Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  All these three presidents—Lincoln and the two Roosevelts—understood the power of the word to secure the support and allegiance of a mass electorate. The modern media-orientated presidency began with Theodore Roosevelt, who was supremely aware of the need for an effective public image.15 But Lincoln also fully recognized the power of the press, while FDR, with his use of radio, pushed presidential communication with the people into a new dimension. These three exemplars knew what they wanted to say, and they said it.

  THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THEN AND NOW IS COMPELLING. THE TWO days of infamy in the history of the United States—December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington, D.C.—were tragedies on a similar scale. At Pearl Harbor 2,390 died and 117 were wounded, while about 3,000 died in the attacks on September 11. Yet the two presidents—FDR and George W. Bush—spoke very differently about the two events. Roosevelt spoke first to a hurriedly summoned session of Congress on December 8, 1941.16 On the next day he spoke to the nation in a Fireside Chat by radio. FDR used a tone of studied control. He did not mock the enemies of America nor did he belittle them. Rather he spoke with an icy neutrality:

  We may acknowledge that the enemies have performed a brilliant feat of deception, perfectly timed and executed with great skill. It was a thoroughly dishonorable deed, but we must face the fact that modern warfare as conducted in the Nazi manner is a dirty business. We don’t like it—we didn’t want it—but we are in it and we are going to fight it with everything we have got.17

  Roosevelt found the right idiom to steel his people: he was measured, implacable, and utterly determined. We should contrast this with President Bush’s reaction to tragedy in 2001, when he told the American people:

  I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to helping the victims and their families, and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.18

  This confused amalgam of tortuous bureaucratic prose and the wholly off-key “folks” to describe mass murderers has continued through the president’s further statements, up to the present. In part, his problem is technical: President George W. Bush is not a natural public speaker. However, modern technology can usually help even the most inarticulate to improve their performance. The difficulty is not just with presentation, for the president’s mixed messages derive not from incoherent speech but from conflicting registers.

  In the nearly 150 years since Lincoln was elected president, the means and modes of communication have been transformed. Yet the essence of winning an audience remains the same. Lincoln and the two Roosevelts all perfected the art of speaking individually and intimately to every individual in their audience. Today, reading the Gettysburg Address, or listening to recordings of TR and FDR, it is impossible not to be drawn. Theirs was a rhetorical skill, which they had honed and practiced like preparing for a battle. Words were their weapons, and like many martial arts, their success came from an absolute control. By contrast President George W. Bush (and his father before him) both exemplify the opposite. Neither has ever seemed entirely in control of what he says. Sometimes their tongues seem to take on a life of their own.19

  Under normal circumstances, this might not be a disadvantage. Many people find it difficult to speak in public, and hearing a political leader stumble sometimes makes them seem more honest, human, and endearingly fallible. But in conditions of crisis, this tolerance vanishes: the endearing frailty suddenly becomes a weakness. For the second President Bush, the “crusade” episode that I described in the last chapter was a first significant example of misspeaking. That off-the-cuff comment reverberated around the world, although its impact at home was much less dramatic. A second slipshod utterance was little remarked outside the United States. But at home, in a changed political environment, it produced a storm of criticism and possibly damaging consequences.

  On the morning of July 2, 2003, the president told a group of journalists gathered in the White House that he would take a couple of questions. The first was an easy lob: “What is the administration doing to get larger powers, like France and Germany and Russia, to join the American occupation there [in Iraq]?” It needed a soft and emollient answer: something along the lines that the whole world should be helping the coalition to get Iraq back on its feet. But for some reason the president took a different tack:

  Well, first of all, we’ll put together a force structure who meets the threats on the ground. And we’ve got a lot of forces there, ourselves. And as I said yesterday, anybody who wants to harm American troops will be found and brought to justice. There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don’t understand what they’re talking about, if that’s the case.20

  The reporters, satisfied with this reply, assumed he had finished and hands went up for further questions. But the president had more to say. He relaxed visibly, leaned forward toward them, and continued.

  Let me finish. There are some who feel like—that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring ’em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation … We’ve got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure.21

  This was George W. Bush in his Teddy Roosevelt mode, waving the big stick and laying down the law to the nation’s enemies. But it was a gross mistake, for he had willfully ignored the first half of Roosevelt’s favorite adage: “Speak softly.”

  The earlier “crusade” remark had caused a stir in Europe and the Middle East but was soon forgotten at home. “Bring ’em on,” conversely, unleashed a torrent of negative comment all over the States. The graphic artists saw their opportunity. Dennis Draughon published a cartoon that showed the president at the podium saying, “Bring ’em on,” to an audience of coffins, each draped in the Stars and Stripes and captioned “U.S. casualties in Iraq.” Another had the C-17 transports filling up with coffins after his ill-chosen words.

