24
Jun
2007
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Where is the Arab B'tselem?

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“You can lecture me about B’tselem the day you can show there is a B’tselem on your side prepared to do something about human rights violations in the Arab world,” I was once told after citing reports by the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem to mock a claim that the occupation of Palestine was ‘humanitarian.’ “Where is the Arab B’tselem?”

This is the question, in one form or another, that we hear from a number of liberals. Its purpose is unclear, but its usage telling. There exists a certain school of thought which is totally comfortable with discarding and ignoring everything that B’tselem has to say about the occupation by shifting to an entirely different subject, spinning B’tselem’s very existence into a point of merit. While B’tselem’s many reports should be a repulsive moral blemish on the Israeli government and military, apologists for those serious crimes manage to use it as a sign of Israel’s ever-brilliant democracy. “At the very least,” they will say, “such a group exists in Israel and is allowed to exist. Where does this happen in the Arab countries?” And thus B’tselem’s reports, which should be more than enough to indict Israel, suddenly become the means by which it is acquitted.

Why would such people be so confident in their position, given that despite the cheap praise they heap on the organization (and their calls for an Arab parallel, as if one did not already exist), they would never be found in the ranks of its membership or on its roster of donors? The reason, I think, has very much to do with a type of political understanding which refuses to consider content and focuses exclusively on form. It does not matter what B’tselem is saying; all that matters is that it is saying something. This tendency, however, is intellectually bankrupt, and I hope to show some of the problematic assumptions that this line of questioning requires, not to mention its erroneous implications.

Let us look at other examples of the same question in different forms. During an appearance on Democracy Now in 2006, Irshad Manji, a self-proclaimed “Muslim refusenik and reformer,” asked the question: where are the mullahs for human rights? She repeated it as if in and of itself it was a strong point or even an entire argument. Perhaps the implication is that there is something wrong with Islam, or with Arab culture, if there does not exist an organization called “mullahs for human rights” which touts the same principles that Irshad Manji believes in, because now the measure of the acceptability of any one religion on this earth is whether or not there exists a “religious leaders for human rights” group in its name.

The search for “good” Arabs and Muslims, ones more acceptable to our sensibilities, is more common than one might think. One professor at Syracuse University, Laurence Thomas, recently fantasized to himself: “Imagine, if you can, a world in which millions of Muslims marched for peace and boycotted any and all acts of military aggression.” Professor Thomas has chosen to focus on Muslims because the non-Muslim world, as we all know, is totally overwhelmed by massive marches for peace, and a total boycott of military aggression. If you haven’t heard already, workers at Halliburton, HR Textron, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin have joined a very popular general strike which has shut down businesses, schools, and government offices as everybody waits in total suspense for Congress to pass a new resolution boycotting all acts of military aggression and calling for world peace. Or, at least, that is what you might think coming away from Mr Thomas’ pleas for peaceful Muslims: that they are the last obstacle to world peace.

Given the insistence with which Ms Manji put forth her question, and the fascination with which Mr Thomas imagines Muslims, we might even assume that if there did exist a group “mullahs for human rights” or massive “marches for peace,” everything would suddenly be all right for Muslims and Arabs around the world. There would no longer be oppressive governments in the Middle East–oppressive governments which, as a matter of fact, are often installed, propped up, or otherwise supported by those same governments which believe themselves (and are often believed by others to be) universal symbols of freedom and liberty. There would no longer be war in the Middle East–which is often waged, if not encouraged with arms shipments and economic aid packages, by those countries who do have “citizens for human rights” groups in the first place.

What Ms Manji, Mr Thomas, and the commentator above all have in common is not their focus on petty points, but the fact that, in doing so, they reveal something about their understanding of politics. In all its forms this question appears to be the epitome of a deep sense of confusion that is found among similar ‘liberal’ commentators, as well as a general ignorance about the Arab and Muslim worlds. It seems, in the first place, that they would have a march for peace by Arabs, whatever that might mean, rather than an actual condition conducive to a non-violent atmosphere (in the case where they are pacifists, because there are those who preach pacifism while aiming a gun), and, in the second place, that they actually do believe that there exist no human rights or non-violence groups or individuals in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

While I would like to focus on the first point, there are a couple things to say about the second. First, it is easy enough to refute: one needs only to look at prisons across the region to find a number of brave activists and individuals who have been jailed for their activities and their genuine fight for justice. Second, we should consider the logic behind it: if there was a group called “mullahs for human rights,” would that mean that a Muslim or Arab society would suddenly become more acceptable to our Western eyes? If this is so, then we should take the presence of a group called the KKK in the United States to be emblematic of a reactionary, racist, and brutally violent society. This would be absurd–but then the argument becomes a numbers game, in which the errant will say that despite the KKK’s presence, they are a minority group that all the “mainstream” religious organizations condemn. To this the question should be posed: if it is a matter of numbers, then just how many Muslims for peace do we need to have before Muslim society is palatable? How many racists or reactionaries can a society have before it becomes distasteful? Any serious attempt at formulating a workable answer to these questions is undermined by the very absurdity of this type of meaningless quantification.

