, but with a fundamental difference: we are talking here about relative demographic pluralities rather than overwhelming majorities. Moreover, this fundamental calculus of preserving the maximum of what had been acquired during colonial process, which militated heavily in favor of ending apartheid among white South Africans, militates heavily in favor of ending the occupation for Israelis, but also heavily against any form of unified statehood with the Palestinians.

One-state rhetoric often presupposes that there is a perfect parallel between the Israeli occupation and South African apartheid models, but it seems to me that this huge distinction in terms of demographic pressure, among other things, means that not only is the problem fundamentally different, the solution is extremely unlikely to be similar. Israelis who reject ending the occupation seem to feel that they can maintain their abusive, discriminatory policies in the occupied territories for the foreseeable future and do not face a grave enough threat from the Palestinians to mandate choosing Israel over the occupation. There is no question they are laboring under a severe delusion. Ali and I agree on one thing: the occupation makes a mockery of Israel’s self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state and is fundamentally unmanageable. However the facts that Israel cannot be meaningfully either "Jewish" or "democratic" as long as the occupation is in place, and that Palestinians will not accept the occupation in peace and quiet, do not translate into reasons to believe that a drive for a single, equitable post-national state shared by both peoples in relatively equal numbers can or would succeed. Not, at least, without a frightful conflagration.

Simply affirming, as Ali does, that whatever concerns Jewish Israelis might have, even though "change is scary" nonetheless "change will come," bears a lot more similarity to an article of religious faith than to the conclusion of an analysis based on the facts pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic as it exists at this moment (as opposed to some alternative fantasy version, of course). That change will come, there can be no doubt. That it will be the change I want, or that Ali wants is very much open to doubt indeed. He avers that, "there are few reasons to believe that it [establishing a single state in place of Israel] cannot be a well-managed process." On this point, we part company fairly dramatically.

One of the main reasons for doubting all of this is another of the more significant factors missing from Ali’s analysis: the fact that both sides are heavily armed and increasingly driven by religious extremists. I would argue that there are few reasons to doubt that Jewish Israelis would resist this agenda virtually unanimously and, if necessary, violently. Ali’s article does not mention at all the presence among Palestinians of large, heavily armed and well-organized Islamist groups led by Hamas that in reality are the primary alternative to the nationalists in the PLO who have sought a negotiated two-state agreement with Israel. One-state rhetoric tends to ignore or dismiss the Islamist factor in Palestinian political life, but it seems almost inevitable that as the fortunes of the nationalist project dwindle, momentum shifts primarily not to an international, grassroots boycott, divestment and sanctions agenda but rather to an agenda of armed resistance on the ground led by the Palestinian religious right (facing an Israel increasingly dominated by its own religious right).

The ANC continuously appealed to the white South African narrative — linking the anti-apartheid struggle with Boer resistance to British rule — and white South African interests as well. However, one should note that resistance by the ANC, not to mention more extreme South African organizations, was by no means limited to, or even primarily defined by, BDS tactics and in fact relied heavily on various forms of armed struggle, including urban terrorism, and other, shall we say, more direct forms of violent resistance (the ANC paramilitary force, Umkhonto we Sizwe or "spear of the nation," was, of course, co-led by Joe Slovo, a white, Jewish, Communist ANC leader). The logic of violence held sway until an alternative logic, which held very real, direct and undeniable benefits for both peoples was fully fleshed out and became irresistible, based on self-interest. Developing such an equation of self-interest in a single state between two peoples of relatively equal numbers is an infinitely more difficult proposition than developing an equation between a privileged but small minority seeking to retain its property and, insofar as possible, status and a large majority willing to forgo any revanchist tendencies in order to secure legal equality and political power. The logic of self-interest in a single state between Israel and the Palestinians has yet to be clarified at all, and seems very difficult to explain, which may be why no one has ever attempted to do so.

Ali and I agree that the present condition is untenable, but the distinction is, at its heart, about what we think the future is likely to hold without a negotiated agreement to end the occupation. Ali seems to think that it will almost inevitably give way to a single, democratic state that will be voluntarily accepted by Jewish Israelis. If I thought this for one second, I would be all for it. However, I am sad to say that I think the most likely scenario involves a huge amount of violence, which I think is almost inevitable given the violence of the occupation and the commitment to armed struggle by those Palestinian organizations who are the primary rivals to those seeking a negotiated agreement.

Moreover, I find it almost unimaginable that a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions, even if it were to be effectively organized throughout the West (which I very much doubt), against Israel would bring it to its knees. I can see no other way of arriving at a one-state outcome than decades, and possibly longer, of brutal armed struggle that is increasingly fanatical and increasingly religious. Even though everything is in place for precisely such a scenario on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Ali and most other one-state advocates don’t seem to take it very seriously, or perhaps, prefer not to think about it. I would very strongly argue that none of us can afford not to think about what is actually likely to occur if there is to be no negotiated end to the occupation and no Palestinian state. I have met people who argue that they don’t care what kind of bloodbath would follow, or what kind of atrocious process of mutual massacre, exhaustion and possibly decimation would be required in order to compel both peoples to abandon their national agendas. I don’t know if it’s more disturbing to see people unaware, or pretending to be unaware, of the consequences they welcome than openly embracing them

The equation one-state rhetoric such as the new EI article presents is a choice between pointless, debasing negotiations that lead nowhere versus an enlightened, inspiring and uplifting campaign of international grassroots activism. Unfortunately, the equation on the ground points in a very different direction, and I think any analysis that pretends otherwise is providing false comfort, because it inhabits a fantasy world rather than the stark, cruel realities that actually exist.

Thank goodness a reader has written in with the following excellent question, which comes as a breath of the freshest of air after the last few days of unrelenting absurdity which I foolishly allowed myself to be drawn into in the social media: “I think the Two State Solution time has passed. Just what meaningful state do you see?”

This is a most relevant, serious and reasonable question indeed. Those of us who continue to support an end to the occupation and a two-state peace agreement have an obligation to explain what precisely we have in mind, why we think it is still achievable in spite of undeniable and major obstacles, and how precisely we think it can be accomplished. I will not be breaking any new ground here, but it bears restating time and again, so here goes.

Two-state advocates believe that the occupation and the status quo are completely untenable for both Israel and the Palestinians, and that there is no military solution available to either party. Needless to say, we also don’t believe that boycotts, divestment and sanctions can work where violence has not, partly because they have all been in place to some extent during the entire period of the conflict on both sides to almost no effect, and because we doubt both the achievability and the effectiveness of boycotts and sanctions as the primary instrument of a national political struggle. That they can cause pain and discomfort, there is no doubt. That when specifically targeting the occupation they can be very useful, again I don’t think there’s much of a question. That they can sometimes be useful in raising the right kind of public awareness is also beyond question, although I think it’s also obvious that they, when badly handled, can also send a counterproductive message that has a negative political impact.

In short, we believe that neither Israel nor the Palestinians are going anywhere and that neither has the ability to destroy the national project or will of the other through any practical, meaningful measures at their disposal. As a consequence, we believe that only a negotiated agreement that allows for two states to live side-by-side in peace and security can end the conflict and end the occupation.

It’s also clear, and I strongly support this position, that the Palestinian people and leadership will not accept a rump state, bantustan, or state in name only, and will only agree to an end of conflict arrangement that provides for a sovereign, independent Palestinian state with all the sovereign rights and prerogatives of the other member states of the United Nations.

If such an agreement were to be reached, this state would have to encompass almost all of the occupied Palestinian territories and have its capital in East Jerusalem. It would probably, however, necessitate a land swap involving between 3-4% of the occupied territories to be retained by Israel in exchange for land contiguous (probably next to the West Bank) to a Palestinian state. Most of East Jerusalem was and remains an Arab, Palestinian city, and the bulk of it will serve as the capital of Palestine, although certain Jewish areas will probably be retained by Israel and some kind of creative solution will have to be found regarding the holy places in the old city with which Jewish Israelis have an undoubted interest. I also don’t think that Jerusalem needs to be or can be physically re-divided through walls, checkpoints and barbed wire fences. I think as a practical matter, the city is going to have to serve as a capital of two states with divided but cooperatively administered sovereignty in much of it.

I think it’s an obvious corollary, and this has long been accepted by most serious Israeli interlocutors, that a safe-passage between the West Bank and Gaza Strip will have to be part of the land swap, that is to say a corridor of Palestinian sovereignty through southern Israel and the Negev Desert that can allow for unhindered transportation between the two non-contiguous parts of Palestine. Just as in the case of Jerusalem, there are many ways of conceptualizing and realizing this principle in practice. Where there’s a will, and more precisely an unavoidable national necessity, there is most certainly a way.

While the Palestinian state will certainly have the normal sovereign prerogatives of a UN member state, I do think that some arrangements on Israeli security are going to be required, at least in some early stages of the limitation of the agreement. I’m thinking here in terms of things like electronic early warning stations regarding serious conventional attacks from beyond the Palestinian state and so forth. But I think these concessions have to be limited both in scope and in time and would hardly be unprecedented between neighbors entering into a difficult arrangement that both had a stake in ensuring succeeds. Obviously, Palestine would have full sovereignty over all of its water resources, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum and so forth.

On the military issue, the Israelis often make a big deal about the potential demilitarization, or other more precisely non-militarization (since there is no extent Palestinian military as such), of a Palestinian state. Well-informed Israelis know that when they are demanding this, they are demanding what is, in fact, a present intention of the Palestinian leadership. It’s also something that my colleagues and I at the American Task Force on Palestine have recommended, along with suggestions that the Palestinian state be democratic, pluralistic and neutral in armed conflicts (I am presently writing from a small country in a volatile and heavily-armed region beset by wars, Costa Rica, that has made precisely this formula work with deeply impressive results). But ultimately all of these questions must be decided by the Palestinians themselves, and cannot be deal-breakers for Israel. As I said, in reality neither state will have an interest in destroying an agreement they have crafted that is essential to their national security and indeed their national survival.

As for the settlements and the settlers, I think it’s clear that those that are not retained by Israel as part of this land swap will have to be evacuated. This is not so much because the Palestinians will insist on this. A number of Palestinian leaders including the current Prime Minister have stated that Palestinians have no objection in principle to Jewish Israelis being residents or even citizens of a Palestinian state. Rather, it is almost certain that any Israeli government that entered into such an arrangement would not seriously consider leaving its citizens behind the lines of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state. If any of these individuals or groups came into conflict with their neighbors or any harm befell them, which is readily imaginable given their ideology and temperament, the entire arrangement could be thrown into immediate question by the political pressure on any Israeli government to intervene in their behalf. It would be an untenable circumstance for an Israeli government to endure, and therefore I think the imperative for a full evacuation of all the settlements excluding those involved in land swap will come mainly from the Israeli and not the Palestinian side, and that this evacuation will, in fact, take place if an agreement is reached.

I think this is a pretty good rough sketch of what two-state advocates imagine, and have always imagined, the implementation of UNSCR 242 and the land for peace formula it initiated in 1967 would look like in practice. There is, of course, a plethora of reasons for believing, as the reader does, that time has passed this aspiration by and such an agreement is no longer feasible. Many one-state advocates also believe that it was never desirable and is insufficient, but we will leave that to one side in this instance.

The main objection to the feasibility of achieving such a two-state agreement in practice is, of course, the Israeli settlements and ongoing settlement activity. This is an extremely reasonable objection. It would, and hopefully will be, a not entirely but almost unprecedented step for a state to move many thousands of its citizens, often against their desires, outside of the context of an ongoing major conventional war. So the obvious question is: what on earth makes us think that this can possibly be accomplished, especially when one looks at maps of settlement expansion in the occupied territories?

The answer goes back to the first principle. It is because there is no other way out of the present situation. We strongly believe that Israel has an overwhelming national interest in securing its future and its self-identity as a “Jewish and democratic” state, and that this can only be achieved by ending the occupation. The occupation involves ruling over and subjugating in a most cruel and unjust manner almost 5 million Palestinians who are not Jewish and who are not citizens of Israel or any other state. This arrangement already does and increasingly will make this Israeli self-definition untenable and even absurd.

Perhaps more importantly, there is no chance that these Palestinians will endure unending occupation and colonization with no hope of a peaceful settlement in quiet and with equanimity. One thing the Palestinian people have proven beyond doubt over the past century is that not only are they not going anywhere, they are ready, willing and able to fight for their rights and for their national aspirations. This was expressed in sectarian conflict throughout the 30s and 40s, the civil war of 1947-48, in many ways in the various Arab-Israeli wars, and most clearly in the two intifadas. That there will be future uprisings if the occupation does not end and shows no signs of ending is really beyond any question.

There is also almost no reason to doubt that these uprisings will follow the examples of the relationship of the end of the first intifada to its beginning, and of the second intifada to the first: that is to say, increasing militarization, increasing violence and increasingly religious fervor on both sides of the equation. Beyond the question of its self-identity, Israel faces this fundamental existential problem: it can either have the occupation or can have peace. It cannot have both. Continued occupation means war, conflict and ever-escalating violence, hatred and bloodshed. It is a literally untenable, unmanageable situation.

It would be marvelous to think that Palestinians would eschew armed struggle in favor of nonviolent resistance as the primary tools in future uprisings, but in reality there is no basis for believing this. There is almost no question that the large, heavily armed and ideological political parties that became entrenched in the occupied territories by the end of the first intifada and seized control of the uprising its latter stages, and then entirely dominated the militarized and disastrous second intifada, would immediately seize hold of any momentum created by large-scale nonviolent resistance movement, especially since that resistance would almost certainly be met with the utmost brutality by occupation forces.

The argument therefore is that there is still reason to believe that a two-state agreement is possible because it is the only way out for both parties, and both parties have an existential need to find a way out of what will otherwise almost certainly prove a calamity for both. I agree that it’s going be difficult, and I would even agree that it is a long shot, but I can’t think of any other plausible scenario that could be achieved that would end the conflict and the occupation.

As numerous people have observed, states, like individuals, generally do what is necessary, no matter how unpalatable, once they have exhausted all other options. My very strong belief is that until the prospect of a viable, negotiated peace agreement is irrevocably foreclosed, all responsible parties should do their utmost of finding a way to make it work in spite of the undoubted difficulties and obstacles.

In my book, “What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda?,” I argued that one-state advocates and others are wrong in thinking that the topographical, administrative and demographic changes wrought in the occupied territories by the settlement project have definitively rendered Palestinian statehood untenable, precisely because it is an existential necessity, not only for the Palestinians, but for Israel itself. What is established by political will can be reversed by political will, if the necessity is strong enough.

In the book I suggested that a more politically precise and accurate yardstick for gauging the viability of a potential two-state agreement is the extent to which a majority of both Palestinians and Israelis believe it is necessary for their interests. By all measures, they both continue to believe this. When and if they don’t, and that is sustained for some period of time, it will be necessary, of course, to seriously examine all the other options, although I really don’t know what realistically they’re going to look like beyond the most atrocious, escalating and religiously informed armed conflict. But because Israel needs this agreement as much as the Palestinians do, and because the Israeli majority should be able to overcome the resistance of a fanatical minority due to existential national imperatives, I think it is definitely premature to speak in terms of the “death of the peace process” and the idea that the time for a two state agreement is definitively past.

There is every possibility, and every reason to fear, that such an agreement will not be reached. My argument is that given the plausible alternatives that can realistically be imagined in the absence of such an agreement, and especially in the absence of a constituency on both sides pushing for such an agreement, it is irresponsible to the point of nihilism to throw up one’s hands, give up and walk away. Palestinians who labor under the illusion that boycotts and sanctions can force Israel to abandon its national project in favor of living on equal terms in a single state with an increasing Palestinian majority, and Israelis kid themselves that Egypt and Jordan can somehow be maneuvered to accept responsibility for the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank that Israel does not want to retain respectively, are both deeply deluded in my view. Neither of these “solutions” qualifies as anything of the sort, because they will not be minimally acceptable to the other parties involved. In my view anything that promotes itself as a “solution” has to be plausibly acceptable to the parties who are supposed to accept it, and if it isn’t, then not only is it not a “solution,” it’s essentially an excuse for not having any real ideas or any real strategy to end the ongoing evil of the occupation and avoid a looming disaster.

