by Barry Rubin
The message presented from all these sources was of a hostile, imperialistic, and repressive America. Since there were supposedly no real conflicts among Arabs or Muslims, the quarrels and disagreements between countries, parties, and communities were said to be largely due to U.S. machinations. Israel, whose elimination was also high on the Arab and Islamist agenda, supposedly only existed because of U.S. backing. Thus, America-and not the rulers' misgovernment or the ideologies' bankruptcy-was mainly responsible for the fact that the Arab (or Muslim) world is not united, strong, happy, pious, filled with social justice, freed of Israel's existence, and wealthy.
Indeed, the high degree of distrust and rejection that results is characterized by a Syrian journalist's claim that the United States follows a Nazi model: "Lie, lie, until the lie becomes truth. But U.S. lies have not become truth."' In most of the Arab world and in large parts of the Muslim world, though, it was anti-Americanism that became accepted as truth despite the absence or distortion of evidence for such assertions.
In the words of Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British writer, the reason for the power and prevalence of anti-Americanism is its value as
a smokescreen for Muslim nations' many defects-their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of identity, making possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric ... that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating ... America because it has made of itself what [they] cannot.... What America is accused ofclosed-mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance-is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror.2
Thus, the main U.S. utility for the region's oppressive dictatorships was not as a protector but as an excuse for their failings. For the Arab world's ills, as the Lebanese-American scholar Fouad Ajami wrote, antiAmericanism was the "Placebo ."3 Given anti-Americanism's intensity and pervasiveness in deliberately misexplaining the meaning of U.S. policy and values, ordinary people accepted its claims as truth. Surrounded daily by anti-American messages taught by teachers, journalists, religious authorities, and government and opposition leaders alike, it was hardly surprising that the masses accepted and echoed such sentiments. They were fed on a steady diet of distortions about the nature of American society and foreign policy, with little or no different views to be heard.
Living with so much corruption, repression, economic stagnation, social restrictions, and lack of hope, people had an urgent need to find someone to blame. Since they were powerless to criticize publicly or replace their own dictators, it is hardly surprising that the United States became their principal scapegoat or that anti-Americanism was a popular way to blow off steam.
As Ajami put it:
The populations shut out of power fell back on their imaginations and their bitterness. They resented the rulers but could not overthrow them. It was easier to lash out at American power and question American purposes. And they have been permitted the political space to do so. They can burn American flags at will, so long as they remember that the rulers and their prerogatives are beyond scrutiny. The rulers ... know when to indulge the periodic outbursts at American power.4
Given this relentless effort by regimes, radical oppositions, and intellectuals belonging to both camps, the Middle East became one of the few places where anti-Americanism has truly become a populist doctrine actually accepted by a large majority of people. "For many Arabs, regardless of their politics," writes the Arab-American academic Fawaz Gerges, the United States was portrayed as "the embodiment of evil, [responsible for all the world's] ills and misfortunes."s
The masses were programmed in this direction not only by direct criticism of the United States but also by the systematic distortion of its deeds and policies. "There can be no written praise of America, no acknowledgment of its tolerance or hospitality," wrote Ajami. No serious Arab work "has spoken of the American political experience or the American cultural landscape with any appreciation."6
Those defending the United States or pointing to the dictatorial regimes as the real problem were few in number. Since they were labeled as traitors to Islam or the Arab nation, such people required a great deal of personal courage but were silenced or denied media access, and faced considerable career and even personal risks. At any rate, advocates of such Western ideas as pluralist democracy, free enterprise, human rights, civil liberties, or friendship with the West saw these arguments dismissed and discredited as the misleading and ruinous notions promulgated by American imperialism.
But the goals of regimes and ideologies were not all that was at stake. Anti-Americanism also reflected the degree to which modernization, Westernization, and globalization has been highly problematic in the Arab world. Nowhere else is resistance to such influences so uncompromising and thoroughgoing as in the Arab and Muslim world along both religious and nationalistic lines. Equally, nowhere else were these new ideas and institutions so identified specifically with the United States.
After all, for Europe and even Latin America, the United States and its influence or way of life represented only one aspect of modern society, pluralist democracy, or a free-enterprise economy. Many features of American life and thought had originated in Europe and also existed there, perhaps with relatively minor variations.
But for the Arab world, coming to full self-consciousness in the aftermath of European colonialism and during the era of American supremacy, these were alien ideas and ones highly identified uniquely with the United States. There was often talk about "the West," but the focus was overwhelmingly on America. As a result, anti-Americanism existed in a much purer form in the Middle East, as a doctrine for disparaging a whole set of ideas that included matters ranging from equality for women to equality for ethnic and religious groups, from new styles of music to greater personal freedom. Westernization, modernization, and globalization became mere synonyms for Americanization.
