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Why is the Arab world so easily offended? Posted: 16 Sep 2012 03:39 PM PDT Fouad Ajami, The Washington Post   MODERNITY requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks. Time and again in recent years, as the outside world has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of birth in search of greater opportunities in the Western world, modernity — with its sometimes distasteful but ultimately benign criticism of Islam — has sparked fatal protests. To understand why violence keeps erupting and to seek to prevent it, we must discern what fuels this sense of grievance. There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation. A vast chasm separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand. In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored — poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the day. If Islam's rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis explored in his 2002 book "What Went Wrong?" The blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to desert them. The ruling caliphate, with its base in Baghdad, was torn asunder by a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Soldiers of fortune from the Turkic Steppes sacked cities and left a legacy of military seizures of power that is still the bane of the Arabs. Little remained of their philosophy and literature, and after the Ottoman Turks overran Arab countries to their south in the 16th century, the Arabs seemed to exit history; they were now subjects of others. The coming of the West to their world brought superior military, administrative and intellectual achievement into their midst — and the outsiders were unsparing in their judgments. They belittled the military prowess of the Arabs, and they were scandalized by the traditional treatment of women and the separation of the sexes that crippled Arab society. Even as Arabs insist that their defects were inflicted on them by outsiders, they know their weaknesses. Younger Arabs today can be brittle and proud about their culture, yet deeply ashamed of what they see around them. They know that more than 300 million Arabs have fallen to economic stagnation and cultural decline. They know that the standing of Arab states along the measures that matter — political freedom, status of women, economic growth — is low. In the privacy of their own language, in daily chatter on the street, on blogs and in the media, and in works of art and fiction, they probe endlessly what befell them. But woe to the outsider who ventures onto that explosive terrain. The assumption is that Westerners bear Arabs malice, that Western judgments are always slanted and cruel. In the past half-century, Arabs, as well as Muslims in non-Arab lands, have felt the threat of an encircling civilization they can neither master nor reject. Migrants have left the burning grounds of Karachi, Cairo and Casablanca but have taken the fire of their faith with them. "Dish cities" have sprouted in the Muslim diasporas of Western Europe and North America. You can live in Stockholm and be sustained by a diet of al-Jazeera television. We know the celebrated cases when modernity has agitated the pious. A little more than two decades ago, it was a writer of Muslim and Indian birth, Salman Rushdie, whose irreverent work of fiction, "The Satanic Verses," offended believers with its portrayal of Islam. That crisis began with book-burnings in Britain, later saw protests in Pakistan and culminated in Iran's ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death in 1989. The protesters were not necessarily critics of fiction; all it took to offend was that Islam, the prophet Muhammad and his wives had become a writer's material. The confrontation laid bare the unease of Islam in the modern world. The floodgates had opened. The clashes that followed defined the new terms of encounters between a politicized version of Islam — awakened to both power and vulnerability — and the West's culture of protecting and nurturing free speech. In 2004, a Moroccan Dutchman in his mid-20s, Mohammed Bouyeri, murdered filmmaker Theo van Goghon a busy Amsterdam street after van Gogh and a Somali-born politician made a short film about the abuse of women in Islamic culture. Shortly afterward, trouble came to Denmark when a newspaper there published a dozen cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad; in one he wears a bomb-shaped turban, and another shows him as an assassin. The newspaper's culture editor had thought the exercise would merely draw attention to the restrictions on cultural freedom in Europe — but perhaps that was naive. After all, Muslim activists are on the lookout for such material. And Arab governments are eager to defend Islam. The Egyptian ambassador to Denmark encouraged a radical preacher of Palestinian birth living in Denmark and a young Lebanese agitator to fan the flames of the controversy. But it was Syria that made the most of this opportunity. The regime asked the highest clerics to preach against the Danish government. The Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut were sacked; there was a call to boycott Danish products. Denmark had been on the outer margins of Europe's Muslim diaspora. Now its peace and relative seclusion were punctured. The storm that erupted this past week at the gates of American diplomatic outposts across the Muslim world is a piece of this history. As usual, it was easily ignited. The offending work, a 14-minute film trailer posted on YouTube in July, is offensive indeed. Billed as a trailer for "The Innocence of Muslims," a longer movie to come, it is at once vulgar and laughable. Its primitiveness should have consigned it to oblivion. It was hard to track down the identities of those who made it. A Sam Bacile claimed authorship, said that he was an Israeli American and added that 100Jewish