I have been saying for some time now that while there is no such thing as a “one-state solution” there may be a one-state outcome. That is to say, a single, unified state could be the result of an imaginable set of circumstances, but these really would only in practice be unprecedented and almost unimaginable levels of violence, warfare and bloodshed over many decades at the very least. 100 years of confrontation and 60 years of armed conflict (boycotts, sanctions and the rest) have done nothing to dent the national wills and agendas of either the Israelis or the Palestinians. I think anyone who embraces the prospect of the one-state outcome needs to be honest about the process that will be required to produce it. In my view, such a process would be much more likely lead to many less palatable (to say the least) outcomes than a one-state reality that is just, fair and equitable. More importantly, the kind of mutual depletion, exhaustion and perhaps even decimation that would be required simply doesn’t bear thinking about at the human level.

In my view, anyone who embraces the one-state outcome in the full knowledge of the bloodbath that would undoubtedly be required to produce it has not only given up on peace, they’ve given up on humanity as well. I respect the ethical fervor and moral impulse of those who want the Israelis and Palestinians to voluntarily agree to live in a single, democratic, post-national state that is fair and equitable. If I thought it were remotely possible, I would be agitating for it as well. But I think I’ve been able to explain why I don’t think it is achievable as a solution and why it’s extremely undesirable, because of its necessary process (which is unlikely to produce this result anyway), as an outcome.

All of this is what leads me to continue to work for the only viable way out of the present untenable, unacceptable, evil and outrageous circumstance and for peace based on ending the occupation by creating a Palestinian state to live alongside Israel.

For years now my colleagues and I at the American Task Force on Palestine have been harping on a very standard, well-established and consensus Arab and Arab American theme — ending the occupation in Palestine — but promoting this goal in the United States through new strategies, conceptual frameworks and rhetorical tactics. Confused by the newness of the method, many people have failed to comprehend the continuity of the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state along the borders of 1967 with its capital in East Jerusalem, etc. Perhaps we should not be too surprised. An audience entirely acculturated to grand opera of the heroic style might be expected to react badly to a dense, careful Baroque aria reflecting the logical precision of the Enlightenment rather than the passionate idealism of the Romantic era.

I’ve often thought that people who listen to ATFP expecting to hear Wagner’s Götterdämmerung lurching from crescendo to crescendo, as Arab American rhetoric on Palestine usually does, are greatly taken aback when confronted with something that bears a lot more similarity to the methodical, exact, sometimes clinical but always purposive Bach. With that in mind, I’ve taken to referring to my recent interview with the Atlantic monthly website as "the Goldberg variation." This bit of silliness refers not only to the fact that ATFP’s entire mission is simply a variation on an established Arab and Arab-American goal and that, except for Islamists and one-state absolutists, the vast majority of Arabs and Arab-Americans almost certainly and strongly agree with this aim, but also to the fact that other than some rather unremarkable comments about the J Street conference at which I spoke, there was nothing new in what I had to say to Jeffrey Goldberg.

I find it hard to avoid the sense that it wasn’t so much what I said (even if that is, perhaps, somewhat objectionable to some people) but rather the forum in which and the interlocutor to whom I was expressing these rather well-known opinions that really got some people’s goat. The outcry in some cases was positively hysterical, even though almost all of these people are well familiar with my thinking already. At any rate, the general quality of the response can be viewed by viewing this posting on the Mondoweiss blog. I think it speaks for itself, rather resoundingly, and the sad truth is that it’s fairly typical of attitudes informing the negative reaction.

As it happens, I know Philip Weiss a little, and I have always thought him to be an intelligent and fundamentally decent man. I e-mailed him a couple of days ago, when this was first posted, to ask him if he could possibly defend the publication of such a response on his own blog, Mondoweiss, and therefore indeed under his own name. I have not heard back from him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t. That would mean choosing between endorsing such empty, vapid rage or acknowledging that there is a more complex reality that needs to be defended from this kind of puerile outburst. Until now I would have been sure that he would’ve chosen the second, and it’s certainly by no means too late, but I’m beginning to lose hope.

On October 18, I sent him an e-mail asking about his opinion about J Street, about which he had just blogged, and also challenging him, since his postings revealed that he had obviously read my book (you know they all have, of course), to go beyond referring to it in passing as he had done on more than one occasion, and actually provide some kind of evaluation. He immediately replied, in part:
You’re absolutely right that I’ve been unfair to you; I mean to amend that. I like your book. I don’t know that I agree with it entirely, but it’s smart and often very sharp.
He ended:
I think the book is well written and often on target. I’ve mentioned it twice now. Count on me to amend by doing a posting dedicated to the book and taking on the positive ideas in a positive way, and thanking you for your assistance to me in the past.

That’s what I call an honorable response from an honorable man who in the past has shown himself to be plainly interested in ideas and more than capable of serious, sustained engagement. Since then, nothing. I had been assuming that he was simply taking his time, which is only fair. I suppose he may well be continuing to do so. If he ever does provide any kind of sustained response — positive, negative or both — it will be a breath of fresh air in a suffocating smog cloud of silence from the one state advocates whose ideas my book challenges. But with this latest posting on his site and no response to my simple, obvious and very fair question — "can you stand by this posting on your site?" — I’m starting to lose hope in him too. I would be deeply relieved if he proves me wrong, but by now I’m not holding my breath.

Worst of all, I have found myself getting sucked into the most pointless and endless exchanges on social media sites like Facebook that have greatly clarified my thinking about how to engage with people in that kind of forum. I’m desperate to have a more wide-ranging, serious debate in the Arab American community, but my recent experiences have convinced me, once and for all, that Facebook just doesn’t help much. I have already criticized e-mail lists and social media for creating smaller and louder echo chambers, and now I can see the extent to which it simply doesn’t function as a useful medium for the exchange of serious ideas — though I should’ve known better all along I suppose. I’m grateful to my friend, the young activist Omar Baddar, who pointed out to me how much time I was wasting on answering truly silly and absurd allegations and accusations ("Ibish supports the siege on Gaza," etc.).

I can do no better than quote him directly:
Hussein, for sanity’s sake, don’t get consumed in these sorts of debates. Anyone willing to jump from what you actually say (some of which I disagree with) to accusing you of supporting AIPAC, Dahlan, & detractors of Goldstone is simply someone who is incapable of having a serious conversation about any of this! To be sure, I do think that you should, on occasion, explain yourself and clarify where you’re coming from. But this type of childish back & forth with amateurish accusations is really not worth your time!

He later added, I think with perfect clarity:
The cycle is seductive, but ultimately useless: They make an assertion, you refute it, then they get more belligerent, then you refutations become more devastating, then they get absurd, then you wonder why you engaged in the first place… & then it starts all over again!

The voice of experience speaking to someone new to social media. Therefore, and as a completely unexpected and very interesting side effect of the Goldberg variation, I’m going to take Omar’s advice and be vigilant about only answering serious, reasonable comments and questions precisely so as not to be consumed by absurdities and foolishness.

A serious blog posting from Philip Weiss, for example, or any thoughtful, serious Arab-American who disagrees with me and is capable of forming a coherent argument, would definitely constitute the kind of debate I have been complaining we are lacking, but that recent posting on his site and some (though by no means all) of what emerged in social media in response to the Goldberg variation are anything but that. Belligerence, anger and outrage are not only not a strategy; they are also not an argument.

In my interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on the Atlantic Monthly website today, "Hussein Ibish on the Fantasy World of One-Staters," I suggested that the organization Jewish Voice for Peace was solidly in favor of a one-state agenda for Israel and the Palestinians. In response I received the following note from Sydney Levy, Director of Campaigns for JVP:

Your statement is factually not true, as I presume you are aware, since you came to our National Conference in 2007, more or less at the same time as we were publicly welcoming the two-state Saudi peace plan.

Our fuller position is available in our website:
One State or Two? A Jewish Voice for Peace position paper:

As activists in the movement for peace and justice in the Middle East, JVP members are often asked for our position on how the Palestine / Israel conflict should ultimately be solved. Our mission statement endorses neither a one-state solution, nor a two-state solution. Instead it promotes support for human rights and international law. As a result, we have members and supporters on both sides of this question, as well as many others who, like the organization as a whole, are agnostic about it. If a short answer is required, it would be that we support any solution that is consistent with the national rights of both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, whether one binational state, two states, or some other solution.

In fact, I was laboring under the impression, on some decent authority, that the JVP position on this issue had actually shifted considerably since the 2007 conference that I did indeed attend. I have been somewhat misled and glad to have been wrong about this. I am delighted to receive and report this clarification and to correct the record. I will not repeat the error.

I am uncomfortable, as I have said many times before, with "agnosticism" about the goal of Middle East peace for important political and strategic reasons, but there is a big difference between that and one-state advocacy as such, and its important to be accurate.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the Middle East and inadvertently created yet another crisis for the Obama peace initiative. It’s not so much that she badly mishandled everything — although that argument could certainly be made — it’s more that I think her difficulties demonstrate how complicated and in some practical senses almost impossible the American diplomatic task at hand really is.

First, she seemed to reverse American policy regarding a settlement freeze by praising Netanyahu’s proposals for a partial and temporary settlement freeze as “unprecedented” and by reiterating the administration’s long-standing request the Palestinians return to negotiations “without preconditions,” in other words without a formal American-Israeli understanding on a settlement freeze. Then, following a firestorm of criticism, she seemingly backtracked from the backtrack and reaffirmed US policy that there should be a complete settlement freeze, but added that Netanyahu should receive credit for how far he has been willing to go although this is still “not enough.”

Examining her language dispassionately, one could easily defend the Secretary’s characterization: for Netanyahu, this is, in fact, unprecedented, just as his grudging and not entirely convincing endorsement of the necessity of a two-state solution was. He has never said anything like this before, or been willing to take such measures. Since his first term, and even more dramatically displayed during the formation of his second cabinet, we have known Netanyahu belongs to the deal-making class of individuals, willing to do things that are ideologically, emotionally and politically unpalatable in order to remain in power. Therefore, and because what he has offered the United States, even though it may be unprecedented for him, is completely insufficient for everybody else, including the Obama administration, politically describing his proposals as “unprecedented” was extremely unfortunate because it gave the impression that the administration is satisfied with his position. It’s extremely helpful that the Secretary clarified that this is not so, but the political damage has been done in spite of the fact that a case can be made for the factual validity of the language itself.

So where does that leave us? First, I think it’s pretty clear, as I’ve been saying on the Ibishblog for many, many months now, that they are either is or imminently will be an informal understanding between Israel and the United States that amounts to something very close to a settlement freeze, especially outside of Jerusalem. There will be latitude, and Israel will cheat, but it seems that the Americans and Israelis have found some kind of private, informal arrangement that allows the administration to push the issue to the side for the moment. However, what is unusual in this scenario, and what distinguishes the Obama administration from previous ones, is that the United States has thus far declined to formally accept Israel’s “unprecedented” compromises on the issue and continues to insist that continued settlement activity is “illegitimate.” The issue therefore remains on the table, if pushed to the side in favor of the resumption of permanent status talks.

The problem is that even though Netanyahu certainly dreads the notion of serious permanent status negotiations with realistic terms of reference as outlined by Pres. Obama at the UN, for the Palestinians returning to negotiations in the near future is both diplomatically wise and politically untenable. The recent flap over Clinton’s remarks in Israel has only complicated matters that have become extraordinarily difficult for the PLO because of the inability of the United States to achieve a satisfactory agreement on settlements and, perhaps even more damagingly, the scandal over the Goldstone report. There is a constant tension among the Palestinians (and for Israelis also, one should add) between what makes sense diplomatically at the international level in terms of advancing the national interest and what public opinion at home will bear politically.

This tension between the diplomatic and political registers was dramatically played out with regard to the Goldstone report. The PLO first operated entirely at the domestic political register, championing the report at every stage and embracing it with gusto. Then, recognizing that there was a pretty impenetrable consensus of opposition to adoption of the report by either the Security Council or the ICC by most if not all of the permanent members of the Security Council, and not just the United States, as well as serious American opposition to the PLO pushing the report in multilateral forums, they switched to the diplomatic register and decided that the limited potential benefits of pressing forward with the report were not worth the considerable diplomatic costs. However, they did so without preparing public opinion in any way, or explaining why they took the decision or even who it was that decided to agree to a delay in the Human Rights Council. There was generalized confusion among the Palestinians which predictably led to generalized outrage, and reversed at least six months of a steady accumulation of credibility by the PLO, the PA and President Abbas personally, especially vis-à-vis Hamas.

In other words, the Palestinian leadership was bound to pay a significant price with regard to the Goldstone report either internationally at the diplomatic level or domestically at the political level. In the event, the entire affair was so badly mishandled that they ended up paying both prices almost in full.

This is not only the backdrop, of course, for the great difficulty the PLO faces in being asked to return to negotiations without a formal settlement freeze and following the Goldstone debacle, but it also helps explain why Clinton was tacking towards pressuring the Palestinians rather than the Israelis in her recent Middle East trip. American diplomacy during the Obama administration has had to delicately balance pressure on both sides that is met with considerable political resistance at every stage. When the administration was pressuring Israel on a settlement freeze, many Israeli and pro-Israel voices were screaming at the top of their lungs about being “abandoned,” “thrown under the bus,” and “betrayed” by the new Neville Chamberlain. Now the Palestinians are being pressured to return to negotiations with nothing to show for their own significant and largely successful efforts to meet their Roadmap obligations regarding security, and having been placed in an impossible position over the Goldstone report, Palestinian, pro-Palestinian and Arab voices are expressing similar disgust (meanwhile, AIPAC “applauds”).

The final complication is the prospect of new Palestinian elections in January, as announced by Abbas, or in June as suggested by the Egyptian reconciliation plan signed by Fatah but not by Hamas. It seems very clear at this stage that Hamas doesn’t want anything to do with any elections because it does not feel capable of performing well in them (and also, of course, because they are ideologically disinterested in democratic processes and other “un-Islamic” procedures). However, it is also possible that they might reverse themselves, even fairly quickly, on this matter and having called for elections, the PA and Abbas have to proceed as if they were going to happen even though Hamas will probably make them impossible. This makes it all the more difficult for Palestinians to emphasize the diplomatic, national interest register over the domestic, political and ideological register.

In fairness, it should be said that, as Kadima leader Tzipi Livni pointed out at the Knesset opening recently, Netanyahu appears to have absolutely no strategy whatsoever other than stonewalling and saying no to everything and everyone, and no vision whatsoever for Israel’s future or dealing with its imminent crises. That’s what you expect opposition leaders to say in Parliament, of course, but in this case it stings more because it has so much truth to it. Netanyahu holds the Prime Minister’s office, for the moment quite effectively, and he has therefore a large stack of papers with the words “office of the Prime Minister” embossed at the top. Unfortunately, the pages are entirely blank. At least the PLO knows where it wants to go. I don’t think the same can be said of Netanyahu (although it might, unfortunately, be said of some of his even more extreme Cabinet colleagues).

It’s an extraordinary thing to plunge into a vertiginous despair without leaping off some kind of precipice of hope. I don’t think any well-informed, serious observer was really moved to any kind of euphoria by the Obama initiative, Cairo speech or any of the extremely positive innovations since his inauguration. The situation is simply too grim, too complicated and too resistant for any such reading to have been taken seriously by informed observers. So it’s a little odd to see people gripped by dysphoria without ever having experienced euphoria. Perhaps we could say that the Middle East peace process used to be a manic-depressive experience, and is now simply depressive, and for some people almost suicidally so. And it must be said, things on the ground, in the region and between the parties didn’t look at all promising in January, and they don’t look any better now.

