Serious Golmal

Ethan Heitner writes, on the excellent TomPaine.com site, a good article about two events that will put the the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ tripe out of service once and for all. But first, what exactly is the Clash of Civilisations myth?

Samuel Huntington’s nonsense 1996 hit, The Clash of Civilizations, holds as its basic premise that the Muslim world as a monolithic whole is historically, genetically incapable of peace and that it is intrinsically opposed to a monolithic “Western world.” The two are destined to fight and one must, in the end, win—us or them. Fortunately a healthy dose of debunking arrived this week.

The “clash of civilizations” is not just a myth, it is a dangerous myth that demands that the United States and Israel use military force to humiliate and conquer Muslim countries to keep them from turning Europe into “Eurabia.” It buys into the apocalyptic dualism of Osama bin Laden and reinforces it—after all, when the West says that Islam is the root of all conflict and must be neutered and brought under Western control, that provides damn good justification for a Muslim to take up arms against the West.

And the two events Heitner mentions are the launch of Al Jazeera English:

[It] is highly important that Americans watch Al Jazeera. It represents for the first time a post-colonial literary shift in the world of cable news: instead of broadcasting a vision of the world based in New York, Washington D.C., or even London, the metropolitan centers of our empire, it is a view of the world from the “periphery.” Watch the first 10 minutes of live broadcast yesterday and note where those stories are coming from: Gaza, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran. For the first time, Americans will be able to see these places not through American filters of American corporate ownership, cultural ignorance and our own self-centeredness. Not to proclaim Aljazeera as any kind of unbiased truth about the world, of course—it has its own filters, its own funders and its own cultural stereotypes to deal with.

And the second, the presentation to Kofi Annan the final report of the High-Level Group of the Alliance of Civilisations (AoC).

the AoC proposes a number of concrete solutions, including focusing on resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, a 50-year-battle at the heart of the world that has moved into a symbolic level for much of the globe. Spain, alongside Italy and France, today announced a new peace initiative, and they have hopes of being the “honest broker” the United States never was.

Unfortunately, few leaders in America have the courage to voice these opinions, and American mainstream punditry seems to continue to focus on maintaining America as an imperial power across the globe (i.e., fixing our imperial overreach, not forswearing it). And Al Jazeera English, so far, has yet to be picked up by a single American cable carrier.

Read the full AoC report here [PDF].

This entry was posted Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Middle East. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.