CAMILLE RETURNS: In her inimitable style, Camille Paglia set
about answering your questions but managed to produce 1500
words for the first one. So here's our second Camille installment.
She's indicated that perhaps later this year, we might send her
some questions again. Here's the question and answer. As to me,
I'm still in the hammock, having a wonderful August. See you
after Labor Day.
READER QUESTION:
I am interested by what Camille has to say regarding the
Palestine-Israel situation. Her past viewpoint in Salon has been
that the U.S. has an obligation to support a democratic state like
Israel, but yet at the same time she seemed largely sympathetic to
the Palestinian cause. The following is an excerpt from her
October 21, 2000 article in Salon:
Many Americans, myself included, have wondered for
years why our safety and security are compromised by an
inflexible foreign policy that has set the entire Muslim
world against us. From the 1988 destruction of Pan Am
Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 bombing
of New York's World Trade Center, the American
mainstream media has been in denial, blaming those
heinous acts of terrorism on small cadres of madmen
funded by outlaw regimes -- as if the attacks were
unrelated to decisions made in Washington. The U.S. is
rightly seen by Arabs as the principal guarantor of Israel's
military might, which Americans have underwritten with
billions of tax dollars for which there are pressing
domestic needs. The media rarely allow Arab views to be
heard unfiltered and unframed, and too often, Arabs are
portrayed as irrational or medieval, clamoring cartoon
figures of no interest until they begin to adopt Western
ways.
I nearly always agree with Camille's political viewpoints, but this
one stumped me.
CAMILLE PAGLIA REPLIES:
Thank you for that excerpt from my Salon column - written ten
months before the attacks on the World Trade Center. Quite
frankly, reading it now sends a chill through me. I warned again
and again in Salon about the dangerous insularity of American
culture, which was worsened by the tilt of the Clinton
administration toward p.c. domestic issues and away from world
affairs. (I speak as a disillusioned Democrat who voted for Bill
Clinton twice.)
The abject failure of the major media to pursue the issue of
terrorism in the years following the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing will live in infamy. I blame the media as well as the
superstructure of the Democratic party for the appalling
delusionalism of the Monica Lewinsky episode, which began in
1998 and consumed the news for two years.
I have not changed my position, as repeatedly expressed in Salon:
first, any politician has the right to a randy private life, but it
should not be conducted on government property, especially not
in revered public space like the White House. Second, any
politician who has disgraced his office and his family should
resign as an act of honor.
When the Lewinsky scandal broke, Democrat big wigs should
have muscled Clinton out the door and let Al Gore assume the
presidency. The nation would have been spared the obsessive
distraction of the Lewinsky affair - with its incompetent, foot-
dragging, whey-faced wimp of an independent counsel (Ken Starr)
and its clumsy, self-infatuated buttinski of a Speaker of the House
(Newt Gingrich), who shot the entire Republican party in the ass
by putting the sex-suffused Starr Report onto the Internet. That
one dumb act guaranteed Clinton's survival: it repolarized the
nation into the tired old drama of prudes versus hipsters.
Had Gore taken power, he would have grown in office and, with
his military background, probably paid far more attention to
geopolitical tensions. I believe that, had Gore replaced a
dethroned Clinton in 1998, this nation might well have avoided
the unspeakable horror of last year's attack on the World Trade
Center.
Instead, Gore was left to dwindle down in his unproductive and
scandal-ridden vice-presidency until the 2000 campaign, when he
went through more silly metamorphoses than a Bloomingdale's
mannequin. The Gore campaign specialized in hurricanes of
patronizing demagoguery and flatulence. I began 2000 eagerly
waiting to vote for Gore; I ended it by voting in protest for Ralph
Nader. (And Nader will get my vote again in 2004 if the
Democrats don't come up with a viable, ethical candidate.)
The Arab-American Nader (his parents were born in Lebanon)
brings us back to the main body of your question. I do believe that
the Palestinians have been treated atrociously--brushed aside by
European superpowers carving up the Ottoman Empire after
World War One and again by the United Nations after World War
Two. I find specious the common argument that Arab states are to
blame for not resettling dispossessed Palestinian refugees after the
creation of Israel.
Though Italian Catholicism is my cultural heritage, I am an atheist
who passionately identifies with ancient Mediterranean paganism.
Since I am not a Christian, I have little interest in the sacred sites
of Jerusalem, aside from their archaeology. (I subscribe to
Biblical Archaeology magazine, in fact.) That detachment from
the religious basis of Judeo-Christianity also means I do not
understand the rationale for Zionism. By the same logic, my
people, descended from fierce Volscian tribesmen, could lay
claim to most of the region between Rome and Naples.