But there is an important difference: there is, in fact, no indication that the Obama administration is giving up, throwing up its hands, or walking away, as many suspect the Israeli prime minister and others have been hoping. I have argued in several published news reports that the administration views Middle East peace as a marathon and not a sprint, and is a process of attrition rather than spectacular breakthrough. I think because they tried for an early breakthrough (not a bad idea), and only made some limited progress that has offset by perhaps even more significant deterioration, many people have the wrong impression that President Obama and his team actually thought they had a very good chance of producing major progress in an early stage and are now disappointed and confused, with their policy and approach in complete disarray. I don’t think there’s any evidence for this whatsoever. I think Clinton’s trip demonstrates that engagement is not ending, but continuing if not intensifying.

Plainly the administration has been trying to communicate subtly that it expects movement to be slower than it had been pushing for, but I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that they are surprised by this. The fact that Obama made his first phone call from the Oval Office within about 10 minutes of his presidency to Pres. Abbas, and appointed Special Envoy Mitchell on his second day in office, and spent the entire campaign talking about how he wouldn’t wait until the end of his administration to deal with this issue, all suggests that he started right away precisely because he knows that in all likelihood this is going to take a long, long time and that it is a matter of wearing down the stonewalling parties rather than creating some kind of epiphanic, miraculous transformation.

Meanwhile, the PA’s state and institution building project proposed by Prime Minister Fayyad provides an extraordinary parallel and complementary process that can strengthen both the Palestinian and American strategic positions vis-à-vis Israel and that can begin to create significant physical and administrative changes on the ground that improve the political context in which diplomacy is taking place. As I argued strongly in the Guardian yesterday, it is essential that this plan receive not only financial and technical support, but also diplomatic and political protection, from the Arabs, the Europeans and, above all, the United States. And, as I pointed out, it will be extremely difficult for Israel to block specific projects that are being carried out in conjunction with American and European agencies and institutions.

As long as the administration persists, and remains — as all its leaders keep saying it is — “determined” to see this process through, there is no reason for anyone to despair. There is, after all, no other choice: it’s either a slow, gradual and, yes, painful, inching towards a two-state agreement, or it’s war, conflict and occupation into the foreseeable future and catastrophe all around. Despairing, giving up and walking away is too irresponsible for this administration, for the United States, or for anyone with the best interests of Palestinians, Israelis and Americans at heart. It’s a nihilistic reaction, and it lacks both political and intellectual substance and moral fiber.

A year ago, in October 2008, I was invited by the American Studies Center at the University of Bahrain, the oldest American Studies Center in the Arab world, to give the keynote address at the 10th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Center. Below is the text I prepared for the talk, which was to address the importance of American Studies centers in the Arab World. As delivered, it was somewhat (perhaps mercifully) shorter, and slightly different. However, reviewing the prepared text one year on, I thought it was well worth posting on the Ibishblog, and the ideas in it still well worth considering. Or is this my worst speech ever? You decide!

Utopian and dystopian themes in American politics, policy and culture

Keynote address at the 10th anniversary celebration at the American Studies Center at the University of Bahrain, October 29, 2008.

I. The importance of American studies in the Arab world

I have been asked to speak about the necessity of American studies centers in the Middle East. I will not dwell too long on the obvious connections between the United States, the main regional power in the Middle East, and the Arab states. In spite of the gradual shift of power in terms of capital from the West to the East, particularly China and India, the United States remains the dominant player in Southwest Asia and will remain so for the foreseeable future. It is particularly relevant to countries in the Gulf as major exporters of hydrocarbons, and given their strategic location. The recent rise of Iran as a potential regional rival to the United States only intensifies rather than lessens the significance of the United States to the Arab states, particularly in the Gulf region.

As for Bahrain, the relevancy of the United States and its political system could not be more direct, as you know better than I do. What we are talking about here, simply put, is your present prosperity and future security. Commercial ties between Bahrain and the United States are extensive and long-standing. The Government of Bahrain has a cooperative agreement with the United States military and has provided the United States a base in Juffair since the early 1990s. This is the headquarters for Commander, United States Naval Forces Central Command and the United States Fifth Fleet, and about 1500 U.S. and coalition military personnel. U.S. Naval Forces Central Command is the naval element of CENTCOM, based in Qatar, a neighboring country to which you will soon be building a massive bridge. It consists of the United States 5th Fleet and several other subordinate task forces, including Combined Task Force 150, Combined Task Force 158 and others. Naval Support Activity Bahrain is the primary base in the region for the naval and marine activities in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, also known as the war in Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, also known as the war in Iraq. So, there can be no doubting the strategic importance of the United States, and its society and political system, to the fundamental strategic concerns of Bahrain, and other GCC and Arab states for that matter. As I say, we are talking about your future.

The United States and the Arab states are mutually dependent in terms of trade and security, and yet are beset by chronic and intensifying misunderstandings and misrecognitions, at times even bordering on fundamental distrust. Some of this is based on rational questions about the roles and intentions of the governments and populations of both societies. Arabs naturally have serious questions regarding American policies especially towards Israel and the Palestinians, as well as its actions and intentions in Iraq and its overall approach to the region and its resources. Americans have deep suspicions about extremist and terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, and growing sentiments in the Arab world critical of and even hostile to not only American policy, but sometimes even American culture and society.

Of course many of these concerns on both sides are not only rational and inevitable given the course of recent history, but many are also based on stereotypes, caricatures, reductions and misrecognitions. As one who follows and participates in both the Arabic and English language media, I can say categorically that the press, particularly television, does little to help educate the public on both sides about the complexities of each others societies and the reality of and need for mutual cooperation and interdependence.

For many years, the most acute Arab-American observers, particularly my late friend Edward Said, complained properly about the lack of American studies programs and departments in the region. Of late this serious oversight has been corrected by programs such as the one we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of today here at the University of Bahrain. The University, the staff of the Center, and the government of this important country are to be congratulated on taking the initiative in promoting American studies here, and being part of an overall movement to not only send Arab students to the United States to learn about American society, but to bring American studies here to the Middle East.

As with most problematic elements in the Arab-American relationship, this problem has been and still is a reciprocal one. There are only a tiny handful of centers for contemporary Arab studies in American universities, almost all of them at private and indeed Catholic universities such as Georgetown and Villanova. In most elite and public American universities, Arab studies are subsumed into larger programs involving the whole “Near East,” ancient and modern, which have been traditionally dominated by Orientalist traditions (which at least involved enormous knowledge, erudition and prodigious scholarship about the region in spite of essentializing tendencies), but which are now increasingly the site of contesting pro and anti-Israel orthodoxies that are shamelessly political. The post-9/11 surge of interest in Arabic language studies and other regional academic interests in the Middle East in American universities has been often geared towards pragmatic military, diplomatic and intelligence agendas. There is nothing particularly objectionable about this, but it is hardly a substitute for a genuine and empathetic engagement with another, very different and difficult, culture for most Americans to grasp.

I would argue that Americans have much to learn from the Arab world about its culture, traditions and incredible complexity and heterogeneity that would enrich the American worldview. To do so, Americans must learn about the Arabs from the Arabs, and that means learning from Arabs who understand how to communicate with Americans effectively and how to craft a receivable message. As anyone who has dealt with the Arab-American dialogue, especially at the political level, knows perfectly well, here we have two cultures that have found it exceptionally difficult to explain perfectly reasonable and understandable concerns and perspectives to each other in a manner that can be readily comprehended by the other side.

But I am here today to talk directly about what American studies can bring to the Arab world. And I mean by this not simply the enhancement of the ability of Arabs such as the people of Bahrain to deal effectively with Americans in terms of business and diplomacy, but also the positive value of appreciating the extraordinary complexity of American politics, culture and art, its enormous contribution to human civilization.

II. Utopian and dystopian tendencies in American domestic politics and foreign policy

I am going to frame my remarks today around the consistent and definitive tension between the utopian and dystopian tendencies in American politics and culture – and hopefully add a layer of complexity to this almost clichéd dichotomy. By utopian, I mean the idea that society is perfectible, and that an idealized state of affairs between people can be accomplished. By dystopian, I mean, of course, the opposite: a perspective that casts individuals and societies in a negative light and which, despairing of correcting them, and instead focuses on controlling them. The American hybrid seeks to balance these founding and contrasting if not contradictory ideals: the utopian perfectionism of the Declaration of Independence (which might be thought of as the mission statement of the United States of America) offset by the finely tuned mechanisms for restraining change and balancing competing self-interests contained in the U.S. Constitution (which are essentially its bylaws). The United States has been struggling throughout its history from this tension between the idealistic essence of its mission statement and the cynical attitudes expressed in its bylaws.

There are not, as is sometimes absurdly suggested, two United States in competition with each other, or a series of contending utopian and dystopian versions of America. Instead the United States at its richest and most compelling enacts a dynamic interplay between coexisting utopian and dystopian traits and impulses. This enigma is the source of both its greatest contributions to world political culture, and the wellspring of its richest fine arts, both of which I will touch upon this evening. I hope to illuminate a common theme that defines the American experience at a fundamental, if in some ways irresolvable, manner.

Let me begin by discussing for a moment the problem of the competing mythological versions of the United States that dominate perceptions both internally within the country and around the world: first, the utopian dream of the “city on a hill” (President Reagan’s speechwriters added "shining" to that phrase centuries later) that has defined the American self-image since the founding of the Republic if not before, and is propagated by the vast apparatus of American culture which projects its power to every remote corner of the globe today. The second myth is the dystopian nightmare, shared around the world and on the extreme wings of the American political left and right, of an omnipotent, rampaging, global hyper-power, the imperialist behemoth responsible for every negative aspect of reality, particularly in the Middle East.

It has been a commonplace of conversation, since my childhood in Beirut in the 1960s, for me to hear everything people do not like to be attributed to the actions of “the Americans.” What American studies must and should reveal is the absurdity of such caricatures, and replace them with an understanding of a society of enormous and increasing complexity that can exude at one moment breathtaking hubris and arrogance, and at the very next moment, at times even the very same moment, an extraordinary sense of fairness and generosity.

In particular, I believe it is vital for Arabs to understand the extremely complex and yet prosaic process of forming American policy, the results of which are often objectionable to many people in the Arab world. I been subjected personally for my entire life, both living in the Middle East and in Arab-American circles in the United States, to an extraordinary misperception of the processes that creates the consensus positions of the American government on the most pressing issues, particularly those involving foreign policy.

The great secret about the American political system is that there is no secret.

The challenge in understanding the evolution of US policy is in accepting the complexity of the forces at work – powerful financial interests and corporate lobbies, single issue power groups, large voting blocs, ideological interests, party machineries — and, yes, both formal, lawful, and informal, unlawful, forms of corruption – almost all of which are played out in the public eye. It is extraordinary that even some Arab-American political scientists persist in describing American imperial policy – a term which seems perfectly apt to me – as if it were determined by some sort of cabal or secret process independent of the structures built into the constitutional and legal process. What these so-called experts have so woefully failed to realize is that there is no Wizard of Oz, to use a very American metaphor, behind the curtain. In fact, there is no curtain. What you see is what you get: one may describe it as a functioning representative democracy, an oligarchy in which wealth is disproportionately empowered, a process driven by personalities, or any number of other contingent or determinative models – most of them tending towards a utopian or dystopian interpretation of the system.

American political processes are played out in public, on a vast scale, and in my view there is little to no mystery as to how the system works. The American government was from its outset designed to be lobbied by powerful interests, and power can come in the form of financial or cultural capital, or large voting blocs among other accumulations of leverage. For most of the past half-century, to be absolutely frank, most Arab diplomacy in the United States has sought to discover which small group within the elite secretly crafts policy, and to capture its ears. It is only in recent years, and I mean years not decades, that most Arab embassies in Washington have begun to understand the need for serious, sustained congressional lobbying. And they are only beginning to show a glimmer of comprehension about the role of public opinion in American politics.

A good example of this complexity can be seen in the controversy over the influence of the organized pro-Israel lobby. Two senior American political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote first an article and then a book in which they argued – in an effectively dystopian reading – that the organized pro-Israel lobby has exercised a distorting and determinative role in shaping American policy, by making Israel a domestic issue in the hands of a small but powerful interest group comprised mainly of pro-Israel Jewish lobbies and more recently right-wing evangelical Christian fanatics. They argue that this consolidation of power by a minority special interest has harmed US national security and produced unbalanced, unwise policies, a dystopian argument to be sure. In a recent issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, another respected political scientist, Walter Russell Mead, attempted to refute this argument by demonstrating at great length the deep cultural basis in the United States for sympathy and support for the Israeli based on mainly utopian civic and religious ideals.

I will not rehash the details of these arguments because my point is that the complexity of American political society is such that both arguments are, in fact, largely accurate even though they position themselves as contradictory. There is no question that the pro-Israel lobby has had a profound impact, especially in Congress, in making questions regarding Israel essentially domestic political rather than foreign policy considerations and effectively placing them beyond the scope of major challenge at the national political level. However, Mead is absolutely correct that this analysis is insufficient to explain the depth of sympathy among the American public for Zionism, a concept that had a significant following in American Christian communities in the 19th century long before Theodore Herzl and the first Zionist Congress in the 1890s. These dystopian and utopian readings must be combined to gain a clear picture of the nature of the passionate American attachment for Israel, which sometimes does indeed look like the kind George Washington specifically warned against in his farewell address of 1796.

Moreover, it must be said that the inability of the Arabs and the Arab-Americans to successfully counter the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, or preferably to make common cause with it on the issue of finding a viable end of conflict agreement which would end the occupation provide for two states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security, is in large measure a consequence of a failure to understand the processes by which American policy comes to be made and shifts slowly, almost glacially, over time due to the myriad levers of power through which it may be influenced. This of course is only one example, although one dear to the heart of almost every Arab, of the consequences of failing to understand the American political system.

There is a great deal of excitement across the world regarding what looks to be the imminent election of Sen. Barak Obama. There is no question that in terms of domestic political culture, this would constitute a seismic shift in US politics. In terms of the return of the Democratic Party to complete control of the government, it could represent a classic realignment. In terms of the rise to power of an African-American, it represents a cultural earthquake, the dramatic culmination of the civil rights movement and decades of struggle against racism and exclusion.

However, it would be a mistake to expect radical changes in policy as a result of such a shift, however dramatic it may be. The United States is about to elect a CEO, not a king. It is crucial to understand that lobbying is built into the American political system (“the right to petition their government for a redress of grievances,” which is in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, seems to address directly the question of lobbying). Therefore, US policies on big-picture issues are determined by a very slow moving process in which dozens of centers of power attempt to influence the parameters of policy by manipulating the levers of power. These levers include votes, money, media power, congressional influence and many other forms of affecting the way people in power think about the issues. The actors using the levers of power include various different kinds of political formations, single interest groups, corporate interests, think tanks and other ideological formations, popular movements, religious entities, ethnic lobbies and so many more. In most cases there are multiple competing interests on any given set of issues. They fight it out over time, representing different constituencies, until a broad consensus framework is established that holds for a certain period of time until either events or a change in the domestic balance of power necessitates a revision. Any president must operate within the parameters of what can be done without encountering untenable opposition from other centers of power inside and outside of the government.

As someone who has worked in Washington on the some of most difficult issues possible for over 10 years now, and as an Arab-American, I have done my best to study of the founding of the American Republic and its fundamental ideology. In academic research on this era, we find the utopian and dystopian mythologies played out in full and in bitter competition. On the one hand is the uplifting saga of an oppressed people throwing off the yoke of colonial oppression in favor of an inspired and almost clockwork-like precise system of self-government reflecting a virtual perfection of checks and balances within its system. On the other hand, revisionists for many decades have argued that the founding was essentially a conservative rebellion by a wealthy oligarchy of white, in many cases slave-owning, males who wish to assert dominance over their own society as opposed to submitting to parliamentary dictates from London, and who wished to preserve their assets and privileges from increasing British usurpation.

