Words&Dirt

“All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth the my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.”

––We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, pg. 41

“In the Middle East, power does indeed flow from the barrel of a gun. Some good citizens of Misrata in Libya may want to develop a liberal democratic party, some might even want to campaign for gay rights; but their choice will be limited if the local de facto power shoots liberal democrats and gays. Iraq is a case in point: a democracy in name only, far from liberal, and a place where people are routinely murdered for being homosexual.

The second phase of the Arab uprising is well into its stride. This is the internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links, and guns are currently far more powerful forces than ‘Western’ ideals of equality, freedom of expression, and universal suffrage. The Arab countries are beset by prejudice, indeed hatreds, of which average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes. We are aware of our own prejudices, which are legion, but often seem to turn a blind eye to those in the Middle East.

The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media. Anti-Semitic cartoons that echo the Nazi Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper are common. Week in, week out, shock-jock imams are given space on prime-time TV shows.

Western apologists for this sort of behavior are sometimes hamstrung by a fear of being described as one of the Edward Said’s ‘Orientalists.’ They betray their own liberal values by denying their universality. Others, in their naïveté, say that these incitements to murder are not widespread and must be seen in the context of the Arab language, which can be given to flights of rhetoric. This signals their lack of understanding of the “Arab street,” the role of the mainstream Arab media, and a refusal to understand that when people who are full of hatred say something, they mean it.”

––Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, by Tim Marshall, pg. 165-6