Hatred (26 page)

But now there are enemies beyond the traditional national ones, occupying communities without boundaries. Osama bin Laden is the leader of a community of haters, Al Qaeda. But where can we locate either bin Laden or his community?

G
ermany is a country with boundaries, a history, culture, and a common language. In other words, it is a nation. Its national characteristics differ significantly from that of other cultures. This is apparent after spending even one night in Tokyo and Berlin. The people look different and comport themselves differently. Cultural attitudes differ significantly even among such neighboring countries with overlapping ethnicity as France, Italy, and Switzerland. Even within the borders of a single country there are subcommunities whose occupants display different forms of behavior, dictated by that subculture. The fast pace and aggressive attitude one finds in New York are significantly different from the laid-back style of Santa Fe. While there is an American culture that binds us in familiarity, these subcultures shape multiple variants of the American character. I certainly experienced a sense of cultural confusion on first moving to New York from the Midwest.

A community of haters, on the other hand, is not a community in the traditional sense of a group defined by a shared geography, politics, or culture. It is an affinity group brought together and emotionally bonded by the shared passion of its members. Formed in different ways, a community of haters operates under different conditions. The culture of hatred is a culture converted to hatred in order to serve the political agenda of its leadership. The community of haters is a group of disparate individuals who find one another and band together because of their shared passion.

The Aryan Nation in the United States and its ideological counterparts in Europe, the skinheads, are affinity groups. They are communities of haters. Earth Liberation Front is such a community. To a significant degree, so is Al Qaeda. These people are joined one to the other by a common passion. The members of Al Qaeda, for example, form a transnational community of poverty, feudalism, and despair. The frustration at their stagnant and depressed state in the face of rapid progress of neighboring communities must be controlled by their leadership. It is handled by diverting their anger from their national oppressors and directing it toward a scapegoat—the international Jewish and American conspiracy.

Al Qaeda is a classic group defined by its beliefs. It makes them a community in ideology, if not geography. And it is a dangerous community. It has demonstrated that once the community of ideas has been created, it is easy for smaller terrorist cells dispersed geographically to be mobilized to carry out common policies of the larger network.

Nothing facilitates the identification of like individuals and their merger into groups as the modern technologies of communications,
from radio to the worldwide web. Technology has made possible the creation of global communities of ideology. The rapid changes that marked the latter half of the twentieth century were almost exclusively in the area of communications. These advances have dramatically shrunk the geophysical world, creating one massive interconnected community, ripe for the transmission of ideas and capable of calling to action similar-minded people in disparate and unlikely places. It has made possible ideological communities that cut across national boundaries and interests.

There is a tendency to miss the singularity of this brave new world of ideology, which creates communities without borders. The spread of cellular telephones, global television, Internet access, and the common languages of computers allows ideas to suffuse the globe in moments. These days, the universal word that everyone seems to understand is not the word of God—who seems to whisper different messages into the ears of his self-chosen messengers—but the Word of Microsoft. And the language spoken is English for the most part.

Neither Max Scheler, at the turn of the nineteenth century, nor Gordon Allport, in the 1940s, two major scholars of bigotry and prejudice, anticipated the new sense of community created by the communications revolution and what it would mean. Both assumed that hatred was likely to emerge in heterogeneous societies and democracies that promised more than they deliver. And both were dealing with prejudice, not obsessive hatred.

Scheler was convinced that prejudice stemmed from the discrepancy between the political promise of power to a group of citizens and its actual power. He was thinking in terms of a country, a democratic country at that, where a group of citizens saw promises unkept and equality denied. Such a group would be resentful of any other groups that seemed to be flourishing at its expense. It could harbor a righteous rage at their leaders, but to
change leaders might require revolution, and revolution is difficult. Instead, it could identify a victim minority that seemed to be stealing its birthright. Scheler—writing a full generation before they occurred—anticipated the conditions of Germany in the 1930s.

Allport listed ten conditions for prejudice to prevail. It required a society:

Both Scheler and Allport were thinking in terms of geographical communities, and they had in mind Western democracies like Germany and the United States. None of the six first conditions in Allport's list is present in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or most of the Islamic states from which Al Qaeda draws its loyalties. Neither author envisioned the kind of ideological community that transcends physical boundaries, the kind of community that became possible only in the new age of communication.

Isolated and alien haters spread across an increasingly shrinking globe can now find their emotional counterparts in lands they barely knew existed. Furthermore, the disparity between their existence and that of people in the developed nations—once only barely appreciated—can now be visualized in all its plush and plentiful detail. The impoverished Afghans or Palestinians in refugee camps can view on television the good life that others enjoy in different and distant societies, leading to feelings of unfairness and envy. And of course such disparity in the human condition is monumentally unfair. Such people can then be convinced that their misery is part of a zero-sum game that is necessary to support the indulgences of a rich society like the United States.