In other words, was American independence genuinely revolutionary and liberatory, or fundamentally conservative and a re-inscription of oligarchical oppression? I am certain this question will never be answered definitively, because I believe that in fact both scenarios contain elements of the truth: in its fundamental ideology, the American Revolution contains some of the most profoundly liberatory political innovations in human history; in its practice it embodied from the beginning, and in some ways continues to express, forms of exclusion and oppression that are unconscionable.

However, I would argue strongly that there is a profound and universally compelling aspect to how this American political system has effectively functioned from a practical point of view for more than 200 years. And that is in its remarkable capacity for self-correction and re-stabilization. In virtually every major case of this kind of self-correction, change was accomplished through lawful or constitutional means, with one obvious exception. The question of slavery was deliberately postponed during the founding, particularly at the Constitutional Convention, and ultimately was settled only through the most sanguineous conflict in American history, the Civil War. And it is fair to say that, given the failure of Reconstruction following the war, the practical liberation of the African-American population in most parts of the country was further postponed until the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, and to some extent continues until this very day.

However, it is noteworthy that in his remarkable second inaugural address, President Lincoln, a figure who is sometimes regarded with exaggerated hagiography, had the brutal frankness to proclaim to a public suffering an exceptionally fratricidal bloodbath that,
Yet, if God wills that it [this war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
This surely is one of the harshest and most forthright self-condemnations and acceptance of the judgment of history in the name of self-correction that was ever uttered by the leader of any society – a dystopian evaluation in the name of a utopian ideal.

However, it is important to note that in its initial formation, the voting franchise in the United States was not only withheld from racial minorities and women, but also from non-propertied white males as well. In spite of the declarations of equality in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents of the United States, the early political structures of the Republic reflected a distinction between dependent and propertied individuals, with only the latter considered to be full participants in the political process. To understand the subordinate role accorded to “dependent” white males and other disenfranchised groups, think in terms of the limitations to political participation placed on dependents as we now understand the term, that is to say children. At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, this status of dependency was presumed to also apply to women, racial minorities (especially slaves), and white males without property.

During the reforms of the first half of the 19th century, the franchise was extended to all white males, regardless of property ownership or (some) residency requirements. In effect, non-propertied white males were allowed to behave politically as if they were propertied, that is to say as if they were property owners, insofar as their full political enfranchisement was concerned. In exchange, the implicit understanding was that the non-propertied majority would not use its electoral dominance to infringe on the property rights of the wealthy minority. Here again, we see a utopian gesture of republican equality employed in the service of what would certainly seem to many people to be a dystopian reality of radical inequality of property and income. This was a quintessentially American balancing act between majority rights and minority prerogatives, and again, a marriage rather than a compromise of dystopian and utopian tendencies within the political structures and philosophy of the Republic.

To be sure, many other struggles for justice including the labor, women’s and civil rights movements and other emancipatory projects have characterized the ability of the American system to adapt itself and to move however haltingly and glacially in the direction of its own stated revolutionary ideals. Many continue to this day and are yet to be completed: but as the candidacies of Barak Obama, to a lesser extent Hillary Clinton, and even in some ways Sarah Palin all show, movement and change are a constant feature of American political life. Sometimes changes that have been building for generations almost unnoticed erupt suddenly, and the unthinkable is instantly transformed into the inevitable. The young and still assimilating American Muslim community, under constant and vicious attack by bigots and Islamophobes of many varieties, has, in spite of significant cultural and civil liberties challenges in the post-9/11 era, during this same period has become represented by its first two members of Congress ever: Representatives Keith Ellison and Andre Carson.

Sometimes speaking with people in the Middle East and reading or watching the Arab media one is given the impression that life is impossible for Arab or Muslim Americans, or that the political system in the United States is closed to them. While few know the challenges in more gruesome detail than I do — having written three major studies of hate crimes and discrimination against Arab Americans — I can attest that the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States can and will thrive politically when they to organize themselves and engage system in an effective manner, and that will develop credibility, clout and ultimately influence on policy as well, if they attend equally to the responsibilities as well as the rights of American citizenship. They must think, speak and act first and foremost as Americans, not Arabs living in America. And I must, in all frankness, say that in my view the Arab world is neglecting its greatest single asset in the United States by largely dismissing and neglecting the Arab Americans.

I would argue that the greatest lesson the founders of the American Republic left as a legacy to its own people, and to the nations of the world, are not the mechanics of its political system and organization of checks and balances. Rather it is the insight that individual human motivations in the political and economic realms are ultimately and inevitably driven by narrow self-interest. This is not to say that altruism, statesmanship and nobility are inaccessible to the human being as a political animal. It is rather that the founders of the American Republic understood that they could and should not trust not only the motivations of each other, but even their own motivations. They accepted as axiomatic the primacy of self-interest and the corruption inherent in the accumulation of power. The most remarkable aspect of this universally applicable insight is that, in general, the founders of the United States did not trust their own motivations as individuals; that they questioned themselves and accepted that each of them personally would, or at least could, also be driven by narrow and parochial concerns.

They created a system designed to evolve with the times, to self-correct, and to strive continuously to achieve the ideals more eloquently elaborated in the Declaration of Independence and than codified in the United States Constitution. But they did not believe in the perfectibility of either society or the human individual, and as I say, the most enlightened of them understood that they could not trust themselves either as a group or as individuals to act in a disinterested manner. In other words, the founders of the Republic deployed a dystopian reading of “human nature” in the service of a utopian republican ideal, a quintessentially American gesture. This illustrates my broader point here perfectly: even at its most idealistic, the American fantasy of a political utopia, a "more perfect union," comes with a dystopian attitude already inscribed into it.

It strikes me that all of the philosophical insights of the Enlightenment and its political legacy, this realization is perhaps the most profound lesson the American experience and what might be called the ideology of the American Revolution offers to the rest of the world. It is precisely this epiphany that has provided the equilibrium and balance between the utopian and dystopian strains of the American polity and experience that has produced such a remarkably stable and self-regulating structure. This insight, which is not absolutely unique to the United States or its founders, but which was perhaps more keenly appreciated at that time and place than any other, could be incorporated into many different cultural contexts and political systems.

By no means does an appreciation of this crucial and decisive insight dictate a replication of the American constitutional system of checks and balances between discrete branches of government. Rather than a specific formula for the clockwork operation of a government apparatus, this recognition of fundamental and universal human frailty of individual interests suggests an ethos or an attitude that the American experience can offer the rest of the world both in terms of understanding how Americans view and operate their own politics domestically and in terms of what the American model can offer to other, especially developing, states in constructing stable and self reinforcing systems of government that include maximal levels of accountability, transparency and rule of law.

Unfortunately, this remarkable American insight – that power not only corrupts, but is dangerous not only to those who are subject to power but also to the powerful themselves – has never been applied in a sustained manner to the American approach to international relations. In spite of Wilsonian rhetoric in the wake of the First World War and the spate of international agreements and treaties and the founding of United Nations in the wake of the Second, in fact the United States has continued to regard international relations as a sphere in which its founding insight into the corruption and limitation of power simply does not apply.

Instead, the United States has continuously clung, as virtually all major powers have throughout the ages, to a policy of maximizing its own coercive influence under all circumstances. There can be no question that international law has been and continues to be regarded by most American administrations at most times as a tool of statecraft to be employed in the narrow pursuit of national interests rather than a system to be upheld universally, and which should apply to the United States, its institutions and officials, and closest allies, well as to all others. Indeed, a commonplace contempt for international law and multilateral institutions, particularly the United Nations, is a dominant feature of American political culture and discourse. These conventions and institutions are seen at best as a tool to be deployed when convenient and at worst as a positive encumbrance on the arbitrary will of the United States to project its power.

The recent invasion and occupation of Iraq was a good example of the very height of this contempt, when the Bush administration sought and did not receive permission for this action from the UN Security Council, and went ahead with the war regardless. This dismissive attitude was even more crudely expressed by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who said derisively of the fixed alliances such as NATO upon which traditional US Cold War foreign policy had been based, words to the effect that the mission defines the alliance, but the alliance does not define the mission. During this heady period of post-9/11 rage and intoxication, even fixed alliances were seen as unnecessary encumbrances to the projection of American power.

There is every reason to believe that during the second term of the Bush administration this attitude has undergone considerable revision and that it will be further revised by the next administration especially if Sen. Obama prevails. My point, however, is that while Americans have accepted at such a fundamental level that they understand, virtually without consciously articulating the principal, that power is corrupting and dangerous even for the powerful, and that balance is useful even for the stronger parties in a relationship given the virtues of restraint in politics, the United States has never seriously attempted to consider that this same principle could or should apply at the international level as well. In the post-Cold War era the consensus that has barely been challenged, if at all, in the United States that maximal power for our country on the global scene is simply and uncomplicatedly in the best interests of the United States. The idea is virtually unheard of that any real system of balance or restraint, let alone the emergence of regional not to mention global multi-polarity, might actually be useful and beneficial not only for the peoples of the world and the global system generally, but also for the United States itself.

For example, it could well be argued that the United States would have benefited from being restrained from the grave error of its ongoing Mesopotamian adventure had the Security Council’s prerogative not to authorize any Chapter 7 application of force – that is to say the invasion and occupation of Iraq – had been respected by our country. Change is a constant at all levels of human life, and there is no question that while the end of the Cold War ushered in a limited period of unipolarity in international relations, a subsequent and emerging era of multipolarity is beginning to develop. However, every national security strategy document produced since the late 1980s commits the United States to resisting and opposing the acquisition of additional influence by both global and regional forces. In other words, it is the considered policy and the consensus of the American foreign policy establishment to attempt, like King Canute, in vain to try to hold back the waves of change and enforce an unsustainable and quickly eroding status quo of unipolarity for as long as possible, without acting now to shape the coming era of multipolarity.

In addition to the myriad obvious problems associated with such an unrealistic strategy, this approach does not recognize the limitations of American power, however unrivaled it may presently be. I believe the experience in Iraq has revealed those limitations in a most unhelpful and unhealthy, but also unmistakable, manner. I have long argued that Americans should begin to consider applying at least some elements of the appreciation of the problems associated with unfettered power, including the negative effects on the powerful themselves, on the question of international relations and the management of the emergent multipolar global system rather than a vain effort to resist its inevitable development.

I am not arguing that we need an international “democracy” of states that reflects democratic principles that might be found within an individual state. I doubt that anyone would seriously consider treating the government of, for example, North Korea as an equally respectable and responsible international actor as any other. However, I do believe that both in its own interests and in the interests of the global order and the peoples and states of the world, the United States has a great opportunity, which it is presently squandering, to manage the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world.

Rather than resisting inevitable change, the long-run interests of the United States, as well as the peoples of the world, would be better served by American support for the strengthening of international law and legitimacy, and the institutionalization of strong multilateral institutions designed to thwart unwarranted aggression or coercion on the international scene. This would be popular, and would prove to the benefit of the United States as newly empowered actors on regional and indeed the global scene begin to emerge and project their power.

As it stands, given the record of the past eight years, and even the past 18 years in many ways, the United States is ill positioned to argue against unilateral actions and disregard for international law by newly emerging powers. This is especially distressing given that the great American utopian/dystopian hybrid insight about the benefits of restriction of power even for the powerful themselves has been so missing from the American approach to international affairs for most of our history, and especially now when it could have such a powerfully positive impact.

It strikes me that friends of the United States in the Middle East, informed by centers of American studies, could be well positioned to help more Americans begin to understand that their own brilliant national insight into the functioning of power in a domestic political context almost certainly has applications on the international stage as well. In other words, I would urge students of the American experience in the Middle East to try to begin to find a way to incorporate this understanding of the dangers of unfettered power in their own societies, and to help their American friends and allies understand that the same dynamics can apply to some extent in the field of international relations as well.

III. The utopian and dystopian in American art and culture

In the final section of my talk here before you today, I would like to address the question of American culture and its global influence. American popular culture, and especially its homogenizing consumerism and hegemonic advertising, is well recognized throughout the world. It has its supporters and its loud, vocal and compelling critics. I think that more than enough has been said throughout the world, including in the Middle East, about the influence of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Hollywood schlock, garbage television, and all the other elements of the vast apparatus of what Adorno called “the great Wurlitzer” of American popular culture. But I think what is often missing in the conversation both inside and outside the United States about American culture is the profound influence of the fine arts from the United States, often intermingled with its popular culture – again raising the tensions between a dystopian “Coca-Cola” version of American culture and its relations to the sublime aesthetic achievements which I would like to briefly touch upon as I conclude today.

Much of the greatest art of the United States has its roots in the cultures of the common people of the country, particularly that uniquely American musical form, the blues, best exemplified by early practitioners such as Charley Patton and the immortal Robert Johnson. By its own self-definition, the blues – denoting depression and despair – is nothing if not dystopian and, at its best, is sublimely uplifting at the same time. The reverberations of Mississippi Delta blues can be heard in music throughout the world, as can that other quintessentially American musical form, Jazz. Here we are talking about contributions to global culture of a profound and sophisticated variety.

In the West, strict distinctions are frequently drawn between “serious” and “popular” music, but who can seriously doubt the achievements of artists like Miles Davis or Bob Dylan? Some might point to Bach, Mozart, Mahler and the like, but such an exclusive attachment to an established cannon of high art would also mean measuring the value of every writer against the achievements of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky. Even when limited to the realm of Western culture, it would eliminate the potential for alternative, innovative and hybrid approaches, and inhibit the appreciation of artistic production reflecting its contemporary cultural context. Indeed, the contemporary minimalism of composers such as John Cage, Steven Reich and Philip Glass could well be heard as the soundtrack of our postmodern era. There is no need, I am sure, to mention the global impact of rock, hip-hop and, increasingly, sampling and other recent innovations, music that reflects the technology, pace, pastiche and repetition compulsion of the way we live now that reaches far beyond the confines of a narrow audience in American artistic circles and touches, I believe, all those who live as postmodern subjects.

American literature is undoubtedly taken seriously, but in the United States at least usually in terms in that tired old cliché of the “great American novel,” of which probably the original and only real example is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Indeed, ironically, while Americans tend to think of themselves as a nation of novelists, it could well be argued that a large majority of the most important and influential American writers were in fact poets, which ought to tell you something about the gap between the American prosaic self perception and the poetic heights its culture can and does actually achieve.

Literary Modernism, the transition from the Romanticism of the late 18th- late 19th centuries to an artistic sensibility that focuses on the interior psychology of the ordinary person — the Modernist antihero — and the valor of suffering the indignities of daily life as represented for example by T.S. Eliot’s narrator in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, most strongly has its origins in the work of a great and underappreciated American author: Edgar Allan Poe. In stylistic terms, Poe was the last of the great Romantic writers, and there is nothing Modernist about his style. However, his subject matter, his endless fascination with the often twisted interior dialogues of his characters, their elusive and weird subjectivity, set the stage for the Modernist shifting of artistic sensibility from Romantic grand and neoclassical themes (think "Ode to a Grecian Urn" or any of the Beethoven symphonies) to investing the most mundane commonplaces of everyday life with both a profound and an ironic significance.