The man who could most credibly claim to be the intellectual author of anti-Americanism in the Arab world was Sayyid Qutb, who was also the most important founding theorist of revolutionary Islamism. Qutb's critique of America was an exclusively civilizational one, with virtually no reference to American policies. In 1948, the forty-two-year-old Qutb was sent by Egypt's education ministry to the United States to study its schooling methods. In articles written for Egyptian periodicals and later in a 1951 book, The America I Have Seen, Qutb expressed his horror about life in Greeley, Colorado, where he studied curriculum at the Colorado State Teachers College.
Like his European and Latin American predecessors in antiAmericanism, Qutb saw his own people as spiritual superiors threatened by an inferior and dangerous culture. Yet, in Qutb's case, because of his miscomprehension, knee-jerk hatred of the "other," and perception of any society different from his own as inferior, he and his anti-American successors embodied in far more extreme ways the very characteristics they condemned as distorting America's alleged vision of Arabs and Muslims.
To show that Americans had bad taste, he described a young American man with large, brightly colored tattoos of animals.7 The attention paid by residents of Greeley to their lawns proved that Americans were selfish people interested only in material things. The competition among the town's Christian ministers showed how everything in America was invested with the spirit of business, while a church dance scandalized him by its "seductive atmosphere" and the visibility of women's legs.8
In terms close to historic French anti-Americanism, Qutb explained that all high culture was imported from Europe and that the only art form Americans did well were films, since this media combined "craftsmanship and primitive emotions." American material civilization might be successful, he concluded, but its people were not, and their abilities were only materialistic ones that subverted spirituality and mocked the proper way of life and relationship between people and God.9
According to Qutb, then-in terms not so far from classical European anti-Amer
icanism-the United States was technologically advanced yet spiritually primitive. Perhaps it could be respected for its technological ingenuity, productivity, and living standards, but the conclusion, in Qutb's words, was that "man cannot maintain his balance before the machine and risks becoming a machine himself. He is unable to shoulder the burden of exhausting work and forge ahead on the path of inhumanity, he unleashes the animal within."10
Its society "reminds one of the days when man lived in jungles and caves" because it appreciates only "muscular strength rather than values in family or social life." Violence is another characteristic in the Arab anti-American lexicon. For Qutb, this was demonstrated by a preference for such sports as boxing and football. Thus, "the American is by his very nature a warrior who loves combat."" This explains why the United States is brutal and aggressive abroad.
In contrast to secular Europeans who disdain America as fanatically religious, however, Muslim anti-Americans see it as distressingly atheist and thus a godless threat to any pious society. Qutb wrote that despite its profusion of church buildings, no one is less able to appreciate religion than Americans." 12
Similar themes recur in the relatively sparse-compared to Europe'sArab travel literature about the United States. Yusuf al-Hasan, a Palestinian, in a 1986 travel book about the country, said it lashes out to punish others without reflection or reasoning, "Just like the cowboy who lives in a world in which only the fastest to pull his gun survives."" As a result, explains Egyptian satirist Mahmud al-Sadani, "America is the greatest, largest, and most obnoxious empire in history." It helps the strong against the weak, Israel against the Arabs. It invades Panama on the "pretext" that its dictator is involved in drug-dealing but really only to control the Panama Canal, or opposes Cuba as a dictatorship while supporting other Latin American dictators."
Middle Eastern anti-Americanism is thus based on a comprehensive critique of America based on such issues as America's history, its society, and analogies with its behavior elsewhere in the world. In some cases, these ideas are drawn by European sources, either read or absorbed during studies there, though increasingly they may come from the direct experience of those who attended universities in the United States.
Many of these sentiments arise from cultural clashes, a pattern similar to nineteenth-century European anti-Americanism. Indeed, even on issues where Arab-Muslim differences to the West in general are the greatest, there is still a striking similarity between the anti-American reactions of Arabs and Muslims and the expressions of horror at America by those from conservative European perspectives.
Such is the case with the view of women's role in America. Qutb's discussion of this issue positively drips with a sense of sensual danger, a frightening power that might overwhelm the pious and subvert ArabMuslim society as the social equivalent of a nuclear weapon. He describes the American female as a temptress, acting her part in a system Qutb described as "biological": "The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs-and she shows all this and does not hide it.""
Like their European counterparts, Middle Eastern critics also viewed America as a country where women suffered from the loss of their proper role and an excess of social power. Islamist Iran's spiritual guide Ali alHusseini al-Khamene'i explained that this was why women were better off in his country than in America.16 A secular Egyptian journalist used an argument identical to Islamists and nineteenth-century European anti-Americans: since the United States was controlled by "money and sex ... the materialistic ambition of some American women ends with ... broken hearts and homes, and sick, exhausted souls, and with them drowning their wretchedness in drugs and alcohol. "17
If American women had subverted their own men to destruction, they could also be portrayed as playing that same role of seducing Arab men into cultural surrender. The secular leftist Egyptian Sherif Hetata wrote a novel entitled The Net in 1982 with a plot like a Soviet Cold War story. The Egyptian hero is tempted by a glamorous, mysterious American woman spy to leave a state-run pharmaceutical company to work for an American multinational. He also abandons his wife, who represents traditional Egyptian virtues. But the evil American's real purpose is to destroy the Egyptian left. The love affair ends in disaster, the woman is murdered, and her Egyptian victim is executed as a traitor. The moral is that Egypt will face disaster if it heeds the siren call of a falsely glittering but treacherous America."
