by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n A<\/span>merican professors have long lectured to our students about purported Western biases and cruel misconceptions toward the “Other.” According to Edward Said and other postcolonial critics, much of our dim view of Arabs is a product of an “Orientalism” that was constructed by European intellectuals of the 19th century West \u2014 blinkered folk actively engaged as colonialists overseas, and conditioned by an earlier pedigree of prejudice toward the East dating from Herodotus and Aeschylus. According to such supposedly biased and unsophisticated views, Asians and Arabs were considered tribal, emotional, less-sophisticated peoples, prone to violence, fundamentalism, and irrational thinking, simply because they did not understand, or chose not to follow, Europe’s rather brutal notions of capitalism, nationalism, rationalism, and Christianity.<\/span><\/p>\n Few any longer accept such a simplistic, black-and-white portrait \u2014 especially when a number of erudite Europeans made great efforts not only to live among and understand the Islamic world, but also to criticize their own culture’s interactions with it. Indeed, “Orientalism” is a superficial charge that does no justice to a wide range of liberal 19th-century thinking and the present array of modern Middle East Studies programs throughout America and Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n What really is startling, however, is not how the West in an earlier age \u2014 without easy communications and cheap travel \u2014 misunderstood the Arab and Islamic worlds, but rather how today \u2014 Internet, jets, student visas, television, and all \u2014 the\u00a0East<\/i>\u00a0continues to stereotype the West, with not a clue about its intrinsic nature.<\/span><\/p>\n We should call this bias “Westernism” \u2014 or, perhaps, “Occidentalism.” In general we can describe it as the mentality of desperately wanting something that one either cannot understand or that one, in fact, blindly and in ignorance loathes. Millions of Arabs have now come in contact with the dividends of Western capitalism and industrial production, most clearly in their easy acceptance of everything from cell phones and televisions to antibiotics and chemotherapy \u2014 everything that makes life a little easier materially, and occasionally somewhat longer. Sheiks from Saudi Arabia go to London or New York for bypass surgery \u2014 not to Cairo or Amman; they buy their Viagra from the States, not from apothecaries in Yemen. The Arab street purchases appliances that are made in China or Japan on Western blueprints, rather than producing them en masse in Damascus or improving on their designs at Baghdad University.<\/span><\/p>\n The Israelis produce the best tank in the world, and export everything from drip-irrigation technology to computer software; their enemies whine that America does not give them more and better weapons. Not even Saddam Hussein could establish a modern aircraft factory, nor could the formidable Assad dynasty produce a single destroyer. All the arms in all the Arab countries are either imported from Europe, Japan, or America \u2014 or licensed and built from Western designs in China and Korea.<\/span><\/p>\n We see such a very thin facing of material prosperity in almost every picture that is broadcast from the Middle East \u2014 thousands of consumer goods, movies, videos, and processed food that would be impossible without the West. Bin Laden himself, after calling for a medieval caliphate, bought a cell phone, a video camera, and sophisticated weapons \u2014 products that his own anti-rationalist madrassas and mosques could not produce. The Taliban liked SUVs, but the government and school system they established ensured that not a single Afghan would ever acquire the knowledge to produce such pricey appurtenances. The killers in Palestine must bring in everything, from their rifles to their bombs \u2014 and the expertise to use them. Those few who do possess indigenous knowledge of sophisticated destruction either are foreign-educated or got the requisite information off the Internet.<\/span><\/p>\n The lust for the West is not only a matter of material addiction; there is a yearning for its freedom, modernity, and liberality as well. On American university campuses, Arab students often are the most vociferous questioners at lectures, and bask in the Western idea of completely unrestricted free speech. At rallies and on call-in radio stations, Islamic visitors on visas keenly exercise their rights of sharp critique \u2014 by openly condemning our own Mideast policy, our president, and indeed our country itself. Non-Westerners metamorphose into hyper-Westerners when they come here to study.<\/span><\/p>\n Diplomats from the Middle East are a funny sort. They are at home in Western ties and suits, and with cocktails and limos \u2014 and adept at the free-for-all of commercial television \u2014 adroit, too, in the subtle nuances of our politics, and aware of the possible nexus between the cause of the Palestinians and a vast labyrinth of American victimology. They grow silent only when caught in an obvious lie, abject anti-Semitism, or incontrovertible evidence of state-sponsored terrorism \u2014 occasions when their newly found Western candor would earn them a bullet or prison billet upon landing on the tarmac at home. Likewise,\u00a0al-Jazeera<\/i>\u00a0has the entire fluff of the Western news media down pat \u2014 the jazzed-up background music, the computer-simulated graphics, the photogenic airhead newsreaders \u2014 everything except true free speech, criticism of government, and doubts about religious orthodoxy.<\/span><\/p>\n So this entire familiarity with Western goods and practices ultimately is superficial. The Arab world is suffering from a deep-seated schizophrenia as it slowly sorts out its ambiguous feelings toward the hated West. Do you despise a country that gives you oil-drilling equipment, Ford SUVs, and contact lenses, along with Spider-Man and McDonald’s, as being crass, godless, and decadent? And if so, do you express such loathing between Big Macs, as you park your air-conditioned Wagoneer, board a 767, or put in eye drops for your glaucoma? Are America’s unveiled, auto-driving, and sometimes belly-baring women sluts and worse? \u2014 or do they accomplish far more than exciting the baser passions, such as doubling the work force and bringing critical brain power to the very pinnacles of society? Should you even shake hands with a Western woman, pay her to join your harem, lecture her about chastity \u2014 or hire her to economize your bureaucracy, control your aircraft traffic, design your power grid, sort our your legal codes?