The use of “native guides” might seem a peculiarly nineteenth-century mode of exploration. Not so. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary would never have been the first to climb Everest if he hadn’t in fact been the second — hard on the heels of Sherpa Tenzing, without whom he’d never have made it. And so it still goes. Some 600 people now summit Everest each year, but most are not westerners paying up to $100,000 for the privilege. They’re Nepalese sherpas, “at least” thirteen of whom were killed in an avalanche last week. And those huge sums don’t go to them, but to the mountaineering outfits that hire them at minimal wage to do the dirty dangerous stuff and ease the way for their wealthy clients.

That’s two underpaid, heavily-laden sherpas per overpaid, lightly-laden westerner. Sound familiar? Since I’m more of a desert rat than an icepick-and-piton type, I think instantly of another climb much boasted of, as in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, which includes his account of an 1867 trip to Egypt:

and this photo from 1870:

Heave ho, my hearties.  Anyone for a spot of post-colonialism?

Two excellent minds — liberal activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy and Huffington Post UK political editor Mehdi Hasan — went head to head at the Oxford Union on whether, per the provocative headline of Eltahawy’s article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Arab men hate women.

Go to it, accidental theologists!  But…

Please view the whole video before you comment.  Let’s get beyond knee-jerk reactions.  It’s true that it’s a long video, but if you don’t consider the whole issue important enough to merit 47 minutes of your time, I hereby suggest you forfeit the right to comment.

–

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot of understandable suspicion out there about exactly how good American intentions even are when it comes to the Middle East.  That’s the theme of David Rohde’s book ‘Beyond War:  Reimagining American Influence in the Middle East.’

The first step I’d suggest:  do some major reimagining of images, and forget Orientalist stereotypes like the camel-rider on  the cover.  The second step:  question the whole concept of influence.

The Catholic weekly America asked me to review the book, and here’s what I wrote:

When the Egyptian military seized power in June, American pundits instantly rushed to preach about democracy.  This took some hubris considering that two recent American elections – 2000 and 2004 – are still considered by many to be of questionable legality, and that redistricting is rapidly ensuring the minority status of Democratic strongholds throughout the south.

Is the US even in a position to preach democracy?  Especially since as with national elections, so too with foreign policy:  democracy is subject to money, and how it’s spent.

This is the hard-headed reality behind two-time Pulitzer prize-winner and former Taliban captive David Rohde’s new book, which focuses on how the US government spends money abroad, specifically in the Middle East.  It’s an argument for small-scale economic rather than large-scale military aid, and as such is immensely welcome in principle. The question is how to do it in practice.

As Rohde writes, “Washington’s archaic foreign policy apparatus” and its weakened civilian agencies mean that “in the decades since the end of the Cold War, the ability of the White House, State Department, and Congress to devise and carry out sophisticated political and development efforts overseas has withered.”

Whether Rohde is aware of it or not, the problem might be encapsulated in the subtitle of his own book, which assumes not only the existence of American influence, but also its necessity. Many of his sources are well-informed and palpably frustrated employees of the Agency for International Development (USAID) who are basically in conflict with both the State Department and Congress.  Yet the stated goals of USAID are clear:  they include providing “economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the US.” [my italics].

For all the talk about the need for humanitarian aid and intervention (most recently in Syria), the reality is purely political.  What’s presented as humanitarian aid is always a matter of foreign policy.  And American foreign policy is still intensely focused on George W. Bush’s GWOT – the “global war on terror.”

The principle is that US aid should act as a stabilizing force against militant Islamic extremism.  But the very idea of the US as a stabilizing force has been thoroughly undermined by the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even the best-considered foreign aid has now been rendered suspect in many parts of the Middle East, especially when there’s “a widespread perception of the American government as a finely tuned, nefarious machine, not an unwieldy cacophony of viewpoints,” and when authoritarian control fosters an intense rumor mill, with conspiracy theories rampant (most recently, for instance, Malala Yousufzai as a CIA plant, or American-backed ‘Zionists’ as the instigators of the new regime in Egypt).  In Egypt in particular, Rohde notes, “Washington faces an extraordinary public-policy conundrum.  Decades of support for Mubarak will not be forgotten overnight.”

