The Enemy At Home (21 page)

Clearly this approach of resignation in the face of human tendencies is not the one that liberals take in other areas. Liberals do not say, “Prejudice is natural,” and therefore racism and gay bashing on the part of young people should be accepted as inevitable. Rather, liberals typically condemn these tendencies and do what they can to suppress them, restrict them, and educate young people to resist them. When parents protest the exposure of their children to sexually explicit materials in school or in movies, liberals typically accuse them of “censorship.” But when civil rights and gay rights groups protest the portrayal of blacks and homosexuals, liberals hasten to get the material withdrawn or rewritten, or to extract public expressions of repentance. The reasonable conclusion, therefore, is that many on the cultural left regard racism and gay bashing as evils that should be discouraged, whereas they regard premarital sex as a good that should be promoted.
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I will have more to say about the consequences of liberal morality in subsequent chapters. My conclusion at this point is that the depravity of American culture is defended and protected by the new liberal morality. This ethic has contributed to making American culture more trivial, debased, and degenerate. Now this gross underside of American culture is being exported to the world. Therefore it is no longer “our problem” but a global problem. Many liberals seem blind to the moral concerns of traditional people, such as their concern for childhood innocence and modesty, because they do not share the traditional view of right and wrong. What traditional cultures and specifically Muslim cultures consider deviant and disgusting, many liberals consider progressive and liberating. Thus, from the point of view of those cultures, liberals promote an “upside down” morality in which traditional forms of depravity become signposts of freedom. Traditional Muslims fear that freedom in the West means moral corruption, and liberals are the ones who are proving them right.

SIX

A World Without Patriarchy

Divorce, Homosexuality, and Other Liberal Family Values

I
F YOU WANT
to understand liberal family values, a good place to start is the Abu Ghraib scandal. For many Americans this statement may seem surprising. After all, Abu Ghraib is widely associated with prisoner abuse, lack of accountability, and torture. Once the scandal erupted in April 2004, with lurid photographs showing U.S. soldiers degrading and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, the American media portrayed the incident as a textbook case of the abuses of empire.

As many liberals saw it, the images of Abu Ghraib—Private Lynndie England leading an Iraqi man on a leash, naked Iraqi prisoners stacked into a human pyramid, captives being forced to masturbate in a public corridor, and so on—demonstrate the Bush administration’s arrogant indifference to the misuse of power. As Mark Danner, author of
Torture and Truth,
puts it, “We’ve been offered a window into the realm of government decision-making having to do with interrogation and torture.” Anthony Lewis saw Abu Ghraib as symptomatic of “the abandonment of America’s commitment to human rights at home and abroad.” Seymour Hersh traced “the roots of Abu Ghraib” to torture memos drafted in the White House and torture policies approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
¹

Conservatives did their best to minimize the significance of Abu Ghraib. President Bush said it “does not represent America.” James Schlesinger characterized it as “Animal House on the night shift.” Many conservatives pointed out that there was no moral equivalence between an admitted excess like Abu Ghraib and the terrorists’ practice of chopping off captives’ heads. Bernard Goldberg noted that liberals who whine about “so-called American atrocities…never seem to cry over the genuine atrocities that are commonplace throughout the Arab world.” Some on the right defended Abu Ghraib as a way to get valuable tips about potential terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart” because, as an interrogation technique, “it sounds pretty effective to me.” Columnist Tammy Bruce wrote, “I’m all for whatever it takes to get information.”
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Throughout the Muslim world, Abu Ghraib was viewed very differently. To see why, we need to take a closer look at the scandal. Fortunately we have a detailed picture of what happened, both from the military’s five-hundred-page report and from the trials of Private England and Private Charles Graner, the two main figures involved. After marrying at age nineteen “on a whim,” as she put it, England left her husband and enlisted in the military. There she met Graner, who was fresh from a divorce in which his wife had taken out three protective orders against him. Shortly before they went to Iraq, England and Graner partied together with another soldier friend in Virginia Beach. “They drank heavily,” the
New York Times
reports, and when the other soldier passed out, “Private Graner and Private England took turns taking photographs of each other exposing themselves over his head.” In Iraq, the two began an affair that they continued even though both were warned that their sexual trysts on the night shift violated military rules.

