The Arab Summer

The past few weeks, Americans have been shocked by a wave of anti-American demonstrations erupting unexpectedly in a number of countries across North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.  Most Americans have been supportive of the “Arab Spring” upheavals against ruling dictators that have occurred over the past 21 months.  But these recent coinciding events have left many, as Secretary of State Clinton said, “trying to make sense of the senseless.”  And these events have sowed potential seeds across America for more indiscriminate anger and prejudice against Muslims in general.

Such seedings are unwarranted.  When the American Embassy in Cairo discovered the existence of an inflammatory anti-Muslim YouTube video, it quickly issued a statement (before any violence had occurred) that said simply (and correctly) that “[we] condemn the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”  Mitt Romney alternately made an ill-informed and ill-advised political criticism in the wake of the subsequent demonstrations that “an apology for American values is never the right course.”

I have no idea what “American values” Mr. Romney was referring to in his campaign statement.  Or what “apology” he thinks was even made.  I know that I value very much the freedom of everyone to practice their religion of choice without interference, obstruction or denigration.  I value that each person is equal in the law and in God’s eyes, and thereby deserves respect as a valued human being.  I know I value freedom of speech, but accept that this freedom is limited by the responsibility to avoid harming others.  These are the very values implicit in our government’s statements.  Which of these values would Mr. Romney have us retract?

As for making an apology, apologies are perhaps due to much of the Muslim world by the Western powers.  We have collectively treated Islam and its Muslim followers with unwarranted contempt and disdain for a thousand years.  Even though their Koran calls for worshiping the same God as Jews and Christians; treats the Jewish and Christian teachings as righteous and from God; commands that Jews and Christians who faithfully adhere to their religious teachings are to be respected and honored – Christians have labeled Muslims as “the infidels” for a millennium.  Christians fought religious Crusades against the Muslims for two hundred years.  In the last 100 years following World War I, the West has sought to hold the Arab/Muslim communities as virtual economic and political hostages – a subservience Western countries would never tolerate.  We have exploited their wealth (mainly oil) until countries have gradually regained control over their own resources.  We have covertly overthrown legitimate popular governments when they refused to follow our direction.  We supported cruel dictators with arms and dollars – arms and dollars used to suppress their populations and keep them poor and un-empowered – and then looked away as long as they sided with us instead of Russia.

Hillary Clinton stated that “America had nothing to do with the making of this [YouTube] film.”  Americans understand full well that this film is protected by our First Amendment right of freedom of speech.  But we are speaking that distinction to millions of people who have never known freedom of speech, i.e. the freedom to speak separately and independently from one’s government.  How can we expect these masses to understand such a fine distinction about an individual right that has been completely outside of their own personal and cultural experience?

We pontificate about the supposed “cultural and educational backwardness” of many Muslim societies, lumping all Muslims and Muslim-dominated countries together as if one homogeneous peoples.  But we skip over the excessive functional illiteracy still present in America.  We decry the stories we hear of Muslim family violence, but domestic violence inexplicably rages every day in America.  We protest the limited rights of Muslim women, but our Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, and many Evangelical and other religious branches continue to operate on a male-dominated / female-subservient inequality in faith and family.  American hate groups claiming to be Christians act in terrorist ways against their fellow citizens of different color, faiths, and lifestyles; both good Christians and good Muslims each get lumped together with the aberrational thugs in their midst.  American political power and economic wealth is increasingly weighted to only a select few businesspeople, politicians, and clergy in a hierarchy not unlike many Middle East countries.  Yet most Americans never mentioned in our headlines go about their daily lives honestly and law-abidingly while trying to be helpful to others, horrified by our own violence against each other – just as we see with people across the Muslim world.  Jesus’ guidance to “judge not lest you also be judged” is highly applicable here.

We Americans have so much to be proud of about this country and our efforts to try to make lives better and more just.  But an honest look in the mirror of self-examination would show us many reasons for overseas Muslims to rightly resent us even as they also admire us for other reasons.  Even our support for their freedom revolutions has been limited by many to “as long as they believe and act like us.”  After centuries of such attitudes and treatment toward these fellow men and women, we should not be surprised at their short fuses over what we may see as insignificant circumstances.  When we “walk around in another’s [Muslim] shoes,” supposedly simple rights and wrongs begin to look a whole lot less simple.  It is like continuing family tensions over long-ago hurts, rubbed raw over years of neglect alternated with exacerbative needling, exploding in a disproportionate argument at a suddenly unexpected moment.  We fear the latent anger of the beast we helped to create.  We need only to look at our own history of attitudes and conduct toward African-Americans and Native-Americans to see the truth of this.

We need to recognize that a bond between American and Muslim cultures and countries must come from people connecting directly with people; observing their right to self-determination over their own affairs; taking time to truly understand the great religion of Islam and respecting their choice of faith; and helping to end Muslim poverty, desperation and hopelessness in favor of a better life.  The same things that American people seek.  We who barely understand how differently people think and live from one region of America to another should remember that Cairo, Egypt is not Cairo, Illinois.  Given that most Americans have never set foot in a Muslim country, we can barely begin to fathom how extraordinarily different their daily life is than in America.

We often forget that our American Revolutionary War took eight years to complete, resulting in a confederative government of thirteen individual states (“tribes”) barely able to work together or collectively decide anything, disrespected and ridiculed by the international community.  A government so weak that four years after the War’s end its potential collapse pushed our Founders into a Constitutional Convention to finally create this strong central government that has now stood for 225 years.  As the Arab Spring moves into the Arab Summer of new governance, we need to extend the same understanding and patience to these various Muslim communities as was required in establishing our new country.

As John McCain eloquently stated, “I know many Americans may feel a temptation … to distance ourselves from people and events in Libya, and Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East … We were right to take the side of the Libyan people, and others in the region who share their peaceful aspiration.  And we would be gravely mistaken to walk away from them now.  To do so would only be a betrayal of everything that [Ambassador] Chris Stevens and his colleagues believed in and ultimately gave their lives for, but it would also be a betrayal of America’s highest values and our own enduring national interest in supporting people in the Middle East who want to live in peace and freedom.”  Those are the true American values that need no apology.