It?s interesting that American conservatives along with Arab liberals are fighting against Arab conservatives who are supported by American liberals. God this world is fucked up.

Arab Liberals Argue about America
January 18, 2006, 9:48 am
By Barry Rubin
Middle East Quarterly*
Winter 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/890
* Cross-posted with permission

Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American analyst, notes the contradiction of ?an Arab world that besieges American embassies for visas and at the same time celebrates America?s calamities.?[1] But this seeming paradox actually makes sense. The more attractive the United States is to Arabs, the more pro-U.S. feelings threaten Arab nationalists and Islamists. As a result, both Arab nationalists and Islamists have an even greater incentive to distort Washington?s policies and the nature of U.S. society in their propaganda. For these opponents of liberalism, the United States becomes the great Satan whose devilishness justifies their behavior and explains their failures. The anti-American card is too useful and popular to be abandoned.


Arab liberals?those who seek democratic reform as well as both civil and human rights?have to handle and perhaps battle against such anti-Americanism. The complexity of their struggle has grown since President George W. Bush declared democratization to be the pillar of his foreign policy in the Middle East.[2] To those suspicious of the United States and its motives, Washington?s involvement in democracy promotion has become just one more proof of America?s evil, subversive nature. Arab liberals have had to craft strategies to navigate the minefield of Arab political opinion and rhetoric. Their approach to the United States illustrates not only the many obstacles to liberalism but also the intellectually diverse nature of its proponents.

Accepting America
Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, former dean of Shari?a (Islamic law) and law at Qatar University, represents one end of the spectrum of the Arab liberal approach to the United States. He insists, for example, that Washington?s response to 9-11 was a relatively moderate one in the context of legitimate self-defense. Other countries faced with such an assault would have been more aggressive and destructive.[3] He further argues that one of the most harmful Arab and Muslim mistakes is to view Washington as hostile. Muslims practice their faith freely in the United States. What the U.S. government is hostile to is the ?destructive? form of radical Islam, he argues, which Muslims should also oppose.[4] Reviewing the history of U.S.-Arab relations, Ansari finds that ?the positive aspects vastly outweigh the negative ones.?[5] Moreover, he asks, what would be the situation if Washington had listened to Europeans who opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Iraq? The Muslims in those places would be worse off if the White House had said that the Arabs were incapable of achieving democracy. He concludes that the Arab peoples need external help to defeat their dictators.[6]

Ansari?s views represent the exception rather than the rule. It is rare for any Arab liberal to advocate an explicit change in Arab views of the United States. Seldom does the Arab debate go beyond mirror-imaging arguments to the analysis so typical in the Western approach to the Middle East?a serious, detached attempt to understand the basis and nature of another party?s behavior. The same point applies to the cost of Arab hostility to the United States. Ansari notes that radical Arab rhetoric and action have always backfired. Instead of ?burning American flags,? he argued, Arabs should ?win over America.? Reform was one effective way to do so because, ?The American people do not respect anyone who doesn?t respect his own people.?[7]

The liberal Kuwaiti politician Ahmad Bishara notes that few speak about U.S. idealism, its noble sacrifice, and its nurturing of human freedom. Although many Arabs have used a U.S. education to develop their own countries, across the Arab world, the media constantly promotes anti-American propaganda. A better view of the United States would be in the Arabs? interest, he concludes, for only by defusing the U.S. bogeyman, could they successfully struggle against despotic regimes and extremist Islamist opposition.[8]

Saudi columnist Anas Zahid, writing in the pan-Arab paper Asharq al-Awsat, ridicules the Arab media and the intelligentsia?s constant calls for war or economic boycott against the United States and the West. ?How,? he asked, ?do we fight countries from which we buy weapons and beg for a loaf of bread?? The West supplies the Arab world?s medicine, food, aircraft, computers, clothes, diapers, and chocolate. The problem, he concludes, is not an East-West, Muslim-Christian, or Arab-Zionist struggle: ?The issue is that we are backward ? and do not want to face ourselves. Without facing ourselves we will not move one step forward.?[9]


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