PDA

View Full Version : Mideast hatred is demented?


Easy E
05-25-2003, 11:25 PM
Interesting conclusion by Mr Gaylin
---
Posted on Sun, May. 25, 2003

American Rhythms | Mideast hatred more than just politics
By Jane Eisner

The face of hatred remained shrouded, but its deadly work roared back into our consciousness in the last few weeks.

Three lethal suicide bombings, executed with minute precision, killed 34 people in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 12, injuring hundreds more, destroying three housing compounds with foreign residents, and shattering any illusion that terrorism had taken a holiday.

Next came Casablanca, Morocco, where, on the evening of May 16, a well-planned, five-pronged attack using cheap explosives and plenty of human fodder killed 28 bystanders and 13 attackers who had the bad luck of being in a Jewish restaurant or a Jewish cemetery or a hotel where Israelis had once stayed.

And in the last week, five suicide bombers killed 12 Israelis as they simply followed the rhythm of domestic life - boarding a bus or entering a shopping mall. Among the dead were a pregnant wife, new immigrants, and, perhaps ironically, two Arab residents.

It is fashionable to offer grand geopolitical and socioeconomic explanations for these attacks, which authorities believe were the work of al-Qaeda, Hamas, or other Muslim militants. They are attacks against perceived American imperialism or Israeli aggression, "born of desperation, nurtured by hatred and fostered by extremist zeal," as one story in this newspaper put it.

Those analyses imply that these attacks are a means to a well-defined end, a way of getting something the terrorists want. Palestinians are so angry about their stateless existence, the argument goes, that they can't but seek to disrupt Israeli life. Al-Qaeda wants the United States out of Saudi Arabia so desperately, it must hurt and kill foreigners.

Give them what they want, the thinking goes, and the hatred will dissipate or even disappear. Put another way: We are at least partly to blame for what they are doing to us.

Willard Gaylin disputes that analysis in a new book that is an illuminating, chilling argument about the nature of hatred: It is not a political statement. It is a severe psychological disorder.

"We are reluctant - unwilling - to acknowledge and condemn hatred... [so] we 'rationalize' it," Gaylin writes in Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence."

"We make it comfortable, by explaining it in everyday terms of sociology and psychology. We look to politics and economics to explain why and how hate-driven acts occur, forgetting that hatred is ultimately a pathological mental mind-set. In such a way we trivialize the acts of terror and in the process romanticize the terrorists, supplying them with ready defenses."

Gaylin is no slouch in the intellectual world; he is a cofounder of the Hastings Center, the preeminent institute for the study of ethical issues in the life sciences. But he approaches the subject of hatred from the perspective of a psychiatrist who has treated patients for decades.

And so he contends that pathological haters such as al-Qaeda are not fighting in defense of an ideology. Nor is their hatred a mere extension of the rage that we may all experience in certain conditions.

Hatred stems from internal conflict and feelings of deprivation that are externalized to a scapegoat, an enemy, in the outside world. Like love, hatred requires a passionate, powerful and enduring attachment to a person or group of people.

Psychology calls this "displacement." It's what happens when, after suffering quietly through a bad day in the office, we come home and yell at the kids.

There have long been "cultures of hatred" that designate a scapegoat to deflect attention from the real causes of a population's anxiety and despair. Nazi Germany is a prime example, in the way it exploited historical anti-Semitism to serve the needs of a paranoid, pathological dictator.

But even more worrying now is the culture of haters such as al-Qaeda, who observe no geographic or territorial boundaries but, thanks to technology, can compound individual pathology into a group's murderous power.

While al-Qaeda's choice of enemy may not be totally arbitrary, it is irrational. How can a Jewish restaurant in Morocco be a real threat to deprived citizens of the Muslim world? As Gaylin explains, in the hater's mind, the enemy is like a delusion, created to serve the needs of the hater. Gaylin quotes the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."

Our response to this irrationality should be to avoid taking the scapegoat seriously, Gaylin says. I'd add that we should also avoid the search for scapegoats and enemies of our own. How often do we displace our own anxiety and envy onto "the other," determined that the - take your pick - black man or Asian woman or Irish neighbor is the reason for our feelings of deprivation? How often do our leaders try to redirect our anger to enemies abroad rather than causes at home?

And while this rich, generous nation has a moral obligation to help the disadvantaged throughout the world, we should not fool ourselves into believing that disadvantage alone leads to terror and hate. Al-Qaeda leaders come from the aristocracy, not the squalid refugee camps. By the same token, the Weathermen who terrorized the United States in the raucous 1960s were led not by poor minorities but members of the white upper class.