This idea of a disgusting society inevitably producing a repellent foreign policy often appears in Middle Eastern anti-Americanism. And so while the political side of anti-Americanism is more commonly expressed than the cultural-civilizational side, this is in no small part due to the fact that the latter is taken for granted. In a remarkable passage, Saddam Hussein brought the two aspects together when he told his subjects, "The United States exports evil, in terms of corruption and criminality, not only to any place to which its armies travel, but also to any place where its movies go."19
Ironically, the main architect of Arab nationalist anti-Americanism, the secularist Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, was the man who executed Qutb on charges of fomenting an Islamist revolution against himself. As the Arab world's leader and would-be unifier, Nasser knew that the United States would not back his plans to seize control of the region and overturn all the other regimes. Therefore, he had to declare America as the enemy of the Arabs in general and stir up hostility to it.
But the United States did not quite live up to the role that Nasser assigned it, another sign of the broad gap between reality and the image of the United States held or disseminated by Arab regimes. Not only was anti-Americanism in the Arab world formulated at a time when the United States played a relatively minor role in the region-and had little to do with Israel-but America had even supported Nasser's 1952 coup and saved him from being overthrown by a British-French-Israeli attack in 1956.
It was, in fact, Nasser's alliance with the USSR in his bid to subvert moderate Arab countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon and to become the region's leader that made U.S. policy makers oppose his ambitions 20 Even then, despite the aggressive and imperialist reputation imputed to it, the United States did not do much against him. Moreover, far from being anti-Islam in this era, U.S. policy became literally its political patron, seeing traditionalist Muslims like those in Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Communism and radical Arab nationalism.
Meanwhile, Arab nationalists came to run the most aggressive, repressive regimes in the region, intimidate moderate traditionalists, and win over almost the entire intellectual class. They claimed that their own doctrine represented the people's will and that anyone who disagreed was a U.S. stooge. As Arab nationalist regimes seized control of Iraq in 1958, Syria in 1963, and Libya in 1970, this system spread, as did the systematic anti-American indoctrination it used.
There were no limits to what could be claimed and believed about the United States. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, Nasser explained away his humiliating defeat at Israel's hands by falsely claiming that his forces had been destroyed by the U.S. Air Force. Egyptian schoolchildren were taught ever afterward the lie that the United States attacked Egypt and fought alongside Israel in the 1967 war. Israel was portrayed as either America's stooge or master.2'
In reality, though, the United States had no significant relationship with Israel until the 1970s. And the sole actual U.S.-backed coup was in 1953 in Iran, where American leaders feared that Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh's government was being taken over by Communist forces. Helping to overthrow Mossadegh, though the coup enjoyed considerable support even among Iran's Muslim clerics, was the one American deed that could be portrayed as a grievance equivalent to those prevalent in Latin America. Unlike in Latin America or Asia, however, where the United States openly confronted, fought, or overthrew gov ernments it de
emed hostile, in the Middle East America courted even Arab radical forces, worrying that those it antagonized would side with the USSR. This strategy eventually worked with Egypt in the late 1970s, and that country became the recipient of large-scale U.S. aid and assistance without having any effect on the regime's massive production of anti-American propaganda.
The Arab nationalist regimes were virtually the world's only nonCommunist forces aligned with Moscow during the Cold War. When it came to the United States, they borrowed extensively from that bloc's arguments and propaganda. Like the Communists, they had no use for the democratic, free-enterprise, human rights-oriented system of the United States. They created dictatorial mobilization states that were in every respect antithetical to American ideas, values, and institutions.
Such views were also expressed by PLO leader Yasir Arafat, who saw himself as part of a global Third World revolution against the United States. At a 1969 student convention in Amman, long before there was any U.S. alliance with Israel, he led the crowd in singing a song entitled, "America, the Head of the Snake."22 Arafat repeatedly denounced U.S. policy as "an imperialist plot to liquidate the Palestinian cause"23 and claimed that America had caused all the region's problems.24 This was despite the fact that the United States never attacked the PLO, even though it killed Americans on several occasions and sided with America's enemies.21
The idea that the United States wanted to conquer the region for itself was echoed almost universally by Arab ideologues and leaders. Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad explained in a 1981 speech, "The United States wants us to be puppets so it can manipulate us the way it wants. It wants us to be slaves so it can exploit us the way it wants. It wants to occupy our territory and exploit our masses. It wants us to be parrots repeating what is said to us."26 Yet, in fact, the United States did not attack Syria and even accepted that country's occupation of Lebanon.