Friedman and reality

For years I have been shocked, not only by the routine suicide mass terrorist slaughters in Iraqi streets and markets that in scale and frequency have dwarfed anything that had occurred in Israel, which up to 2003 I had thought was the ultimate in evil, but by the way Iraqis accepted these slaughters and did not rise up in horror and outrage against them. Thomas Friedman is also disturbed by it:

I can logically understand the lack of protest when Muslims kill Americans in Iraq. We’re seen as occupiers by many. But I can’t understand how the mass slaughter of 70 Baghdad college students last week by Sunni suicide bombers or the blowing up of a Shiite mosque on the first day of Ramadan in 2005 evoke so little response. Every day it’s 100 more.

I raise this question because the only hope left for Iraq—if there is any—is not in a U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. That may be necessary, but without a Muslim counternihilism strategy that delegitimizes the mass murder of Muslims by Muslims, there is no hope for decent politics there. It takes a village, and right now the Muslim village is mute. It has no moral voice when it comes to its own….

If Arab Muslims can summon the will to protest only against the insults of “the foreigner” but never the injuries inflicted by their own on their own, how can they ever generate a modern society or democracy—which is all about respecting and protecting minority voices and unorthodox views? And if Sunnis and Shiites can never form a social contract to rule themselves—and will always require an iron-fisted dictator—decent government will forever elude them.

For once, Friedman has no clever plan or proposal to heal this problem. While he expresses vague hopes for a “Martin Luther al-King,” a moral leader of Islam, he seems to be slowly accepting the fact that Muslims are different from you and me.

M. Jose writes:

Of course the Iraqis are rising up in horror and protest. What do you think the Shiite death squads are? The torture of Sunnis in Shia-run prisons? They don’t get mad, they get even. The response to this violence is a slow attempt to kill or make flee as many Sunnis as possible.

When people wonder why the Iraqis don’t protest the violence, we are projecting our values here. The Iraqis of the various factions do not want as their highest goal, and end to violence. They want their side to be victorious. They don’t want to stop the civil war, they want to win it.

Robert Brandtjen writes:

Friedman: “It takes a village, and right now the Muslim village is mute. It has no moral voice when it comes to its own….”

Funny that this white American journalist cannot see that his own people are in the same boat …

Randall Parker writes:

Friedman’s confusing use of the term “village” shows the basic error in his position. Are all Arabs part of this same village? Or all people within the borders of Iraq? Or all Shiites? Or, hey, how about everyone in the same physical village?

The truth is that even a single larger sized village has multiple extended families in it, too many for much common loyalty. The loyalties that Friedman wishes would bring forth Iraqi people to protest against terrorism do not extend far enough beyond extended family for his appeal to have any chance of getting heard. Why should a single cousin-marrying clan go spill their own blood trying to get revenge for the benefit of people from other clans who get blown up in an attack?

At this point what is most notable about the events in Iraq is the intellectual failure of liberals and neoconservatives to see why the Arab Muslim Iraqis aren’t acting like white Americans. They do not think like we do. This fact has huge ramifications for liberalism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, and conservatism. The world’s peoples do not think alike. They do not embrace compatible values. They do not have the same loyalties to the same degree.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 25, 2007 07:25 PM | Send