They Hate Our Freedom?
“They hate our freedom.”
-George W. Bush, March 18, 2002
“They hate our freedoms.”
-John McCain, January 5, 2008
I am so tired of politicians simplifying the threat of terrorism to such an idiotic level by saying things like “they hate our freedom.” Really, that is not only an oversimplification, it is a rational and moral cop-out. This isn’t a battle of freedom and fascism and it isn’t a battle of good and evil. The terrorist threat to the United States can, in many ways, be understood as a political and cultural conflict with concrete causes and factors.
What better source on the rationalle behind Al Qaeda’s September 11th attack on the United States than Osama bin Ladin. Read the transcript of his speech to the American people, which aired on Aljazeera November 1st, 2004. In the speech, bin Ladin specifically addresses and denies the claim of freedom-hating.
While I am not a terrorist sympathizer, I do think that bin Ladin lays out a much clearer explanation for why Al Qaeda and other groups in the Middle East have so much resentment for America. To many people in the Middle East, America is a distant imperial oppressor that intervenes directly or through Israel and causes massive suffering. America and Israel can be blamed for numerous wars, occupations, airstrikes, sanctions, and other problems.
Again, I am not apologizing for any terrorists or terrorist attacks. Read the transcript and try to think a little deeper about the subject than the overused freedom-hating assumption. While I think that deliberately attacking civilians in New York is a despicable thing to do, maybe what I am really trying to say is that we might have our hands pretty dirty, too.
They envy our freedom and hate our #1 ally, Israel. It’s something very interesting that John Mearsheimer explores in his book, The Israel Lobby, that the aid and support or quite acquiescence to Israeli policy toward Palestine has made the U.S. one of the Middle East’s most hated westerners.
Bin Laden has condemned the US on several occasions prior to September 11 for its support of Israel against the Palestinians and called for jihad against America on this basis. The 9/11 Commission confirmed confirmed that Bin Laden and other key figures of Al-Queda were motivated both by Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians and the U.S. support for Israel.
The 9/11 Commission also stated the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often described as the “principle architect of the 9/11 attacks, was primarily motivated by the Palestinian issue.
Max Rodenbeck, a Mideast correspondent for the Economist, has shown that the “notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden’s Speeches.”
I don’t think I’ve ever bought into the notion that the reason the Arab nations hate us so much is because of our freedom. That’s simply pedantic political rhetoric meant to rouse support in the ignorant masses. The sad part is, it works. For evidence, see the Bush/Cheney disinformation campaign of 2003.
Ron Paul is one of the few pubic figures who rationally engages this issue and isn’t afraid to talk about the real causes for terrorism and how the United States’ foreign policy may be exacerbating it.
But then again, they call him crazy.
Statements like those of mssrs. Bush and McCain are obviously too simplistic and primarily intended to cloud the judgement of a domestic political audience. However, they are, as part of a larger answer, true.
While Bin Laden claims not to hate “freedom” (a nebulous concept indeed), it is clear that he has a much different concept of freedom that you or I. His freedom is the freedom to live wholly under the dictates of Islam as he sees it (not a pretty thing). A society in any way influenced by post-Enlightenment liberalism cannot coexist with the sort of freedom that Bin Laden desires, and the forces of globalization have pushed the West into the near East in a way that cannot be rolled back.
It is similar to the way that American religious fundamentalists complain that the state is denying them their freedom of religion by cordoning off certain public aspects of life and by allowing behavior and social constructs that conflict with their beliefs as to how the would should be ordered. They do not recognize the value of a liberal society in which every man is free to choose his own way. Much of their quarrel is with the American backed regimes in the Muslim world (Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi, etc) that, while not being anyone’s ideal of a liberal democracy, are not hospitable to the kind of psuedo-polity that the Bin Ladenites might want. So, in this respect, their quarrel most definitely is with our freedom.
