Adult Behaviour

Tarek Masoud's recent Slate article just got my goat.   It had the sensationalist title, Why Can't Muslims Remain Calm? (which was prudently changed to Is This the Clash of Civilizations?) that we now come to   expect from most news media, where the glibly used identity-marker of "Muslims" covers a staggering 1.6 billion people, and the desired (but sadly unattained) emotional state for said billions is an opiated state of "calm".  The subheading and most of the article speaks of how the United States is being an "adult" in this whole situation -- how they are responding to "Muslim Rage" and senseless mob violence with an even-toned and very reasonable call for afore-mentioned calm.  This elicited from me a sardonic smile, a mirthless chortle.

Michael Muhammad Knight hits the nail on the head when he writes of the kind of violence being exported from the United States abroad, in his response to recent events: "[The anti-Islam movie] is simply the playground bully calling your mother a slut after already breaking your jaw, and then wondering why you can’t take a joke."But on the face of it, the United States response does seem to be a very grown-up one -- sensible press releases and press conferences that speak of sorrow at loss, condemnation of a "reprehensible" video, defense of free speech -- the very epitome of good sense...on the face of it.

Here's the thing to not lose sight of, though.  The United States is a two-headed beast -- both the good cop and the bad cop. Official press-releases and statements from the United States are all markedly elegant and restrained, not allowing for more than a creased brow and a sombre tone.  And yet, this creature coexists with a United States that routinely kills civilians through drone attacks (read as "collateral damage"), places its own citizens on "kill-lists", indefinitely detains people whose only crime is being born in the wrong country and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and props up oppressive regimes all over the world.  

The violence we're seeing in response to the video, and the deaths that have resulted are tragic and horrifying.  That is a given.  But to say that "the United States is the only one willing to act like an adult" in all this is tantamount to commenting on the restraint of Don Corleone and the elegant cut of his suit, while paying no heed to the bloody horse-head under the sheets. 

Men in suits

A couple of weeks ago I watched (with a smirk, I'll admit) CNN's Wolf Blitzer reveal to his presumedly shocked audience that Qaddafi's youngest sons had been interning with a corporation in the United States till very recently.  Blitzer, in his characteristically sleep-inducing cadence, informed us that Khamis Qaddafi had been a high-level intern with AECOM, an engineering firm.  The central idea that was being sold as a shocking revelation was that a man associated with such brutality (Khamis Qaddafi heads the feared Khamis Brigade, an elite unit of the Libyan armed forces) had till recently been hobnobbing with the corporate elite in the United States.
Though I found this disbelief to be utterly bizarre, I was glad this story was receiving some reportage.  For a while now, folks in the United States have been given to believe that the bad-guys, the much talked-about "enemies of freedom", are men in flowing robes, head scarves or turbans, sporting decidedly un-fashionable beards; men who think up their diabolical plans in desert caves, and execute them with the words "Allah hu akbar" [God is great]!  All of this played quite well into the 'us-vs.-them' narrative of Euro-American governments, in which the 'us' were the freedom-loving people of the West, and the 'them' were the afore-mentioned troglodytes.
But since January, the face of "evil" has been dramatically altered in current mainstream reportage.  And I dearly hope that those in America watching the recent events of the Middle East have taken note of this.  It started quietly enough with President Ben Ali of Tunisia being ousted; but by all accounts, Ben Ali was the mildest of the lot and left without too much fuss.  Egypt came next, and with Hosni Mubarak, the image of a stoic, clean-shaven man with brilliantined hair and an immaculately tailored suit entered the Euro-American public consciousness.  But the image that perhaps chilled us to the bone was that which followed in Libya.  In Saif al-Islam Qaddafi's first appearance on television in the early days of the troubles in Libya, he is cool and detached.  His rimless glasses, his smart tie and crisp suit add a bureaucratic detachment to the scene as he casually threatens that blood will flow in the streets of Libya. And now we have rumblings in Syria and what promises to be a brutal suppression of dissent at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad, another man in a suit.
Brutality, tyranny and suppression meted out by men who would look quite at home in corporate boardrooms and martini lounges has been a reality the world over for a while, but we're seeing it on full view after a long time.  These men, often educated at elite Western academic institutions, who live lavish life-styles complete with yachts and parties on Greek islets, cannot so easily be relegated to an Other-ness, to a world-view far removed from our own experiences.  These men are visibly modern. Their excesses and their repression cannot be dismissed as the products of some obscure alchemical processes.  They represent regimes that have long been political and economic allies of Euro-America.  And they are what they are not in spite of these alliances, but because of them.  I hope that these images and the accompanying coverage by the mainstream media will add complexity and nuance to a picture that has been painted for too long in primary colours. 

