People Like Us (13 page)

Prominent Westerners often labeled the 9/11 attacks as “a direct assault on Western civilization.” But whoever looks at Bin Laden’s story will see that he presents his program as one of self-defense. The West—more particularly, America—
might have received a thrashing, but Al-Qaida’s guns are directed at the Saudi royal family, the regime in Cairo, and other Arab dictators. According to Bin Laden, the Islamic world is involved in a civil war, America is supporting his opposition in this war, and that’s why he hit America. Al-Qaida is not out to rule New York or London, at least not primarily. Mecca is the main prize for him.

This part of Bin Laden’s message has remained, for the most part, out of the Western news stream, meaning that very few Westerners know about their enemy’s motives. There has been virtually no debate in the West about its support of dictators, and leading figures continued calling on Muslims in the Islamic world to enter into a “discussion about their faith.” But a Muslim who starts a debate about the interpretation of Islam in a key country such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia goes straight to prison because talking about faith is also talking about politics. In prison, that Muslim will be tortured by whomever the CIA trained for that purpose.

N
ow, after the event, I can say more precisely what I would have liked to have done differently. For while Al-Qaida was represented with bias, there was another group that remained almost invisible in the Western media in the aftermath of 9/11: The nonviolent faction of political Islam—those Muslims who say they want to express and promote their conservative or fundamentalist interpretations of Islam without violence. These nonviolent fundamentalists were a blind spot for the West, and a very large one. Not only could no one say how many of them there were, we didn’t know what they really were, or what their agenda was.

Just as is the case with communists, Zionists, or Catholics, there are underlying conflicts, a wide scale of opinions and interpretations, and enormous differences between Islamic fundamentalists. The difference is that Islamic fundamentalists aren’t free to speak openly. Their books are banned, their websites are shut down, and their leaders are tried or murdered. There’s no International League of Fundamentalists or any arenas such as the ones that the Vatican and the Zionist World Congress have in which to deliver resolutions or formulate binding conclusions. Whom should I speak to, to find out what the nonviolent fundamentalists really want?

If you interview a leader in the West, you can figure out what his followers think. If the leader subsequently contradicts himself or deviates from his previous line, he’s called to account. For instance, how can he get away with telling the media that September 11 was punishment for American interference in the region, if he said at last month’s party congress that September 11 was an attack on humanity? If a leader tries this on, he either has to defend himself or resign. That’s how power works in a democracy, and that’s how, after a few interviews with the leaders, you can get a reasonable insight into the opinions of the groups represented by them. But in a dictatorship, the leadership group represent only themselves.

Nowhere was the problem so acute as with the semi-underground Muslim Brotherhood. This is the largest fundamentalist movement in the world, with branches in every Muslim country. They are not bearded adventurers who excitedly threaten the West in grainy videos or kill kidnap victims; they are doctors, engineers, scientists, and lawyers. They say that they are nonviolent; but, in the past, the brothers have used violence, and factions have spawned Hamas, the Algerian GIA,
and Al-Qaida. Muslim Brothers counter that European social democrats aren’t outlawed when extreme leftist splinter groups commit attacks; on the other hand, leading figures within the Brotherhood frequently express undemocratic or anti-Semitic sentiments. These are often later withdrawn, denied, or modified, and then these remarks are denied or modified, so the movement’s real agenda remains opaque.

What can you do? In retrospect, I think the best way would have been for correspondents to admit their ignorance. I and my colleagues could have said something like, “It’s impossible to guess what the nonviolent branch of ‘political Islam’ is really planning, and I’ve only been able to speak to a few dozen of them properly. But they seem like decent people; they all say that they want to realize their ideals without using violence, through their local training college, hospital, or law clinic. Perhaps all of these nonviolent fundamentalists were taking me for a ride, but I don’t think these people lay awake in bed at night wondering how to destroy the West. They’d be more likely to be lying awake wondering how to prevent the West from destroying them. What we in the West see as ‘development aid’ and ‘consciousness-raising,’ they see as a foreign power using donor darlings and political pressure behind the scenes to try to change them, their beliefs, their male-female social relationships, and the relationship between gays and straights, and between old and young. Supporters of political Islam feel threatened by this kind of interference,” I’d end. “They want to shape their own futures, but that doesn’t make them instant terrorists.”

 

 

P
erhaps we correspondents should have tried to make the “nonviolent fundamentalists” more visible in this
manner, but it was always going to be a tough sell. We just didn’t know what we were looking at.

Here is one final example of how this fed through to the reporting. After 9/11, the Egyptian regime ran a number of show trials of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. A show trial is by definition public, so I found myself in a military court on the road that leads to the Suez Canal, next to a cage containing seventy-eight men.

It was like a zoo, only the men were behind the bars, while pigeons flew in and out of the holes in the roof, cooing and crapping. Outside, billboards lauded the greatness of the Egyptian fighting forces; inside was chaos, women holding up babies, and inconsolable teenagers who stood on tiptoes to wave or to push food through the bars. The men had already spent months without any contact with the outside world, and their families knew that after they’d been sent down they’d see them for precisely three minutes every six months. I copied this down in my notebook, since it was a “telling piece of information”—three minutes every six months.