As a student of ancient history, I also know that the Mideast
(except when under an imperial thumb) has always been boiling
with ethnic and religious rivalries, leading to endless wars and
slaughter. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just the latest episode
in this saga. I used to feel that the establishment of a Palestinian
state would bring some resolution, though it might still take two
or three generations for hatreds to subside.
After last year's attack on the World Trade Center, however, I'm
no longer as optimistic. The total destruction (within 90 minutes)
of such major symbols of Western economic power has certainly
emboldened the most fanatical Muslims around the world to
dream that Western culture, like imperial Rome, can indeed be
brought down, along with its client state, Israel, whose military is
subsidized by American taxpayers.
Over a decade ago, I began arguing for a global core curriculum -
an education based on world religions (which I respect and admire
as profound symbol systems far more complex than
poststructuralism). Mutual understanding, I hoped, would be a
basis for world peace. I proposed that Hinduism and Buddhism be
taught and that the Koran, as well as the Bible, be made central
texts in public schools. (Without the Bible - unrivalled for the
quantity and quality of its poetry - students cannot comprehend
great Western literature and art from the Middle Ages on.)
Hence I was surprised and alarmed by the reluctance of moderate
Muslims to make their presence consistently felt in the period
(now almost a year) since 9-11. At first I disdainfully rejected the
idea that we are engaged in a global clash of civilizations - Islam
versus the West. It seemed impossible and medieval. I saw Arab
culture as richly informed by its brilliant past, with its interplay
between Bedouin stoicism and Moorish cultivation.
But as a chain of suicide bombers steadily blew up buses and
restaurants in Israel over the past year, my sympathy for the
Palestinian cause has gradually diminished. War, declared or
undeclared, justifies attacks on military targets. But the massacre
of civilians - in the World Trade Center or at a Jerusalem market -
is barbarism. What kind of state could be formed by people who
tolerate and cheer such atrocities? When moderate factions are so
feeble, who can believe that a Palestinian state would not be the
staging area for missile attacks on Israel?
My reading of history - based on the rise and fall of Egypt,
Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome, and Byzantium - is that the world
has embarked on a long period of uncertainty, a century or more
of grotesque contrasts. There will be years, even decades of
Western affluence and peace, then scattered outbreaks of violence
and chaos, put down by assertions of military and police power,
verging on the fascist. Should there be severe climatic shifts
affecting food production (a subject I harped on in my Salon
column), the world economy would be destabilized, and complex
societies would unravel.
The hopes of my 1960s generation for a progressive, ethical
politics have been dashed. We're back to realpolitik--which
requires the mind and not the heart. No matter what the flaws and
misjudgments of the Israeli government (including its winking
enabling of settlements in Palestinian territory), the West has
common cause with Israel. World Islam, it has become clear, is a
totalizing creed that, whatever its spiritual beauties, invades
politics and stifles dissent.
Europeans find it difficult to understand the intricate
interconnection of American politics with Israel. Indeed, over the
past three decades, there has been an intensification of simmering
resentments among working-class African-Americans about what
is perceived as Jewish power in media and business. This should
have been more directly addressed in the 1980s, when members of
the black Nation of Islam were blocked from appearing on
American campuses. That decade's speech codes (banning
"offensive" speech) proved foolishly counterproductive in this
case, since it allowed anti-Semitic ideas and outright myths to
spread unchecked under the national radar screen.
Since 9-11, vastly more open debate about Israel, pro and con, has
been permitted in the American mainstream media.
Unfortunately, a strident polarization, close to hysteria, has also
developed. Support of Israel on the far right sometimes blurs into
religious and therefore undemocratic presumptions - the
fundamentalist view that the Christian shrines of the Holy Land
must be kept out of Muslim hands.
Before 9-11, even faint criticism of the Israeli government could
provoke baseless charges of anti-Semitism. But real anti-Semitism
has now emerged or rather reemerged as a powerful, irrational
force in Europe. Aside from overt terrorist attacks, nothing more
dangerous has reared its head since the end of the Cold War. The
Arab states, riddled with bureaucratic corruption, have not shown
they can control or contain the fanatics in their midst bent on the
West's destruction. If Europeans, along with the pro-Palestinian
U.N. establishment, continue to undermine Israel, the next
generation, or the one after it, will reap the whirlwind.
Not all Jews endorse the expansionist policies of the current
Israeli leadership; on the contrary, Jewish leftists around the
world generally support the Palestinians. But the cruel suicide
bombings in Israel, along with the revival of European anti-
Semitism, have forced distant observers to choose. Because of my
own massive lifelong influence by Jewish-American culture - in
the arts, media, and entertainment industry as well as law, science,
and medicine - I have concluded that, for me, only one moral
imperative is possible: to support Israel.
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