businessmen had backed the venture. This alone made it rankle even more — offending Muslims and implicating Jews at the same time. (In the meantime, no records could be found of Bacile, and the precise origins of the video remain murky.) It is never hard to assemble a crowd of young protesters in the teeming cities of the Muslim world. American embassies and consulates are magnets for the disgruntled. It is inside those fortresses, the gullible believe, that rulers are made and unmade. Yet these same diplomatic outposts dispense coveted visas and a way out to the possibilities of the Western world. The young men who turned up at the U.S. Embassies this week came out of this deadly mix of attraction to American power and resentment of it. The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that took the lives of four American diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, appeared to be premeditated and unconnected to the film protests. The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they seek to break out of its restrictions. Freedom of speech, granting license and protection to the irreverent, is cherished, protected and canonical in the Western tradition. Now Muslims who quarrel with offensive art are using their newfound freedoms to lash out against it. These cultural contradictions do not lend themselves to the touch of outsiders. President George W. Bush believed that America's proximity to Arab dictatorships had begotten us the jihadists' enmity. His military campaign in Iraq became an attempt to reform that country and beyond. But Arabs rejected his interventionism and dismissed his "freedom agenda" as a cover for an unpopular war and for domination. President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his biography — the years he spent in Indonesia and his sympathy for the aspirations of Muslim lands — would help repair relations between America and the Islamic world. But he's been caught in the middle, conciliating the rulers while making grand promises to ordinary people. The revolt of the Iranian opposition in the summer of 2009 exposed the flaws of his approach. Then the Arab Spring played havoc with American policy. Since then, the Obama administration has not been able to decide whether it defends the status quo or the young people hell-bent on toppling the old order. Cultural freedom is never absolute, of course, and the Western tradition itself, from the Athenians to the present, struggles mightily with the line between freedom and order. In the Muslim world, that struggle is more fierce and lasting, and it will show itself in far more than burnt flags and overrun embassies.

Tanda Putera: Potrait of an apologist Posted: 16 Sep 2012 03:22 PM PDT Suaram adviser Kua Kia Soong rebuts criticisms levelled against him by Tanda Putera director Shuhaimi Baba. By Kua Kia Soong, FMT At the outset, let me clarify that I am certainly not the director of Tanda Putera's (TP) "most vocal critic". Until this controversy started, I had never heard of this maker of Pontianak movies. On the other hand, I am an ardent admirer of the late Yasmin Ahmad's classic Malaysian films through which Yasmin's truly multi-ethnic and prejudice-shattering humanity shines through. Still, I was ready to give this director of TP the benefit of the doubt by appealing to any fibre of intellectual honesty in her body when I wrote my reply (Tanda Putera: Deconstructing Prejudice) to her unwarranted attacks on my credibility in her interview with FMT. It appears my efforts have all been water off a duck's back. Hapless victim with a blame frame This controversy started I believe, when Lim Kit Siang rightly protested against images posted on TP's website and the outrageous allegations by some bloghead that the DAP leader had urinated against a flagpole at the time of the May 13 incident. Such a blatant untruth and serious warping of history was explained away without heartfelt apologies by the TP director and I believe the loathsome images and comments were only taken down four weeks later after Kit Siang had made a strong protest. We witness the same attempt by the TP director to blame others by claiming that "I did not refer to Kua when I pointed out that a writer published his work on May 13, 1969 but did not qualify he was not even in Malaysia during the incident. The credibility of that source is questionable." Did the director of TP feel that there had been grievous harm done to the reputation of both Kit Siang and myself when these supposed "errors" were discovered? Did she demand that FMT make a correction and would she have bothered to make a correction if I had not protested against her scurrilous attacks on me? Or are we considered mere collateral damage in her mission to beatify the Umno leaders? Who were the "hidden hands" behind May 13? The director of TP has clearly fallen in with the "official" version that the May 13 Incident was a "spontaneous outbreak" of violence between "the Malays" and "the Chinese" after "the Malays" were provoked by "the Chinese". In this official rendition, the victory parade by the opposition parties in 1969 is often compounded with an earlier demonstration by the Labour Party which had actually boycotted the 1969 general election because practically all their leaders had been incarcerated under the ISA. Were these parades so provocative that they were the trigger for the pogrom?  