Rohde details the conundrum in a series of country-by-country chapters, some intensively well-reported (particularly on civilian contractors’ takeover of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and on the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan), while others (on Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia) seem more perfunctory by comparison.  But in the light of the June military coup, the chapter on American dollars-for-peace financing and the Egyptian army’s vast business empire is particularly fascinating and uncomfortably prescient.

Oddly, though, there is no chapter on Israel, the largest recipient of American aid.  This seems to me tantamount to ignoring the elephant in the room, since the intense investment in an Israel that seems willing only to prolong and intensify the conflict with Palestine undermines US efforts elsewhere in the region.  In fact you could make a pretty strong argument that American support of Israel, driven by domestic electoral politics, runs directly counter to its own foreign policy interests.  Inevitably, the US is perceived elsewhere in the Middle East as at least tolerating if not encouraging Israel’s land grab in the Palestinian territories;  if its funds do not literally finance the expansionist project, they certainly free up funds that do.

Even assuming the best American intentions, then, they’re all too often interpreted as the worst.  But what exactly are those best intentions?

At root, this book is, or could have been, about America’s perception of itself.  Are we the world’s greatest do-gooders, distributing our largesse (and our arms) where most urgently needed?  Or are we acting to secure a blinkered and out-dated conception of our own interests?

Either way, as Rohde wrote in a New York Times op-ed back in May, “We should stop thinking we can transform societies overnight…  Nations must transform themselves.  We should scale back our ambitions and concentrate on long-term economics.”  His economic recommendations are accordingly small-scale (sometimes to the level of pathos, as in his enthusiasm for an Egyptian version of ‘The Apprentice’).  Yet his emphasis on entrepreneurship may actually undercut his argument that trying to force Western models on other countries will backfire.  And this is the argument that matters.

Like Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, says Rohde, American officials need to listen rather than try to muscle their way in, whether economically or militarily.  A little respect, that is.   Preach less, listen more.  That may not be much of a “reimagining,” but it’s the really important message of this book.

In the whole debate on whether to deploy a missile strike against Syria for the use of sarin gas, my mind has been (appropriately?) like the many-handed Hindu goddess of darkness and death, Kali.

— On the one hand, what exactly would a US missile strike achieve, especially since President Obama has so carefully described it as limited in scope and intent?

— But then am I really so callous as to say we should not move when chemical weapons are deployed, especially against sleeping civilians?

— Then again, the level of the debate has sickened me (all the talk about maintaining America’s credibility, for example, as though that were more important that what’s actually happening in Syria — or the talk about how we can’t let Assad “get away with it,” as though he were merely a schoolboy who’d broken the rules).

— But does that really mean we just sit back and do nothing?

— Though that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as an average of 5,000 Syrians have been killed each month.

— But is military action really the only option?

—  And isn’t the idea of a surgical strike another of those military oxymorons created for armchair warriors thrilling to missile-mounted cameras as though war were a video game?

—  And shouldn’t the US have intervened to prevent chemical weapons being used, instead of as a gesture of disapproval after their use?

All this, and I haven’t even gotten to the question of who would actually gain from such a strike.  And without even mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and…

Kali needs more than eight hands.

But today’s diplomatic developments seem to me immensely hopeful.

All I know at this moment is what you do:  Russia has publicly proposed that Syria give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons.  And since Russia has so openly supported the Assad regime (and been a major supplier of the ingredients for those weapons), and since Assad has so publicly claimed his regime did not use chemical weapons (all evidence to the contrary), the demand that he give them up to avoid a US-led missile strike may be an excellent example of his bluff being expertly called.

So I have a modest proposal that might sweeten the deal — for all of the Middle East.  It’s as follows:

Seven countries have held out on the international treaty against the use and manufacture of chemical weapons, aka the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Those countries are Syria, Israel, Egypt, Angola, Myanmar, South Sudan, and North Korea.  (Two of these — Israel and Myanmar — have signed, but so far, have not yet ratified it.)