There can be little doubt that it was the American Poe who provided the basis for Charles Baudelaire to virtually invent the Modernist literary style in Les Fleurs de mal. The process continued with Jules Laforgue who — taking a sensibility that originated with Poe and then developed into a radical new style by Baudelaire — articulated the voice of the Modernist antihero. And it is from the language of Laforgue that T.S. Eliot learned to speak and gave us literary Modernism in its most fully developed forms: the poems in Prufrock, and above all The Wasteland. No slight to James Joyce or Marcel Proust intended, but the lineage of literary Modernism really is Poe-Baudelaire-Laforgue-Eliot. It is surely no coincidence that the tension between utopian and dystopian in American cultural sensibility was at the very foundation of the development of the Modernist literary sensibility that seeks to find the heroic in the mundane and to simultaneously universalize and satirize the neoclassical ideals of Romanticism — or that the great collaborators with the Americans in the Modernist project were the French, authors of the other great political and cultural revolution produced by the Enlightenment.

Literary Postmodernism too has its origins in a uniquely American sensibility. William Burroughs, in particular, along with the other key beatnik writers gave us a new aesthetic for the atomic age based on pastiche, radical nonlinearity of narrative, anti-commercialism and an almost Sadean drive to press the limits of the imagination in defiance of or in collaboration with new forms of technology that were both threatening and inspiring at the same moment. This same era, let us admit, up to and including the present day above all in the United States, has provided us some of the worst poetry ever celebrated and well-regarded in English language in the form of a Postmodern (as opposed to the Modernist) “confessional” style that asks us to be interested in trivialities devoid of significance simply because they are presented in the guise of “poetry.” But in spite of the achievements of Burroughs, Pynchon and a handful of other accomplished Postmodernist writers, narrative art has shifted definitively, in my view, away from the novel and toward the film.

Perhaps the increasingly recognized fine art form of the comic or graphic novel at its best stands some way in between the two media of literature and film. It has come to the point where almost more American films seem to be based on comics and graphic novels than on literary texts anyway. It would be invidious, then, not to acknowledge the greatness of a true American original, the "comic art" genius Robert Crumb. Controversial though he may be, I believe Crumb is without question the preeminent American satirist of his era, a celebrator of the not only dystopian but the grotesque in American life. With an honesty that is breathtakingly, uncomfortably unflinching, Crumb explores the depths of contemporary American society and popular culture and, as Robert Hughes has argued, should properly be placed in the tradition of Brueghel and Goya.

No study of contemporary American culture would be complete without a serious consideration of the most provocative work Crumb has produced, particularly his merciless interrogations of in the racism and sexism embedded in mainstream American culture including his indefensibly misogynistic depictions of monstrous and headless women, and his two extraordinarily controversial and brazen satirical rants, “When the Niggers Take Over America!” and “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!" These satires were so shocking, scandalous, powerful and incisive that they were actually adopted as brilliant expositions of their own attitudes by some of the worst racist groups in the United States, so foolish and ignorant that they proved unable to recognize they were being lampooned — although, at the same time this demonstrates how truly piercing satire can come dangerously close to reproducing that which it mocks and how thin is the line a really fearless satirist must walk. There isn’t much in contemporary American culture or art that can match Crumbs’ merciless satires such as these in interrogating the dystopian strain of American mainstream culture.

The world’s contemporary major narrative medium, film, in spite of its largely American origins is ironically not, at its highest level of artistic achievement, a quintessentially American art form. Historically its greatest practitioners – geniuses such as Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Eisenstein and Buñuel – have generally not been Americans in spite of the relentless narrative factory of Hollywood, and its embrace of brilliant refugees like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, or the importation of artistic genius such as Hitchcock’s. The great homegrown exception, of course, was the amazing prodigy Orson Welles, driven almost instantaneously from Hollywood and from America, and all but banished by the commercial apparatus of cinema.

Interestingly, however, in my view perhaps the most innovative and important film director working today is not only an American, but a crafter of Americana, a reveler in and lover of American culture and society as well as one of its fiercest and most savage critics. David Lynch, in my estimation, is an artist of the highest stature, head and shoulders above any of his peers around the world working at present in the medium of cinema and now digital video. His subject is, in fact, America itself. His early work such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, both the television series and the film (which is both prequel and antithesis to the television program), are literally as American as apple pie (pie being an obsession for Lynch, especially in Twin Peaks).

However, in his more recent work including Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, Lynch has managed to create an entirely new genre: an American surrealism that carries forward and elaborates on the European surrealistic achievements of the likes of Breton, Ernst, Dali and Artaud, and threatens, I think, to at least equal those of the greatest cinematic surrealist of them all, Don Luis Buñuel. I do not believe there is a more significant living American artist working in any medium, and given that his subject is America and Americana, I would urge that his work be studied seriously in centers such as this one. One could not find a recent artistic production more evocative of the dynamic tension between the utopian and dystopian strains in American life, culture and imagination than Mulholland Dr., which I would not hesitate to call the greatest American film of the past 30 years at the very least. Lynch’s cinema has been aptly described as "beautiful dark," which is about as pithy an encapsulation as one is likely to encounter of the utopian-dystopian American hybridity I have been trying to describe.

I would like to close today by speaking briefly about Mark Rothko, perhaps the quintessential American painter of the second half of the 20th century (the British artist Francis Bacon probably exceeding him in international importance). Rothko’s late works, particularly those indescribable 14 black monochrome paintings housed at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas represent a unique artistic achievement and really could only have been produced in and by late 20th century American creativity. These gigantic paintings, which at first glance appear to be simply masses of black pigment on enormous canvases for me powerfully evoke both indescribable despair and ineffable hope, a sense of the death of traditional Western culture and the rebirth of something new and infinitely more powerful, that lies at the heart of the dystopian threat and utopian promise of American culture at its most powerful.

Some critics, anthropologists and even historians of religion like Mercea Eliade saw Rothko’s descent into spaces of utter and overwhelming darkness as a return to the Neanderthal cave, a tremendous regression bordering on the defeat of the human spirit. I think this is precisely incorrect. In Rothko’s final paintings, I believe we can experience a spiritual and psychological journey into the macrocosm of endless and collapsing space and time — the possibilities suggested by the vertiginous discoveries of contemporary physics — and at the same time into the microcosm of the human psyche, into that powerful agnostic space of wonder at the unknowability and inaccessibility of both the self and the other (the other in this case standing for the totality of incomprehensible reality). When contemplated seriously, these so-called black monochromes reveal infinities of detail of tone, shade and texture. They welcome you into what Rothko himself called, “unknown adventures in an unknown space.”

If Western art of the first three quarters of the 20th century was dominated by the likes of Picasso, Dali, Kandinsky and Klee, all Europeans, whose work fundamentally reshaped and expanded Western consciousness, then Rothko and his zenith of darkness and impenetrability invite an experience approximating a confrontation with consciousness itself. His final work suggests a register of experience beyond the categories of space and time. In a Nietzschean and almost cosmic sense, it represents the nadir of the dystopian threat of the American experience representing in the most nihilistic manner the death of culture, the obliteration of both religion and rational understanding, and the extermination of the aesthetic as it has heretofore been recognized by almost all human societies.

At the same moment and through the same method, these paintings liberate the viewer from all the illusions carefully constructed by and for all of us from the moment of birth that bear no resemblance to the most fundamental truth of existence – the impossible coexistence of being and nothingness – and announce infinite possibilities for the regeneration and explosion of consciousness and a genuine transcendence of the profane, mundane and delusional ideologies of ego, consumerism and literalist faux spirituality. Ironically, of course, the paintings themselves are enormously valuable commercial commodities and the subject of considerable fetishism, including in my remarks here. That underlying reality notwithstanding, I do think they can be read as presaging at least the potential of a new aesthetic, a new cultural spirit and a new philosophy far better suited to all that we now know — and much more importantly all that we increasingly understand we do not know — about our lives and our universe. Radically dystopian and exuberantly utopian in the same gesture, the final paintings of Mark Rothko represent, to me at least, the very finest and most universal offering contemporary American fine arts present to the rest of the human family.

What I am suggesting then is that a potentially useful framework for studying American culture and society in the Arab world are the debates opened up by examining the dynamic tension between and hybrid formations created by the dystopian and utopian strains in American domestic politics and foreign policy, and in the best of American fine art. I congratulate the University of Bahrain and its American Studies Center in beginning to make American society and culture the subject of serious study here in the Middle East, and I hope that universities around the region emulate your example.

I hate to mention them twice in a row, and I really have no intention of picking on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), but I noted their recent statement expressing outrage at a new episode of Larry David’s occasionally brilliant HBO comedy series "Curb Your Enthusiasm," in which David is apparently depicted as inadvertently urinating on a painting of Jesus. The Christian American right is up in arms, as always (remember the whole Andres Serrano "Piss Christ" flap from the late 80s?), but why would the Muslim American right want to join them in this?

Well, for one thing, it gives them an opportunity to reinforce the little understood veneration for Jesus, although not as God or the "son of God," Muslims share with Christians but not with Jews, atheists or agnostics. So it’s an opportunity to show solidarity with the majority community over an issue of apparent sensitivity, and an understandable act of political opportunism that probably also reflects genuine Muslim religious sensitivities.

But there might be something somewhat more troubling at work here: that is a sense shared by both Catholic and other Christian extremists and the Muslim right that there ought to be a special zone of protection for religion and religious ideas in the public discourse in which satire, blasphemy and harsh criticism, even if it is in good faith, of religious ideas cherished by millions is simply out of bounds even in societies that cherish free speech and are constitutionally secular. The Organization of Islamic Conference is even trying to push this horrible idea, under the guise of a ban against religious "defamation," at the international level, presenting a vote at the UN General Assembly for November.

On his blog at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg suggests that had Larry David inadvertently urinated on the Quran In his program rather than a painting of Jesus, he would be facing threats of violence rather than expressions of outrage. Internationally, there’s some evidence for that, but thankfully here in the United States no one has ever reacted violently (as far as I can tell) to satire or blasphemy aimed at Islam. But there have been plenty of misguided efforts to equate such perfectly legitimate if provocative and even outrageous speech, satire and blasphemy with genuine Islamophobia, which I believe is a very serious intellectual and political error.

Opposing efforts to stigmatize and spread fear and hatred of entire communities and promote bigotry and even violence is essential, and has been a major part of my own life’s work. Adopting, on the other hand, a puritanical, humorless, oversensitive and anti-intellectual attitude serves no legitimate purpose whatsoever, and can only stigmatize and undermine efforts to combat real hate speech. Moreover, the censorious position is almost always the losing one in the American context: one can demand and battle for fairness and against stigmatization, defamation and hate speech; but one cannot legitimately or successfully demand and battle for the right not to be offended, provoked or angered. This is a very important distinction that I think has eluded much of the Muslim and Arab-American communities to date, in which I think needs to be the centerpiece of any successful campaign to combat the Islamophobic and anti-Arab racist discourses that have become the biggest single problem our communities face in the United States.

There is an all-important consideration for those who would oppose Islamophobia with honor and with effect: it is vital to accept and put into practice a distinction between combating Islamophobia as a form of anti-Muslim hate-speech designed to promote intolerance and bigotry (which is a threat that must be answered in the strongest possible terms) and responding, for those who care do so, to serious if critical engagements with Islamic texts, doctrines and practices (which constitute perfectly legitimate interventions in public discourse).

To take an obvious case in point, Rushdie’s brilliant novel The Satanic Verses (Viking Press, 1988), which does engage in a kind of satire (although not a blasphemous one) of early Islamic history re-created in the mind of a degenerating mental patient, is not in any sense Islamophobic, nor would it have been even if it had been a blasphemous satire. Expecting all representations to be respectful is both unrealistic and inconsistent with free speech and free inquiry. Moreover, Ayatollah Khomeini’s outrageous and criminal “fatwa” against Rushdie and all connected with the novel was much more a source of, than a response to, Islamophobia. It was a cynical and opportunistic effort by a politician who had been mercilessly lampooned by a satirical novelist to both take advantage of a misguided firestorm of criticism against the novel to establish and extend his authority as a political and religious leader amongst those resentful of the West — particularly beyond his more typically Shiite constituency — and to take personal revenge for the marvelous and biting caricature of his own personality in Rushdie’s novel.

It still stands as perhaps the most repulsive, unjustifiable and inadmissible abuse of the natural impulse on the part of many devout Muslims to assertively respond to perceived Western denigration of Islam. Similar cynical efforts by political forces in the Islamic world to use the Danish cartoon scandal for political purposes are another important example of the abuse of these sentiments. Protests coordinated, if not manufactured, by the Syrian and Iranian governments against the cartoons were clearly intended to promote their “Islamic credentials” while antigovernment forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India similarly manipulated crowds and mobs in an effort to channel outrage to their own political purposes. It is imperative that those who would critique and resist Islamophobic discourse categorically oppose the misapplication of this term to respectable speech like The Satanic Verses and the cynical political manipulation of defensive populist sentiment among Muslims in both that case and the Danish cartoon issue.

A television cartoon satire such as South Park, which has mercilessly lampooned all major American religions on a routine basis, cannot be described in any meaningful sense as Islamophobic since it does not single out Islam or Muslims for any particular vilification, and therefore will not complicate or compromise the ability of Muslim Americans or the Muslim-American community to build a healthy, productive and fully-realized life in the United States. The same can be said of generalized critiques of religion such as Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: how religion poisons everything (Twelve Books, 2007), which subjects Islam to the same rationalist and skeptical interrogation as other major religions such as Christianity and Judaism. (Bill Maher’s terrible film Religiulous could be argued to have crossed the line, however, by being insufficiently fair, or rather quite detectably biased, in its framing of the relative problems facing various faith traditions and, as a fellow agnostic, I couldn’t imagine a worse advertisement for my own persuasion — so even in the world of satire and rationalism it is entirely possible to cross the line).

However, one cannot object to The Satanic Verses, South Park or God is Not Great without essentially holding that satire or rationalist critique of religions are impermissible. Opponents of Islamophobia, if they seek to be socially or politically effective and intellectually defensible, cannot allow themselves to adopt such an oppressive, censorious and ultimately inadmissible position. On principle they should not be inclined to try to suppress, or even denounce as repugnant, perfectly legitimate, albeit challenging or disrespectful, speech. These distinctions are more manageable in practice than they might first appear in theory.

To return to the Danish cartoons scandal, which originated outside the United States but had a major cultural impact regarding the discourse about Islamophobia in this country, the Jyllands-Posten images were essentially a mixed bag. Some of them were deeply offensive, portraying profoundly racist stereotypes of Middle Easterners and reflecting a very crude form of bigotry against Arabs and Muslims that can only serve to stigmatize the vulnerable Muslim communities now growing in countries like Denmark. Others are merely stupid. A few were actually interesting. In other words, some qualify as genuinely Islamophobic and others do not, and one ought to be willing to judge them each on their own merit and qualities.

To demonstrate how such distinctions might be made in practice, it’s worth considering a number of these cartoons individually. First, however, it is necessary to reassert that simply representing the image of the Prophet Mohammed is neither Islamophobic nor inimical to all forms of Islam. While Islam in the Arab world has generally considered representations of Mohammed to be unacceptable, lest it lead to heretical idolatry, this has not been the case in many other parts of the Muslim world. (And, one can argue that this prohibition of graphic representations of the image of the Prophet has actually resulted in more rather than less idolatry and fetishism of this mortal personage in practice, and therefore has had the opposite of its supposed intended effect).

As Wijdan Ali has pointed out, “There were many illustrations of the Prophet in early Mongol manuscripts from the Ilkhanid Dynasty down to the Ottoman period.” (see: Ali, Wijdan, “From the Literal to be Spiritual: The Development of the Prophet Muhammed’s Portrayal from 13th Century Ilkhanid Miniatures to 17th Century Ottoman Art,” EJOS, IV (2001).) Ali notes that while a majority of Muslims consider figurative images of the Prophet to be “a taboo,” and a minority even rejects figurative representation of all kinds, nonetheless there are important traditions in the Islamic world of representations of Mohammed. Therefore, the mere act of representation itself, while it is considered by many Muslims to be a taboo, is not even outside of the scope of the range of Muslim traditions, let alone conceivably by definition a form of Islamophobia.