The cynical leaders of these depressed communities encourage such displacement in order to divert the frustrated rage away from the even more extreme inequities at home, where gilt palaces coexist with mud houses. The enmity between Sunni and Shiite, Iraq and Iran, can be put on hold while all join in unity supporting Al Qaeda. This group cuts across national boundaries and creates a true community of haters bonded by their shared envy and intense hatred of that great Satan, the United States of America. Why the United States? Who else represents all that they desire, all that they are entitled to? In the world of paranoia and projection, he who has what you have not has taken it from you.

What distinguishes the hatred of the Al Qaeda from the hatred manifest in the Palestinian refugee camps is that with the latter there is an actual geographical community and a territorial enemy to be joined with an ideological one. Still, the nature of the hatred is the same.

Hatred is always an attempt to find a way of dealing with one's impotent rage before it strangles one. Hatred is designed to make reason of one's agony and frustration. It is an attempt to convert humiliation into pride. Hatred among the Palestinians is an attempt
to find rationality out of the inequity of their conditions and that of their neighbors in Israel. The Israelis exist in a state that—by its sharp contrasts—mocks the conditions of their Arab neighbors. They are a high-tech, democratic state that illuminates all the true deprivations of the vast majority of the Arabs in the Middle East from Egypt to Iran. And with the emergence of an almost steady state of war, actual grievances support the biases of the Arabs.

The Israelis are but a pygmy, however, in comparison with the American colossus that bestrides the real world. Hostility towards the American Goliath is seeping into the cultures of such European democracies as France and Germany, which feel eclipsed and less respected, less “equal.” Unilateral actions by the United States, of course, do not help. If resentment against the United States exists in such similar states—with allies bonded by two world wars—what can one expect from the disenfranchised? Because of its strength and its riches, United States has become a target for the envy of all the oppressed Muslim communities from Africa to Asia. Al Qaeda taps that envy to create a community of haters that ignores the local political conditions, which clearly separate the interests of the disadvantaged groups. Hatred for the United States can make allies out of Iran and Iraq.

While the inequities between Israel and the United States, on the one hand, and these deprived communities, on the other, are real, the ascribed cause of the inequities is manufactured out of convenience. It is easier to blame the other rather than one's own. It is the cynical leadership of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinians that control their people and deprive them of a richer life in a modern world. But that same leadership controls the media and the schools that will determine the perceptions of the underprivileged. It is that leadership that will find the scapegoat.

To the Palestinians, the Israelis are invaders occupying land that the Palestinians view as rightly theirs. But the latter's readiness
to displace their rage onto innocent Jewish targets around the world exposes an anti-Jewish bigotry that contaminates what well may have been considered authentic and righteous rage. The antisemitic hatred is facilitated by the radicalism and bias of Islamic preachers who declare all Jews infidels, all Jews enemies, all Jews suitable for attack.

Independent of just and rational debates about the differing claims of the Palestinians and their Arab supporters and the Israelis, the two peoples now differ in psychological terms. The Palestinians have become a community of hatred and the Israelis have not. I am not here entering the debate about who has victimized whom; of where historic fairness lies; of right and wrong. I am not making a case of who has necessarily inflicted the most pain or has done the greater injustice. I am not even measuring the bigotry of one group compared with the other. I am talking of the emerging psyches.

The Palestinians daily demonstrate, in their actions and words, their delight at the sight of the macerated victims of suicide bombers and their pride in the bombers. The Israelis, even when they have clearly committed atrocities, have struggled with shame and angry denial, not self-congratulations (this may be changing with time and frustration, particularly among the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers). The reasons for hatred lie in the degraded nature of the life of most Palestinians in a modern world that owes them more. The have-nots are always more likely to be involved in mass hatred than the haves. Unfortunately, even the haves may perceive themselves as have-nots—witness the leadership of Al Qaeda. What is “not had” is respect, not just money. Francis Bacon in his superb essay on envy linked deprivation to general causes of envy:

The Arab world is a community of people “fallen out with the times.”

The typical community of haters is formed through their allegiance to a common cause—the unborn, the environment, helpless animals—and a common enemy. While the community is often strident, its major danger comes from those at the fringe of the movement ready to act out their own despair in the service of a legitimate cause. It is an assemblage of the converted. It has relatively little opportunity to evangelize a larger population

The radical Islamic movement is different. It, too, is a transnational group linking like-minded people. But Islam is a natural constituency of people joined by history, culture, and authentic beliefs. It is one of the major religions of our world. It starts with a following already unified in their identification one with the other. Radical Islamism is a major threat to world stability because of its ability to
create
hatred by converting normal populations of individuals into crusaders for a cause. Typical hatemongers do not have an existing constituency. They do not have
the reach, or the authority, of religion. They cannot both direct and legitimate violence in a large community in the way that the mullahs of radical Islam have done. Religion has historically provided a fertile field for the definition of enemies and the creation of hatred. It is a traditional venue for the sponsorship of hatred.