From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven: The Poverty of Interpretation

Berghahn Books

From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven: The Poverty of InterpretationAuthor(s): Jonathan FriedmanSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 46, No.1 (Spring 2002), pp. 104-109Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23170135 .

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From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven The Poverty of Interpretation

Jonathan Friedman

Witnessing

Since September 11 2001, there have been a limited number of reactions

beyond the initial shock which some might say was the result of media cov

erage, the actual horror of seeing two planes crash into the Twin Towers.

The fact of witnessing the event must be understood here, and the proof of

its significance is that the attack on the all-important Pentagon which could

not be seen directly, did not provoke the same kind of immediate response. The actual incident is worth consideration since quite a bit has been writ

ten and said about it.

MI watched the scene over and over again! I couldn't stop watching it. It was

horrible and fascinating at the same time, unreal yet real!"

What is the nature of disbelief? This could not happen. It was unreal. It was

more than a shocking experience. There was an enormity of the event that

is difficult to ingest. Is this the nature of the extra-ordinary? Were we not

well prepared for this in a certain sense, the disaster films had certainly rehearsed us for it. Children's questions come to mind. What is it like for a

plane to penetrate a skyscraper and emerge on the other side? Why doesn't

the building just fall over? Imagine a plane coming in through offices, right

through the glass facade. Were people hit and thrown out of the other side?

How fast was the plane travelling? What was the impact like for the pas

sengers? Must we work this out in the imagination to come to terms with

it emotionally? It is important in any case not to confuse this immediate

reaction with that which has been produced by the media, and by intellec

tuals who have sought to interpret the event. The latter consists in linking the event to either motives or intentionalities, to reasons that are not nec



From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven 105

essarily immanent in the event itself. The immediate response would nat

urally be to know what the immediate intentions were, assuming that this

was not a mere accident. And an immediate next step is why do three

commandeered planes attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (a

fourth plane may have been aimed at the White House). Well, there is some

one out there who does not like something in our country.

Interpreting

Among the major reactions that have occupied the media and intellectual

discussions are the following. One reaction is a combination of fear and anger, driven by a strong

emotion to defend the country from its enemies. It sanctions counter

attacks, and invests itself in eradicating the terrorists who have done this

thing and who would destroy our world. This is perhaps the secondary reaction of people who do not see themselves as living in the "belly of the

beast," who think well of their country and have invested in something

they want to preserve. Another reaction is the strained converse of the latter. It is critical of the

United States as an imperial power, a power that has too often demon

strated the kind of arrogance that might incite this kind of action. Within

this reaction, there are a great majority who condemn the action itself

while finding a reason to engage in something other than retaliation. But

there are also those who think that the US in some sense deserved what it

got. The field of this reaction is complex and partly self-contradictory. A third reaction is the real antithesis of the first one. It understands the

attack as an act of righteousness by a civilization that has been dishonored

by Western hegemony. It speaks in terms oí jihad, in terms of the loss of the

Caliphate at the hands of that Western agent, Mustapha Kemal, in terms of

the necessity of instituting a new world order, one based on sharia. While

not always expressed directly, as in the words and texts of certain extrem

ist or fundamentalist organizations, it exists as a background text that can

be elicited when needed. One should note here the possible importance of

Wahabism, a sect originating in Syria, but which became at the turn of the

century critical in the formation of the Saudite dynasty. Wahabism is based

on an alliance between warriors and priests. I shall not, in this short space, dwell on all these reactions, but shall

limit myself to one that is closest to home, the second response, one char



106 Jonathan Friedman

acteristic of liberal-left intellectuals and media people. The structure of this

response is interesting in itself. It contains the following propositions:

1. The West is the "bad-guy." The United States in particular is an

arrogant superpower today with no major enemies after the

downing of the Wall. The US exploits the rest of the world, and is

the single most important perpetrator of global inequality and

excessive poverty. 2. This exploitation and inequality is the root cause of the hate that

has grown up against the United States in particular, and against

the wealthy Western World in general. While no citizens of any country deserve to die as a result of

we should understand that it is the long term effect of the

arrogance of power.

Now a number of discourses can be deduced from these basic propo sitions. One, voiced early on by Chomsky and many others is that the

attack on Americans is nothing compared to what Americans have done

elsewhere in the world, the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of

people that Americans have killed in various military actions and unde

clared wars and campaigns of starvation. And of course there is the crucial

issue of the state of Israel, supported by the United States in its war against the Arabs, and more specifically, its occupation of Palestinian territory. It is

interesting to note here that while for Western supporters of the Palestini

ans, Israel is an outpost or a lackey of American imperialism, for many

Arabs, the United States is itself a Jewish controlled state, thus reversing the

perspective on power. Another is that while it is understandable that peo

ple should react to being attacked, making war on terrorists and on

Afghanistan is no solution. Alternative solutions range from negotiation to

a Marshall Plan for the world's poor. The conditions that are assumed to be

the cause of this attack must be changed.