As to the the Jyllands-Posten images (for those who can bear to look at them, and I strongly encourage you to do so, so that we all know exactly what we’re talking about, click here [I don’t endorse anything at all about that page, its just a readily available archive of the 12 images in question]).

Some are plainly Islamophobic or anti-Arab by any reasonable standards. One features Mohammed with a halo that forms a pair of diabolical horns, clearly suggesting a link between Islam and demonic forces. Another is an image of Mohammed wearing a turban that that is also a bomb with a lit fuse, creating a generalized connection between Islam as a religion and terrorism that is a hallmark of almost all forms of contemporary Islamophobic discourse.

Most patently offensive of all, one cartoon depicts Mohammed as a stereotypical Arab male holding a gigantic dagger with two fully veiled women standing behind him peering out from their eye holes. A black strip of similar size covers his own eyes, creating an ironic symmetry between three figures. This cartoon combines many of the most damaging stereotypes in the Islamophobic canon. First, the caricature is less of Mohammed himself then it is a generalized racist portrayal of a generic “Arab male” with his requisite angry expression, violent countenance, beard, turban and dagger. Moreover, he is blinded by his own innate sexism and rage. It is an image that stigmatizes entire ethnic and religious groupings, and not a historical figure as such. Second, it reproduces the most negative stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women, featuring them as fully veiled, silent, in the background, and implicitly subject to polygamy. This image, taken overall, says virtually nothing about Mohammed as a figure, but rather is a fairly standard reproduction of the crudest forms of anti-Arab and Islamophobic caricature that can only have the effect of reflecting negatively upon large groups of living people.

Other images in the group are borderline, in which a case could be made that they have crossed some line, but are also plausibly defensible. The best example of this among the cartoons is an image in which an idealized, and rather benign, version of “the Prophet” is greeting a long line of suicide bombers arriving at the clouds of heaven with the disappointing news that, “stop, stop, we ran out of virgins.” The case could be made that this image links Islam and terrorism in an unfair manner, and many people have taken it that way.

However, the case could also be made that this is not in fact a satire against Mohammed or Islam in general (that is to say, mainstream Islam) – which in itself would not necessarily be Islamophobic – but rather a satire of the belief by some extremists that this kind of heavenly reward awaits those who would sacrifice themselves in some kind of misguided holy war. This obviously would not be about mainstream Islam, which makes no such claim, but rather the perceptions of extremists. The “joke,” such as it is, seems to be mostly about the large number of individuals, at the time of its publication fully on display during the Iraq conflict, who were willing to become suicide bombers (for the most part killing other Arabs and Muslims) for the most misguided reasons. In other words, it is entirely possible to read the message of this cartoon as, “suicide bombers, whatever they think they are pursuing, are certainly going to be disappointed."

Reader response is particularly crucial in the effect that this cartoon is likely to have on its audience: some may take it as reinforcing unfair negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in general, while some may understand it as lampooning an extremist fringe that is by all means fair game on these grounds. In the case of borderline speech, the default certainly ought to be sympathetic, and the burden of proof has to be on claims of Islamophobia. In order to be truly damaging, and hence truly objectionable, phobic speech cannot be multivalent, ambiguous or subtle, and objections ought to be reserved for what is obviously outrageous.

Some other images printed in the newspaper do not seem to be offensive in any meaningful sense. One of these simply shows a bearded man, presumably Mohammed, in what is presumably meant to be 7th-century Arabian garb, leading a donkey bearing goods through a desert landscape. Other than the observations that Mohammed was a man, and a man of his time, (neither of which any Muslims would disagree with) or the simple act of representing him, there does not seem to be any other clear message in this cartoon. Another shows an image of a bearded man with a turban with a crescent moon forming one side of his jaw and a star forming one of his eyes; a conflation of an image of Mohammed with the traditional “crescent and star” image often adopted by Muslim institutions. It is difficult to see any serious problem with that, silly and pointless though it plainly is.

Perhaps the most interesting image of them all shows a young, vaguely Middle Eastern looking man (without beard or turban) wearing jeans and a soccer jersey pointing at a blackboard, with the Danish words “Mohammed the Schoolboy, 7A” written next to the figure. The cartoonist, Lars Refn, appears to have played a double-joke on the newspaper, as the words written on the blackboard in Farsi have been widely translated to read “Jyllands-Posten journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.” In other words, Refn seems to have been using the opportunity to mock the intentions of the newspaper while at the same time participating in its page caricaturing Mohammed. The joke in his cartoon, if any, is plainly at the expense of Jyllands-Posten, and not anyone else.

As this brief review of some of the different elements in the usually casually lumped-together “Danish Mohammed cartoons” demonstrates, it is not only possible, but necessary to carefully consider the specific elements of any instance of speech to determine whether or not it has Islamophobic characteristics – even if some of its elements, or, in the case of representations of Mohammed, its very existence – makes some Muslims uncomfortable. Moreover, perhaps the most Islamophobic, or at least prejudiced and deeply damaging, aspect of the whole “Danish cartoons” controversy was the assumption, common on both or many sides of the issue, that the rioters who violently objected to the publication of the cartoons somehow spoke for “the Muslims” of the world or were expressing some kind of majority sentiment.

Another important example of what might make some Muslims uncomfortable but which cannot be considered in any way Islamophobic is scholarship that examines early Islamic texts with a critical eye towards developing secular knowledge about the codification of the Quran, Hadith, etc., even when proven to be erroneous. Books and articles critiquing some doctrines that really are believed in by many Muslims regarding, for example, the status of women in society, or various indefensible practices in some Muslim societies, are not, in most cases, Islamophobic. All of these are legitimate, respectable commentary, and the best way to engage them is to subject them to serious scrutiny and nuanced debate.

It ought to be entirely possible, even though the task is subjective and value-laden, to generally distinguish between expressions designed to investigate, study and challenge, or even lampoon, Islam and the attitudes and behavior of Muslims one the one hand, and those that egregiously seek to denigrate them in order to promote fear and hatred on the other. Similar judgments are made all the time about commentary and public interventions regarding other racial, ethnic, sexual and religious minorities. Of course there will always be differences of opinion, but more often than not agreement and a consensus position among those of good will who are committed to both tolerance and free speech can be found. It is not that difficult, once the distinction is accepted on all sides, to distinguish between speech that is intended or inevitably will have the effect of being hateful and malevolent versus speech that is within the bounds of respectable discourse, even if it is offensive to some.

In holding people to account for Islamophobia, one cannot imply that others must always be nice or speak well of to Islam and the Muslims. It cannot mean that some or even many people should never be disturbed or offended by speech, or that speech cannot be provocative and challenging. Those who would challenge Islamophobia, cannot come across as calling for the de facto censorship of speech some find disturbing or offensive. In the United States, a censorious position is, and should be, the losing position. In addition, recent experiences with speech codes and other forms of censorship suggest that any restrictions on free speech will be enforced first on the powerless and marginal and not on dominant forms of discourse emerging from the mainstream even if they are reckless, irresponsible and indefensible. Efforts by some feminists to restrict certain forms of pornography in recent decades in the United States and Canada illustrate both points decisively.

Obviously, in a free society and in light of the first amendment, there will be forms of speech that many Muslim-Americans don’t like that will have to be tolerated and cannot automatically or accurately be called “Islamophobic” if the term is to have any effective political meaning in our society. There will be blasphemy, satire, apostasy, challenges to the tenets of the faith or aspects of collective or individual Muslim behavior from commentators, politicians, scholars, adherents of other religions, secularists and others. Unless these cross some narrowly defined red lines, such speech should be challenged and rebutted by those who disagree with or disapprove of it, but not be denounced as bigoted or stigmatized as incompatible with basic standards of decency in public discourse.

The recent death of Irving Kristol prompted me to go back and read a probably inordinate pile of of material produced by the so-called New York intellectuals, including several of them who later became the original neoconservatives. Tracking the transformation over four or five decades of extremely intelligent people from the far left to the center and then, in some cases, to the extreme right, is extremely interesting, and I have to say engaging and entertaining, although not, it should be quickly added, in the least bit convincing. Most of these people seem to have confused being cutting edge with being extreme, meaning that they lurched from one madcap position to another like an 18-wheeler with four flats going at 85 down a lonely highway. I was just finishing Norman Podhoretz’s hilariously self-serving and disingenuous memoir "Breaking Ranks," which is a chronicle of his abandonment of all his previous principles for both ideological and pecuniary reasons, when what should arrive in the mail but the new book attacking the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), "Muslim Mafia." I was dragged therefore from one end of the right-wing spectrum — the insufferable but unquestionably brilliant New York intellectuals who became neoconservatives — to the militantly stupid and breathless hysterics of the Glenn Beck-paranoid right.

Holding the book gingerly between thumb and forefinger with one hand, and my nose with the other (turning the pages proved slightly awkward under the circumstances, and elbows aren’t well designed for this process — trust me) I made my way wearily but quickly (there is no other way to read this thing) through its turgid, overwrought and wretched prose. The bottom line is that for all of its self-congratulatory hyperbole, after months of ad hoc spying on CAIR, taking every piece of information it could gather in the worst possible light and apparently stealing a small mountain of documents (none of this probably illegal, mind you) the authors have come up with absolutely nothing new or interesting. I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a more prodigious waste of time, not so much for the reader who can traverse its pages in an hour or two without missing an all too predictable beat, but more for the people who actually put it together. Their ballyhooed "infiltration" of what they, with typical subtlety, call "the belly of the beast" resulted in absolutely nothing new for a well-informed reader to learn.

It’s not that CAIR doesn’t have problems. Anyone who follows the Washington scene will know that the government has been in fact refusing to deal with it long before the formal break in contacts that was announced to a congressional group about a year ago, and that it has been many years since most NGOs (the ACLU and some other Muslim groups being notable exceptions) would have much to do with it either. The authors of "Muslim Mafia" are entirely wrong, of course, when they suggest that the emergence of the Obama administration is heralding a reversal of this relationship; in fact, since the administration is trying to retool their relationship with the entire Muslim world and secure peace in the Middle East, the stakes for all Arab and Muslim Americans are actually higher than they were under the Bush administration, and subsequently the scrutiny even greater and existing problems intensified rather than ameliorated.

There is no need for me here to regurgitate what issues plague that organization. They know what they are, and so does anyone else who follows these issues even casually. And, of course, every single one of them is given enormous shrift in "Muslim Mafia," as if the authors had somehow discovered any of this themselves or were telling any of us who pay attention anything we haven’t heard before.

But really, it is extraordinary that six months of "infiltration and undercover work" in the "belly of the beast" involving the theft of a small mountain of documents would have uncovered precisely… nothing! Or at least nothing that wasn’t already common knowledge among those who follow these things to any extent whatsoever. It’s extremely interesting in that what this really suggests, in fact, is that there isn’t anything left to be discovered. If all of this effort produced nothing but a regurgitation of well-known complaints and issues regarding CAIR, whether any of them are well-founded or not, what this strongly implies that there isn’t anything more to be learned. Not only did these people waste their time, apparently they have demonstrated that the long-standing concerns about the organization, and especially its prehistory, that have been circulating in Washington for many, many years is about all there is to it.

This doesn’t exactly help CAIR resolve those issues, and until they do they really won’t be able to serve the Muslim American community in the manner the community desperately requires, but it does suggest that there isn’t anything deeper at work, which in a roundabout and counterintuitive manner may actually help them in the long run. As I have said many times in the past, if one must have enemies, is best that they be as unhinged as possible. In this case, CAIR has been blessed with the wackiest, most unhinged accusers imaginable with unimpeachably bigoted and overtly malicious motivations. In the end, CAIR is going to have to deal with the real problems and the genuine historical and political baggage that is, as a practical matter, presently crippling the organization’s efforts to represent the Muslim American community. But as long as those limited, specific and serious issues remain buried under a mountain of breathless, feverish nonsense, outlandish hyperbole and outrageous exaggeration and even fabrications from dyed in the wool bigots and Islamomophobes, the more they can brush all concerns aside as nothing but a shameless attack on an entire community.

This book purports to be dealing in facts, and the real, verifiable facts in it are either well-established long ago or completely banal and almost entirely without interest. The recent flap by a tiny group of brain-dead Republican members of Congress about CAIR’s "nefarious plot" to secure congressional internships for young Muslims is a perfect case in point. If the authors of this book and their friends wanted to make themselves look completely ridiculous, they succeeded admirably. They variously complain about American Muslims voting, lobbying, serving in government, volunteering to assist law enforcement, and lots of other all-American activities which are not only the right but also the responsibility of all Americans. Again, whatever its intentions, in certain aspects, and largely because of the obvious paranoia and hysteria behind it, it discredits itself so thoroughly that it actually does CAIR a favor. I’m not saying the organization wouldn’t have been better off if this ridiculous book hadn’t been written, but I am saying that the whole thing is so idiotic that I’m not sure which of the two parties — the authors or the targets — is more badly damaged by it.

And what of the authors? Well, CAIR and many others have gone into some detail on the extreme Islamophobia of the co-author of the book and father of the "infiltrator," the hitherto unheard of David Gaubatz and his affiliated group SANE which wants to actually outlaw Islam in the United States and is about as openly racist and prejudiced as any collection of yahoos one is likely to come across in any part of our fruited plains. So, no need to retrace those accusations here.

They and others have also delved into the unsavory mindset of the book’s publisher, WorldNetDaily.com, run by the Arab-American evangelical charlatan Joe Farah, whose repulsive website and other publications are chockablock with "end-times" balderdash and is, among so many other outlandish things, the headquarters of the "birther" movement which bizarrely insists that Pres. Obama was not born in Hawaii but somewhere else, and is therefore not qualified to be president! Obviously, the pedigree of this tome couldn’t be less edifying or reassuring. It is what it at first glance appears to be: the product of a gang of bigots and hysterics, which isn’t to say that nothing in the book is true, but rather is to say that you can’t take their word for anything in it because they are wackos and fruitcakes. And they didn’t actually discover anything new, so the whole thing was a colossal waste of time.

One is, unfortunately, much better acquainted with the other co-author, Paul Sperry, a former staffer at one of the most shamelessly racist publications in the United States, the unrelentingly bigoted, mean-spirited and oddball rag, Investors Business Daily. He is best known for his earlier work, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington" (Nelson Current, 2005). Of all of the Islamophobes outside of the blogosphere, I don’t think there’s any question that Sperry is the most reckless, mean-spirited and McCarthyite of the bunch. "Infiltration" accuses every single Arab and Muslim American who had any prominence in Washington at the time, including stalwart Republican Bush supporters in the administration, of being Islamists, "Islamofascists," and, as the title says, infiltrators. The man’s work is nothing less than a regurgitation of the most hysterical anti-Semitism, redirected towards Arabs and Muslim, seeing disloyalty and treason as an inherent characteristic of anyone from the Arab or Muslim communities.

Sperry claimed at the time to be writing a book that is not hostile to Islam and that he likes and respects many Muslims, however his unbridled hostility to the faith is fully evident from his reply to the question he poses, “is Islam really one of the fastest-growing religions in America?” his answer being: “afraid so.” In "Muslim Mafia," he seems to reverse this position in a strange and incoherent manner (consistent with his entire approach to reality). Early on in his first book, he warns against "those trying to mainstream Islam" in the United States. Sperry even objects to a efforts to protect basic religious accommodation for Muslims in workplaces and the like as provided by the Constitution, a position that makes him stand out even among the most virulent Islamophobes in his hostility to Muslim Americans as such, an opposition continued in "Muslim Mafia." He describes all requests for constitutionally-mandated religious accommodation as unreasonable “demands” from a “cultural fifth column.” Drawing largely upon inference, guilt by association and suggestive implications typically free of evidence, Sperry sought to indict virtually every Muslim American individual and organization active in Washington as “Muslim subversives and fellow travelers.”

