Looking Across the Chasm

I found this essay under  INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN in the New York Times of the Tuesday November 17, 2009 issue. I thought that this essay was so well thought out and intricate that I would like to share it with my blog readers. 

NEW YORK

I’ve been gazing at the grainy video of Major Nidal Malik Hasan in a convenience store in Killeen, Texas, six hours before he went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead. He smiles, greets the owner, taking his time. 

 As with the security cameraimages of Mohamed Atta entering the airport at Portland, Maine, on Sept 11, 2001, we crave some clue to what is about to happen. We look into those eyes and see only blankness. We seek some sign of madness and find only the mundane. We are frustrated in our search for meaning.

The two men are dressed differently— Hasan in his traditional white religious garb, Atta in his anodyne blue shirt and dark pants. But they bear some similarities to each other as middle class, well-educated Muslims, both apparently asexual or at least not known to have had girlfriends, living in Western culture while cultivating radical Islamic beliefs at odds with it. Hasan complained he could not find a bride devout enough for him.

Eight years elapsed between those videos. At about the midpoint, in 2005, we also have Hasib Hussain, caught in an early-morning security-camera frame at Luton station, leading the young bombers who, hours later, would wreak destruction in the London underground. With their caps and backpacks, these Leeds killers look like just another bunch of lads dressed in American gear.

All these images of our globalized world deepen the enigma of what precisely pushes some Muslims exposed to United States and European societies into violence. The persistence of that enigma is a measure of the failure, in the first decade of the 2lstcentury, to bridge the dangerous abyss between the West and Islam. President Obama has rightly placed outreach to the Muslim world at the heart of his foreign policy, but has failed to make meaningful headway.

My sense is that the very onerous nature of Western liberty, with its absence of moral absolutism and multiplicity of choices, its consumer culture and sexual freedoms, is part of what leads the likes of Atta and Hasan to seek angry refuge in faith. The West looms as a form of humiliation, an affront to Islamic civilization; it is perceived stifi as the culture of French and British colonialists, Zionist intruders or American imperialists (now at war in Muslim Iraq and Afghanistan).

I have grown more pessimistic over the past year about Obama’s capacity to overcome this antagonism. He is a natural conciliator. But the festering war in Afghanistan, the deep frustrations of the Arab and Persian worlds, and the powerful lobbies in the United States, with more interest in confrontation than conciliation, have hemmed in the president. He seems caught between a bold vision and cautious political instincts.

Of one thing I am sure. There will be no victory of the West over political Islam, no triumph of moderate secularists over Muslim extremists. The answers lie in compromises between them. It’s precisely such compromises that Iran’s reformist movement seeks, a middle road combining Islam and modern pluralism.

That was one of the ideas behind the Iranian revolution of 30 years ago. It’s been quashed for now, but its importance endures.

Ten years after that revolution, the Berlin Wall came down. But soon enough another barrier went up: the Israeli security fence which already stretches for over 400 kilometers, cordoning off the occupied West Bank.

If democratic Israelis a projection of Western liberal culture, and ever-receding Palestine is now a central cause of Islamism, then the fence embodies the failure to bridge the chasm between the two. It is the most visible expression of the fault line behind the mystery of the Atta and Hasan images. Wails and peace do not go together; not in Europe and not in the Middle East.

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