This is not to say that the question of Israel/Palestine, the legacy of hard imperialism, and modern petropolitics do not contribute to/enflame the conflict. They obviously do, and the hands of the West in this region (or any region, for that matter) are far from clean. But do you really believe that if Israel was gone and the Palestinians (whoever, in the end, they really are) ruled the Holy Land that their anger would go away? Or even subside? I’ll grant that much of the mass appeal of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world relates quite strongly to Israel and, more recently, Iraq, but the deep rooted motivation for the shock troops of jihad is something else entirely. It is, at its irreducible base, the last and most violent stand of antimodernism (something akin to the fascist epidemic that swept Europe in the early 20th century. And no, I am not saying that it is in any way Islamofascism or that that is a legitimate term.).
Addressing this issue from a liberal perspective is so very important, both from a substantive and political perspective, and it is my passion in the realm of concrete public policy. I would recommend a few books that, of course, address the topic in a much more intelligent manner than I have (or can); The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart (now out in paperback!) is a wonderful blend of the intellectual histories and futures of both sides of the conflict; Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (highest possible recommendation, and short) is as honest an attempt to understand the fundamental nature of the conflict as I have found; The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright is a terrific history of the jihad movement and its forefathers; and The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan is a great exploration of the threat posed by fundamentalisms to freedom as we conceive of it.
All of that is to say that just because the Right in this country deploys this argument irresponsibly does not mean that it is not an integral part of the fight we face. It is a part of the fight that cannot be avoided and to which their can be no surrender or accommodation (most obviously at home, but also abroad). To do so would be to consign billions to despotism. That does not mean that the Iraq War was right, or that we ought to be unflinching in our support for Israel, or that we ought to attack Iran (or anyone else). It doesn’t mean anything in terms of a specific policy prescription. When Ron Paul speaks of blowback, he speaks the truth (sort of). What we should do about it is a question for more mature minds that his.
On a side note, it seems likely that I will find myself in your fair burgh next month. I’d love to meet you guys for coffee if we can work that out. I think we’d have an interesting chat.
Somehow you guys always manage to coax an absurdly long blog comment out of me at damned near 2 in the morning.
I shamefully admit that I know very little on this subject compared to y’all. I enjoyed the post, as well as the insightful comments.
Thanks again, Political Cartel and friends.
I think you are right on some level, JKK. In fact, I wrote a post that compared fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. Neither one really appreciates the liberal democracy, no doubt there.
However, I think my point still stands that their lack of appreciation for liberal democracy is not the reason why they were motivated to attack our country and kill our people on 9/11 or any other time. As bin Ladin says in his speech, they haven’t attacked another “free” nation such as Switzerland. The reason is because Switzerland isn’t seen as an oppressor in the Middle East.
I would go so far as to say that even if you took America’s “freedom” completely out of the equation (suppose we became an authoritarian state like the USSR), radical Islamic extremists would still despise the US because of its foreign policy in the region. How do I know? They despised the USSR for its foreign policy in the region, especially in Afghanistan. It wasn’t that they hated Soviet freedom at all. They hated Soviet invasion and occupation.
Let’s definitely do coffee. Facebook me.
The loathing they felt toward the Soviets was of course due primarily to the occupation of Afghanistan. However, their feelings toward the United States are inextricably intertwined with the social dictates of liberal democracy. It is precisely because globalization has made the economic and cultural prejudices of the West universal that the Islamists feel that their ideal is under siege.
I don’t buy that it is an abstract ideological battle when they point to so many concrete examples of American foreign policy that opresses Muslims.
US blanket support of Israel
US sanctions on Iraq and Iran
US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
US bases in Saudi Arabia
US failure to keep Israel in check (especially in the most recent war in Lebanon)
Your explanation also falls because if al Qaeda and similar groups just felt general loathing torward liberal democracies, they would be targeting many other nations in Europe. They aren’t. Al Qaeda and similar groups pretty much only target nations that directly interfere in the Middle East.
Of course they point to specific instances of perceived Western interference in the region. They are both actually aggrieved by these actions and using the popular dissatisfaction with the American Israel policy to draw support from the general population of the region. As in the United States, in order to sell yourself to the common man they have to highlight the visible and concrete rather that the abstract and philosophical. The tone and direction of AQ’s public pronouncements is quite different from that of the tracts and pamphlets written by Zawahiri and, probably more importantly, Sayyid Qutb.
They do not target other liberal democracies because the United States serves as the symbol of neo-imperialism. And really, how often have they targeted anyone? It is not easy for them to strike so far from home.