So if we’re really serious about banning chemical weapons, and if we’re really serious about the search for some nascent form of Middle East peace (two big ‘ifs,’ but bear with me), we should demand not only that Syria give up its chemical weapons and sign and ratify the treaty, but that at least Israel and Egypt both step up to the plate too.

We should seize the moment and say “Sign here, Mssrs Assad, Netanyahu, and Sisi.”

And we should do it right now.  Before we forget about chemical weapons until the next time they’re used.  Before we leave Assad to keep killing Syrians with conventional weapons.  And before the American public again retreats into its normal state of apathy about anything that happens in countries where the majority are not apple-pie white and Christian.

At least let something good come out of all this horror.

I wish I could say that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s anti-Semitism surprised me half as much as it seemed to surprise The New York Times.  (“Egyptians should nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists, Morsi declared in a videotaped speech three years ago. “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout history. They are hostile by nature.”)

But the rampant use of anti-Semitic imagery in political rhetoric both in Egypt and in other Muslim countries (“apes,” “pigs,” “bloodsuckers,” said Morsi) is hardly news.  It comes right out of the convoluted paranoia of The Protocols of the Elders of the Zion, which far too many Egyptians still take for fact instead of the fictional fake it was long ago proved to be.  What concerns me is how it seeps into even the best-intentioned minds, in far less obvious but nonetheless insidious ways.

Consider, for instance, an exchange like this one, which I seem to have had a number of times over the past several years:

— “What do the Jews think they’re doing in Gaza?”

— “The Jews?  All Jews?  Which Jews?”

— “The Israelis, of course.”

— “Which Israelis?”

— “Well, the Israeli government.”

— “So why do you not say ‘the Israeli government’ instead of ‘the Jews’?”

This is what you might call the low-level shadow of anti-Semitism.  My interlocutors (I love/hate that word) would never dream of using Morsi’s inflammatory language of hatred.  They’re liberal and moderate American Muslims (some are believing mosque-goers, others self-described agnostics or atheists).  And yet even they are not always immune to that conflation of politics and ethnicity, of Israeli policy and Jewishness.

Each time such an exchange occurs, there’s a pause in the conversation — a moment of discomfort as my interlocutor (that word again!) realizes what I’m responding to.  And then comes a nod of acknowledgement, one that takes considerable courage, since none of us appreciate being called to account.  Call it a small moment of sanity.

I recognize this because it’s mirrored in Israel, where talk of “the Arabs” — a generalization as bad as “the Jews” — veers more and more not just into outright racism, but into a kind of gleeful pride in that racism, as shown in David Remnick’s long piece on “Israel’s new religious right” in the current New Yorker.

Israeli politicians have taken to presenting themselves as defenders of “the Jewish people,” regularly using “Jew” as a synonym for “Israeli,” even though — or because — over 20% of Israeli citizens are Muslim or Christian Arabs.  They do this deliberately, of course, just as the Morsi-type anti-Semitic rhetoric is deliberate.  The emotional resonance of “Jew” is deeper and far older than that of “Israeli,” and thus far more useful as a carrier of both covert and overt pride and prejudice.

As a Jew I find this political claim to represent me both insulting and obnoxious.  Like an increasing number of American Jews, I’m appalled by the policies of the Netanyahu government (let alone those of its predecessors), and at the development of what has clearly become an apartheid regime.  I deeply resent being lumped together with the Netanyahus of this world — and I equally deeply resent the attempt by the Netanyahus of this world to lump themselves in with me and define my Jewishness.  How dare they?  And how dare Morsi?

I’d ask “have they no shame?” but the answer is obvious.

Oh what a bandwagon that noxious little anti-Islamic video has set in motion.  There seems to be no end of people eager to hop on it for personal and political gain, no matter how many lives it costs.

There’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, reeling from backlash against his support of Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing massacre of Syrian civilians.  What a perfect opportunity to deflect criticism by calling for more and larger protests — not against the Syrian regime, but against America, in the name of “defending the Prophet.” Except that’s not what he’s doing. To cite the headline of Nick Kristof’s NYT column today, he’s exploiting the Prophet.

