Greenwald and Maher are both wrong
by David Atkins
It has been interesting to me to watch the various reactions to the dispute between Bill Maher and Glenn Greenwald. People tend to see the winner of the debate as the one who confirmed their own prior views. Maher’s argument is that Islam is a uniquely violent religion; Greenwald’s is that there’s no difference between Islam and any other religion, but that U.S. imperialism is to blame for any differential blowback.
But the evidence would dictate that they’re both wrong. Both of their arguments are too simplistic to be taken seriously, and both are easily assailable. We’ll start with Greenwald’s.
Falsehood #1: “Imperialism is to blame for everything.” Yes, we all know: imperialism is bad. Imperialism begets blowback. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. All of this is true. But on the question Maher puts, those answers are sleight of hand. The debater in Greenwald’s position would have to argue that predominantly Muslim nations have suffered imperialistic horrors so disproportionate to the experiences of other nations and cultures that their reactions must be equivalently disproportionate. On that front, Greenwald’s argument totally falls apart.
It would be hard to argue that the average citizen of Iran or Saudi Arabia has suffered more greatly from racism and violence than have the victims of U.S. backed military juntas and death squads in Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina or El Salvador. Yes, the U.S. coup against Mossadegh in Iran and interposition of the corrupt Shah surely led to the rise of the Ayatollahs. But it’s also true that the U.S. did far worse in Chile when we deposed Allende in favor of the brutally awful war criminal and genocidal maniac Augusto Pinochet. Few honest people would argue that Iran suffered more mightily under the Shah than Chile did under Pinochet. It’s not as if the U.S. didn’t covet Chile’s copper just as surely it did Iran’s oil. And yet, Chileans didn’t take hostages at a U.S. embassy, nor are they threatening to use nuclear weapons against the rest of the world. Did the U.S. arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets, and then abandon them to their fate? Yes, and it led directly to the rise of Bin Laden. But we also did the same thing in Vietnam with far worse carnage. Somehow our far less atrocious involvement in Afghanistan led to the current predicament, while not even the horrors of My Lai set in motion a Vietnamese assault on the World Trade Center.
It would be difficult to argue that Estonians or Latvians somehow suffered less imperial oppression at the hands of the Soviet Union than did the Chechens. And yet the result is dramatically different. It would be difficult to say that the Muslim Uighur people in Western China have suffered more greatly under Chinese rule than have the Tibetans. And yet,