If hatred were an entitlement of the deprived, and always led directly to action, then all Palestinians would strap bombs to their bodies and stroll into crowded restaurants. Obviously, the vast majority do not. Living conditions and political oppression may fuel resentment, but something else is at work in individual psyches to transform that resentment into lethal action.

None of us, no matter how we live, is entitled to hate so deeply and cruelly. The terrorists are not, and neither are we in response. The first step to ending hatred is to end the excuses.

Chris Alger
05-26-2003, 02:53 PM
This has nothing to do with the Middle East. Instead, it's a string of platitudes about random violence caused by irrational hatred and the problems with rationalizing it. It applies everywhere, including here.

Of course terrorism inspired by blind hatred is irrational. Of course the bombers in Casablanca, Riyahd and Israel had no legitimate greivance against their targets. This does not imply, however, that eliminating the causes of the more rational animosities will have no effect on their most extreme manifestations. You can prove this simply by asking: did 9/11 create hatred that compelled some Americans to commit or support random violence against innocent people? Of course it did. Does this mean that the perpretrators of 9/11 bear no responsibility for this, or that terrorists generally should refrain from giving American haters "what they want" on the grounds that hatred is really caused by other things? Of course not.

Easy E
05-26-2003, 11:08 PM
Maybe because I'm tired, but this didnt' translate into English for me:

"Does this mean that... terrorists generally should refrain from giving American haters "what they want" on the grounds that hatred is really caused by other things? Of course not."

Can you be more specific?

Chris Alger
05-27-2003, 12:49 AM
The article states:

"Palestinians are so angry about their stateless existence, the argument goes, that they can't but seek to disrupt Israeli life. Al-Qaeda wants the United States out of Saudi Arabia so desperately, it must hurt and kill foreigners. Give them what they want, the thinking goes, and the hatred will dissipate or even disappear. Put another way: We are at least partly to blame for what they are doing to us."

There are a lot of problems with this argument, beginning with the slick equation of "Palestinians" and "Al Qaeda" with "them," as in giving "them what they want" will do no good because "they" are hate-filled terrorists motivated by a psycholgoical disorder. The article also ludicrously implies that accomodating terrorist demands has become a "fashionable" response.

My point, however, was that one can easily reverse the argument by pointing out that the victims of Arab terrorism -- or citizens of victimized countries -- also include those filled and even consumed by hatred. At the extreme, you see this in the anti-Arab harrassment and murder, most insanely those of Sikhs, and in the widespread assumption that the war against Iraq amounts to fighting the perpetrators of 9/11. (About a quarter of the American public, according to several polls, believe that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for 9/11, although not even the White House or its most vociferous war supporters make this claim). In any bar, I doubt I'd have trouble finding at least one patron who agrees that we should just bomb the crap out of "the Arabs." These sentiments can be defined with as much justification as the "psycholgocial disorder" of irrational racist hatred. The terrorists, when requested to refrain from terrorism, could just as readily invoke the same argument to say, look, our victims include those suffering from psycholgical disorders and their Iraqi civilian victims were picked at random, so accomodating "their" political demands (e.g., to stop the bombing) will probably not have any positive effect.

In other words, its the same tedious argument we've seen a thousand times since the Sepoy "mutiny" of 1857: a policy causes widespread hate and discontent. A small number of the aggrieved party (or their most extreme sypathizers) react with savage irrationality against random victims. Those who favor the status quo argue: changing the policy will do no good, because our enemies are mere savages, remorseless, without pity, bent on extermination, etc. It's just been slightly updated to reflect modern pop-psychotherapeutic attitudes.

nicky g
05-27-2003, 05:54 AM
I think you'd have to be mentally ill to think that Palestinian terrorism has nothing to do with the occupation. As for al-Qaeda, clearly what they do is irrational but I still think but can be partly explained in social terms. Islamic extremism is one of the only (if not the only)dissenting ideologies available in repressive Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, where all political activity is banned but religious activity can't be, given that it's the holiest place in Islam; hence it flourishes. The leaders of al-Qaeda are not poor or disenfranchised, but it is worth noting that it has flourished in extremely poor and/or failed states: Afghanistan, the slums of Pakistan, the Horn of Africa etc. The security vacuums and uneducated, desperately poor local populations in such places offer irrational extremists both somewhere to hide and a vulnerable population to exploit and and convince of their cause. The Palestinian situation clearly isn't what motivates al-Qaeda and they know their attacks do nothing to help Palestinians, but it is easily exploitable propaganda material that they can use to show how evil the west is in its treatment of Arabs and Muslims. So while poverty, Palestine, Saudi Arabia etc can't be seen as underpinning any rational al-Qaeda ideology, addressing such issues would severly reduce its threat.