Several days after the Obsession screening Washington Square News columnist Aaron Greenblatt writes that the movie and its supporters offer no solutions, but that groups at NYU do:
“…100 Muslims, Jews and Christians dedicated to confronting one of the growing ills of this generation: the demonization of Muslim and Arab culture throughout the world.
[…]
Many students suggested that one of the main problems of “Obsession” is that the film represents the epitome of pulp. One student said the film is like a Starburst: It packs a flavorful punch with its post-production gloss, but it has no veritable nutritional value. With a menacing soundtrack underscoring the movie, interviewees such as former Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist Walid Shoebat and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz give the sense of a coming apocalypse. Although they highlight a legitimate problem - that Muslim extremists do have a small, firm hold on a minute segment of the overall Muslim community - the movie takes advantage of the audience’s vulnerabilities and exploits them to create a culture of fear. A culture where rationalism has no place. A culture gripped with prejudices, lacking any insightful understanding of the Other.
[…]
In elucidating his views on “Obsession,” Robert Friedman, a volunteer advocate of the film, likens radical Islam to a disease, and now that he has identified the disease, he explains that we must prescribe a cure. So what does the doctor suggest? He said, “If I were a Muslim, I’d be disgusted, and I would feel compelled to speak out against [these extremist elements].” How profound. The point is that Friedman and the documentary offer no tangible solutions, only overt and paralyzing criticisms.
[…]
In the near future, the Middle East Sustained Dialogue Group and associated organizations are doing just that through bringing Jews and Muslims closer. In the next few months, the Bronfman Center and the Islamic Center are organizing a joint Jewish-Muslim spring break trip to New Orleans to help rebuild the city, and they are also planning an evening of entertainment titled “One Jew, One Muslim, One Stage” for March.”
I have never heard of Aaron Greenblatt until I read this article. But it is enough to know that he is a total idiot. They used to say the same thing about Hitler: “He is bad, but don’t compare him to Ghinghis Khan.” Until he outdid Ghinghis Khan. Same thing now. I am affraid that “Islamic fundamentalists”, headed by Ahmadinejad with his nuclear weapons, will soon outdo Hitler.
As Jews, we learn not to talk about it. We’re taught, from an early age, that it’s not our business. As leftists, we’re taught to interpret it in the broader context, as the understandable outgrowth of occupation, of colonialism, of Western oppression.
So this month, when a Palestinian toddler named Hassan Abu Nada was killed in the crossfire of a Hamas-Fatah gunfight in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lehiya, we said nothing. His grandmother was wounded. This was none of our affair.
Just as in December, when Palestinians gunned down three children of a Fatah security chief, boys aged three to nine on their way to school. We knew better than to pass judgment, protest on their behalf, raise our voices.
Just as we kept our opinions to ourselves when, in a Frankfurt court, a Muslim woman whose Muslim husband beat her and threatened to kill her, was denied a divorce. Judge Christa Datz-Winter ruled that “the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives,” The New York Times reported. “The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse.”
Just as every morning, when the news of a fresh act of moral obscenity reaches us from Iraq, we swallow hard and shut up. On Sunday, for example, when a Sunni Muslim mosque was stormed, its minaret blown to pieces, and the structure set ablaze, in apparent retaliation for a suicide truck bombing the beside a Shiite mosque the day before.
Muslims should be able to worship without other Muslims blowing them to mist. Muslim children should be able to go to school and back without other Muslims shattering their bodies with automatic fire. Muslim women should be able to live their lives without worrying that their husbands are within their rights to beat them and threaten to kill them.
And we, as non-Muslims, should be able to say something about it.
Not a simple issue. Especially for those of us Jews and leftists who were educated at places like Berkeley, where we received our degrees in Selective Blindness, with a minor in Understanding the Roots of Violence when practiced by Muslims.
We were taught to sniff out, publicize, and condemn every instance of racism, violence, injustice, and humiliation practiced by Israeli Jews against Palestinian Muslims.
But we were also taught that it was racist to impose our Western values on the acts of Muslims, even, or especially, when it came to the most extreme of Muslims.
We can, with facility, therefore, comprehend all Muslim atrocities against Muslims in Iraq as the direct, understandable, and legitimate response to the American-British occupation.
We were taught wrong.
We can understand terrorism in Bali, in London, in the Twin Towers, as an outgrowth of anger over American expansionism and Israeli military repression.
We were taught wrong.
There are, of course, many Jews whose selective blindness works in the other direction, condemning Muslims at every opportunity, as though that made wrongdoing by Jews eminently forgivable and forgettable. As though we are somehow made moral by the moral failings of our neighbors.
This is what we should have been taught: Violations of human rights are violations of human rights, regardless of the cultural background of the perpetrator, regardless of the background of the victim.
This is what we should have retained: One way to demonstrate compassion for victims is to stop showing sensitivity to their tormentors. Even if both are Muslims. Because it’s our business to cry out. Because the victims are human beings. Because villains deserve to be denounced.
We were taught to feel guilt, when we should have been taught that wrongdoing is the work of the wrongdoer.
In the end, those of us who excuse Muslim fanatics their outrages against their own, those of us who explain away their crimes by blaming them on the West, or on ourselves, are guilty of racism as well.
We are saying, in effect, that they cannot be considered responsible for their actions, as would any other human being.
We are saying, in effect, that we made them who they are.
We are saying, in effect, that the suicide bomber who kills his own, lacks the ability to discern right and wrong. We are also saying, in effect, that they can do what they like, to their own.
There is racism in our view, and megalomania, and arrogance, and cowardice, and weakness. Terrorists know this. They feed on it.
They were taught well.