There’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she of the soft voice and the compelling back story, who just can’t stop talking about what she calls “the Muslim mentality.” (Pop quiz:  if someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Jewish mentality” is an anti-Semite, what’s someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Muslim mentality”?  Click here if you don’t know.)  Hirsi Ali told her story yet again in Newsweek‘s “Muslim Rage” issue (to which the best answer was the often hilarious #MuslimRage meme on Twitter).  Strange to think that the rapidly failing Newsweek was once a reputable publication.

There’s the sophomoric French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose idea of cutting-edge humor is cartoons of politicians with their pants down around the ankles.  This week they ran similar cartoons of Muhammad in order to inject some life into their plumetting circulation by creating controversy.  Oh, and as a beacon of free speech, of course.

There’s Pakistan’s Minister of Railways — the man responsible for the system’s chronic debt, constant strikes, and devastating crashes. What better way to distract people from his total failure than to make himself out to be a “defender of Islam” by offering a $100,000 bounty for the life of the director of that inane video?  There’s nothing quite like incitement to murder to cover up your own corruption.

There’s more — there’s always more of such people, including of course the miserable little bigots who made the video in the first place —  but that’ll do for now. Because none of this reflects the real Muslim rage:  the palpable outrage not only at the killing of Ambassador Stevens, but also at the blatant attempt of Islamic extremists (and their Islamophobic counterparts) to hijack Islam.

Listen, for instance, to Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, who was one of the voices of 2011’s “Arab spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Violent protests over the video are “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand so-called ‘Islam-attacking’ films,” he writes, and calls on Egyptians to condemn Islamic fundamentalists as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover” for political ambition.

Twitter is spilling over with similar protests and disgust from Muslims all over the world at the way the “defenders of Islam” are destroying it from within.  And this disgust was acted on in Benghazi on Friday when 50,000 Libyans marched to demand the disarming of the extremist militias suspected of attacking the US consular buildings, then stormed the headquarters of two of the biggest militias and forced them out of town.  Two other Islamist militias instantly disbanded.  Yes, if you unite, you can face down the thugs, even well-armed ones.  This, of course, is not something you’ll see on the cover of Newsweek.

As Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, and with especial pain, Syrians know, the “Arab spring” is not a matter of a single season.  The moniker itself is a product of Western media shorthand, of the desire to label a “story” and assign it a neat, self-contained timeline.  But this was no mere story for the people living it.  It was and still is the beginning of a long process.  But one that once begun, cannot be undone.

All over the Middle East, real voices are making themselves heard, unmediated by government control whether in the name of “security” or of an extremist travesty of Islam.

And this is surely the real manifestation of that much abused principle:  freedom of expression.

Could that pernicious video have ended up working against itself?  Could this be the tipping point for both Islamophobia and its mirror image, militant “Islamist” extremism?  Is this where both are revealed for the ugly con game they really are?

Perhaps the one good thing about the video is that it is so upfront in its ugliness.  It’s no longer just you and I saying it;  it’s also the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, whose anger was palpable:  “To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Now we know who made the video:  a convicted con man, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, indicted on multiple charges of bank fraud and check-kiting.  And he may indeed end up back in jail, since by posting his work to the Internet he violated the terms of his probation.  That’s little consolation, of course, for the multiple deaths he’s caused — at least a dozen so far.  And none at all for those who don’t understand that the principle of freedom of speech, no matter how hard it is to accept, applies to all. Under a different administration, the same principle by which they demand that he be jailed could then be turned around and applied to them.

But we know more.  We know that the protests against the video have been used and manipulated by Al Qaeda and Salafi types, who manipulated the sincere outrage and insult of protestors to further their own political agenda and try to destabilize newly elected governments.  In the process, they also furthered the agenda of their Islamophobic blood brothers, providing graphic images of Muslims doing everything Islamophobes expect — rioting, burning, killing.  But for the first time, all countries involved seem to have clearly recognized this and given voice to it, perhaps none more perfectly than Hillary Clinton: “”The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”

We know that Twitter is alive with condemnations of the violence from Libyans, Tunisians, Egyptians, and more.  Mainstream Muslims, both religious and secular, will no longer tolerate being intimidated into silence by those who claim to speak in their name for a violent, extremist travesty of Islam.  They are speaking out in unprecedented volume and numbers.

