Why Do They Hate Us?
The venerable magazine The Nation is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. (Happy Anniversary!) They asked me to contribute to an extraordinary special issue of the magazine, and my contribution is titled “Why Do They Hate Us”? The essay deals with the rising anti-Islam sentiment among liberal warriors. Here’s a selection:
Specifically, the problem with today’s liberal anti-Islam crowd is that they won’t countenance context or complexity. They justify their positions by arguing on the level of “ideas,” although their knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence is sorely limited (few to none read Arabic), and their focus on “ideas” conveniently allows them to bracket off the messy history of America’s “war on terror.” These liberals argue that the problem is “Islam today” (not “Islam” per se), but then they deliberately avoid thinking about what makes today different from yesterday. Wouldn’t such a consideration mean reckoning with the various ways that the “war on terror” feeds the creation of the very terrorism it is supposed to eliminate?
Such self-delusion is what makes the current outburst of liberal anti-Islamic philosophizing especially distressing, though it illustrates a useful distinction between Orientalist and Islamophobic ways of thinking. The anti-Islam positions of liberals, like those of conservatives, are instrumentalizing hostile attitudes toward Muslims into policy. But the anti-Islam positions offered up by conservatives today mostly serves a domestic (sometimes evangelical) agenda that relies on a fear of the Muslim “other” to prove that a mythic America is in danger of slipping away. With liberals, it’s different: their Orientalism at this moment works largely to continue and possibly expand the “war on terror” overseas. Packer writes that France must have a “renewed debate” regarding its Muslim citizens after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, but that in “other places”—presumably places peopled with Muslim “others”—“the responses have to be different, with higher levels of counter-violence.”
Read the rest of the essay, which also includes my drawing attention to a little noticed element of the Senate’s Torture Report, here.