Soon Graner and England began to make videos of their sex acts. They circulated the videos among their friends, and even mailed some to friends back in America. In October 2004, Graner persuaded several other soldiers to join him in staging and photographing prisoners. They made Muslim men strip naked and simulate various sex acts for the camera. They ordered male captives to put on female underwear, sometimes on their heads. They compelled prisoners to masturbate while they watched. At one point England said of a detainee, “Look, he’s getting hard.” Graner said he was the one who took the infamous photograph of England holding a leash around the neck of a crawling prisoner. “Look what I made Lynndie do,” Graner boasted in an e-mail with the photo attachment that he sent to someone he knew. Graner said the pictures he took of inmates masturbating were a “birthday gift” to England. Graner made another unexpected present to England: he made her pregnant.

England discovered the pregnancy two days after she broke up with Graner. The reason for the breakup was that Graner was having an affair with another woman, Specialist Megan Ambuhl. During their courtship Ambuhl e-mailed Graner an article headlined, “Study Finds Frequent Sex Raises Cancer Risk.” She commented, “We could have died last night.” The army sent England home on account of her pregnancy, and by the time the baby was born she was no longer speaking to Graner. Graner proposed marriage to Ambuhl during his court-martial, and England found this out from her lawyers. Graner got ten years in prison, England three years. The other soldiers received lesser sentences. Paul Arthur, the military investigator who was the first to question England, quoted her giving a simple motive for her actions. “It was just for fun.” Arthur added, “They didn’t think it was that serious. They didn’t think it was a big deal. They were joking around.”
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Now we are in a better position to understand the Muslim reaction to Abu Ghraib. Most Muslims did not view it as a torture story at all. Muslims were not outraged at the interrogation techniques used by the American military, which are quite mild by Arab standards. Remember that Abu Ghraib was one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prisons. Tens of thousands of people were held there and many were subject to indescribable beatings and abuse. Twice a week, there were hangings outside the prison. This is what Muslims mean by torture, not the lights-on, lights-off version that American liberals are so indignant about. Moreover, Muslims realized that most of the torture scenes in the photographs—the hooded man with his arms outstretched, the prisoner with wires attached to his limbs—were staged. This was simulated torture, not real torture.

The main focus of Islamic disgust was what Muslims perceived as extreme sexual perversion. For many Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring. In the Muslim view, this perversion is characteristic of American society, and is the root of family breakdown in America. Moreover, many Muslims viewed the sexual degradation as a metaphor for how little Americans care for other people’s sacred values, and for the kind of humiliation that America seeks to impose on the Muslim world. Some Muslims argued that such degradation was worse than execution because death only strips a man of his life, not of his honor. As these Muslims saw it, there was in fact no moral equivalence between the sexual humiliation of Abu Ghraib and the decapitation of hostages by terrorists: the former was worse!

A writer on one Muslim Web site termed Abu Ghraib “a mirror of the pornographic lifestyle of America that has fun while it tramples on Muslim hearts.” Anouar Abdel Malek, a columnist for the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram,
wrote that Abu Ghraib reflects the kind of sexual depravity that is normal in America but that revolts the conscience of traditional Muslims. As Muslims, he wrote, “We feel as though we are knocking on the gates of hell, and all hope is about to abandon us.”
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A Muslim businessman told me in Istanbul, “Abu Ghraib showed a side of America that many of us have suspected but tried not to believe. Now we see that it is true. There is a sickness in American society that goes beyond a few soldiers who got carried away. What that female American soldier in uniform did to the Arab man, strip him of his manhood and pull him on a leash, this is what America wants to do to the Muslim world.”

Although I do not believe that Abu Ghraib reflects America’s predatory intentions toward the Muslim world, I can see why Muslims would see it this way. In one crucial respect, however, the Muslim critics of Abu Ghraib were wrong. Contrary to their assertions, Abu Ghraib did not reflect the shared values of America, it reflected the sexual immodesty of liberal America. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of blue America. Casting aside all traditional notions of decency, propriety, and morality, they simply lived by the code of self-fulfillment. If it feels good, it must be right. This was bohemianism, West Virginia–style.

At some level, the cultural left recognized this, which is why most of its comments about Abu Ghraib assiduously avoided the issue of sexual deviancy. The left’s embarrassment on this matter seems to have drawn on class prejudice. For some liberals, soldiers like Graner and England were poor white trash getting into trouble again. Of course if Graner and England were professors at an elite liberal arts college, their videotaped orgies might easily have become the envy of academia. If they were artists staging these pictures in a loft in Soho they could have been hailed as pioneers and encouraged by leftist admirers to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. But being low-life Appalachians, Graner and England inspired none of these elevated thoughts. Instead, liberals moved opportunistically to attack the military and discredit its prisoner interrogation policies—even though these policies had nothing to do with what actually happened. Conservatives completely missed the significance of Abu Ghraib. Chagrined because they knew how bad the incident made America look, conservatives sought desperately to minimize Abu Ghraib, to call it a prank, to explain it as an interrogation technique, to say it wasn’t typical. In trying to defend the indefensible, conservatives became cheap apologists for liberal debauchery.

