The truthiness of martyrdom

I usually ignore Thomas Friedman. Well, that's not exactly true. Instead, I pretend to ignore him while peeking at him through interlaced fingers. Have you ever tried interlacing your fingers in front of your eyes while holding your nose at the same time?

What makes Mr Friedman so insufferable is his constant preachifying at the Arabs. If you want a good example of that, read yesterday's column. His writing is a fine example of what Slate journalist Farhad Manjoo has called "truthiness". See some of his blogging about it here, here, and here. Well, he actually takes the concept from Stephen Colbert (whom I had never watched until the run-up to the latest presidential elections, after I got Orbit, one of the satellite TV services in the Middle East - For years I have had a very limited Showtime bouquet, which was purposeful because I wanted access to Arab satellite news channels without having to run the risk of even surfing by CNN. Turns out CNN International is a lot more intelligent than its sister channel (or is it parent?) in the States - but that is a different story). Back to Mr Friedman. His latest column is full of truthiness. That is, stuff that sounds plausible enough when an authoritative voice relates it and is for that reason taken as being true. (You can just imagine how this could get traction on the Colbert Report). Mr Manjoo contends that news reporting in the US is replete with it.

Let's take the core contention of Mr Friedman's latest screed as an example:

Sunni Muslim suicide murderers...have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as “martyrs” whose actions deserve praise.

Sounds true enough. This is the contention that flits about the opinion columns, and I daresay straight news reporting, when the subject comes up. So it must be true, right? Wrong. Arab mainstream media and certainly not al-Jazeera, the most mainstream of them all, in fact, don't refer to suicide bombers as martyrs. Some outlets do refer to Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli military actions as martyrs. But that is a different discourse. Egyptians debate about whether to refer to people killed in ferry-boat and train accidents as martyrs. In fact, Al Jazeera's rival channel al-Arabiyya, also in the mainstream of Arab media, does not use the term at all. I can't speak for the extremist websites; I have, of course, seen such things, but I am not terribly interested in their rants. But notice the juxtaposition of mainstream media outlets with extremism. To the unwary, this will appear that the Arab mainstream media are extremist, and by extension, then, all Arabs must be extremists.

Mr Friedman's latest piece is full of other questionable assertions. Take this one, for example, "Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society." Does this mean anything at all? In the first place, religion is part of culture, not something separable from it. And in the second place, if cultural norms were effective means of regulating criminal behaviour, then we are safe in abandoning the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and in embracing the theories of anarchists like Mikhael Bakunin. The latter asserted that in an open, anarchistic society, there was no need for sanctioning criminals, as they would be rehabilitated by the acceptance of their compatriots into the utopian, small-scale community. This dreamy theorizing finds an echo in Mr Friedman's claim:

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police.

Realistic authorities seem to agree that the most effective way of combating terrorism is through thorough police work. So it seems that this feel-good approach advocated by Mr Friedman might not work. In any case, Mr Friedman is engaging in his usual practice of asserting the truthiness of dubious claims.

Somehow it seems that he cannot close his piece without a justification of his ongoing support for the disastrous war in Iraq. Here too his assertions are either contradicted by the facts, or entirely unsubstantiated; truthy but not truthful.

few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda.

And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away.

Do I need to point out how those last two assertions flatly contradict each other?