And we know this:  the new governments of Libya and Yemen instantly condemned the violence and apologized for the death of Ambassador Stevens.  In the words of the president of the Libyan National Congress, it was “an apology to the United States and the Arab people, if not the whole world, for what happened.  We together with the United States government are on the same side, standing in a united front in the face of these murderous outlaws.”  Residents of Tripoli and Benghazi staged demonstrations to condemn the attack on the Benghazi consulate and to express their sorrow at the death of Stevens, who was widely admired for his support of the revolution that ousted Qaddafi.

Even the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt finally realized that this was not a matter of defending Islam against outside enemies, but of defending it against its own worst enemies on the inside.

All this, it seems to me, is new.  As is the reaction of the US administration, led by Obama and Clinton — calm, measured, determined, and in the spirit of Ambassador Stevens himself,  the opposite of the heavy-handed American imperialism of the past.  Imagine if this had happened under Bush, or under Romney, and shudder at how they would have reacted.

Could it be, finally, that more and more people are getting it?  That both the Islamists and the Islamophobes are losing?  That sanity, however high the cost in lives, might actually prevail?

Sometimes I wonder what year it is.  2011, or 1911?

Item:  former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s legal team is about to spend at least half a million dollars trying to discredit the immigrant chambermaid who accused him of rape and sexual assault.  Presumably, they’ll try to use her sexual history against her.  After all, she’s a widow with a 15-year-old child.  That is, she’s no virgin.

Item:  the so-called virginity tests forced on women protestors in Cairo by the military.  In fact these were officially sanctioned rape, even if no penetration was involved.  They were a deliberately chosen means of intimidating, humiliating, and attempting to control women.  To say that virginity has nothing to do with political activism is to belabor the point.  It’s not as though those who “passed” the publicly administered “test” were released with the military blessing to go demonstrate in freedom.  It was yet another means of repression.

For those who might think this is a peculiarly Islamic thing, consider that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, with whom he lived monogamously for 19 years, was twice widowed by the time they married.  And that of the nine women he married after her death, only one was a virgin at marriage (the others were all divorced or widowed).  Since virginity was clearly a non-issue to Muhammad himself, any religious argument for it is hard to make.

As for those virgins in paradise, well, see my TEDx talk for that.

The same applies in Christianity.  Yes, of course I know about the Virgin Mary — I wrote a book about her.  But as I pointed out there, to reduce the concept of virginity to the existence of a biologically useless membrane called the hymen is worse than absurdly literal.  It totally misses out on the grand metaphor of virginity, which existed around the world at the time.  As with a virgin forest, it stood for incredible fecundity, for a surfeit of growth and reproduction, untamed and unfettered.  That is, virginity was the miracle of fertility, and in that respect, the Virgin Mary is the last in a long and once-powerful line of mother goddesses.

So let’s not blame religion.  That’s just the excuse.  Nor such a thing as a “Middle East mentality.”   Because…

Item: as late as the 1970s, British officials were administering virginity tests too.  And again, the purpose was to intimidate women — to deter them from entering the country as immigrant brides (if they weren’t virgins, it seemed, they had to be lying about their reasons for entering the U.K.).   And while we’re talking about Brits, by the way, how weird is it that at that same time, the early 1970s, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin for his enterprises?  Flying the friendly skies?

Perhaps all this means that in forty years’ time, the confusion of virginity with virtue will be as outmoded in Egypt as it now is (Branson excepted) in England.  But then of course it’s not about virtue, and never was.  It’s about the peculiar desire of some men (thank God not all) to control women — their sexuality, their behavior, their freedom of choice.  That is, it’s about not about women as people, but as possessions.

Item:  A commenter on this blog, fulminating against Islam with such blatant racism that I had to bar him as spam, summed up his argument this way:  “We know how to treat our women.”  That “we” evidently referred only to men, specifically to non-Muslim western men who think of women as possessions — “ours” — and as such, to be (mis)treated as “we” see fit.   He was, he made clear, a fundamentalist Christian.

