Date: 9/28/2003
*An American official told The New Yorker magazine in April that Lewis advised them to disregard warnings against inflaming the so-called Arab street since "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force".
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article976.shtml
In those meetings, and many that followed, Lewis argued that 9/11 demonstrated the danger the West was facing, especially if "Muslim terrorists" were supplied weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, Syria or Iran. His message to the administration was that the US could not afford to show weakness towards Arabs and Muslims. An American official told The New Yorker magazine in April that Lewis advised them to disregard warnings against inflaming the so-called Arab street since "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force."
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Article:
Subject: Muslims only respect force - Bernard Lewis (Islam scholar)
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003
*An American official told The New Yorker magazine in April that Lewis advised them to disregard warnings against inflaming the so-called Arab street since "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article976.shtml
In those meetings, and many that followed, Lewis argued that 9/11 demonstrated the danger the West was facing, especially if "Muslim terrorists" were supplied weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, Syria or Iran. His message to the administration was that the US could not afford to show weakness towards Arabs and Muslims. An American official told The New Yorker magazine in April that Lewis advised them to disregard warnings against inflaming the so-called Arab street since "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force." Lewis often cites the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, which he criticised as "too early", as an example of such signs of weakness that inspired the Palestinians to emulate Hizbullah's "perceived victory" by launching the Intifada.
But it is his broad definition of the relationship between Islam and the West that makes Lewis invaluable to the war lobby. Arab and Muslim grievances against the West, in Lewis's view, are by in large baseless and no more than desperate attempts by failed societies to blame external powers, especially the US and Israel for their self-inflicted misery. Lewis provides "a scholarly" cover for a lobby that has been openly advocating the reshaping of the regional map to eliminate "the Arab threat to Israel". Furthermore, Lewis considers Israel and Turkey the only real nation states in the region and has been forecasting the demise and the disintegration of Arab states since the Gulf War. "Most of the states of the Middle East... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, [and] no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates -- as happened in Lebanon -- into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties," Lewis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1992.
Lewis has repeatedly cited the rise of Islamism, following the decline of Pan Arabism and socialism, as evidence that all Arab and Muslim responses to Western hegemony -- ranging from the Palestinian resistance to intellectual anti-imperialist discourse -- result from irrational religious fanaticism.
Lewis seemed to relish the rise of Osama Bin Laden, who he portrayed in a 1998 article as the eloquent and poetic voice of Muslim rage, taking the Islamist's ascendancy as a vindication of his own inattention to secular and democratic forces in the region who oppose Western domination. In Lewis's world view, which has been adopted by countless media pundits, only tyrants, oppressors and fanatics would stand up to US plans for radical change in the region, while "true democrats", like certain figures in the Iraqi opposition, are awaiting military liberation at Washington's hands.
At the opening of a conference entitled "The Day After: Planning For A Post Saddam Iraq", organised by the right- wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Lewis put forward his views with respect to the current context.
As Lewis sees things, the military campaign is actually a "vision of democratisation" that elicits two types of responses. "The first could be summed up like this: The Arabs are incapable of democratic government. Arabs are different from us, and we must be more, shall we say, reasonable both in what we expect from them and in what they may expect from us. Whatever we do, these countries will be ruled by corrupt tyrants. The aim of foreign policy, therefore, should be to make sure that they are friendly tyrants rather than hostile," Lewis told the opening session of the conference on 3 October.
"The other point of view is somewhat different. It begins more or less from the same position -- that Arab countries are not democracies and that establishing democracies within Arab societies will be difficult. Yet, Arabs are teachable and democratic governance ought to be possible for them, provided we proctor and gradually launch them on our way, or I should say on their way.
"That point of view is known as imperialism. It was the method adopted in the British and French empires, in their mandated territories and in some of their colonies, creating governments in their own image. In Iraq, in Syria, and elsewhere, the British created constitutional monarchies and the French created unstable republics. None of them worked very well. But hope still remains", Lewis said as he argued for the virtue of American military intervention as an opportunity for the West to modernise the Arab world.
Lewis, who worked for British intelligence during World War II, not only has considerable nostalgia for bygone days, but has put himself solidly in the service of the new American empire, hoping it will pick up where the British and the French left off.
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