From the declassified documents at the British Archives, they were not. The British were more likely to be pro-Alliance rather than pro-Opposition since after all, the Alliance leaders were the local custodians of British interests in the Independence manoeuvres. But if the director of TP has credible local documents to the contrary, pray, produce them. Malaysians in recent years are only too well aware of the manner in which the far-right fascists have been quick to stage violent actions against such civil society initiatives as Suqiu in 2000, the racial violence at Kampung Medan in 2001, the Article 11 Coalition in 2006, the even more recent cow head protest and the other recent fascist actions against the Penang state government. Would the director of TP likewise conclude that these recent incidents by "the Malays" were similarly "justified" because they were provoked? The well-known poet and writer, Said Zahari wrote his poem "Hidden Hands" when May 13 broke out and he was under ISA detention in Singapore. He wasn't even in the country! Still, he knew enough of the class nature of the ruling coalition to write this poem that is now the "soundtrack" of May 13. To the evidence I produced of credible Malay intellectuals who did not find my book on May 13 "prejudiced against the Malays" as alleged in her interview with FMT, she says: "No point going behind names like Subky and your 'Malay colleagues'. They don't bring validation. " In fact, I only needed to point to one Malay intellectual to expose her own prejudices but I produced the highly respected (the late) Rustam Sani, Dr Syed Husin Ali, Dr Mohd Nasir Hashim, Dr Azmi Sharom and now, Said Zahari. By the way, the PAS leader, Subky Latiff is also a renowned Malay journalist and an academic whose work I cited from "Southeast Asian Affairs", a respectable academic journal of the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs, Singapore. All of these citations she dismisses as "my Malay colleagues" who "don't bring validation". Apart from echoing the old trite official version of May 13 that has no credibility, she does not cite a single intellectual of note to back her official version. But apparently, the director of TP has another theory, namely, "What about the view that May 13 was a push for the Chinese radicals at that time to get rid of the Malays and take over power in Selangor because only one seat stood in the way? Was that a failed "coup detat"? Gerakan held on to that seat in favour of the Alliance." Is the director of TP serious in posing that it was "the Chinese radicals" who had started the violence and that they were ready to take on Umno and the police and the army to achieve their objectives? So where is the evidence to back up this theory? Declassify the Special Branch files on May 13 The only evidence we have is the fact that the violence started at the menteri besar's house. I based that on the declassified documents from the British Archives which happen to be the ONLY declassified documents available to researchers. The director of TP betrays her ignorance of public records when she says: "You blame the British for the things that didn't go your way, like this country not being a socialist country. But you stand by their records and declassified reports. I'm no stranger to the British public records library and I can say that British intelligence reports were known to also make mistakes. They are human. But some mistakes were not corrected and only done on hindsight." Bob Dylan has a line that says: "If you don't underestimate me, I won't underestimate you…"  A credible social scientist knows how to sieve information from public records regardless of whether they are Malaysian, British or American. I too read the rags of the ruling coalition but that does not mean than I am incapable of sieving the information I want. I would be only too happy to join the director of TP in calling for the immediate declassifying of the documents on May 13, especially the Malaysian Special Branch reports. If they show that the violence did not start at the menteri besar's residence but by "assorted bad elements" and "communists", I will be the first to retract my theory in the book. Ultimately, if we really want to create a society "at peace with itself", we need to set up a Truth & Reconciliation Commission entrusted to encourage all witnesses including the police, army, hospital and Red Cross staff and families of victims to come forward to tell their story. I made this abundantly clear in my article on "Deconstructing Prejudice". I do not see why a witness statement by my brother in law who was a professor at the university Hospital where some of the bodies were brought to should not be credible. Everyone who witnessed the violence and deaths during May 13 should be welcome to give us their narratives at a Truth & Reconciliation Commission hearing. It's class, stupid! The director of TP fails to see that my thesis in "May 13: Declassified Documents…" was essentially that the actions of the emergent Malay state capitalist class against the Malay aristocratic class at the time amounted to a coup detat. The historical personalities were significant in this analysis because of the class role they played.  It is clear the director of TP is unfamiliar with social scientific usage when she asks: "Kua labelled Tun Razak as an 'ambitious Malay capitalist'. Is it because of the colour of his skin…!" That label is her own coinage. My thesis in the book was that Tun Razak led the emergent Malay state capitalist class to power. They subsequently came to an accommodation with the local Chinese and Indian capitalists and they lived happily ever after with the formation of the Barisan Nasional. Unfortunately, this cosy story came to a sobering end in the general election of 2008 when the rakyat finally got wise to the "bumiputeraist" fairy tale as being the ideology spun by the Umnoputras after May 13. The director of TP may not know that class analysis in the academic corridors of our local universities uses similar designations. Social scientists are interested in ethnicity, not race which is Umno's strategy to divide Malaysians into "bumiputera" and "non-bumiputera". We can't really blame her since, as Roger Ebert, the film critic observes: "Class is often invisible in the movies, and usually not the subject of films." READ MORE HERE

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