Stardate 20040105.1905

(On Screen): I've reached the point where I pretty much assume that if any writer is described as being a professor of "Arab and Islamic studies" or something like that, then it's a foregone conclusion that he will be strongly biased against my nation and that I will disagree with him. Case in point is Fawaz A. Gerges, who wrote an analysis for ABC News a couple of days ago that I responded to here. Gerges is described as "professor of Middle East and international affairs at Sarah Lawrence College".

To a great extent, this is the legacy of Edward Said.

Said attacks not only the entire discipline of Orientalism, which is devoted to the academic study of the Orient, but which Said accuses of perpetuating negative racial stereotypes, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice, and the myth of an unchanging, essential “Orient”, but he also accuses Orientalists as a group of complicity with imperial power, and holds them responsible for creating the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, which they achieve by suppressing the voice of the “oriental”, and by their anti-human tendency to make huge, but vague generalizations about entire populations, which in reality consist of millions of individuals. In other words, much of what was written about the Orient in general, and Islam and Islamic civilisation in particular, was false. The Orientalists also stand accused of creating the “Other” – the non-European, always characterised in a negative way, as for example, passive, weak, in need of civilizing.

And after the smoke cleared, it became something of a presumption that professors in any kind of ethnic or gender studies department were supposed to be advocates for that group, defenders of it. (Except for "Whiteness studies".)

Given the basic situation in the "War on Terror", it was inevitable that professors of Arab/Islamic studies would feel the need to speak out, and that they would tend to argue against the policies of the US in various ways. So when we learn that Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, then it's hardly any surprise to learn that the editorial he wrote for the International Herald Tribune is not particularly sympathetic to us. (Especially since the IHT belongs to the NY Times and takes its political cues from the Gray Lady.)

Saikal's editorial is a marvelous example of moral equivalence. There's war because "three minority extremist groups" are driving events in certain nations. If the moderates in those nations will rein in their extremists, then the war will be over. But if the moderates don't do this, then there could be disaster.

Working perversely to reinforce each other's ideological excesses, they have managed to drown out mainstream voices from all sides. Each has the aim of changing the world according to its own individual vision.

If these extremists are not marginalized, they could succeed in creating a world order with devastating consequences for generations to come.

So who are they? Even Saikal can't deny that Islamic radicals are part of the problem, so that's one. The other two are Zionists and Neocons.

Three minority extremist groups - the militant fundamentalist Islamists exemplified at the far edge by Al Qaeda, certain activist elements among America's reborn Christians and neoconservatives, and the most inflexible hard-line Zionists from Israel - have emerged as dangerously destabilizing actors in world politics.

So it's all about religion, and what we're seeing apparently is Muslims fighting back against a new aggressive Crusade launched by American Christians against Islam, egged on by the Zionists. Man, the power and influence those Zionists seem to have almost makes me wish I was Jewish so I could become part of the Great International Zionist Conspiracy.

In fact, it almost makes me wish I was a "reborn Christian" so I could be a NeoCon and be part of that conspiracy. Only I'm no Christian. But I do seem to be a neocon. Saikal is simply wrong when he tries to make it seem as if the neocons are some sort of expression of Christian fundamentalism. On the contrary, the neocons are mostly humanists, as I am, and have little sympathy for Christian fundamentalism.

Saikal goes into greater depth in describing the three forces he sees arrayed against one another in this war, and begins with the Muslim extremists by trying to explain that "yes, they're going too far BUT... there are reasons why they feel as they do which are actually the West's fault" and so on; you've heard it all before.

Al Qaeda and its radical Islamist supporters, believing in Islam as an assertive ideology of political and social transformation, want a re-Islamization of the Muslim world according to their vision and their social and political preferences. The alternative that they offer is widely regarded as regressive and repressive even by most Muslims, let al