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Posted on 11/08/2001 8:54:05 PM PST by Migraine

BEIRUT. One of the symptoms of paranoia is that the sufferer is unable to put himself in someone else's position. It is highly likely that those who see only the reaction of the United States against Arabs and Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks are unable to put themselves in someone else's place or see his reaction in the appropriate context.

Arabs in the United States and Europe have undoubtedly experienced a climate of hatred. Their places of worship and religious symbols have been regarded suspiciously, and they have even met with occasional racist prejudice. Yet that is not solely due to delusions or hatred on the part of Americans, but to the fact that Arabs and Muslims have shed American blood -- even Arab- and Muslim-American blood. In doing so, they also shed the blood of every Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and atheist -- not to mention the blood of Muslims who do not share their beliefs. They have thereby declared all those fair game who do not share their opinion or lifestyle.

If the oppression of a Muslim is a graver offense in the eyes of God than the destruction of the entire world, as Osama bin Laden says in his interpretation of the prophet Muhammad, the destruction of the world along with all unbelievers and Muslims, is neither considered reprehensible nor rejected.

There is no doubt that Arabs, Muslims and Islam itself are surrounded by suspicion. But this is not the result of a crusade. Indeed, the hostility to which Arabs, Muslims and Islam have been exposed immediately attracted attention from those in the West who oppose it, instantly arousing awareness of the moral threat it poses to the foundation of democracy. The statements made by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi did not prove anything to the contrary. Rather, when provocation, battle cries and general ideological mobilization reached their peak, people recognized the threat to the minority and reached out to protect and even adopt it.

All of this serves to underline that the West is not always only the blood-sucker that we often imagine it to be and that Western fear of a new racism cannot be explained by a greed for oil reserves or a fear of an uprising by a billion Muslims, but is actually anchored in a system of values and moral awareness that we would do well to accept as credible. In the end, the judgment we pass will fall back on us.

Perhaps the attacks of Sept. 11 were the acid test for this system of values. It has stumbled but not fallen. After Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese were imprisoned in internment camps. In comparison, what Muslims experienced after Sept. 11 in the United States and Europe appears almost normal. Moreover, those of us who come from countries torn by civil war and have experienced the blaze of hatred should not rush to hold others accountable -- especially when we ourselves are still in the depths of the abyss and practice mutual suspicion, hostility and collective hatred.

Many of our intellectuals are obviously incapable of putting themselves in someone else's position, and perhaps it is this incapacity that drives them to schizophrenic behavior. The deep concern about religion among lay and atheist intellectuals alike is especially remarkable. The sensitivity of thinkers who have always doubted the infallibility of clerics toward any criticism of Islam and its history is astonishing, as is the same sensitivity from those who always favored independence from religious discourse and regarded it as a premise of cultural development.

It certainly is amazing that this sensitivity is now directed against every view of this kind if it comes from the West, although we know that the West fought its own Christian faith vigorously, always subjected it to historical and critical scrutiny and thereby destroyed its sanctity. It was the West that developed a system of ethical and cultural values that recognizes minorities and criticizes Western standards and Eurocentrism. We, on the other hand, have all too often accepted the victory of unity and uniformity over pluralism and differences of opinion. We stayed silent when large minorities among us were oppressed, and we never accepted responsibility for genuine mass murder. All too often, we can still not distinguish between culture and fanaticism, between bigotry and well-founded opinion.

Instead of demanding accountability from others, it would therefore be our greatest duty to free our culture from its characteristic propensity for bigotry. Even if our charge that America abuses our suffering and ineptitude were justified, we have still not made an equivalent effort to recognize our own responsibility for the causes of this suffering. It is a responsibility that grows by the day. We have always preferred to establish a small tyrant inside each of us who puts off all accountability toward ourselves and others until historic revenge has been wreaked on the West, as small as the hope of that ever happening might be. All too often have we cheered on our real and major tyrants, expecting the promised hour of revenge to be at hand. All too often we have rejected accountability to ourselves, as soon as a glimmer of hope that this revenge may materialize appeared, and all too often we gambled away our responsibility and self-judgment just to close ranks again.

Now many of our intellectuals appear to be raising small bin Ladens within themselves by evoking historic revenge at any price, even if that involves the destruction of culture, the incarceration of women or delivering up Afghanistan to the fighter-bombers of President George W. Bush.

Perhaps many among us are now praying that Western racism and the American paranoia may grow, because that would offer us a new pretext for not looking in the mirror. It would again allow us to submerge ourselves in the insane notion of "collective oppression," so as to spare ourselves the sight of an appalling face -- the face of a different Islam, an Islam of isolation and arbitrary violence, which is gaining ground little by little and soon, when we head for the apex of our blindness, will have become our real face.

It is beyond doubt that Arabs and Muslims are subject to unjust treatment. But if this is all we see, it means that we have learned nothing of the other yet.

The Lebanese poet Abbas Baydoun was born in 1945. He is the culture editor of the daily newspaper As-Safir in Beirut

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