An update

Several weeks ago I posted about how responsible the Egyptian military had been while the Revolution of Tehrir Square played out.  Well, over the past couple of weeks we have been witnessing a very different, and at times diametrically opposite, face of the Egyptian military.
Mubarak has been ousted, but he has been replaced by a military regime.  Though the military government purports to be merely transitional, the Egyptian people have quite naturally been less than sanguine about the regime and the intentions of its constituent members.  And so, to ensure that this transitional government does not forget its mandate, crowds of protestors have continued to gather every Friday at Tahrir Square.  And as these protests continue with unabated intensity, reports have been pouring in of dissidents being imprisoned and tortured, journalists being obstructed and suppressed, and just today, we hear news of an Egyptian blogger being sentenced to prison by a military court.
So I fear that I spoke too soon, and was too readily wooed by the men in khaki.  The Egyptian military's supposedly-transitional government is now, by all accounts, a junta.
Vive le revolucion...

Mixed signals?

A few days ago, we were confronted with two pieces of news that were seemingly at odds with each other.  First, we heard that the Arab League had endorsed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya.  Second, we heard that many Gulf States (Saudi Arabia and the UAE included) were sending troops to Bahrain to help the ruling family put down civilian protests. My first reaction to this was to think that surely we had here two incompatible stances. On the one hand, the Arab League was acquiescing to foreign intervention to aid rebels in their bid to oust the leader of an Arab state; and on the other hand, they were actively providing military support to an Arab regime to quash unarmed rebellion within its territory.  Mixed messages?
On further reflection, I realized that there was a huge difference in the way these countries perceived Libya and its leadership (for want of a better term), and the way they perceived Bahrain and its ruling family.  And the word 'family' is one of the keys to this conundrum.
Libya is certainly like the Gulf States in that its politics and society is shaped in many ways (perhaps even dominated) by issues of clan/tribe membership, and Qaddafi's loyalties to his al-Qaddafa tribe speak to this matter.  However, the origins and the sources of Qaddafi's power are markedly different.  A colonel in the army of Libya's King Irdis, Qaddafi staged a successful coup in 1969, abolished monarchy and established a republic. His power is based on an anti-monarchical stance, and is entirely contemporary in origin.
Contrasted to this are the ruling families of the Gulf States.  The ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the various city-states of the United Arab Emirates trace their power to authority that has been inherited, and not usurped.  Though the domination of such families as al-Saud, al-Nahyan, and  al-Khalifa can be traced back only a few generations, these families most likely see their rule as an entitlement, rather than a consequence of various fairly-recent geo-political forces (such as colonialism, the discovery of oil and various bargains made with the religious elite).  In this view, while the ouster of the upstart Qaddafi is a worthy cause, the dethroning of the al-Khalifa family is not at all an option.  The power vested in the al-Khalifa family is too much like the power they possess.  Theirs is power taken for granted as a consequence of their birth; Qaddafi's power comes from its seizure, and can therefore be seized away from him just as surely.
The presence of a large Shia population ruled by a Sunni ruling family in many of these Gulf States has also a role to play in this drama. But that may have to be the topic of another post.