[lit-ideas] Re: Anti-Americanism, this malediction considered
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:41:52 -0700 (PDT)
--- Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Omar, You don't say anything of your own in this
> post of yours, but since
> you left my Subject title I assume you are saying
> that Anti-Islamism is also
> a malediction.
*You guessed it.
I'll further assume that you agree
> with the author of the
> post you cite, Abukar Arman.
*I agree with most of the things he says in this
article.
I do share Arman's
> concern but I see it
> differently. I have wondered where Moderate Muslims
> were in the Middle
> East. Several times I made the comment that if I
> ever found a reasonable
> article from a moderate Muslim he was sure to be
> writing from the safety of
> the U.S. or Europe. There is no question but that
> Moderate Muslims exist in
> great numbers in the U.S., but unfortunately they
> have been subdued in the
> Middle East.
*I think that, as usually, we are confusing several
different things there. Muslims who are moderate in
their approach to religion are not necessarily tame in
their attitude to the US and / or Israel, and vice
versa. There is perhaps some correlation between the
two at the moment, but this is far from being a
mathematical formula. You seem to think that most
moderate Muslims reside in the US, but many of those
'moderate Muslims' would qualify as fundamentalists.
Indeed, as I pointed out before, the US and the
fundamentalists have a history of co-operation in
Afghanistan in the 1980s, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia and
in other places.
I don't find them speaking out there,
> and it was about this I
> was most concerned - a concern Arman doesn't seem to
> share - or rather he
> seems to suggest that somehow we in the U.S. are
> muting our moderate Muslims
> in their attempts to educate Muslims in the Middle
> East. I seriously doubt
> that many Muslims in the Middle East care what they
> write. The comments I
> have read suggest that the Middle-Eastern Muslims,
> the Moderates who don't
> write or speak out, feel resentful against Muslims
> who flee to America and
> from there boldly speak out. "Who cares what they
> write in America? They
> have almost certainly sold out to the enemy," seems
> to be the resentful
> accusation.
*Again, it depends on who qualifies as a moderate. The
mainstream media of countries like Egypt, Jordan,
Lebanon, Pakistan etc. are still fairly secular in
outlook. But they are not generally pro-American or
pro-Israeli. In general, Lawrence, I think that you
and your authors are deceiving yourselves that liberal
attitudes must result in pro-American sympathies. This
is not the case in China, either, speaking from
personal experience of having lived here for five
years. But it's late here, so the China discussion
will have to await another day.
O.K.
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