So tell me, what year are we living in?  Scratch the years I gave at the top.  If you go see Werner Herzog’s new movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (about the prehistoric paintings on the walls of that cave), you might discover that even Neanderthals had more respect for women than this.  And they lived 35,000 years ago.

It’s kind of absurd that I should even be writing this post, since I know next to nothing about Libya.  But I’m writing it because I have the uncomfortable impression that those policy-makers who urged the current American and European military intervention in Libya – aka instituting a “no-fly zone” (a strange formulation when it involves so much use of fighter jets) — know very little more than I do.

I hope I’m wrong about this.  But hope isn’t much of a substitute for reason when people’s lives are at stake.

Why Libya?  Apparently because it seems safe.  Everyone in the west can agree that Qaddafi is nuts, that his regime sucks, and – most important from their point of view – that they have nothing to lose by intervening.  No strategically important naval base to protect, as in Bahrain.  No major oil supplier to coddle, as in Saudi Arabia.  No “partner” in the struggle against the elusive Al Qaeda, as in Yemen.  No close military ties, as in Egypt.

I can almost imagine the decision-makers thinking “Finally, a chance to prove that we really are on the side of freedom and democracy and all the things we keep talking about but don’t back up with action.  Phew!”

Of course the last time they did that – barging with heavy firepower and astounding ignorance into a country where it seemed clear who was Good and who was Bad – the result was disastrous.  Iraq is still a mess.  Afghanistan, an even worse mess.   But this time, you see, it will be different.  This time, we’ll do it right.  From the air,.  No feet on the ground.  So what if we don’t even know who’s who in Libya?  They hate Qaddafi;  what more could one ask for?

When I was a dreamy adolescent, I used to think that if I could only go round the world with a six-shooter and assassinate the worst dictators, the world would be a better place.  I spent hours deciding which six I would target (some weird English sense of fair play dictated that I could only have six bullets), until I grew up enough to realize that those I killed in my dreams would only be replaced by others, that this was not a matter of individuals, but of systemic social and political problems way beyond my grasp. (As for “solving” violence by violence, I’m glad to say I quickly grew out of that too.)

Now, in 2011, it seems that powerful nations are acting like that naïve adolescent that I once was, the difference being that their choice of target is determined not by dumb idealism, but by strategic realpolitik.  So sorry, Bahrain – we know you’re right in your demand for democracy, but our hands are tied.  Too bad, Egypt – we know the military has no intention of giving up power, but we need them.  You’re on your own, Yemen – who knows if you mightn’t threaten our good Saudi friends next?

But Libya?  Thank god for Qaddafi.  A chance to prove how good we are, at last…

Replying to an email from a friend just now, I quoted a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s “Ozymandias,’ written in response to a giant sculpture of a pharoah’s head lying on its side at Luxor, Egypt. Then as I thought of the whole poem, I began to get chills up and down my spine. So with nuclear disaster in Japan uppermost in all our minds, here it is:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far way.

I know you probably don’t have time for this long a video, but for the record, here’s my February 19 keynote speech at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, MI — on fundamentalism, stereotyping, and (with suitably Jewish agnostic chutzpah) religion, as well as on the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and the effect they may have on American attitudes toward Islam.

The occasion, at the largest Shia mosque in America, was the celebration of the birthday of Muhammad.   The still shot has a somewhat disturbingly preacher look to it, so please tell me I’m not preaching, just talking…

(The sound comes in fully after about 45 seconds.)

“I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” someone wrote on this blog a while back, commenting on my agnosticism (actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but I’ll refrain).   And I was a bit shocked by that.  What kind of human being can I claim to be if I don’t believe in anything?  A nihilist?  A god-forsaken creature left to the whims and mercies of fate?    A craven whimpering coward afraid to commit herself?

So in between keeping up with what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain and Yemen and Jordan and Iraq and Iran and oh-my-god Libya, I’ve been haunted by what she said — and have realized that she placed the stress on the wrong word.  It doesn’t belong on the word ‘anything,’ but on the word before it:  ‘in.’

