[Culturechat] A Comment on Muslim Rage

[WesTexas@aol.com]

The Core of Muslim Rage
Commentary by Thomas L. Friedman 

The latest death toll in the Indian violence between Hindus and Muslims is 
544 people, many of them Muslims. Why is it that when Hindus kill hundreds of 
Muslims it elicits an emotionally muted headline in the Arab media, but when 
Israel kills a dozen Muslims, in a war in which Muslims are also killing 
Jews, it inflames the entire Muslim world?

I raise this point not to make some idiot press critique or engage in cheap 
Arab-bashing. This is a serious issue. In recent weeks, whenever Arab Muslims 
told me of their pain at seeing Palestinians brutalized by Israelis on their 
TV screens every night, I asked back: Why are you so pained about Israelis 
brutalizing Palestinians, but don't say a word about the brutality with which 
Saddam Hussein has snuffed out two generations of Iraqis using murder, fear 
and poison gas? I got no good answers.

Because the real answer is rooted in something very deep. It has to do with 
the contrast between Islam's self-perception as the most ideal and complete 
expression of the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity 
and Islam — and the conditions of poverty, repression and underdevelopment in 
which most Muslims live today. 

As a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East said to me, Israel — not Iraq, not 
India — is "a constant reminder to Muslims of their own powerlessness." How 
could a tiny Jewish state amass so much military and economic power if the 
Islamic way of life — not Christianity or Judaism — is God's most ideal 
religious path?

When Hindus kill Muslims it's not a story, because there are a billion Hindus 
and they aren't part of the Muslim narrative. When Saddam murders his own 
people it's not a story, because it's in the Arab-Muslim family. But when a 
small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims it sparks rage — a rage that must 
come from Muslims having to confront the gap between their self-perception as 
Muslims and the reality of the Muslim world.

I have long believed that it is this poverty of dignity, not a poverty of 
money, that is behind a lot of Muslim rage today and the reason this rage is 
sharpest among educated, but frustrated, Muslim youth. It is they who 
perpetrated 9/11 and who slit the throat of the Wall Street Journal reporter 
Danny Pearl — after reportedly forcing him to declare on film, "I am a Jew 
and my mother is a Jew."

This is not to say that U.S. policy is blameless. We do bad things sometimes. 
But why is it that only Muslims react to our bad policies with suicidal 
terrorism, not Mexicans or Chinese? Is it because Arab-Muslim conspiracy 
theories state that Jews could not be so strong on their own — therefore the 
only reason Israel could be strong, and Muslims weak, is because the U.S. 
created and supports Israel?

The Muslim world needs to take an honest look at this rage. Look what it has 
done to Palestinian society — where the flower of Palestinian youth now 
celebrate suicide against Jews as a source of dignity. That is so bad. Yes, 
there is an Israeli occupation, and that occupation has been hugely 
distorting of Palestinian life. But the fact is this: If Palestinians had 
said, "We are going to oppose the Israeli occupation, with nonviolent 
resistance, as if we had no other options, and we are going to build a 
Palestinian society, schools and economy, as if we had no occupation" — they 
would have had a quality state a long time ago. Instead they have let the 
occupation define their whole movement and become Yasir Arafat's excuse for 
not building jobs and democracy. 

Only Muslims can heal their own rage. But the West, and particularly the 
Jewish world, should help. Because this rage poses an existential threat to 
Israel. Three broad trends are now converging: (1) The worst killing ever 
between Israelis and Palestinians; (2) a baby boom in the Arab-Muslim world, 
where about half the population is under 20; (3) an explosion of Arab 
satellite TV and Internet, which are taking the horrific images from the 
intifada and beaming them directly to the new Arab- Muslim generation. If 100 
million Arab-Muslims are brought up with these images, Israel won't survive.

Some of this hatred will remain no matter what Israel does. But to think that 
Israel's exiting the occupied territories — and abandoning its insane 
settlement land grab there — wouldn't reduce this problem is absurd. 

Israel cannot do it alone. But it has to do all it can to get this show off 
the air. It would take away an important card from the worst Muslim anti- 
Semites and it would help strengthen those Muslims, and there are many of 
them, who know that the suicidal rage of their fanatics is dragging down 
their whole civilization.