The second analysis that might be presented explaining why the presence of the KKK is okay in America is that the “mainstream” in Arab and Muslim countries is “extremist,” whereas in America extremists are recognized, at least, for what they are. If we look at these terms relatively (and we must, because they are), then thinking about the phrase “mainstream extremists” is an amusing exercise, and we should then understand that the only way in which this apparent oxymoron would make sense is from the perspective of somebody far-removed from the society in question. After all if you go to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine and tell the children there where the bombs falling over their heads, destroying their homes, and killing their neighbors, cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents come from, they will almost certainly come up with a different definition for “extremist,” and would probably recoil away in disgust, anger, and hatred if they then learned that this “extremism” was actually quite “mainstream” in another country. Our inability to recognize the relative qualities of these words and to situate ourselves in the position of somebody who has different definitions for them, not for the sake of justifying what they believe but understanding it, is what makes it difficult to recognize how ridiculous this explanation is.

But why are some people moved to such questions in the first place? And why do still others consider them to be good or important points that are useful in analysis?

We could note, for example, that with regards to what the commentator above said about B’tselem, importance is not placed on what B’tselem has to say, but the very fact that it is saying it at all. B’tselem could be talking about the second-class citizenship of Arabs in Israel or the lack of political rights for Palestinians under occupation, but its speech, instead, is taken to signify a healthy democracy. The logic that allows for this prevails among a group of people who have difficulty considering the very possibility that there might be real and serious social, political, and economic problems under a democratic order–and this belief (that democratic countries are perfect or the best, by their very nature of being democratic) always happens to coincide with the interests of those in the superior position, be they material or ideological.

In fact, it appears that all of these real, practical problems that manifest themselves in our daily lives are wholly subsumed by the inconsistent emphasis on select liberal values. In all of these cases traditional principles of free speech are invoked to assert a moral righteousness which, somehow, manages to eclipse and effectively hide any other moral shortcomings. Perhaps on the hierarchy of moral crimes death and destruction come lower than a violation of free speech. I do not believe this, but this appears to be the logic behind the rationale “at least we have a B’tselem (that we can dutifully ignore).”

But let us look at this situation more generally. To ask where the peaceful Arabs and Muslims for human rights are, is really to suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with Muslims and Arabs, or their culture, that prevents them from believing in human rights or being peaceful. That there are many organizations and individuals working towards goals similar to these, however, disproves that idea. One might then point out that the problem is actually that many of these people are in jail. But in doing this they themselves depart from the original idea, which is a flawed cultural theory, and attach onto a different one: that the reason these people are in jail is because the political system that rules them does not tolerate them.

These are two entirely different things, and only the second is actually true. But the second is no point at all, it is self-evident. Whosoever adopts these talking points is doing nothing more than stating the obvious by saying, “we live in a liberal democracy and they do not.” Taking this beyond a mere statement of fact and attaching a value judgment to it is dangerous because there was a time where there was no liberal democracy, anywhere, and, more importantly, there has never been a time in any liberal democracy where those supposedly fundamental liberal principles have not been threatened or curtailed by the system in question. That is, the value judgment can only make sense if we imagine all liberal democracies to be perfect. Otherwise we should be readily able to apply the same repugnance we project onto those “non-liberal” societies onto our own.

That is the way to distinguish between those who are seriously interested in the proliferation of B’tselem style organizations, and those who are simply looking for other ways to act out on their crass chauvinism by distracting attention to the ‘inferior’ values of the Other.

If anything, then, the appropriate question is not “where is the Arab B’tselem?” but, rather: “where is our B’tselem, and how can we empower it?” Anything less than taking it seriously rather than tokenizing it as the tolerated dissent is, frankly, a total bastardization of all of those liberal values we claim to have in the first place.

This article is cross-posted at my personal blog.