IN A DEEPER
sense, the Muslim anguish over Abu Ghraib reflects a broader Muslim concern about American sexual depravity. Many Muslims believe that Americans are sexual perverts, that sexual perversion destroys the family, and that the United States is trying to impose its deviant ways on the Islamic world. Islamic radicals continually exploit these issues. Referring to the Americans, bin Laden said in a 1998 interview, “They want to skin us from our manhood.” By encouraging women’s liberation and the free mixing of the sexes, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, charges, America is trying “to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption.” In this way, he said, the United States is trying to emasculate Muslim men and weaken Islamic society. Speaking at a mosque in Riyadh, the radical sheikh Fahd Rahman al-Abyan said, “The West is a society in which under-age girls know what married women do and more, a society where the woman does as she pleases even if she is married, a society in which the number of illegitimate children approaches and sometimes surpasses the number of children from permitted unions. These putrid ideas…are being pushed on us in the name of women’s rights.”
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Years ago Sayyid Qutb wrote that no society that undermines the family can be considered to be civilized. Sexual depravity is the essence of
jahilliya,
Qutb argued, because it destroys the elemental unit of civilization. Among the bedouins in pre-Islamic Arabia, he wrote, “Fornication was rampant in various forms and was considered something to be proud of.” Qutb noted that a typical bedouin woman had relations with so many men that when she became pregnant, the tribe would wait for the child to be delivered and then determine the father with the assistance of “an expert in recognizing resemblances.” Qutb suggested that precisely this kind of sexual and social chaos is increasingly characteristic of America. The new
jahilliya
is the consequence of “this animalistic behavior which you call the free mixing of the sexes, this vulgarity which you call the emancipation of women.”
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Critiques of this sort strike a deep chord among traditional Muslims today. Tariq Ramadan points out that, even in the West, many young Muslim women “wear headscarves and give visible signs of the modesty in which they wish to be approached.” In Ramadan’s view these Muslims represent “a liberation movement within Islam,” a movement that seeks liberation from Western feminism. If freedom is defined in the West as sexual liberation, then Muslims have decided to adopt “another way of freedom.”
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In Muslim countries this resistance is nearly universal. The Turkish sociologist Nilufer Gole says that most Muslims have concluded that freedom in the West basically means freedom from the marriage contract, “the freedom of seduction.”

The distinguished Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “The most basic right of a child is to have two parents, and this right is taken away from nearly half of the children in Western society.” America’s social system, he remarks, “places the desires of the individual above responsibility in marriage to one’s spouse and children.” Nasr argues that the idea that people own their bodies and can do as they please with them “is totally alien to Islam.” Even so, Nasr charges that this is precisely the doctrine that America is trying to impose on the Muslim world.
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Imagine the outcry if Muslim countries routinely convened international conferences that featured testimony and resolutions on social life in America. One can envision the testimony of American children wounded by divorce, or graphic details of the various sexual diseases that homosexuals routinely contract, or vivid images of American women aborting their offspring. Imagine if Islamic countries funded massive programs to increase or decrease the American population, change the status of American women, pass laws to alter the structure of authority in the American family! No doubt Americans would be outraged and would act swiftly to stop such arrogant meddling. Muslims charge that the United States is interfering in precisely this way to destroy the patriarchal family in the Islamic world. As one Western-educated Muslim told me in India, “I wish you Americans would take your family values and shove them up your ass.”

It is not hard to understand why many Muslims might feel this way. There is widespread agreement in America that the family is in crisis. The divorce rate in America is 50 percent. One in three American children is born out of wedlock. One-third of American children are living apart from their biological father. Even in two-parent families, two-thirds of women with young children have full-time jobs, so most children under school age are cared for in day-care centers. There have been more than 30 million abortions in America in the past three decades. The very concept of family no longer seems to refer to a married couple with children—it is now an umbrella term covering cohabiting couples, “blended families” resulting from divorce and remarriage, single-parent households, lesbian couples with adopted children, and so on. Americans are fairly accustomed to all this, but from the Muslim point of view, might not America’s social reality reflect precisely the
jahilliya
that Qutb warned about?