Of course there are things I believe.  I just don’t generally feel the need to believe in them.  I may well believe that such-and-such a thing is true, though in fact this is much the same thing as saying “I think that…” or the more amorphous “I feel that…”  and I’m trying not to be amorphous here.  And in fact there are some things I do believe in, prime among them the possibility of some seemingly impossible form of peace between Israel and Palestine.

If I look at Israel/Palestine rationally right now, I see no way to a peaceful resolution.   So in the lack of empirical evidence, I have no choice but to fall back on belief – that is, on the conviction that peace is possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’m not being over-idealistic here.   The first step in any thinking about peace is to get rid of all those images of doves fluttering around all over the place and everyone falling on each others’ shoulders in universal brother/sisterhood.  Peace is far more mundane than that.  It’s the absence of war.  It’s people not being killed.  It’s the willingness to live and let live.  And that will do just fine.

There’s no love lost between England and Germany, for instance, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the 20^th century.  There’s less than no love lost between Egypt and Israel – in fact it’s safe to say that for the most part, they detest each other —  but that peace treaty, signed by an Egyptian dictator and an Israeli former terrorist, has lasted three decades.  It’s nobody’s ideal of peace, but however uneasily, it’s held, and will likely hold whatever the changes in Egypt – a frigid kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.

But even thinking in terms of pragmatic, undramatic, boring peace, which once seemed as impossible for England and Germany, and for Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine, I still can’t see it.  Of course this may simply mean that I have a very limited imagination, and so can’t see the forest for the trees.   But to think that something is impossible because I can’t see it is not only an absurd assumption, but also a dangerous one.

What we believe affects how we act.   If we stop believing that Israel/Palestine peace is possible, or even desirable, as the Israeli government seems to have done, then that affects how we act:  we really do make it impossible.  That is, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of unending conflict.   We act in our own worst interests.

I’d rather be naïve than nihilistic.  So in face of the despair that often overtakes me at the latest news from Gaza or from the West Bank, I have to fall back on belief in the possibility of peace, no matter how seemingly irrational.  After all, if it was rational, it wouldn’t require belief.

One definition of despair is in the inability to imagine oneself into the future.  It is, in a very real sense, a failure of the imagination.  So perhaps this is what belief really is:  an act of imagination.   The astonishing human ability to imagine something into existence, and to act in accordance with that imagination.

That’s what we’ve seen these past few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain (and maybe even in Libya), and that’s what’s been so inspiring about it:  belief transformed into possibility.   Belief not as faith in the divine, but as faith in the human ability to act and to change the future.   Belief, that is, in ourselves.

There’s been a ton of punditry about what the Tunisia and Egypt revolutions mean for America, and you can bet there’ll be several tons more.  But I suspect its biggest effect is yet to register, and that is psychological.  Because these two revolutions – achieved through determinedly non-violent action – constitute a radical, positive challenge to the politically manipulated atmosphere of fear and paranoia about Islam.   In fact, as New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it, 2/11 may be the perfect antidote to 9/11.

Too optimistic?  I think not.  There’s a very good chance that we’re due for a major paradigm shift here in the United States — one that seemed unimaginable just a few weeks ago (and one even a congressman like Peter King, head of the HUAC-like committee due to start ‘examining’ the supposed radicalization of American Muslims (“are you now or have you ever been an American Muslim?”), might have to take into account).

What’s happening all over the Middle East challenges the crude stereotypes of “Arabs = riots.”  Of “Islam = terrorism.”  And above all, of Islam as somehow fundamentally anti-democratic.

These stereotypes run deep.  Think of the scenes shown in the American media from the first week of the Egypt uprising.   A close-up of 200 people prostrated in prayer, excluding the tens of thousands who stood behind them, not praying.   A protestor holding a poster of Mubarak with horns and a Star of David drawn on his forehead – the only one of its kind, it turned out, in the whole square.  Or a few days later,  the replay after replay of Molotov cocktails – “flames lead” being the mantra of TV news – reinforcing the image of rioting Muslims out of control, “the Arab street.”  It was exactly the image Mubarak was aiming for.

