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February 7, 2003|Volume 31, Number 17



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New York Times foreign affairs
columnist Thomas Friedman



Journalist describes forces fueling 'wheel of bin Ladenism'

Recent events in Iran -- the country where students once rallied behind the slogan "Death to America" -- may hold the greatest hope for the future of the Middle East, said New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman in a recent talk on campus.

Friedman came to Yale on Jan. 30 as a guest of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He spoke before a packed Luce Hall auditorium.

The journalist, whose travels across the Middle East recently brought him to Iran, said presently in that country, there is a civil war against the kind of intolerance that led to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

"The [Islamic] fundamentalists took over, they got elected, they controlled the country, and they are now burdened with that responsibility," said Friedman.

The most recent generation of Iranians only know two things, he explained, "that they have had enough democracy to know that they want more of it and that they have had enough Islam imposed on them to know that they want less of it."

The students, he said, "are in a struggle now for a new equilibrium based on a real democracy and an honored place for Islam, but not an imposed one. They will find it, and when they do, the impact they will have on the Muslim world will be 100 times the impact of the Khomeini revolution. ...

"Root for those young Iranians," Friedman urged the crowd. "They are going to make it. It will take time because of the corrupting factor of oil, but the attempt to keep the students down is a losing battle."

Friedman told the audience about his personal journey across the Middle East to discover who the Sept. 11 hijackers were and what impelled them.

He described the forces that shaped the hijackers as the "wheel of bin Ladenism" -- a "cement mixer" that churns out individuals who are unemployed and unprepared for modernity. At the top of the wheel, he said, lie the autocratic anti-democratic regimes that the "boys of 9/11" were raised under. To stay in power, the illegitimate leaders of these regimes empower and fund anti-modernist religious leaders, he explained, adding that the religious education advocated by the radical religious leaders produces poverty and backwardness that in turn reinforces the autocracy.

"And the wheel keeps turning and turning," said Friedman.

"A big part of the problem is not Islam," he added, "but rather that two to three people in every household in the region are not working." A deficit of freedom, a deficit of women's empowerment and a deficit of modern education are behind people drifting into the "Rolodex of Osama bin Laden," he said.

In his journey, Friedman was surprised to find some of the roots of 9/11 in Europe. Pointing to the key plotters and pilots of 9/11, he said "not a single one of them left home a Muslim radical." According to his research, the leaders of the 9/11 terrorist cell, like many other young Muslims, were radicalized in a European mosque or prayer group.

"America is an imperfect melting pot," said Friedman. "But we do aspire to be a melting pot. Europe does not aspire to be a melting pot." Muslims in Europe, Friedman argued, feel as though they are being "stiff-armed outside of society" and are finding solidarity in groups formed by radicals who were expelled from their own countries by the autocratic regimes.

The "poverty of dignity" is another factor that contributes to the growing schism between the West and the Arab and Muslim world, he noted. In fact, "dignity" and "humiliation" were two words that he consistently encountered during his interactions with young Muslims, said the journalist, leading him to conclude, "9/11 is not about the poverty of money."

"Honor, respect, dignity, identity are 'indivisible goods' that carry much more weight than money," argued Friedman.

Using a computer analogy, Friedman said that Muslims come to Europe believing their version of monotheism -- Islam -- to be "God 3.0 ... Christianity to be God 2.0 and Judaism, God 1.0." Yet there, he said, Muslims are confronted with the reality that followers of the other two "versions" are "living so much more prosperously, powerfully and democratically."

According to Friedman, this "cognitive dissonance" is exploited by utopian cult leaders like bin Laden who preach that the "infidels" did something to or took something away from Islam and that the current leaders of the Arab world have also corrupted the "operating system." The truth, said Friedman, is that Christianity and Judaism, for the most part, have both embraced modernity. Until and unless Islam goes through this same process, the journalist noted, this "cognitive dissonance" will likely continue.

Encouraging Muslims to adopt an updated "version" of the world will take efforts on both sides, said Friedman, adding that the West needs to do two things -- bring to justice the people who perpetrated 9/11 and to attack their ideas.

"We need to kill those people," said Friedman. "There are times where violence directed at certain people is the only way out, and we cannot shrink from that responsibility" for deterrence purposes. "But more important than killing the perpetrators is killing their bad ideas," he added.

America has to be the best global citizen it can be, contended Friedman. The United States, he argued, cannot be in a war on terror and ignore the other universal principles that other nations value, such as environmental concerns. He also suggested that the current U.S. administration needs to be much more sensitive about how it talks to the world.

"People will listen if we convey a sense that we are inviting them into our future, that this war is about something transcendent," said Friedman, noting that the United States should not show contempt to those with different views.

He also argued that the United States needs to make a much more aggressive, high-profile effort to resolve or defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "There is no excuse for sitting back with arms folded," he said.

The leaders of the Arab and Muslim world also need to take on bin Laden at an ideological level, said Friedman, describing the terrorist leader as an "authentic character" who gave up a life of luxury to live in a cave in Afghanistan and drive out the Soviets. To defeat such a powerful message, Friedman said, there needs to be an equally authentic progressive message.

"The sources of the message are there, but it needs leaders to articulate it. Unfortunately, since 9/11, George Bush has given more speeches as to why Islam is a progressive religion than all the Arab leaders combined," Friedman said. The reason Arab leaders are not speaking up, he lamented, is because virtually none of them are progressives.

"Islam is not an angry religion, but I think a lot of Muslims are angry," said Friedman, adding that this anger is the result of the West treating the Arab world like a "big dumb gas station" for the past 50 years."

People, he said, need to be given "a context where there is a free enough market for them to advance themselves, where there is enough democracy where if they have a grievance they can shout it without being thrown in jail and where there is enough rule of law they can adjudicate it without buying of the judge ... they want to be a part of the world."

Friedman concluded his talk by telling the audience about a young man he met in Indonesia who was wearing an Osama bin Laden tee-shirt and a New York Yankee's baseball cap. Young people like this young man can go in either direction, said Friedman, because they wear the hat and the tee- shirt very lightly.

"They can embrace some of our best values, or they can go the other way," he said. "It is our job to do what we can to see that more grow into the hat and not the tee-shirt."

An interview with Thomas Friedman conducted by the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization can be found online at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu

-- By John Longbrake


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