World: The Strong Horse, an interview with author Lee Smith

Got to give Hugh Hewitt a lot of credit for devoting an entire program to the discussion of a timely book about the Middle East like Strong Horse.

One just can't get that kind of in-depth conversation in a typical 90 sec to 3 minute news piece on television.

For me, the most chilling part was this exchange with Lee Smith where Hewitt reads from p. 153 of Smith's book and begins a discussion of some of the driving forces of radicalism in the Middle East:

HH: Now this is on, from Page 153, I’m going to read three or four paragraphs here, because it’s so different from what most people think about the Middle East, but it’s also important in terms of how we understand it, Americans do. “Masculine energy is a powerful force. It creates civilizations and destroys them. In every society, there are only two internal checks to the inchoate charisma of its young men, less they lose themselves in free-floating violence that takes everyone down with them. There are the male elders, and even more important, there are the women, mothers and wives. Every society must decide how best to use its manhood to create, govern and defend itself. None can afford it when either the elders or the women urge their young men to take them to the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, it isn’t just the male elders who have been pushing young men to violence. Perhaps the unhappiest fact of the Arabic-speaking Middle East is that Arab women have been as well. A 9/11 joke,” you write, “A woman sees a man coming out of the men’s room in Cairo or Riyadh or Damascus or Beirut or Baghdad, and asks him are you Osama bin Laden? Why no, says the man. Why would you think such a thing? Because, she says, he’s the only man left in the Arab world. It’s just a joke,” you write, “but it gets at something important about the Middle East, which is that often Arab women hold men in contempt if they’re not willing to kill and die for Arab honor. Arab women are complicit in the violence of Arab societies, and so it should come as no surprise that of late, Arab women have picked up the mantle of martyrdom and chosen to suicide themselves while killing innocents. After all, many have been sending their men to death for years.” That’s going to shock a lot of people, and I think probably the first thing you want to say is you’re not talking about Arab-American women. You’re not even talking about all Arab women.

LS: Right, right.

HH: You’re talking about this crazy sort of culture that’s taken hold there.

LS: Right.

HH: How do you change that?

LS: I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know. But I mean, I think that this is one of the things, you know, for understandable reasons, we haven’t talked about…you know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes out with her wonderful books, her very, you know, courageous books about her courageous life. And so we’ve tended to look mostly at Muslim women, as Arab women, as victims. And yes, there is no doubt about it. In many ways, they are. But you know, when we see these different parades of young Palestinian, little Palestinian kids, infants, dressed up in suicide bomber outfits, it’s not just the dads were dressing them up, right? I mean, the moms are a part of it, too. So I think we need to look at it more. You know, it’s not just a couple of bad Arab guys who are responsible for this. There’s a lot of people who are complicit in this violence, and in this culture that it’s just sort of pushing itself towards the edge while it’s killing other people, too. So I think yeah, women have to be part of the solution.

HH: A couple of pages later, you write, “Maybe the question is not what went wrong with the Islam and the Arabs,” you’re quoting your friend here, “but what went right with the West. To ask what’s wrong with the Arabs is to take the West as the historical norm, and imagine that its progress is a trajectory that all societies must inevitably follow, leading towards freedom, democracy and respect for the inherent dignity of the individual human being. But since we have been handed all of these things for free, it is easy to overlook the sacrifices many generations made in blood along the way. Likewise, to forget how we got here is to trivialize the efforts of others elsewhere who strive for the same ideals, but met with little or no success.” Very pessimistic, Lee Smith. Very pessimistic.

LS: No, I don’t mean to be pessimistic. I mean, one of the things…okay, it’s pessimistic. But one of the things, again, one of the things that I want is for us to respect and admire what we have and who we are, and our forefathers, and the people, you know, our forefathers, the political officials, the people who died, who were burned at the stake, all the different people who led us on this path to get where we are today. It’s a remarkable story. It’s a remarkable narrative. It’s a great gift that we all enjoy. And we shouldn’t sell it short and assume that everyone else is capable of this. And also, I think we do need to give credit to these people who have tried the same thing but they failed. I mean, there are a lot of heroes in the Arab world. There have been a lot of Voltaires. But just because the Arab world doesn’t look, you know, doesn’t look like where you and I live, doesn’t mean that there haven’t been people who have tried. There are people who know that there are problems. I mean, I have a lot of friends still in Lebanon, in Egypt, all sorts of places who want something much, much better for their society. The sadness is I just don’t think they’re going to get it anytime soon.

Read the whole thing.