  Copyright © 2003 John Trever, Albuquerque Journal. Reprinted by permission.

  The most historically resonant cartoon was John Trever’s in the Albuquerque Journal. He drew George W. Bush at the podium, declaiming, “Bring ’em on!” Beside him is the Stars and Stripes. But behind on the wall is a huge portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, labeled “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Covering his eyes with his hand, TR grimaces, with a look of disbelief and pain at this pointless and incompetent gaffe.

  But why should an American president, “the most powerful man in the world,” need to “speak softly”? Almost a century earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had explained to a large crowd in Minnesota what the mysterious adage meant:

  A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.” If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; but neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.

  Great powers needed strong military forces—the big stick. But possessing this power allowed them safely to use soft (diplomatic and appropriate) words. During his presidency, Roosevelt had settled disputes by quiet diplomacy, secret and open threats of force, but never by all-out war. Bush reversed Roosevelt’s priorities, using force where words and threats might have sufficed.

  The gulf between the two men is not just a matter of time and very different generations. TR reveled in words, matched his expression precisely to his aspirations and policies. He recognized that time, place, occasion, and audience all determined how he should express his message. President Bush, surrounded in the modern style by advisers, speech-writers, and policy wonks, is not in control of what he says.

  WORDS MATTER, AND THEY HAVE WINGS. SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH in 1975 Mikhail Bakhtin wrote in the final paragraph of his last essay that there are “immense boundless masses of
forgotten contextual meanings” which at some future moment “are recalled and invigorated in renewed form—in a new context.” His final word on his life’s work was: “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming.”22 In writing this book, I have been struck by the accuracy of his prediction: that words and ideas can be as fearsome and dangerous as zombies, unwelcome revenants. By a curious coincidence, in the same week of October 2003, words spoken by both the prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohammad, and by a senior U.S. general, William G. Boykin, deputy undersecretary for military intelligence, intensified antagonism between Islam and Christendom. What they said rather than what they did resounded around the world, and while neither man set out to antagonize, it was the inevitable consequence of the words they chose to use.

  What did they say? In a long and wordy disquisition to the World Islamic Conference, Mahathir denounced Muslim passivity:

  Some would have us believe that … our life is better than that of our detractors. Some believe that poverty is Islamic, sufferings and being oppressed are Islamic. This world is not for us. Ours are the joys of heaven in the afterlife. All that we have to do is to perform certain rituals, wear certain garments and put up a certain appearance. Our weakness, our backwardness and our inability to help our brothers and sisters who are being oppressed are part of the Will of Allah, the sufferings that we must endure before enjoying heaven in the hereafter. We must accept this fate that befalls us. We need not do anything. We can do nothing against the Will of Allah.

  Then he specified the enemies:

  There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak. Some believe, as I have said, this is the Will of Allah, that the proper state of the Muslims is to be poor and oppressed in this world.

  But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people? …

  It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counterattack.

  For Mahathir, the enemies of all Muslims were the West and a “Jewish plot.”23 Blind force was useless against these powerful foes, and he called for a united effort to defeat them.24 His long speech was applauded politely.

  In the same week, the story broke in Los Angeles that General William “Jerry” Boykin, a much-decorated fighting soldier recently promoted to a senior high-profile post in the Pentagon, had been unmasked as a zealous neo-Crusader. More and more details were uncovered. In January 2003, speaking of a captured Muslim warlord he had met in Somalia in the 1990s, he had said, “Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” Regarding a later speech by General Boykin at a church in Boring, Oregon, one eyewitness wrote:

  On June 21, 2003 we were invited by a friend and neighbor to attend a celebration “… to honor those who have served in our country’s armed services” at the Good Shepherd Community Church … The pastor stood up and introduced a Major General William G. Boykin … Boykin has a slight southern drawl and an obvious sense of humor, both of which makes him an effective speaker …

  Boykin showed us a few slides from the recent war in Afghanistan, made a joke about sending some of the prisoners on a “Caribbean vacation,” a reference to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A bit crude and possibly offensive to some, but still nothing out of the ordinary.

  General Boykin then showed a picture of Osama bin Laden and commented “This is not our enemy.” Another slide of Saddam and again “This is not our enemy.” Kim Jung Il was also described as “not our enemy.”… General Boykin explained that “our real enemy is Satan.”25

  It was one of many such events. At one, a videotape was made. General Boykin later apologized, and claimed his views had been taken out of context. They had: what was appropriate for a gathering of like-minded evangelical believers sounded like the words of a bigot to the wider world.26 But Boykin can have had no illusions that his meetings would remain secret. He became a star speaker on the evangelical circuit, often in full uniform, speaking at church after church. Each time he added a little to his presentation. Standing in the pulpit of the First Baptist Church at Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, he showed a slide of a strange black mark over the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 1993. “This is your enemy,” he told his audience. “It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.” As I read this I was reminded of the sickly Opicinus de Canistris in 1335, who appeared in chapter 8. He, like General Boykin, saw the dark shape of the devil over the land. But, of course, he was a cleric with a clouded mind, not a senior commander in the United States Army.