Essentially Sperry offers a conspiracy theory that holds that:
Islamists with covert agendas have permeated every layer of American society — from classrooms and military bases to city councils and Congress and… they are slowly and assiduously manipulating an open an ever-tolerant society to try to transform the U.S. into an Islamic state.

Sperry relies not only on insinuation and guilt by association, but on classic Islamophobia of such as “the Muslim art of telling ‘white lies’ to defend the faith and further the cause of Allah, as instructed in the hadiths.” Sperry accuses “orthodox Muslims” of not considering Jewish and Christian civilians to be “necessarily innocent,” a calumny very similar to the notion that Muslims believe non-Muslims can be killed at random. He claims that “many Muslim-American leaders” hide the fact that in their Friday sermons “more often than not [they] advocate violence against Jews, Christians and the West.” To be sure there are some extremist mosques, but the idea that there are “many Muslim-American leaders” preaching violence against the United States in their sermons is absurd. Sperry is also one of those who feels the need to interpret Islam in the most radical manner possible, accusing the mainstream of “sugarcoating” concepts such as jihad by emphasizing a nonviolent interpretation of the doctrine. He argues that the Quran “not only condones violence, but commands it.” There is some truth in this, of course, but it’s not any more applicable to the Quran than the Bible (thus far I have resisted the temptation to get into the details of violence, some of the genocidal, mandated in the Bible, but suffice it to say the Quran simply cannot compete on that score), or to the main holy books of any of the world’s major religions for that matter, all of which include passages that can and have been used to justify both the very best and the absolute worst in human behavior.

His list of the “top 10 myths of Islam” reads like a primer of Islamophobic defamation:
• Islam is a religion of peace
• Jihad means inner struggle against sin
• Terrorism does not come from Islam 
• Allah is the same God of the Bible
• The Quran teaches tolerance of other religions
• Osama bin Ladin has hijacked Islam and distorts its teachings
• Islam is compatible with Western-style democracy 
• Those virgins? They are really raisins 
• Poverty and oppression motivate the terrorists
• The Quran does not encourage self-immolation

Obviously, since he believes that Islam is not and cannot in any legitimate form be peaceful, promotes terrorism, is intolerant and incompatible with democracy, that bin Laden is, as he puts it, “a model Muslim,” and that Muslims are authorized by their religion to systematically lie to all nonbelievers, Sperry is terrified at the spectacle of any Muslim American whomsoever attaining any position of trust or influence in Washington. Even professions of unqualified support for Israel, which might mollify most pro-Israel and even some evangelical Islamophobes, would apparently not be sufficient for Paul Sperry. Given the model he constructs, there can be no such thing as a loyal or trustworthy Muslim American of any stripe, and his shamelessly bigoted arguments all proceed on the basis of that assumption.

Sperry frets in his 2005 book about the prospect of any Muslim-American being elected to Congress, anticipating perhaps the election of Keith Ellison and Andre Carson:
Muslim members would have unfettered access to top secret US intelligence without undergoing any FBI background checks. Unlike their staffs and other federal employees, members of Congress are elected and therefore exempt from such investigations (although they must file financial disclosure papers). And unlike the president, they would not have to be US-born. Hypothetically, a young Jihadist from Saudi Arabia who has been a citizen of the US to seven years could get elected to the house, get appointed to a committee responsible for homeland security, and feed critical counterterrorism intelligence back to Al Qaida. It is not far-fetched.

Not only is it far-fetched, it’s downright preposterous, and indeed laughable. But this attitude is inevitable given Sperry’s uncompromising suspicion of anyone and everyone with any sort of Muslim connection whatsoever. In fact, Sperry is not only suspicious but condemnatory of every Muslim in America, and approvingly quotes a former FBI agent as saying that “virtually every Muslim in America supports terrorism in one way or another."

Sperry not only denounced all prominent Washington Muslims, but also all non-Muslim Republicans and Democrats who have maintained a decent working relationship with the Muslim community. For example, along with upbraiding numerous members of Congress, Sperry viciously attacked famed conservative activist Grover Norquist for supposedly engaging in a “political jihad for Muslim rights.” In a particularly revolting and underhanded passage, observes that Norquist’s marriage to a Palestinian American woman, “gives literal meaning to the notion that Norquist is in bed with Islamists.” How clever. Typically, Sperry provides not a shred of evidence about her beliefs or activities (I can vouch for the fact that she is both a fine woman and a loyal American), but in Islamophobic discourse anyone from the Muslim American community can be simply labeled an “Islamist” no matter what they actually think or do (as I too have been, on countless occasions). Sperry’s agenda is all-too-obvious, and it embodies the fundamental essence of contemporary American Islamophobia: to keep any and all Muslim-Americans as far away from political empowerment, engagement, and serious contribution to the American political scene as possible.

I was delighted to see my friend Suhail Khan, a conservative Republican and former Bush administration official, who was the subject of vicious Islamophobic attacks while in office, including in Sperry’s first revolting book and again in his new hate speech manifesto, appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC the other day calmly and with typical dignity explaining that these people are nothing but a bunch of racists and religious bigots and determined to attack the Muslim American community without restraint or the least regard for the truth.

"Muslim Mafia" is an embarrassment to its authors, its publishers and all who have praised it. It will be one of the many examples of contemporary Islamophobia that will be remembered with shame and national discomfort when our latest fad of prejudice and bigotry (this time aimed at Muslim Americans) becomes, as previous eruptions of irrational hatred against minority communities have, seen as simply another chapter in the story of our country overcoming the irrational fear and prejudice against a new immigrant community striving to find its place in the mainstream of American society and culture.

It is extremely good news that there has been an out-of-court settlement essentially vindicating the claims of discrimination by the six imams who, in a particularly notorious incident, were removed from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis on Nov. 20, 2006 following overwrought complaints by fellow passengers. Even more egregiously, after being detained, interrogated and cleared by the authorities, the next morning they were denied passage on another US Airways flight and had to go to another airline entirely to complete their travel. According to the terms of the settlement, the Minneapolis Metro Airport Commission, US Airways, and perhaps also the FBI, will be paying the clerics an undisclosed sum in compensation for this notorious incident of discrimination.

This result was almost inevitable once federal Judge Ann Montgomery in July dismissed a summary judgment motion from the Airport Commission and allowed the suit to go forward. As soon as the defendants couldn’t argue that their discriminatory acts were immune from legal challenge, a settlement was virtually assured.

This case is noteworthy beyond its specific details because it’s an excellent example of a particularly neurotic form of post-9/11 Islamophobia, which can be described as is the affect of free-floating paranoia attaching itself randomly to people perceived to be Arabs and/or Muslims in various different situations, prompting suspicions that remain active even when the situation is entirely resolved by the authorities. This paranoia then translates into demands for profiling. But, precisely because it is so amorphous, subjective and based upon almost Rashomon-like discrepancies in perception, it is a particularly slippery social and cultural manifestation of Islamophobia to define, track, analyze and, except in the form of specific individual lawsuits and complaints, combat in a more generalized manner that exposes the underlying patterns and cultural attitudes that inform such cases.

In the months immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, precisely this kind of free-floating paranoia led to the removal of over 80 people – many of them with no connection to the Middle East or the Arab world but all of them with dark complexions – from airline flights based on the suspicions of fellow passengers or crew members until the FAA itself cracked down on  the practice by suing airlines that engaged in it. Yet comparable incidents continue to persist to this day, although at a much lesser rate than they did in the immediate post-9/11 period.

The Minneapolis "flying imams" case is probably the most notorious instance of this kind of free-floating paranoia resulting in discriminatory abuses. The facts of the case were hotly disputed. The imams claim they were merely praying in the waiting lounge before boarding the flight. Their accusers, mainly unnamed fellow passengers, accused them of praising Saddam Hussein, criticizing the United States, chanting Allah loudly in Arabic, exchanging seats for no reason, requesting seatbelt extenders (supposedly for no reason and without using them, the implication being that they were potential weapons) and, most implausibly, of mimicking the “9/11 hijackers’ seating patterns" (whatever that means).

Certainly, it is possible that a mix-up and misunderstanding occurred in that boarding area, and that passengers, airline personnel and the authorities misunderstood or overreacted to the men’s behavior, some of which could possibly have been unintentionally unnerving to skittish non-Muslim-Americans in the post-9/11 environment. It is further conceivable that all or at least most of the parties involved were acting in good faith and were caught up in a concatenation of circumstances in which events took on a life of their own and spiraled out of anyone’s control. This view is consistent with the government’s assertion that, while the airline and ground crews acted properly in removing the men from the aircraft and alerting the authorities, the subsequent investigation revealed no evidence to sustain any suspicions against the imams.

However, Judge Montgomery, following a thorough examination of the evidence, found all of these allegations to be baseless and ruled that that:
Unquestionably the events of 9/11 changed the calculus in the balance American society chooses to make, especially in airport settings, between liberty and security. Ultimately, the proper balance will be achieved, in large part, because we have the most capable and diligent law enforcement and intelligence communities in the world. But when a law enforcement officer exercises the power of the Sovereign over its citizens, she or he has a responsibility to operate within the bounds of the Constitution and cannot raise the specter of 9/11 as an absolute exception to that responsibility. On the record before the Court, no reasonable officer could have believed they could arrest Plaintiffs without probable cause. The right that was violated is clearly established, and, thus, the MAC Defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity. Accordingly, summary judgment is denied on the unreasonable seizure claim.

In other words, in hindsight it’s obvious that not only the passengers but also the authorities plainly overreacted, and as a consequence the imams were unreasonably and unlawfully discriminated against (hence the settlement following almost immediately upon this ruling).

The broader significance of this case comes from the passionate insistence of Islamophobic and pro-profiling commentators that, although there is no evidence for this whatsoever, there was nonetheless something sinister about the imams’ behavior, expressing precisely this trope of free-floating paranoia in contemporary American Islamophobia.

Author and blogger Richard Miniter, after speaking with one of the spooked passengers, concluded, “So what are the imams really up to? Something more than praying it seems.” What exactly that might have been, he was unable to say.

Profiling queen and ardent proponent of systematic discrimination Michelle Malkin described the event as an example of laudable “reality-based preemptive and precautionary measures to prevent the next 9/11,” as opposed to what it plainly was: an unfortunate mix-up in which some passengers were unnecessarily detained and interrogated, and ultimately discriminated against, by the cops and the airline, and other passengers frightened and unnerved for what proved to be no good reason.

Radio talk show host Mark Williams produced what may have been the most extreme reaction to the imbroglio, saying on Fox News Channel’s Hannity and Colmes program that the imams “are one of two things. … They are either terrorists or they’re trying to cash in on the politically correct lottery,” and that “these people want us dead. … I don’t want this guy as my neighbor.” When asked if an Arabic speaking passenger should be thrown off the plane in midair, Williams’ response was: “Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Those who continued to condemn the imams as “a threat” in spite of their clearance by a thorough and even somewhat abusive investigation in which they were handcuffed and interrogated for hours, as well as denied service on subsequent flights, latched onto the fact that their discrimination lawsuit initially included as defendants certain unnamed “John Does” accused of filing false reports. This was interpreted by many uncharitable, if not simply Islamophobic, observers as a threat to security at airports because it would supposedly discourage people from reporting their concerns to the authorities at airports. This perspective does not stop to consider how falsely accused individuals can protect themselves without availing themselves of the usual protections against false accusation in civil court.

This criticism reached well beyond the usual sources of overt Islamophobia. USA Today, for example, editorialized:
Now the reward for being vigilant apparently includes being dragged into a lawsuit and accused of bigotry. The wry adage about how no good deed goes unpunished seems apt, though not so funny… the imams want to know the names of an elderly couple who turned around “to watch” and then made cellphone calls, presumably to authorities, as the men prayed.

The newspaper argued that, “Suing passengers who merely report such behavior threatens everyone’s ability to travel securely,” without ever stopping to ask whether Muslims praying at a terminal constitutes legitimate grounds for reporting “suspicious behavior.” The fact that all the suspicions proved to be unfounded does not seem to enter into USA Today‘s calculations. I fear that we will wait in vain for the newspaper to issue any kind of correction to its earlier unfounded accusations.

James Zumwalt opined in the New York Times that,
Some security experts suggest the imams’ conduct may have been intended to identify aviation security weaknesses. Their John Doe lawsuit tends to support this theory, as such a complaint can also serve to manipulate our legal system to silence those who might otherwise report suspicious activity.

Again, Zumwalt does not consider how innocent travelers could or should protect themselves otherwise from abuses by those who have filed false reports with the authorities. The strong presumption here is the guilt and not innocence of the imams, even in the face of no evidence against them at all, and an unwillingness to allow them to pursue the defense of their rights in a court of law. If their claims had no merit, presumably they could not expect to prevail, although in the event, of course, they now have. Again, I very much doubt that Zumwalt will be honorable enough to issue a correction or retraction given the Court’s ruling and the subsequent vindicating settlement.

These arguments joined those of the notorious Paul Sperry (more about him in an upcoming posting on the Ibishblog very soon), who in 2005 was already complaining about lawsuits filed by people who had been unlawfully removed from airplanes, as noted above. In 2005, Sperry denounced the government’s refusal to engage in crude forms of racial and religious profiling, writing
[this] means that terrorists may ultimately win. And they are getting a lot of help from Muslim activists, who are encouraging Muslim passengers to file discrimination complaints against the government and airlines.

Sadly, the outcome of the lawsuit will almost certainly prove largely irrelevant to its cultural and political impact, and the rhetoric with which it was greeted by numerous commentators. The "John Doe" aspects of the case were dropped following federal legislation protecting those who complain about "suspicious behavior" in public places such as airports, but the case against the authorities and the airline remained valid and ultimately has triumphed. if they had any sense of honor whatsoever, those who had persisted in raising suspicions against the clerics would have the decency to now acknowledge their mistakes, but I’m not holding my breath and neither should you.

Most commentary on the incident, thus far at any rate and there is little reason to believe that the vindication of the imams claims of unlawful discrimination are likely to change this, held that there was either a certainty or at least a reasonable possibility that they were "up to something" nefarious.

The queen of the genre of free-floating air travel paranoia, Annie Jacobsen (whose prodigious paranoia I will explain in more detail in a future Ibishblog posting for those not familiar with this relatively obscure and yet viciously insidious hysteric) insisted that in spite of the lack of evidence of any threat or malevolent intent from the imams: “The imams’ lawsuit is a decoy. Its aim is to locate security holes in the castle walls,” she confidently asserts. In this version of Islamophobia, these imams to must be, if not fully-fledged terrorists, as she writes, then at least “spies” for terrorist organizations seeking to uncover the weak spots in the American transportation security system.

The saddest part of the tale is that now that court proceedings have proven that all suspicions were unfounded and that the clerics were subject to an egregious case of unlawful discrimination and unbridled paranoid overreaction, it is extremely unlikely that the overall record will be corrected or that the public will be informed by the same sources that urged them to be suspicious that these suspicions have been demonstrated to have been entirely unfounded

In the world of free-floating Islamophobic paranoia, every Muslim ever suspected of being a threat, no matter how arbitrary the suspicion was and how thorough the exculpation proves, nonetheless always was and must forever remain a potential “terrorist threat.”

