“Tribal Ignorance”
Professor Christopher Hitchens’ latest dissertation, this time on Iraqi ethnic and religious studies, is now up at Slate.com. As is often the case, much can be learned about complex issues through his ‘teachings’. Let’s get started with his lesson:
If you fall into conversation with an Iraqi, you will soon enough find out what you want to know. Kurds are not shy about mentioning their nationhood, and followers of the Shiite confession are not inclined to make a secret of the fact. So don’t force the question. But you will have to know a lot of Iraqis before you meet one who cannot introduce you, usually with pride, to his or her Sunni cousin, or Kurdish auntie, or Shiite brother-in-law, as the case may be.
Due to the lazy reporting of the Agenda Media, we never hear about these nuances and twists in Iraqi culture and makeup. It’s a shame that we don’t hear more about it instead of reading the same death-and-destruction stories day-after-day. Instead of bringing in scholars who could shed light on Iraqi society, we get statistics about casualties of war. The reality is that they could mix this information into their death and pessimism stories.
This information also casts the reporting into a totally different light because it isn’t as cleancut as the Agenda Media would have you believe. In fact, had we known of these nuances before Saturday’s elections, we might’ve concluded that the Iraqi Constitution would be ratified. That’s assuming, of course, that the Agenda Media’s goal was impartial dispensation of pertinent facts. We know, of course, that that isn’t on their radar screen, at least when a Republican is involved.
And as for ethnicity and religion beyond our customary categories, you had better be prepared to meet Turkish and Assyrian Iraqis, as well as to bear in mind that in 1947 there were more Jews in Baghdad than in Jerusalem (many of the former of whom had been there longer), that many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are Christian from more than one denomination, Islamic fanatics murdered the head of their Anglican congregation just the other day, and that the spiritual leader of the Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, is an ethnic Persian.
Actually, I knews that Iraq had a substantial Christian population through the writings of Kenneth Joseph, Jr. Mr. Joseph’s first article that I was familiar with is titled “I Was Wrong!” and is must reading for Christians and anti-war protesters. It’s a powerful, compelling piece about Mr. Joseph’s turning from human shield to war supporter.
Also, through The Presidential Prayer Team’s program to pray for Iraqi cities, I re-learned about the Biblican significance of Iraq. When the prophet Jonah was told to visit Nineveh to preach to them, he went to the area now known as Mosul. When the prophet Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego were cast into the fiery furnace, that firepit was near the city of Kirkuk in northeastern Iraq. The modern city of Hilla sits atop the ruins of Babylon, the first great world empire. The Garden of Eden is believed to have been located near the modern city of Basra. Ur of the Chaldees, the city from which God called Abram and Sarai, was also near Basra.
When it comes to Iraq, one of the most boring and philistine habits of our media is the insistence on using partitionist and segregationist language that most journalists would (I hope) scorn to employ if they were discussing a society they actually knew.
All I can say about that paragraph is OUCH!!! With that simple sentence, Mr. Hitchens indicts reporters stationed in Iraq sa being idiots and lacking even basic understanding of the country they’re reporting from.
To be a Sunni or a Shiite is to follow one or another Muslim obedience, but to be a Kurd is to be a member of a large non-Arab ethnicity as well as to be, in the vast majority of cases, a Sunni. Thus, by any measure of accuracy, the “Sunni” turnout in the weekend’s referendum on the constitution was impressively large, very well-organized, and quite strongly in favor of a “yes” vote. Is that the way you remember it being reported? I thought not. Well, then, learn to think for yourself.
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The Saddam Hussein regime was based on a minority of a minority, a Mafia clique based in and around the city of Tikrit, and it stayed in power not by being “secular” or multiethnic but by being sectarian and by playing the card of divide and rule. It treated all the inhabitants of the country as its personal property, and it made lifelong enemies among all communities and all confessional groups.
There’s much more to be gleaned from Professor Hitchens’ geography lesson but this is enough for you to ponder. I’d recommend bookmarking the article for future references.
Cross-posted at Let Freedom Ring
October 25th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
Anti-Latinism is hostility or violence towards Italians. In genealogical terms, Latin and Italian are synonyms. We Arabs are no whiter than Greeks or Latins. Iranians aren’t Arabs. They are Persians. You Americans need to stop being ignorant and do some research.