James Zogby Disappoints
The best thing about After Words, the book interview show, is that it pairs an author with someone who knows the subject and often comes at it from a different point of view. The best example of this was David Frum's superb interview of Victor Navasky a year ago, for Navasky's book, A Matter of Opinion. Frum was both respectful and sharp, and the polished Navasky humored him for a while before he grew impatient with Frum's description of the errors of the left, and defenestrated him. I forget the specific exchange, though I do recall that Frum tried to grill Navasky over the alleged anti-Semitism of Nation magazine writers. (Frum and I share a hobbyhorse; he just rides it backwards).
Anyway, last night, the interview went along on data points surrounding Al Qaeda before Wright climbed up to the high board: the despair in the Muslim world. "Islamic societies are in a crisis... All the statistics are so dismal... the absence of knowledge, the widespread illiteracy, all these things create depair..."
This is Bernard Lewis regurgitated by a new generation, and some of it is true. I have commented often on the lack of reading I observed in Syria. The problem is that it is purely materialistic. The statistics are economic ones, and they often seek to valorize Israel, because it is so modern. Those of us on the left who are concerned with Muslim hearts and minds are not talking strictly about their pocketbooks. Other things beside western progress puncture the spirit of Arabs. Like, injustice.
Zogby knows this, and could have educated a great number of us by expressing this point of view. The closest he got was "Doesn't the loss of control and policies we've perpetrated contribute as well?" He meant, I will bet, the Occupied Territories, and the charnel house that David Frum and John Podhoretz have made of Iraq. But he didn't say so out loud. And Wright then pushed the question aside with another serving of pablum. Zogby had something of a fawning smile throughout. This was a true misfortune, a lost opportunity to extend the dialogue between worldviews...
Jim Zogby has learned to be very cautious. And with good reason. For two decades the AIPAC crowd has demonized this liberal Democrat, supporter of the two-state solution as some kind of terrorist sympathizer. They even managed to get his nephew fired from the State Department for...being Jim's nephew.
And yet Zogby, A Christian no less, takes the same position on Israel as a sizable minority (or majority) of Americans Jews and Israelis: two states for two peoples.
So I'd cut him some slack.
Being an Arab-American leader in Washington these days (and the Dems are perhaps worse than the GOP in this regard) has got to be a miserable experience.
Wasn't Zogby speaking in code?
We count on your reporting to decode the secret messages and tell us what they meant to say.
I know what you mean about those stupid materialistic facts like literacy rate, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, percentage of people with adequate food, clean water, housing, stability and health of living things and natural environment, human rights, economic and political equality of men and women. They are so ethnocentric and don't "get" the Arab street.
There were two info-rich articles in the New Yorker.
One dry review on Iraq - Al Quaeda by Lawrence Wright:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060619ta_talk_wright
and one on Taha by Packer:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060911fa_fact1
All are proof that we are dealing with incredible naive people, whose violence is childish. Taha was a moderate, murdered by the incredible naive Sudanese regime.
Part of the Muslim world needs adult supervision.
One supervisor must be despatched to work on the Saudi King.
Lawrence Wright or Steve Centanni may be the right choices.
"This is Bernard Lewis regurgitated by a new generation..."
Cf. Martin Amis in the Guardian, regurgitating with abandon. Like his hiccup-y pal Hitch, he's gone over.
"...and some of it is true. I have commented often on the lack of reading I observed in Syria."
According to the CIA, the US enjoys a 99.9% literacy rate. Take that with a cruise missile-sized grain of salt. By 2005 UN estimates, Syria's rate is 82.9%, though other sources have it lower and the rate for women as abysmal as 50%.
Those brandishing Arab and more broadly Muslim subliteracy for reasons of declaring western superiority make an especially selective case. No one, for instance, would confuse the United States, where sales of 15,000 copies can constitute success for serious books, and publishers flog ghosted celeb junk to stay in the black, with a nation of readers. Literacy measures ability, but always in situ--if deployed mainly to parse plasma TV set-up guides and Wal-Mart job applications, maybe it's an unreliable guide to a civilization.