<\/span><\/p>\n And what exactly is this mysterious Western paradigm \u2014 the right to speak freely when visiting America, but not when you return to Egypt? If you are a envoy from the Sudan, Palestine, or Saudi Arabia, do you condemn America on\u00a0Crossfire<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Fox News<\/i>, but then curb such criticism when it concerns Arafat and the royal princes at home? Quite simply, very few in the Arab world realize that the reason we produce CAT scanners and F-16s and Apaches, and they do not \u2014 or the reason they come here to be schooled and we, as a rule, do not go there \u2014 is that our universities are free, our governments elected and tolerant, our people welcome to chose any religion or none, and our schools secular and meritocratic rather than fundamentalist and tribal.<\/span><\/p>\n Occidentalism \u2014 this counterfeit affinity with, and superficial knowledge of, the West \u2014 is most apparent in politics, where America’s support for Israel is wrongly attributed to Zionist conspiracies and Jewish influence, rather than a tolerance and liberal values shared with the Middle East’s only true democracy. When we see Israeli women in uniform, we think of our own \u2014 not those veiled in Pakistan. When we see the fiery debates in the Knesset, we recall our own Congress \u2014 not Syria’s faux parliament. When we witness in the last few years Rabin, Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon, we think of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II \u2014 not of the uninterrupted tenure of an Arafat, Mubarak, or Hussein.<\/span><\/p>\n In short, Occidentalism is a simulacrum of the West, and it is an insidious and often tragic phenomenon. One uses the Internet \u2014 a handy device that one’s own society could not create or repair \u2014 to spread fundamentalism. One has a parliament and a president \u2014 even a staged election or two, on occasion \u2014 but no free press, real opposition, or unbridled speech. A writer likes Western acclaim, the genre of the novel, and literary prizes based on merit not obsequiousness \u2014 but finds stone-throwers in the courtyard when one’s narrative dares to question the hold of Islam. One travels abroad to become a vociferous Western student, but upon graduation goes from a vocal lion on an American campus to a timid mouse in the Gulf.<\/span><\/p>\n At day’s end, the Arab world will have to sort out these paradoxes and contradictions \u2014 and decide how traditional, how fundamentalist, or how autocratic and closed its societies should be in rejecting some, all, or none of the West’s material and ideological dynamism. But we here in America have our own choices to make \u2014 and it is high time that we confront Occidentalism squarely and without pretense.<\/span><\/p>\n Politically, our officials must at last realize that Israelis tell the truth more often than Palestinians do \u2014 not because of genes or superior morality, but because their system of a free press, informed citizenry, and vocal opposition requires them to. We must not take seriously too much Arab hatred that is predicated on real grievance, but realize that most antipathy is the result of this unhealthy stew of envy, anger, and desire for the West, a concoction that can so often be as humiliating to them as it is dangerous to us \u2014 as we saw with the Westernized murderers on September 11.<\/span><\/p>\n As a people and a government, we must realize that our West is not Westernism; that all the suits, jet planes, and televisions in the Gulf do not add up to gender equity, free speech, or religious tolerance \u2014 and that the latter are precisely what ensures the life that is good, and humane, and uniquely our own. We must accept that the most parochial and ridiculed American \u2014 selling real estate in Des Moines or hammering nails in Provo \u2014 in fact knows far better who and what he is; what his own culture is, and is not, about; and what the Arab world stands, and does not stand, for, than does the wealthiest, most sophisticated, and most glib Westernized intellectuals and professors of the Middle East.<\/span><\/p>\n We wish all this was not so, but it is \u2014 and we should get used to it, fast.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a92002 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online American professors have long lectured to our students about purported Western biases and cruel misconceptions toward the “Other.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[828],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1jF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4756,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/when-should-we-stop-supporting-israel\/","url_meta":{"origin":5063,"position":0},"title":"When Should We Stop Supporting Israel?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers The recent assassination of Sheik Saruman raises among some Americans the question\u2014at what point should we reconsider our rather blanket support for the Israelis and show a more even-handed attitude toward the Palestinians? The answer, it seems to me, should be assessed in cultural,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2004"","block_context":{"text":"March 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/march-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7190,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/israels-worst-enemy-lies-and-myths\/","url_meta":{"origin":5063,"position":1},"title":"Israel’s Worst Enemy: Lies and Myths","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 8, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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Thornton Advancing a Free Society As the history of communism and fascism both illustrate, modern political tyranny has relied on fabricated history to legitimize its claims and actions, and such history in turn relies on the debasement of language. Nowhere is this axiom more evident than in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5502,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/an-interview-reflections-on-iran-iraq-the-middle-east-and-the-west\/","url_meta":{"origin":5063,"position":3},"title":"An Interview: Reflections on Iran, Iraq, the Middle East and the West","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 23, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Ellis Weintraub Private Papers The Jerusalem Post\u00a0recently published a portion of Weintraub's interview with Victor Davis Hanson. What steps should be taken on Iran by Israel, the United States, or the West in general? 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