History's Unforgiving Toll

Obama’s United States is paying for the deep resentment that the Arab world has held since the years of George W. Bush.

History times its cruelty inconveniently; it tends to collects its tolls at the worst moments. After so many years of imperial disregard for the people of North Africa and the Near East, of intellectual belittling of Islam and the Arab cultures, of supporting authoritarian regimes such as those of Ben Ali and Mubarak, of unconditional loyalty and protection toward Israel, it is certainly unfair that Obama’s United States now has to pay the price. During his speech in Cairo, Obama proposed reconciliation with the Muslim and Arab world. He supported the Arab Spring with a conviction that was at minimum greater than that of the European Union. He has also expressed a will to cooperate with the supposedly moderate Islamic governments that have risen out of the democratic elections in Tunisia and Egypt.

Let no one be deceived: Resentment toward the United States in the Arab and Muslim world runs very deep. It was cut considerably deeper during the years of George W. Bush. There was the invasion of Iraq, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and a brutal style of fighting jihad that, among other things, was supported by the Arab authoritarian states. They even subcontracted these states to detain and torture their suspects. Even in Tunisia, the most open, tolerant and liberal country in the good-old sense of the word of the Maghreb? Yes, even in Tunisia. Its inhabitants — secularists, piously peaceful followers of Islam and militant fundamentalists — have not forgotten that Ben Ali was cited as an exemplary Arab leader by both Washington and its local financial institutions, such as World Bank and the IMF.

That said, it is plainly apparent that the United States is not responsible for the Muhammad-defaming movie snafu that was posted on the Internet by a little-known person. It is even more apparent that the reactions of the angry Salafist mobs that we are seeing these days in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Sudan and Tunisia only speak badly of their participants by confirming their own barbaric ideology, political totalitarianism and violent methodology. Salafism, sadly, is a metastasizing tumor. Its primitive, fundamentalist and exclusionary interpretation of Islam has been cultivated in recent decades using petrodollars from the United States’ ally, Saudi Arabia. What a surprise.

Their latest victims are the United States’ embassies and their staff, flagrantly violating international conventions about which they could not care less. But in recent months, their victims have been many Arab men and women whose infractions range from art exhibitions to broadcasting of “blasphemous” TV shows, from leaving home without the “hijab” to resisting religious fundamentalism within the democratic governments that have risen from the Arab Spring. Even the peaceful Sufis, Islamic advocates of a beautiful and mystical interpretation of the Quran, are being viciously persecuted by the Salafists in northern Africa. In Timbuktu, which has now fallen to these maniacal zealots, centuries-old shrines of popular Muslim saints are being destroyed by the iconoclasts.

For months, Tunisian advocates for democracy and their friends abroad have denounced the Salafist thugs for spreading terror in the jasmine country: assaulting art exhibitions, shutting down movies and TV shows and harassing women. Additionally, that was all under the passivity of the supposedly moderate Islamic administration of the Ennahda party, which won the constituent assembly elections of 2011 following the fall of Ben Ali. In a country whose main economic resource is its now-scarce foreign tourism, these gangs have besieged hotels for serving alcohol strictly inside their own walls. The Salafists in Tunisia and Egypt respond to this with a shrug. They want “halal” tourism that caters to clientele from the Gulf countries.

After the brutal attacks in Tunisia on the embassy and other civilian centers with U.S. ties, the world now knows that the denouncements were not just paranoia. They know that the Salafists are taking advantage of their recently won freedom to impose their agenda as the Nazis did in the Weimar Republic — using violence, to be precise.

Meanwhile, Obama’s United States is paying the heavy toll of history. Maybe the greatest symbol of injustice is the violent death of Chris Stevens in the attack on the consulate in Benghazi last Tuesday. The American ambassador to Libya was personally appointed by the current American president. He spoke Arabic, loved the Arab people, understood and respected their manners and customs and this past year has aggressively supported their desire for liberty and dignity voiced by millions. His murderers could not care less.