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.
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 DNA 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 foreign policy 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 minority. 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 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 knowledgeable 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 (the right) 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.