Mideast hatred is demented?

[Easy E]

Interesting conclusion by Mr Gaylin
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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.