Thus the pumping up of the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat by both the Mubarak regime and conservative western pundits, as though the Egyptian protesters were extraordinarily dumb and naïve.  As though they were not highly aware of  how the 1979 Iran revolution was hijacked and perverted.  As though they couldn’t see the fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia or the Hamas regime in Gaza.   As though the Brotherhood itself were unanimously stuck in the 1950s mindset of ideologue Sayyid Qutb.  As though the only way to be Muslim was to be a radical fundamentalist.

Thus the surprise in the west at the sophistication of the Tahriris, when “the Arab street” turned out to include doctors and lawyers and women and IT executives (you could practically hear the astonishment:  “you mean there’s Muslim Google executives?”).

Thus the continually stated fear, stoked by the regime and by conservative pundits, that the protestors would shift from nonviolence to violence – that the nonviolence was merely a cover for some assumed innate propensity to violence.

Thus the slowness to realize that the old anti-West sloganism had been superseded, and that this wasn’t about resentment of the west;  in fact that it was about the very things President Obama had talked about in his speech right there in Cairo in June 2009 – about democracy and freedom.

In short, what we heard and saw in those first few days was the modern version of Orientalism:   The idea that the ‘Orient’ – that is, the Middle East (it should come as no surprise here that the geography is as weird as the idea itself) — is an inherently violent, primitive, medieval kind of place.  Or as right-wing Israeli politicians have been endlessly repeating for decades, “a bad neighborhood.”   And that the responsibility of ‘enlightened’ westerners and despotic leaders alike was to keep these benighted people under control.

But as the uprising went on into the second week, something began to change. Nobody at the blog of Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, for example, which one would have thought the first to support any kind of uprising, even bothered to comment on it at first.  When they began to, it was with their usual weary stance of pseudo-sophisticated cynicism.   But by the day after Mubarak unleashed his goons in Tahrir Square, when the protestors’ response was to turn out in larger numbers than ever, even The Stranger gave in to excited support.   How not, when millions of people stood up to repression and dictatorship in the full knowledge of what they faced if they failed – arrest, torture, and death?   Would you have such courage?  Such determination?

So here’s what I saw here in the States:   more and more Americans abandoning their unconscious Orientalism in favor of stunned admiration.

And that’s the beginning of something new, the very thing Obama declared twenty months ago in Cairo:  respect.

Finally.

Oh my God…

It’s hard to type through the tears.

Egypt, you did it! Egypt, I love you!

You are celebrating right now.  And so are all of us all over the world who’ve been glued to Al Jazeera‘s livestream and to protesters’ Twitter feeds for the past three weeks in stunned admiration, in anxiety and exhilaration, our hearts in our mouths, humbled by the sheer courage and determination of every single Egyptian who risked imprisonment, torture, and (for over 300 people) death.

Thank you, Egypt.  We needed to be reminded of this.  We needed to see that the desire for freedom and justice cannot be squelched.  That it can prevail against the most horrendous odds.  That it can stand up to guns and tanks, to thugs and torturers.  That the power of ideas is stronger than the power of weapons.  That democracy really is the will of the people.

I have no more idea than anyone else what happens from here on.  No idea if the ‘Supreme Military Council’ really does intend to hand over power to an interim civilian government.

But I do suspect that the generals may not have a choice.   Faced with such huge numbers of protesters —  even if accounts of 20 million Egyptians demonstrating in the streets today were exaggerated, even if it was “only” 10 million —  those numbers are doubling, even tripling, as people flood outside in jubilation.   In the face of such numbers, and such widespread support for genuine, total reform, I very much doubt that the military would even dare try to pull a double-cross.

All that is for the usual pundits, however.  For today, Egyptians celebrate.  And most of the world celebrates with them and for them.   Bravo Tunisia!  Bravo Egypt!  You have given notice to all dictatorial regimes — in the Middle East, and indeed worldwide.   You’ve renewed our faith in our own principles.  You have, literally, encouraged us — filled us with the courage so often lacking in our wavering liberal convictions.

Egyptians, there is only one word for what you have done:  magnificent!

The anthem of the uprising?  This song was recorded in Tahrir Square on Friday, and subtitled and posted over the weekend:

It should come as no surprise, however, that Husni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman are tone deaf.  Human Rights Watch lists 297 confirmed killed since January 28.