World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [135]
43 reveals much about the psychology of a majority that perceives itself as dominated and degraded.
“Power” can also be subjective and complicated—but in the United States’ case, it is not. As a country, America is not merely disproportionately wealthy, but economically, politically, culturally, technologically, and militarily dominant over the rest of the world.
“America is the most powerful nation on Earth,” wrote Nepalese columnist Daijhi, shortly after September 11. “Its economic force controls every field of commerce. Its military strength can destroy any other nation. It is effectively both the global government and the global policeman. But a small group of dedicated people armed only with fruit knives and a passionate cause was able to bring death, destruction and humiliation upon it. The spectacular attack on New York and Washington was the most important international event since the collapse of Communist Russia.”
44 Although Daijhi condemned the attack on America, the hint of pride in his tone is unmistakable. “So America is not so invincible after all,” hundreds of other developing-country commentators observed.
Many on the Arab street gloated more expressly. “Bulls-eye!” cheered taxi drivers in Egypt as they watched over and over footage of the hijacked planes slamming into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. “Mabrouk! Mabrouk! (Congratulations!),” shouted jubilant crowds huddled around televisions in shop windows.
45 While most Muslims are not fundamentalists, the September 11 killings nevertheless prompted many of them to celebrate and give special thanks to Allah. “[T]here can be no question,” writes Martin Peretz, “that today, it is in the lands of Islam where the greatest number of lives are invigorated by ecstatic hatred of the United States. We see this ecstasy, at once joyful and enraged, from Gaza to Egypt to the Gulf to South Asia.”
46
Demographics exacerbate the problem. The majority of the population in the Middle East are young. “Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970,” Robert Kaplan warned presciently in his 1994 essay “The Coming Anarchy.” “The most distant recollection of these youths will be the West’s humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991. Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a declining gross national product; in the next twenty years, at current growth rates, the population of many Arab countries will double. These states . . . will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies.”
47
The statement bin Laden aired shortly after the September 11 attacks, nauseating to grief-stricken Americans, hit just the right chord with millions throughout the Middle East: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammed is his messenger. There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed. Thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years.”
48
The momentary jubilation, however, of the millions of poor and exploited people around the world who rejoiced at the mass murder of Americans reflects profound weakness. In the words of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, “It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself that directly engenders support for terrorists whose ferocity and ingenuity are unprecedented in human history; it is, rather, the crushing humiliation that has infected the third-world countries.” Pamuk continues as follows:
At no time in history