Bret Stephens just reminded me there's a reason why I usually don't read opinion articles from mainstream media: they pretend to postulate theses against the Beltway conventional wisdom, but really only reiterate the ignorant crap that hinders productive conversation.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, Stephens writes the reason "they" [the Jihadists/Arabs/Muslims...which he conflates into one] really hate us [Americans] is because of scandalous temptresses such as Lady Gaga, and not the Israeli settlements on Palestinian property. I'm serious.
His source is Sayyid Qutb, the radical Islamist Egyptian thinker whose written philosophies in the 1950s influence the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda. Stephens sites from Qutb's relatively less popular essay "The America I have seen," which was written after his stay in conservative Greeley, Colorado, and most likely as a response to a changing and "modernizing" Egypt (points that Stephens forgets to mention):
"The American girl," he noted, "knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it." Nor did he approve of Jazz—"this music the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires"—or of American films, or clothes, or haircuts, or food. It was all, in his eyes, equally wretched....
Bear in mind, too, that the America Qutb found so offensive had yet to discover Elvis, Playboy, the pill, women's lib, acid tabs, gay rights, Studio 54, Jersey Shore and, of course, Lady Gaga. In other words, even in some dystopic hypothetical world in which hyper-conservatives were to seize power in the U.S. and turn the cultural clock back to 1948, America would still remain a swamp of degeneracy in the eyes of Qutb's latter-day disciples.
This, then, is the core complaint that the Islamists from Waziristan to Tehran to Gaza have lodged against the West. It explains why jihadists remain aggrieved even after the U.S. addressed their previous casus belli by removing troops from Saudi Arabia, and why they will continue to remain aggrieved long after we've decamped from Iraq, Afghanistan and even the Persian Gulf. As for Israel, its offenses are literally inextricable: as a democracy, as a Jewish homeland, as a country in which liberalism in all its forms, including cultural, prevails.
Not sure what to tackle first. Let's start with geography. Stephens is absurd in assuming that Qutb, who encouraged Sharia Law, shaped Jihadists' ideology across the Middle East, when the role of religion and politics developed quite differently and distinctly from Gaza to Saudi Arabia to Iran. If Stephens needs any reminding (sad that he would), Iran is a Shia state - with an Islamic government, yes, but one that is quite distinct from a state with Sharia Law. Shia and Sunni political ideology has manifested throughout history, which is why constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran is unprecedented - not Sharia, but an experiment.
A quick note about his timeline: it's incredible that Stephens believes there was no push for "modernism" or any influence of American and/or foreign culture in the Middle East before Elvis or birth control pills. The 1950s and 1960s was a vulnerable and formative period in Middle East history. Not only were countries and socieities struggling to balance modernism with religion, but also a new nation-state system with forces of monarchy and foreign governments that were willing to "buy" out ME states for their support in the Cold War. It wasn't the American temptress that citizens were worried about, but their ownership of land and identity being stripped away from them.
Flawed history: Stephens must be zoned into an obscure news source, because in the real world, the U.S. has in fact NOT left Iraq, Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf. And if not militarily, then it certainly holds influence in countries monetarily and through the CIA. The U.S. presence in the Middle East hasn't been doubted for the past 50 years.
What's disgusting of all, is that by claiming that Jihadists are obsessed with the "American temptress" image, Stephens dismisses the legitimate arguments of those Jihadists, Muslims, Palestinians, and others, who do find fault in Israel's settlement activity. Just because Jihadists use a simplistic "down with Americanization" argument does not mean that Israel's hostile tactics are not a legitimate concern. The fact that Biden's and Patraeus' remarks were in fact met with hostility means that the settlement issue is not readily accepted in conventional wisdom as a reason why "they hate us" - as Stephens states. [As a side note, using the "modernism" argument to theorize "why they hate us" was used 9 years ago and thrown out as flawed over the course of several years...not only is there nothing original in this article, but the argument is incredibly archaic]
The only thing that makes me feel slightly better about WSJ having printed this worthless article is the hope that they were following the new media business model: clickability.
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