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Run, Osama, Run
Run, Osama, Run
Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publication: The New York Times
Date: January 23, 2002
On the way back from Kabul, I passed
through Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, London and Belgium, where I had a variety
of talks with Arab and Muslim journalists and business people and Muslim
community leaders in Europe. All of them were educated, intelligent and
thoughtful - and virtually none of them believed that Osama bin Laden was
guilty.
Let's see, there was the serious
Arab journalist in Bahrain who said that Arabs could never have pulled
off something as complex as Sept. 11; there was the Euro-Muslim woman in
Brussels who looked at me as if I was a fool when I said that the bin Laden
tape in which he boasted of the World Trade Center attack was surely authentic
and had not been doctored by the Pentagon; there was the American-educated
Arab student who insisted that somehow the C.I.A. or Mossad must have known
about Sept. 11 in advance, so why didn't they stop it? There was the Saudi
businessman who declared that there was a plot in the U.S. media to smear
Saudi Arabia, for absolutely no reason. And there was the Pakistani who
confided that his kids' entire elementary school class believed the canard
that 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Center were warned not to
go to the office on Sept. 11.
Frankly, these views have been
present across the Arab-Muslim world ever since Sept. 11, but I somehow
hoped that after the fall of the Taliban, or bin Laden's confessional tapes,
they would have melted away. But they have not. Indeed, they have congealed
into an iron curtain of misunderstanding separating America and the Arab-Muslim
world, and are now as deeply held as they were on Sept. 11 - even if people
are slightly more reticent about airing them.
And they add up to a simple point:
that while America has won the war in Afghanistan, it has not won the hearts
and minds of the Arab-Muslim world. The cultural-political-psychological
chasm between us is wider than ever. And if you don't believe that, ask
any U.S. ambassador from Morocco to Islamabad - any one of them. They will
share with you cocktail party chatter about the "American conspiracy" against
the Muslim world that will curl your ears.
Yes, there are exceptions in every
country. When I sat with Bahraini friends in Manama last week, I found
many of them deeply introspective and ready to look reality in the eye.
But these are not the rule. Why? What produced this iron curtain of mistrust
and misunderstanding?
There are many rivets in it. One
is our own failure over the past two decades to really explain ourselves
in Arabic and to puncture canards about U.S. policy with hard facts. The
Bush team has yet to provide a dossier, in Arabic, detailing all the evidence
against bin Laden. It is not too late for that, although facts alone will
not be enough.
There is enormous cultural resistance
to believing anything good about America. Some of this is deliberately
fanned by the state-run press in certain Arab countries to deflect criticism
from the regime. Some is revenge for America's support for Israel, particularly
at this time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has turned into such
a human meat grinder, aired every night on Arab TV. Not acknowledging America's
version of reality, or undercutting its sense of victory in Afghanistan,
is a way for Arabs and Muslims to get revenge for America's support for
Israel, which they feel so powerless to affect.
At the same time, there does seem
to be a certain strain of self-loathing at work in parts of the Arab-Muslim
world today. What else can one think when someone tells you that Arabs
or Muslims could never have been clever enough to pull off Sept. 11 - only
the Mossad or C.I.A.? It is a sad fact that Arab self-esteem is very low
these days, because of the lagging state of Arab political systems and
economies, and that feeds the free-floating anger that bin Laden has been
surfing on.
Finally, we have to admit that
bin Laden touches something deep in the Arab-Muslim soul, even among those
who condemn his murders. They still root for him as the one man who was
not intimidated by America's overweening power, as the one man who dared
to tell certain Arab rulers that they had no clothes, and as the one man
who did something about it.
Quietly today, many in the Arab-Muslim
world are rooting for bin Laden to get away. They are whispering in their
hearts, "Run, Osama, run!" That's what's really going on out there. I just
wish we knew how to change it.
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