by Stanley Rogouski, 4/5/06
As easy, and in some ways as comforting as it would be to
dismiss the attacks on Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll as the
product of a few unhinged sexually frustrated minds in the right-wing
blogosphere, they have a deeper, and much more troubling significance.
The products of unhinged, sexually frustrated minds they
certainly are.
The quotes from FreeRepublic or from the Little Green
Footballs weblog are difficult to read. ‘I’ve been watching this traitor bitch
fawn all over her captors this morning”. “Nice furniture, safe, nice
clothes, they NEVER threatened me”. “I’m very glad you were so comfortable
while working to undermine our efforts in Iraq. Now, wipe that Muslim
from your face and confess to pre-planning this?”
And they extend beyond the fringe right on the Internet. On
Imus’ TV show, his executive producer Bernard McGuirk was every bit as crude
and sexual. ‘She may be carrying Habib’s baby at this point.’
But explaining these attacks as sexual frustration and
resentment of the young attractive Carroll would not explain how women like
Michelle Malkin and Debbie Schlussel penned similar attacks on Carroll or how
all of them echo the savage campaign against the British journalist Robert Fisk
back in 2002.
What’s it really about?
Let’s start by quoting a mass murderer. 20 years after the
end of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, in his book ‘IN RETROSPECT The Tragedy
and Lessons of Vietnam’, partly blamed the failure of American on the
McCarthyite purges of the 1950s. Commonly known as the ‘China Hands’ they were
a group of scholars who lived and worked in China, spoke Chinese fluently and
understood the culture intimately. After the victory of Mao and the Communists
in the Civil War, men like John Service and Edgar Snow and women like Agnes
Smedley came into the crosshairs of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and were
purged from the State Department and from academia and even, in some cases,
driven out of the country. The results were catastrophic for American foreign
policy. With the purging of the most knowledgeable, reputable experts on Asia
and with the elevation of anti-communist hacks, the American foreign policy
establishment was unable to recognize the true implications of Mao’s victory in
the Chinese Civil war and instead aligned itself with the corrupt, ineffective
Chiang Kai-Shek and the rump state of Taiwan. The United States would have no
diplomatic relations with the third most powerful nation in the world for close
to 20 years and the entire course of American foreign policy in Asia descended
into the self-destructive madness of the Vietnam War.
As McNamara argues ‘the irony of this gap was that it
existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State
Department–John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter
Vincent [and Edmund Clubb]–had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the
1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights,
we–certainly I–badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose
rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated
the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a
Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.’
What Jill Carroll has in common with the late
pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie and the late NGO worker Marla Ruzicka is
not only that she’s been on the receiving end of the hysterical vitriol of the
radical right, but that she, like Robert Fisk went to the Middle East to live
with Muslims and learned to appreciate their culture and see them as human
beings, not as monsters or terrorists. Carroll, who speaks Arabic fluent enough
to pass for a native while underneath full Islamic dress, has an understanding
of the Iraqi people so nuanced and sophisticated that she was able to talk her
way out of three full months of captivity in the middle of an exploding civil
war between the Shiite majority and Sunni majority. That she was forced at
gunpoint to make a video denouncing the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq
and that she was forced to give an interview shortly after her ‘release’ in the
heart of an area dominated by the Sunni insurgency (where she still feared for
her life) provided the radical right with the opportunity to denounce her as a
traitor and a collaborator with the Sunni guerillas. Ms. Carroll, having been
held for 3 months by armed, masked Sunni guerillas is unlikely to be
intimidated by the clowns who hurl invective at her from their blogs and fringe
publications like FrontPage or WorldNet Daily. As frightening as she they seem
to you or me, neither Michelle Malkin nor Debbie Schlussel packs the same
ability to strike terror into the heart as armed Sunni insurgents pointing AK
47’s at your head.
But if Ms. Carroll decides she’s had enough of life as a
freelance journalist and decides to put her fluent Arabic and knowledge of the
Middle East to work in academia, she may find that the same people who slandered
her upon her release have already gutted the Arabic studies programs in most of
the major universities. She may also find that most of the knowledge experts in
the State Department, like the China hands in the 1950s, have already been
purged and replaced by hacks and administration loyalists. From David
Horowitz’s Campus Watch to the various Daniel Pipes affiliated groups to
radical right-wing student organizations like ‘The David Project’, Middle
Eastern studies programs all over the country are under attack. These are
powerful, well-funded organizations with close ties to the Bush Administration
and are determined to push Arabists out of the State Department and to purge
any pro-Arab and anti-Israel point of view from academia. They are truly the
heirs of the China Lobby in the 1950s and have already done as much, or even
more damage to the ability of Americans to come to an informed, nuanced opinion
on the Middle East and on Islamic culture. Journalists like Jill Carroll and
Robert Fisk and academics like Noam Chomsky are a threat to the illusion they
want to create, that Arabs, like the Chinese communists of the 1950s and 1960s,
are a demonic, all powerful force that threatens the very existence of the
United States, and they will be attacked, vilified, slandered, whispered about,
accused of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, and driven out of any position
of influence.
Should the agenda of the radical right win out and should we
wind in a shooting war with Iran,
we may all be looking back with nostalgia to the halcyon days of the Vietnam
War.