Why they love us

A tongue-in-cheek look at the principle of reverse jealousy

by Tarek Atia

(cairolive.com, November 22, 2001) “Why do they hate us?” asked Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, positing that the Islamic and Arab Third World were steeped in jealousy of US success and democracy. However, even as Zakaria was arguing his case with much force and evidence, the most interesting of paradoxes was occurring at the exact same time. There, in the West, at the epicenters of luxury and liberty that the developing world supposedly craves to the point of insane rage, the rich and powerful were having a not-so-minor change of heart.

“Why do they get to arrest people without charging them?” authorities were asking themselves, suddenly discovering that maybe the Third World did possess some “positive” attributes after all. Emergency law, state censorship, political oppression, greater powers of surveillance — maybe all these things, the leaders of the rich and free western world were discovering, could provide real “added value” to their regimes.

Ironically, just as Zakaria and so many others were confidently declaring that jealousy — a sort of civilisation-wide envy of Western success and liberty — was one of the main driving forces behind the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the attacks themselves had resulted in a reverse sort of jealousy worming its way into the psyche of the leadership of the Western world. In response to Zakaria's query of “Why do they hate us?,” dictatorships the world over could now be tempted to ask back "Why do you love us so much?"

That love is symbolised in the sudden desire for any and every draconian measure invented in the Third World.

The trickle down of political, social, economic and cultural influences from West to East, from developed to developing, has been the norm for some time, taken for granted as the natural course the geopolitical world would take. But now a sort of “trickle up” effect is going on, with the masters learning something from the students.

The reversal, of course, was only natural. With the world becoming a smaller place in every way, it was unreasonable to expect that the free flow of ideas and influences would only move in one direction.

Now, with military personnel patrolling the gates, Washington's Dulles airport was “looking more like Cairo airport every day,” in the words of one recent traveller. And how totally expected that Britain would suddenly implement an emergency law after years of complaining about Egypt's.

While the question of security versus liberty is a very serious one, pundits on both sides of the Atlantic are having fun with this new dynamic.

Al-Wafd's co-Editor-in-Chief Magdi Mehanna argued that now that the US has started on the long descent into the “disease” of stricter state control on the liberties of their citizens, perhaps the Egyptian government should open consultancy offices in Washington and get paid in dollars.

Other columnists seem more upset than anything else that the US — long considered a beacon of freedom — was taking on such bad habits. Al-Ahram's Salama Ahmed Salama said it would be “unfortunate if the US were to become a Third World country.”

Salama also pointed out the contradictions between the way the US is acting now, and the way it has always pushed its human rights agenda via State Department missions, investigations, and commissions abroad.

Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post also points to this geographical inconsistency. "Abroad, tribunals seem possibly okay,” writes Mallaby. “At home, they are harder to stomach; after all, there's a Bill of Rights to protect here."

In the October issue of Wighat Nazar, prominent political analyst Mohamed Hassanein Heikal argues that ever since destroying the Soviet Union the US has been busy becoming more like its former enemy. To fight the new enemy, Heikal says, it looks like the US will be borrowing some of the very tactics it fought against with the old enemy, communism — things like wider state control and censorship.

“There is no doubt,” predicts Heikal, “that the US will be transformed from the inside out into a military dictatorship that will bring it down from its pinnacle in the pecking order of modernity to a Third World country run by emergency laws.”

Back in Washington, the coma that legislators seemed to have fallen into ever since 11 September seems to be clearing — at least for some. As George W Bush defended his recent decision to establish military tribunals for terrorism suspects, arguing that it was “the absolute right thing to do,” Democratic senators and liberal columnists were starting to wake up and smell the coffee, arguing that security was one thing, but that shredding the US Bill of Rights was something else altogether. Vermont Senator James Jeffords told the Washington Post that he was “very concerned about my good friend (Attorney General) John Ashcroft... Having 1,000 people locked up with no right to habeas corpus is a deep concern.”

Jeffords's situation is rather interesting. A Republican until very recently, his switch to the Democratic Party in May 2001 gave the Democrats control of the Senate. Jeffords told the Washington Post that he is afraid of the “damage that might have been done to the country if Republicans controlled the Senate and there was no check on the White House or House Republicans.” If there is one single thing that made the switch worthwhile, Jeffords said, “it is that it gave fellow Vermonter Patrick Leahy the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee in time to fight administration plans to increase police powers to battle terrorism.”

The interesting thing about the US — and its savior perhaps — is not just how the country is changing, taking on Third World qualities, but how it's doing that via a public debate, out in the open, discussed, talked about, and not hidden behind censorship as in other countries. According to former US Ambassador to Egypt Edward Walker, that is just one of several self-correcting mechanisms in the United States that makes him less worried that this draconian gut reaction to the September 11 attacks will win out in the long run

After all, you certainly wouldn't have seen something like a recent edition of the popular cartoon Doonesbury in many parts of the world. The cartoon pokes fun at the way Bush has been taking advantage of the non-partisan support he's getting for most of the legislation coming out of the White House in September. But this kind of cartoon is certainly there in the US, syndicated in thousands of US papers this week.

“Is it still unpatriotic to criticize me?” the president asks one of his advisers in the cartoon.

“Yes sir,” he is told.

“Cool, this is great,” Bush responds. “Thanks, evildoers.”

Go to cairolive.com's complete coverage of the terror aftermath

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