  Mahathir and Boykin have responded differently to widespread criticism of their words. Some political leaders of the Islamic world claimed the prime minister was misunderstood. It is true that the few words concerning the West and the Jews were inevitably taken out of the context of a much longer speech, allowing many interpretations of his overall message. But many of his own countrymen regard him as a reprehensible individual, and during the twenty-two years of his authoritarian rule, his bigotry, his dictatorial and vindictive character have been widely condemned. This was a secular politician’s speech, carefully crafted for its audience. It was his swan song as a prime minister, yet also staked his claim as a leading sage of the Islamic world. Mahathir knew the power of the word and exploited it ruthlessly.27

  Boykin, by contrast, did not court publicity. He was caught by the relentless spotlight of the press in a highly compromising position. Preaching in uniform about Satan and the devil’s work, he exercised his right to free speech, to audiences of a like mind. Yet had he used his right to free speech in advancing racism or (like Mahathir) anti-Semitism, very few of his supporters would have come to his defense. To that degree, free speech in public by a paid employee of the U.S. government has its limits, and Boykin foolishly overstepped the unmarked boundary. In his public response he apologized to those who “might be offended by what he said” but his words could not magically become unsaid and their effect wiped from human memory. The Reverend Allen Brill, founder of the Right Christians, saw precisely what Boykin had done. His perspective was drawn from something he did every week: delivering a sermon. He knew the temptation to score a cheap hit on someone his audience would dislike: for example, a Bible class composed of upstanding heterosexual married couples might be unusually receptive to a powerful discourse on the “sinfulness” of homosexuality.

  “General Boykin,” said Brill, “appears to have succumbed to such a temptation. He now says that he never meant that his Christian God was bigger than the Somali warlord’s Muslim God … But that isn’t what he said at the time … But he didn’t get to be a general by failing to be attuned to what his superiors and others wanted to hear. That’s just the way life works. And he knew his audiences as he spoke to these prayer breakfasts and church groups too. He was aware of their feelings about Muslims and their political leanings, and he told them what they wanted to hear.”

  In short, it was a cheap shot, just like Mahathir’s “sugar” of old-fashioned anti-Semitism to sweeten his bitter message to the Islamic conference. What should they both have done? Brill has no doubts:

  General Boykin had a wonderful opportunity to aid our nation’s effort in the war on terror if he had emphasized how important it is for Christian
s to demonstrate respect for Islam and its adherents. Prime Minister Mahathir would have done well to go beyond his call for a Muslim renaissance to condemn the evil effects of anti-Semitism on Jews and Muslims.

  Both failed to be leaders with integrity because of falling to the temptation of telling them [their audiences] what they want to hear.28

  Which brings us back to Lincoln, and the better angels of our nature.

  LINCOLN’S SPARE SIMPLICITY OF STYLE PLACED ENORMOUS WEIGHT upon his choice of words. I have always thought of the “mystic chords of memory [that] will yet swell the chorus of the Union” as binding every member of a huge crowd together as it rose to roar out words they all knew by heart. That rousing affirmation of nationhood I imagined would be the chorus to “Hail Columbia,” America’s de facto anthem in 1861:

  Firm, united let us be,

  Rallying round our liberty,

  As a band of brothers joined,

  Peace and safety we shall find.

  But the chords of memory can also be understood in a less literal way. Perhaps Lincoln was saying that it was only common, shared memories of being American that could eventually bind the nation together again. He spoke with an undaunted certainty: even if civil war were to sunder them temporarily, those memories would be restored. By contrast much of this book describes memories that undoubtedly bind and unite but not in a good cause. The French poet Paul Valéry wrote, almost three quarters of a century ago, that “history inebriates nations … saddles them with false memories.” His words are the epigraph at the beginning of this book. Historical memory, for many oppressed minorities, is honored as a defiant act of resistance; but at the same time we now also know that memory, written and oral, is only at best a partial recollection. False memories, as this book has recounted, are often the means by which hatred is sustained or reinvigorated.29 Much of what describes the past today, particularly in popular formats—on television or in film—is a form of memory, oral rather than written, a concatenation of impressions. Few of the memorial connections I have described extending over many centuries conform to the paradigm of normal, documentary history. This gulf between history and memory is widening rapidly, and to our peril.30