There are common themes here, and one in particular, that seems to lie

implicit in all that has been written and said. Supposing that the West, and

especially the US represent imperial power, what is asked for is that they be

morally accountable imperial powers. In other words, empire is OK as long as it is moral, and this implies that it is truly engaged in reducing inequal ities within the world, in respecting cultural difference, that it should strug

gle to be a non-empire. This is a moral rather than a political perspective on

the world. The United States has been a shameful and arrogant empire,

supporting all the wrong kinds of people and politics. There is a strange




paradox in this. Empire is apparently OK perhaps, but it does need to be

reformed. Intellectuals are nervous about the world. In their post-national

ist fervor, they are perhaps more positive to empire, to some form of global

governance, although most of them would prefer a true global government

rather than the Washington consensus. In any case, global power is proper

and necessary but it must serve the Good itself. So the West should be more

understanding of the evil of its ways:

to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not

only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness

even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who

have real grievances (Said, New York Times, 16-7-01).

But there are strange bedfellows around this time, some who have gone

much further in their critique, pinning the blame not only on arrogant

power, but on imperialism and expansionism itself.

How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution ... Have

we not suffered enough from Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center [the first

bombing], to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salem—not to know

that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism. Or will it take some cata

clysmic atrocity on U.S. soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire? (Buchanan 18-9-01, citing an earlier speech.)

And right-winger Buchanan goes to the limit with his argument:

"Either America finds an exit strategy from empire, or we lose our republic"

(Buchanan op. cit.).

Is there a difference here between liberal-left and extreme right? Perhaps,

but in this case it is in the isolationism of the right. And the opposite of iso lationism is the Empire of Good.

There are some who believe that the US is the only source of evil in the world, and that therefore European states represent something closer

to the good with their missionary rhetoric of aid and good deeds. Look out here for the total hypocrisy that is revealed when comparing this to the

complex motives that lie behind it all. The project of empire is alive and well in Europe as well.. It is also alive, but not well, in certain quarters of the Muslim world, in the form of post-Ottoman blues, a kind of subaltern

desire for an empire of sharia. And when I say this I am met often by a

knee-jerk reaction that is molded by the inversion of Western ideology. How can you say such a thing? You must be a reactionary. Nothing bad



108 Jonathan Friedman

can come from the so-called oppressed of the earth. This is one of the re

actions from the globalization quarters—the liberal-progressive wing of

the new global governance-imperial position. This is the position that is

emerging in the vacuum left by the left—a moral-globalism that would

have the wise rule the world.

And on the Other Voices?

Is this a clash of civilizations? In an ideological sense there is evidence that

the Islamic groups involved in terrorist activity are closer adherents of

Huntington than Western liberals who have lambasted his work as both

reactionary and wrong. Of course the relation cannot be understood in

terms of regional conflict, especially since much of the Islamist discourse is

produced within globally dispersed networks whose main centers are in

Europe and the United States. Dealing with the issue of networks, of

course, does not detract from the ideological production of religious and

regional conflict, for such are the terms of the discourse. It is said that the

relation between the Jews and the United States is crucial since the kingpin in much of the discussion is Israel. Many of the pronouncements from

Islamic extremists adopts the "elders of Zion protocols" and interpret the

US support for Israel as a Jewish conspiracy. The existence of a Jewish State

on Arab soil is a clear denigration of integrity that must be met. And if this

is all linked to a larger scheme of Jewish world dominance, then we have

a logic of violence all ready to go into operation. The structures of the network are clear enough for those interested.

Musa Abu Marzuk, executive officer of Hamas, arrested in 1995 in the

United States, had lived in that country for fifteen years, had connections

to most other major terrorist leaders and was involved in a multimillion

dollar laundering operation. Bashir Nafi who was deported in 1996, had

been working for WISE (World Islamic Studies Enterprise) attached to the

University of South Florida. The head of WISE, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah

was professor at the University of South Florida from 1991 to 1995 when he

surfaced in Damascus as head of Islamic Jihad. Investigation of the organi zation revealed a deep involvement in terrorist organization.

The point for an anthropologist, even assuming that I am wrong, is that

there is a tendency in intellectual reactions to repress the intentionality of

those involved in the events, by translating their actions into a métonymie

expression of world poverty and injustice, or even worse, making them into

the dumb ventriloquists of American arrogance. This is not to deny the fact




that the US, but Europe as well, of course, have been leading actors in the

past one hundred and fifty years of imperial expansion. There may well be

tendencies in the current global alliances for the emergence of empire, for

the political institutionalization of world order, but this is, historically,

always a late stage in the pulsating history of imperial organization, and it

is usually an expression of a demise of hegemony that is realized subse

quently. Intellectuals who insist that everything following the attack on the

Twin Towers, and perhaps even the attack itself is part of a conspiracy aimed at the establishment of total US power, are living the fantasy of their

own fear, in this new age of uncertainty, a fear that things might really be

much worse in the not so long run, that their own well-being might be in

jeopardy. And in all of it, to commit the atrociously anti-ethnographic act of

reducing the perpetrators to mere mindless puppets is, not so paradoxically, to purify the imperialist mentality which they would see fit to demolish.



From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven: The Poverty of Interpretation

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