Is it an ideological struggle or a geopolitical entanglement?
I think that most Arabs perceive it as a clash of both, in so far as America is willing to use its ideas of democracy to make a geopolitical transformation of an area. Or in the case of Israel, to support the ideological and political suppression of another group.
It is true that the proliferation of the globalization movement has many nasty ramifications for parochial cultures. This, in turn, fuels hatred and indignation of the movements center, that is arguably the United States. Perhaps rightfully so.
I think the basic question is this: has America’s foreign policy over the last 40 years done more harm or more good, in respect to Arab-American and Persian-American relations? It seems to me that the answer is more the former than the latter. And this harm has done justice to radical movements’ support base and mass appeal, regardless of the rhetoric and mission.
I don’t think that anyone reasonably can argue that the postwar foreign policy of the United States and the West in the region has not has far reaching deleterious effects on the American brand. Some of the actions that have had this effect may have been necessary in light of other geopolitical strategic imperatives, but most of them were due to reflexive proto-imperialism wrapped in the garb of anti-communism.
But when simply discussing the motivation of the extremely small groups that have shown the desire and ability to strike the United States and the West where they live is more complex (as I have described in previous comments). The well articulated thoughts of Qutbism and its antecedents have at least as much to do with the situation.
The real danger is the original assertion that “they hate our freedom” is that it precludes our leaders from any meaningful analysis of foreign policy. If they hate us and will stop at nothing to kill us, then the only thing to do, logically, is preemptively kill as many of them as possible. On the other hand, if we can recognize certain actions that the US could take to reduce the Mideast backlash against it, that would be beneficial. We need leaders who will discuss what we can do and what we shouldn’t do, not leaders who actually create policy based off of narrow, warped views of the world based on rhetoric and fear-mongering.
I think we are probably all in agreement there.
It’s good to have the Recent Comments widget back. I was lost without it.
Kolby, given your knowledge of Qutb, do you think that Arab Nationalism is on a downward spin?
Qutb wants to fight the institutions of ignorance and reestablish a Sharia judicial system (obviously). How strong is this movement, do you think?
My knowledge of Qutbism is limited in scope, but I do know that on a macro scale organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are gaining in popularity and influence. The question regarding that movement is, how “democratic” and “peaceful” are the respective Muslim Brotherhoods throughout Europe and the Middle East?
From what I’ve read on the Brotherhood, its European counterparts tend to be more tolerant and democratically workable, compared to their Middle Eastern equivalents who see the west and globalism as the enemy of the umma.
Correction from earlier post: Qutbism is considered by most Muslim experts as an off shoot of fundamentalist salfism/wahhabism. I apologize for my affiliation mishap (portion deleted for ignorance).
Sorry for the delay in responding. Sometimes Valentine’s Day intervenes.
Arab politics is too damned confusing. The street politics aspect creates a dynamic that we in the modern West just cannot properly understand. It allows for more cross contamination between ideas and the common man. I’m skeptical of any real connection between any serious ideology and the current direction of the Arab world.
As to the Brotherhood, the European and American offshoots are by necessity more liberal than their Middle Eastern counterparts (though I’d hardly call them liberal). I don’t trust the Brotherhood in Egypt as far as I could throw them. It just so happens that they represent the largest element that vaguely resembles a democratic movement contra Mubarak (their popularity insulates them in ways that less Islamist groups cannot expect).
As far as middle eastern street politics go, it’s worth commenting that Islamist or Islamist flavoured political groups with popular support owe much of their political success not to their religiosity, but to their anti-establishment stance. At the very least, this is true in Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan at the moment.
The perception is that the political establishments don’t give a damn about anyone outside their circles of patronage (true), and the Islamist parties at least are incorruptible, care about justice, distribute food and supplies to the poor, etc.
You’ve always got to remember that Islamic terrorist groups have usually focused most of their energies against governments in the Middle East, not us. It’s the old, secular kingdoms and regimes they want to topple. They’re held in place by America, however, so they have to settle businsess with us, too.
The idea that it’s about our freedom, or anything else about our culture is just more of the same American narcissism that gets us into so much trouble abroad.