Having neglected to answer my own poll

[ewx]

Let's start with the first line.

WE ARE told by some of the more hysterical critics of the war on terror that "it is destroying the Arab world". So? Should we be worried about that?

Is the Arab world the states or the people? I think the latter is the obvious interpretation, but the next couple of sentences do address the states more explicitly. I think those critics, hysterical or otherwise, are more interested in the fate of people rather than the details of which governments remain in power, and RKS ought to be addressing what they mean, rather than an attacking a straw man. If he's not dismissing millions of people as below our collective attention, and not employing a lame rhetorical trick, then I think he has to plead a confusion between people and governments.

We're told that the Arabs loathe us. Really? For liberating the Iraqis? For subsidising the lifestyles of people in Egypt and Jordan, to name but two, for giving them vast amounts of aid? [...etc...]

Clearly a reference to Arabs in general. One might have one opinion or another on how the good and bad the Arab world has recieved from the west add up, but it is wilful blindness to completely ignore the bad. It seems unlikely that they loathe anyone for sending aid. But they might quite reasonably object to aid to their enemies, support for repressive rulers, etc.

What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders?

Blatant generalization, and I can't see how you could possibly interpret this as referring to the region's governments (unless perhaps I missed King Fahd dancing in the streets of Riyad).

That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, womenrepressors? I don't think the Arab states should start a debate about what is really loathsome.

This paragraph barely make sense, as a whole. Perhaps one could, at a real push, interpret it as accusing Arab states of all these various wrongs. However the Mombasa and Yemen attacks are usually attribute to Al-Qaeda, and with a specific organization being responsible I don't think it's possible to appeal to the state/people confusion suggested above. It reads more like he originally wrote "I don't think the Arabs should start a debate", and then thought better of such an obviously racist remark but neglected to make the change make sense. But who knows for sure?

But why, in any case, should we be concerned that they feel angry and loathe us? The Arab world has not exactly earned our respect, has it? Iran is a vile, terrorist-supporting regime - part of the axis of evil. So is the Saddam Hussein-supporting Syria. So is Libya. Indeed, most of them chant support for Saddam.

Chanting isn't a term one usually applies to governments - it brings to mind demonstrations in the streets, rather. State/people confusion is about the best one could claim, but I don't really believe it here.

I suspect it's hard to have a rational discussion about the Arab world, past or present, that completely excludes Persia, so I'm not going to complain that Iran is not an Arab state.

Moreover, the people who claim we are loathsome are currently threatening our civilian populations with chemical and biological weapons. They are promising to let suicide bombers loose in Western and American cities. They are trying to terrorise us, disrupt our lives.

Could be interpreted as applying to only a minority; but the article purports to refer to the Arabs as a whole, not to be an attack on Al-Qaeda and Saddam in particular, so why include it?

We have thousands of asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries living happily in this country on social security.

This shows what their own people think of the Arab regimes, doesn't it? There is not one single British asylum seeker in any Arab country.

This seem like a fair and unambiguous attack on middle-Eastern governments. Competence at last ... though "aslyum seekers living on social security" could well be an appeal to one of the nastier strains of thought in British politics. And on the other hand the last bit has the ring of something one of his friends said in the pub ("That's good, I'll put that in my article, can I get you a drink?"); is it really so different from "you wouldn't be allowed to say that in Russia"?

The Galloway stuff seems entirely irrelevant to the rest of the article, so I shall ignore it.

A lot of the article is just plain confused. I can see why people interpret it as racist; it reads like an article - a rant, really - written as an attack on Arabs in general with the language incompetently adjusted to apparently refer to their governments instead. I wouldn't want to argue that it was definitely a racist document in a court (and that may be precisely the point of the adjustment if it really happened), but both on first reading and after more detailed examination it leaves a very unpleasant taste.

It also comes across as profoundly igorant of the history of the Middle East and of the links between the Arab world and the West. But really, just how often is racism based on a deep understanding of its targets?

The claim that it was written at the time of the war rings true to me, though I've no idea whether it was published then or how it came to be published now. I don't think it matters.

Kilroy-Silk, the BBC and Censorship

On the one hand, taking someone off the air because of their views is hard not to call censorship, which I object to but that's not what I want to talk about because, on the other hand, I don't think people (including the BBC) should be required to give money to obnoxious people merely because stopping doing so could be construed as censorship. (Also even if the show is killed permanently he'll probably still have greater ability to get his views, whatever they may really be, published than the average person.)

Comments

[pm215]

It reads more like he originally wrote [...] and then thought better of [it] but didn't neglected to make the change make sense.

Nice to see that some of the rules of Usenet apply to LJ too :-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Whoops. Well spotted. Corrected.