Op-Ed
Battered America Syndrome
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Infomaniacs Anonymous
Infomaniacs Anonymous
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I love opening The Sun in the morning and finding the editorial page filled with letters from the Cornell community — it reassures me that some still read this newspaper and care enough about what’s written to respond in kind. My own mailbag’s contents are fairly diverse. Many of the letters I get are well-written. Some are idiotic. And every once in a while, I get one that’s well-written and idiotic. Witness the following paragraph of a letter printed on Friday, from a Cornell sophomore I’ll call “Neville:”
Re: Mr. Ahmadinejad Goes to Columbia, Opinion, Sept. 25
“I try to understand the reason for the terrorists’ hate for our country as much as I understand the gaping hole in the soul of my city, New York, and my people, New Yorkers ... I was in Manhattan on the morning of September 11 … from that experience, [I] have begun to understand what it feels like to have your home be a war-zone. I understand why one could hate America for the methods it uses to promote its values and on the world — proxy wars, dictators, training death squads. I try to understand how I would view America if my only experience with it was having troops come in to my country (Afghanistan), destroy it in a proxy war, then abandon it, having funded and trained our warlords. We may not have flown a plane into their buildings, but we caused violent, barbaric destruction to their homeland. We left a gaping hole in the soul of their cities and their people.”
Let’s forgive Neville’s erroneous belief that the hijackers grew up in war-torn Afghanistan and instead evaluate the letter’s interpretation of the 9/11 attacks as a completely understandable, albeit regrettable, response to American actions abroad. The question Neville seems to be asking isn’t, “Why do they hate us?” so much as, “Why wouldn’t they hate us?”
I agree with Neville that simply labeling Islamic terrorists “evildoers” and fighting them as if they were the sons of Satan gets us nowhere. We must understand the nature of their hatred, especially if we’ve played a part, intentional or not, in sowing it. I’d add that it’s also essential for nations, as for individuals, to engage in the sort of introspection that Neville exhibits — all the more so for a country whose global actions have a greater effect on humanity than any other.
The trouble with Neville’s reasoning is that it begins with an ipso-facto conclusion — that horrific acts against America must be responses to equally terrible acts by America. If, however, we accept Neville’s premise that American actions abroad were primarily to blame for the violence we witnessed on 9/11, we should’ve expected most of the perpetrators to come from a country other than Saudi Arabia (which, but for American blood and treasure, would be a province of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). Uncle Sam, after all, has inflicted far fewer injustices upon the Muslim world than he has on sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia, not to mention the natives of this land.
Yet when we open up our newspapers and turn on our TVs, we don’t find stories about terrorists from Nicaragua, Ghana or Vietnam. No, instead we see something like the following, reported yesterday by the A.P…
“Police arrested a Bosnian man after he tried to enter the US Embassy in Vienna with a backpack containing explosives, nails and Islamic literature, authorities said.”
Let’s play Blue’s Clues here:
Clue #1: U.S. Embassy
Clue #2: Explosives
Clue #3: Islamic literature
I’m not seeing a connection here, are you? Let’s see… the man had nails with him — perhaps he was a carpenter? And he was going to the U.S. Embassy — maybe he was getting his passport renewed? No, that’s not it … Gosh, I’m stumped.
Oh, wait! The man was from Bosnia, so therefore we must have done something terrible in Bosnia lately to merit his anger … Come to think of it, I do vaguely recall something about American soldiers in Bosnia. But my memory must be mistaken because, as I remember it, they were on a mission to prevent Bosnian civilians from being slaughtered by the Serbians — and I seem to recall us doing the same thing a few years later for the Muslims of Kosovo. (The Tutsis in Rwanda and the Darfuris in Sudan should have been so lucky.) Apparently, the Muslim world not only has the fewest legitimate grievances against America — it also has the most causes for gratitude. (I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention the 1992-93 American mission to feed starving Muslims in Somalia, in which 18 American soldiers were brutally murdered.)
I have no intention in this column of navigating the political minefields most commonly cited as Muslim grievances against America — I do that enough— and, frankly, it would be irrelevant. American support for Israel or the war in Iraq might explain Muslim hostility, but they don’t account for the barbarity with which that hostility has been expressed. Only in the twisted religious ideology that our enemies cite as inspiration do we find such an explanation.
Neville and other secular liberals dismiss religious fundamentalism as a causal force behind such violence because it’s foreign to them. They refuse to entertain the notion that a Muslim teenager might actually believe what his elders tell him about the 72 virgins awaiting him in paradise because, well, how could anyone rational believe something so ridiculous? On the other hand, Muslim rage at American foreign policy makes perfect sense to them because, more often than not, they share that anger.
But there’s more to this intellectual sadomasochism. Attributing 9/11 solely to American misdeeds is comforting. There’s peace of mind in the illusion that if we change our sordid ways, we have nothing to fear. And our foreign policy, unlike their religious ideology, is within our locus of control.
This reflexive identification with our enemies reminds me of the Stockholm Syndrome of kidnapping victims and the Battered Woman’s Syndrome of abused girlfriends and wives. I wonder if there could be a similar dynamic — a Battered America Syndrome — at work in the psyche of those most traumatized by 9/11.
Blaming the victims (i.e. ourselves) is tempting. If only it were that simple.
Ben Birnbaum is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at bbirnbaum@cornellsun.com. Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.