Beirut, Lebanon
June, 2006
Dear Dr. Rice,
Since in the past year you have passionately and sincerely expressed your hopes for an Arab future of freedom and democracy, I thought you might benefit from some equally honest and humble thoughts in return.
The American civil rights movement and the Arab quest for freedom and democracy have effectively framed my own life — as a student in the United States in the1960s and as an adult working in the Arab world for a democratic future. I was especially moved when you spoke last October, during your visit to your hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, about your childhood friends who were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church by white racists in 1963. You’ve spoken of your own life’s transformation — from a segregated childhood to success in academia and then joining the world’s top decision-makers “as an example of a very American story.”
Indeed, it is an inspiring story, but you should be fully aware of how that story plays out when viewed from abroad, in the context of America’s policies at home and abroad.
The epitome of the racist mentality in Birmingham in your youth was police chief Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor. He routinely unleashed fire hoses, baton-swinging deputies and vicious police dogs against the non-violent demonstrators who demanded only that they be treated as human beings.
The individual and collective quest for freedom and dignity may be the strongest force on earth. It pushes ordinary people to do extraordinary things, as happened in Birmingham when young children marched into the fire hoses and stood their ground against Bull Connor’s police dogs. The spirit of Birmingham is about transcending fear, and affirming humanity. It takes special courage and moral certitude to stand one’s ground in front of the violent, intemperate hatred and ignorance that Bull Connor represented.
I see that same spirit around me in the Arab world today. I have many courageous Arab friends and colleagues who stand up today to their own violent, intolerant governments, or foreign military occupiers, knowing they may be killed, injured or imprisoned. They stand up and resist fearlessly, defying danger and intimidation, because they are fired by the same passions that fuelled the civil rights movement in your country.
So I write you today because in my passion for your twin nods to American civil rights and Arab democratic freedoms, I also see a fatal flaw that causes your exhortations to fall on deaf ears in most of the Middle East. That saddens me, because I sense that your sentiments are sincere, and I also firmly believe that your mission must not fail — for your sake and ours. But your drive to promote Arab freedom can only succeed if it sheds its inherent flaw. The main flaw is somewhat personal for you, which is why I send you this letter. It is simply this: In the eyes of most people in the Arab world, the United States is the Bull Connor of our generation. The worst symbol of this is that your country, on your foreign policy watch, has sent police dogs to Iraq to humiliate and terrorize prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers. In the same way, the use of Bull Connor’s police dogs to degrade your fellow citizens in the early 1960s became a lasting symbol of American racism and American anti-racist heroism.
Of course, these are only symbols, not the full story. Bull Connor’s dogs are now long gone. Some abusive American soldiers at Abu Ghraib have been tried in court. But the symbols matter — for they do reflect realities and are not imagined evils, they burn deep images into human minds and hearts, they endure for generations. You should be careful about using the imagery of the civil rights movement to promote Arab freedom because your government and its policies look to many of us like Bull Connor — complete with the dogs. You simply are not credible when you evoke the civil rights struggle to inspire us, and then send police dogs to torment us. We love your inspirational exhortations, but we despise and reject your dogs.
The dogs are symbols, of course, of a wider policy and a larger reality. But the images of the dogs — in Birmingham and Baghdad — remain the most sharply etched in my own mind. Many other images and symbols come to mind, too. Young children killed. Old people degraded. Terror bombs hurled against innocent civilians. Houses destroyed. Young men lynched. Families and entire communities finding solace in their holy books and their shared God. Police and armies using massive force against marching schoolchildren or rock-throwing kids. And inspiring leaders thrown into jail.
We can choose any of these, and many other, images that permeate your nation’s recent struggle for dignity, and our ongoing one. In the final analysis, these struggles have validity only if they are truly universal. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, wrote in your city when you were a child: “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
If you want us in the Arab world to respond to your powerful analogy of the American civil rights movement as a harbinger of what is possible in a single lifetime, you must deal more honestly with the problem and the symbolism of your dogs — official American dogs, sent with your army, as part of your foreign policy.
I hope you accept these thoughts in the spirit in which they are written — with profound awe and humility before those who struggled for civil rights in your country, and in deep solidarity with those in the Arab world who muster the same spirit in their own fight against oppression and foreign domination. You need to do some more work and introspective thinking to credibly connect those two worlds and eras, as we are trying to do here every day.
In the battle for freedom and justice in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world, one cannot simultaneously preach the morality of Martin Luther King, Jr. and pursue the policies of Bull Connor, and expect to be taken seriously.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 26 June 2006
Word Count: 1,076
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