It was the day that the military judge would assess the evidence against the men, who stood accused of having orchestrated an “attempted coup.” The prosecutor presented his first piece of evidence, at which point the public tribune chanted, “Reject! Reject!” The judge looked at the baseball bat in question—the only weapon seized in the case—handed it to an agent, and said, “I reject this.” Those present applauded the ruling that this evidence did not count.
“Allahu akbar,”
came from inside the cage, and one suspect even cried out, “Judge! I’m fifty-five. I’m much too old for a coup. I’m a granddad!” Grins all round from the lawyers and some of the suspects. Second piece of evidence: Books that anyone could buy on any street corner, and cardboard boxes with magazines about
technology and aeronautical engineering. The judge said loudly, “I reject these.” Cue more cheering.

Then came the lawyer for the defense, and he proved without much difficulty that the “crown witness” was a different person from whom he said he was, and that the police had raided a different house than they said. His final piece was a tape recording on which the suspects were supposed to have been discussing their revolutionary plans. It played only static. For a while, the mood in the barracks was almost jovial. What was the regime up to?

The answer came a couple of months later, when the judge sentenced everyone to years of forced labor. The suspects had no right to appeal, and the presiding “officer” was, of course, not a judge. The sentence he handed down had been decided in advance, just like the results of an Arab election.

That’s how the show trials went. If human rights activists or other donor darlings had been in that cage, Western media and politicians would have screamed blue murder. But the defendants were “fundamentalists”—they were lumped together with Al-Qaida, and so the regime could do with them as it wished. In fact, because forced labor in the Egyptian heat is a death sentence for older people, the verdict was tantamount to authorizing dozens of murders. In Egypt alone, tens of thousands of people have been thrown into prison after similar show trials, and no one has said a thing. In the meantime, the Egyptian regime receives 2 billion dollars’ worth of weapons and cash from the United States each year.

If I had to sum up the Arab world by using one image, it would be that show trial: Regimes stamping out opposition—more often than not on the sly—under the cover of arguing that they are terrorists. The West stands by, looks on and, when necessary, offers a helping hand. That’s why you
can’t decide whether the opposition is the Islamic variant of fascism or the Islamic variant of Christian democracy.

The truth is missing in dictatorships; that’s what makes the system so enduring. But there was more that made the Middle East opaque, and for that I had to go to Lebanon and the Holy Land.

In a book you can tell the important stories one after another, but in life they often overlap. For this reason, I have to take a step backwards in time, to under a year before the 9/11 attacks radically transformed my job as correspondent.

I transferred to another Dutch broadsheet, the
NRC Handelsblad
, where I could focus more on background pieces. I also went to work for the
NOS Journaal
television news program, where I’d be able to study the medium of television from the inside. And I decided to move—I’d had enough of the pollution and third world chaos of Cairo, and a couple of unpleasant things had happened to me.

I’d gotten into an Egyptian prison through the Dutch acquaintance of an inmate, and had come out feeling
disgusted. After enduring the spectacle, in the boiling heat, of twenty men being confined in a cell measuring fifteen square meters, their feet having become deformed by enforced standing, and infections and sores caused by the toilet being in the cell ... Suddenly, I’d had enough of the cruelty with which some Egyptians treated their fellow men. I almost exploded at a taxi driver when he refused to get out of the way of a blaring ambulance, and a few weeks later at the zoo I knew that I wanted a trial separation from Cairo. It was full of unhealthy animals in rusty cages, rancid shrubbery, and rubbish everywhere. Worst of all were some of the visitors, screaming hysterically until one of the monkeys had a heart-wrenching panic attack, bombarding the elephants with fruit and stones, and feeding plastic to the giraffes. I was at the zoo with a Dutch girlfriend, and the kids kept throwing stones at us, too—apparently, we fell into the same category as the animals. As these things go, the kids egged each other on, until one of them dared to run up to us and say:
“Fuckyouwoman!”
That’s when the lights went out for me; when they came back on, the kid was lying on the ground. Bystanders hurried over to us and I began to apologize, but everyone reacted with complete understanding, and the boy offered his excuses. I’d always kept my cool in the past when faced with little bastards like these, but I was never shown so much respect as when I crossed the line with violence.
I have
to get
away from
here, I decided, there and then.

I looked at a map and thought,
What place is more logical to go to than Lebanon
? In the clichéd terms of the travel guides, it was the Switzerland of the Middle East, with snow-topped mountains, and an educated and cosmopolitan population. To Lebanon, then ... but I’d barely arrived when there were more changes. The peace process between
Israel and Palestine ran aground in a new and violent conflict—what came to be known as the second intifadah. My colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had previously covered both Israel and Palestine; but when the violence escalated, I was called up.