The other day I was talking with Jim Zogby (a fairly unusual occurrence in and of itself), and he said of differing views, “let 1,000 flowers bloom.” “And 100 schools of thought contend,” I immediately replied (the actual phrase being, “bai hua qífàng, bai jia zhengmíng,” generally translated, “let 100 flowers bloom, and 100 schools of thought contend”). I then reminded him that this invitation in 1956 by Chairman Mao to the Chinese intelligentsia to criticize government policy and propose their own alternatives was, in effect, a trap designed to flush out any potential internal dissidents and that when the program was abruptly canceled in 1957, probably about half a million newly identified “rightists” were fired, imprisoned, tortured or killed. He dryly thanked me for “making his day” and ruining his favorite quotation. I suppose I could have ruined it even further by pointing out that among some Maoists, the image of 100 blooming flowers has served as a grim “black humor” metaphor of the crimson glory of mass executions as the government’s steel axe unceremoniously collides with the tender necks of hundreds of supposed potential dissidents. I decided I had already done enough damage to his mood and didn’t rub it in, but the whole exchange did get me thinking about the state of debate in both the Arab world and, more especially, the Arab-American community.

Grand generalizations are always a dangerous thing, and it’s almost unavoidable to be both reductive and simplistic in talking about attitudes towards a subject as vast as the concept of debate and engagement with ideas among a group as huge and diverse as the Arab-Americans, let alone the Arabs. But I do think there is a very clear pattern in our community here in the United States and in the Middle East as well that suggests that, at this point in our political and cultural history at least, and for whatever reason, the Arabs generally really do have a problem with debate. By debate I mean recognizing that there are multiple respectable, reasonable perspectives that intelligent, well-meaning people can adhere to that should be seriously considered and which should engage with each other in a public exercise designed to elucidate what these varying perspectives have to offer to illuminate our very challenging circumstances on multiple fronts. I mean taking ideas seriously and dealing with them as ideas. I do not know how this complex phenomenon plays out in other societies and among other peoples, and I’m not trying to stigmatize the Arabs or the Arab-Americans as somehow particularly resistant to critical thinking and the interplay of contending ideas, but it seems to me that this is a pronounced feature of our political culture and a debilitating liability of the first order of importance.

This process of debate is not, let me hasten to add, the same thing as factional disputes. Of those, we have plenty. What passes for debate, generally speaking, in the Arab world — for example on Al Jazeera and other Arabic language news channels — are mostly contradictory assertions, competing accusations, and more often than not shouting matches between people who refuse to consider the arguments of the other side on their own merits and instead either denounce the character and motivation of their opponents or appeal strictly to some kind of totally irrational and emotional response in the listeners based on religious or nationalist sentiment. In other words, we may think we have debates, but generally speaking we simply don’t. We have disputes and arguments and shouting matches. In few of these cases are large, meaningful ideas at the heart of the questions or is there really a mutually respectful exchange of views based on ideas. Instead, these televised disputes, not to glorify them with the lofty title of debate, generally simply oppose contending political positions, and not really ideas as such.

I think it’s fair to say that there is a paucity of critical thinking at work here, and a palpable discomfort with the idea that sincere, reasonable and intelligent people can come to very differing conclusions, many if not all of which have some merit, on the same problem and that the best way to deal with this diversity of perspective is to have a discussion in which people actually listen to each other and engage with those ideas. I don’t think it’s particularly unfair to suggest that there is a real absence of this approach to political and cultural ideas among the Arabs at the present moment. The tendency is not to listen critically and to engage but rather to judge ideas based on their supposed provenance, which immediately leads to the pigeonholing of people based on supposed political factions, orientations and whatnot (very frequently erroneous assumptions).

On many subjects, such as Palestine, Iraq, and other issues that are assumed to have national importance to the Arabs as a whole, there is also a hegemonic Narrative which includes not only concepts but also rhetorical formulae, the deviation from which tends to mark both the speaker and the idea as highly suspect if not automatically condemned. The hegemony of The Narrative, and the automatic and emotional resistance to deviations from it, is probably the strongest single factor in the relative absence of meaningful public debate and critical dialogue among the Arabs today, but I think the process extends to almost the entire spectrum of political, cultural, social and religious issues.

The box we are all living and thinking in is unbearably small, and yet the general tendency in our community here in the United States and in much of Middle Eastern societies is to feel more uncomfortable outside of the box than to remain trapped in the narrow but reassuringly familiar confines of this self-imposed dungeon of little ease. It’s even come to the point where people are happy to assert that in the United States, at least, the community is in fact, “not divided” in any meaningful sense on the most pressing issues it faces. Many on the Arab-American far-right and ultra-left deny that there is any split in the community at all. They claim, as radicals invariably will, to speak on behalf of virtually everyone and to suggest that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is simply a bad person motivated by greed, malice or perhaps even mental illness. Others who acknowledge that differences do exist bemoan the fact that there are such deep divisions in our community, and seem to think that any hegemonic orthodoxy, no matter how dysfunctional or removed from fundamental realities it may be, is preferable to division and debate.

Arab-American organizations and political orientations tend to construct and enforce echo chambers in which only approved ideas are given space and attention. During my time at ADC, it was only with the greatest difficulty and overcoming considerable opposition that I was able to occasionally introduce dissenting viewpoints into the panels that occasionally fell under my control at our conventions. This gesture wasn’t generally welcomed (in fact it was almost always heavily criticized), and it certainly hasn’t been continued since I left. I don’t mean to single that organization out, since I think this attitude is absolutely typical and ADC not in the least unusual or egregious in this regard. It’s not that real debates never, ever happen among Arab-Americans, it’s just extremely rare, and thus far at any rate generally unwelcome.

The echo chambers have become even more deafening with the technological innovations in communication in last 20 years, as first e-mail lists and now the new social media, above all Facebook, have created self-selecting, mutually re-enforcing communities of like-minded individuals who bombard each other with “information” that reinforces the conventional wisdom at play and excludes or excoriates any alternative perspective. Thus small factions can even more readily convince themselves that they are representatives of not only vast groupings that in most cases probably don’t exist, but also even to be speaking for the Arab-Americans or the Arabs as a whole (I can hardly describe the relief I felt at joining an organization, ATFP, which purports to speak for no one but its Board of Directors and those who voluntarily choose to affiliate with it — I don’t know what getting out of jail feels like, but there might be some vague similarity). The number of people who purport to speak on behalf of the entirety or at least the overwhelming majority of the Arabs, generally without exhibiting the slightest indication of how preposterous they sound to everyone else, is simply extraordinary. And, of course, everyone who disagrees with them is instantly accused of having bad intentions or ulterior motives.

Governments and other political factions in the Middle East do pretty much the same thing, suggesting that any major deviation from their own point of view is confined to a perverse and tiny minority with highly suspect motivations and no significant public support. It seems to me divisions among the Arabs and the Arab-Americans are pretty clear-cut, and thinking about the problem of a rather glaring lack of real debate and engagement at the level of ideas (as opposed to dispute and mutual recrimination) requires examining the broadest outlines of those divisions.

The Arabs and Arab-Americans are actually split into at least four major factions. First are those who support the governments, or at least one government, out of personal or professional loyalties or convictions, with or without acknowledging in public or in private that these governments are all illiberal and oppressive to one degree or another (not to mention, in many cases, downright incompetent). Second are those on the far religious right who support the large, organized opposition groups, which in all Arab countries now essentially consist of Islamist factions of varying stripes, mainly Muslim Brotherhood and similar Sunni salafist organizations or Shiite Khomeinite factions.

The last two groups are those caught in the middle: the liberals, leftists and reformers. Those Arabs and Arab-Americans who are unabashed in seeing the deficiencies of the current governments and leaderships are themselves split into two opposing camps. First are those that Marwan Muasher has correctly called “the Arab Center,” who seek and promote reform, secularism, liberalism and democratization, but with a keen eye to the even greater dangers posed to these values by Islamist opposition groups than by the illiberal governments themselves. The second are those, mainly on the left and ultra-left who are making what I strongly consider to be the dreadful mistake of imagining that championing, to one extent or another, the Islamist opposition, usually under the rubric of “the resistance,” is the most useful path to a better future in the Middle East.

While the actual struggle for power in the Arab world is taking place between the first two groups — the governments and the Islamist oppositions — the political and intellectual debate that matters in my view, or at least that should matter because it is the arena in which real ideas are actually on the table, is between the second two groups: those reformers who recognize that the religious ultra-right is even more dangerous than the illiberal governments versus those who imagine that charging wildly to the extreme right is somehow going to shift the cultural and political climate in the Middle East towards the center. History, I would note again in passing as I have many times before, is replete with examples of what happens to liberals and centrists, and their agendas, who make the mistake of siding with extreme left-wing or right-wing revolutionaries, most recently illustrated by events surrounding the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s.

In the Arab world, Islamists and their left-wing supporters are promoting a reading of the political situation that characterizes the present Middle East as the scene of a contest between “the martyrs,” i.e. the Islamist revolutionaries, versus “the traitors,” i.e. the existing governments. This discourse has the great danger of channeling understandable and often justified Arab popular anger at certain events, especially wars, into a programmatic corollary of action holding that the necessary corrective for the present unacceptable state of affairs is for “the martyrs” to defeat “the traitors,” seize power and begin to improve the situation (presumably by implementing radical-right wing Islamic policies domestically and, somewhat less plausibly, aggressive confrontationalist policies internationally).

In the United States, among the Arab-Americans this division in perspective is mirrored by a similar dispute between those who believe that our collective interests and agenda can be best pursued through a sincere and dedicated engagement with the government and the political system versus those who hold that the American system is irredeemably corrupt and corrupting, and/or completely closed to the Arab-American perspective. Of course, much of this dispute takes place on emotional rather than intellectual terms, and is often reduced to expressions of outrage on one side or the other. The tendency, especially on the ultra-left to deride centrists as “sellouts,” “collaborators,” or “traitors,” is particularly outrageous as it goes to motivations rather than ideas.

It might be argued that I have done the same thing myself, but in fact I haven’t, even though I have been very critical of some of the people I disagree with. When for example I recently, and I agree rather harshly, described Joseph Massad as a “crackpot” I was not talking about his personality, his motivations or his lifestyle. I was talking about the quality of his ideas, which I consider, with a great deal of evidence on my side, to be frankly bizarre. I think that crackpot is a perfectly reasonable characterization of the preposterous notion he shares with Glenn Beck that President Obama is a racist. I am extremely happy to harshly critique what I consider to be dangerous and even ridiculous ideas, which is in fact the essence of an open, honest debate, but I do not question other people’s motivations or character, which is the antithesis of that same exchange of ideas. It is extremely dangerous to equate or confuse a harsh attack on what one considers bad ideas with an attack on motivations or character. The former is what a real, serious debate looks like (even though it’s not always pretty), while the latter forecloses it entirely.

In a recent interview with me, a radio host began to talk about proponents of the one-state agenda for Israel and the Palestinians, of which I am a leading critic, as participating in some sort of “industry,” designed to advance their careers or accumulate wealth or status. I immediately interrupted him to insist that there is, in fact, no such “industry,” and that getting involved in these arguments on either side is no way to become rich or acquire any really valuable status (although I suppose demagoguery must have its satisfactions). However, it is commonplace for one-state proponents and others to make accusatory statements about a “peace process industry,” in which proponents of ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state (which, as it happens, all polls and surveys demonstrate most Palestinians unquestionably want) are supposedly pursuing this agenda out of some kind of self-aggrandizing and avaricious pecuniary interest. Precisely this accusation was leveled by Arab-American ultra-leftists at no less than Mahmoud Darwish.

As a community, we desperately need to get over this phobia about divisions when there is, in fact, a great deal to be divided about, and many important issues that must be thrashed out, and about which no one has a monopoly of wisdom or a simple, self-evident answer. Ever since I started this blog I have been the recipient of a great deal of positive feedback, but I’ve also been bombarded with a smaller amount of extremely vitriolic criticism that almost never challenges the ideas I am discussing (although I do have a few very careful and penetrating readers who disagree with me thoroughly and have engaged respectfully, honestly and in the most helpful manner, and I value them enormously) and almost always engage in the most absurd ad hominem attacks questioning my motivations, my identity and my supposedly pecuniary interests in writing and arguing the positions that I have come to espouse. It must be very comforting to believe that one’s opponents take their positions simply in order to make money or for some other debased reason, but it’s obviously not true. No one has ever gotten rich off of engagement in the Arab American political scene, especially not by writing articles and maintaining blogs.

The fact that I published my last book in-house and provided it for free download on several websites I think plainly demonstrates the complete lack of interest in making a brass farthing out of the project, which I certainly won’t. I don’t believe for a second that any of the Arab-Americans on the extreme religious right or ultra-left with whom I disagree most frequently and vociferously are motivated by personal ambition or private greed either. I know many of them personally, in some cases exceptionally well, and I know them to be fundamentally honorable people who honestly believe what they’re saying and have come by their opinions honestly as well. We can’t have a debate if we don’t take each other’s ideas seriously and engage them no matter how harshly, instead simply assuming that people on the other side are all saying what they do because there is something wrong with their motivations or deeply deficient about their personalities.

The purpose of this blog from its outset was to engage in a critical conversation with my fellow Arab-Americans in order to broaden what has so far generally been, and unfortunately largely remains, an incredibly narrow discourse on the most important issues facing us as a community. We desperately need to have this debate in order to correct what have been manifestly ineffective approaches to politics and culture both in the Middle East and here in the United States. Obviously I don’t claim to have the answers, although I do have quite a bit of professional experience and some knowledge on which to base my views, but I do claim to have some new, or at least unorthodox, opinions and approaches on a number of crucial questions that are worth considering. The angry reaction from some quarters bespeaks a certain horror of debate, this feeling that there is an established Narrative that not only is, but must be, hegemonic and that deviation from this is a form of intolerable disloyalty bordering on the treasonous.

We have got to get over this widespread Arab and Arab American aversion to honestly held, sincere disagreements even about the most fundamental issues. The conventional wisdom among the Arab-Americans is that our biggest liability and the greatest obstacle to our political effectiveness both in the Middle East and in the United States is our supposed “disunity” (ironically, this disunity is often complained about by the people who, in the same breath, will assert that there are no fundamental divisions in the community on the most pressing issues, and that disunity is simply a function of personalities, parochial fiefdoms, and petty rivalries). When applied to the positions of the Arab states, which are certainly disunited, parochial and beset by rivalries, this has been and to some extent remains a perfectly valid criticism. But when it’s applied to civil society, especially among Arab-Americans in the United States, I think it is completely wrong. We suffer from the contrary debilitating symptom, which is the informal enforcement of a very rigid orthodoxy of attitudes and opinions, especially on the subject of Palestine, but also on a whole host of other issues, that essentially shuts down debate and stigmatizes critical thinking. Obviously, we’re just not used to this. But in our own interests, we’re going to have to learn.

Traditionally in our community, solidarity has been a one-way street flowing only from the political center towards the two extremes of the far-right and the ultra-left. Those days are over, and not a moment too soon. There are those who would argue that our community is “under siege” — which I consider to be a gross exaggeration, the serious ongoing post-9/11 problems notwithstanding (and I quite literally wrote the books on these problems) — and that we are therefore simply too vulnerable not to band together with as much solidarity as possible and to ignore our differences and disagreements or keep them discreetly reserved to very private occasions and forums. I think this is a dreadful mistake. It is a formula for paralysis, for groupthink, for cliché and for a lowest common denominator taqlid to always dominate our discourse, and for foreclosing the political ijtihad that will be required if we are to develop a richer, more sophisticated and ultimately more effective political culture.

I’d go so far as to call this aversion to freewheeling debate a phobic symptom, and I’d be the first to agree that the Arabs have come by this honestly given their political history and experiences over at least the past hundred years. But this is one instance in which enjoying our symptom is simply too costly, too debilitating, too disempowering. We are an exceptionally intelligent, well-educated and politically engaged community. We need to start acting like it. Welcoming and participating in a broad-ranging, critical, unabashed and robust internal set of debates on multiple issues must begin to become a regular feature of Arab-American civic and political life. If we continue to shun each other because of disagreements about fundamental ideas, or pretend that there aren’t any serious divisions in our community and in the Arab world, we are likely to continue to languish in the present unenviable situation in which we find ourselves both in the Middle East and here at home.