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MR MOHAMAD'S FANTASIES

Mr. Mohamad's fantasies
By Jack Schwartz
October 23, 2003

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia caused a stir recently with his warmly received speech before the Organization of the Islamic Conference in which he declared that "Jews rule the world by proxy: They get others to fight and die for them." His words were roundly denounced by Western leaders including the American President, as well they should have been, but in a perverse way, from the viewpoint of speaker and listeners, they made perfect sense. Like most second-tier anti-Semites -- let us give the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt -- he damns the Jews with faint praise. If one reads his entire speech, Mr. Mohamad is chastizing the world's 1.2 billion Muslims for being unable to overcome its 12 million Jews, a people they outnumber roughly 100 to 1 and whose territory is a postage stamp compared to the land mass occupied by the collection of Muslim states on three continents. Of course, he may be a little off in charging that Jews get others to fight their battles for them -- Israel has done quite well on its own against an array of Arab armies in the last half-century as Islam knows only too well -- but that is understandably playing to the crowd. What is most bracing about Mr. Mohamad's observations is his belief that Jews rule the world -- whether by proxy or otherwise. And who can blame him for his outlook? From his colored perspective, Jews have projected their influence onto the most powerful countries on earth bending these nations to their will. Their brainpower has led them to invent "socialism, communism, human rights and democracy." To what purpose? "So that they can enjoy equal rights with others." It is, of course flattering to imagine that, notwithstanding Marx (a baptized anti-Semite), Engels and Lenin on the Left and those notorious Israelites, the Founding Fathers, in the democracy department, the Jews are credited with so much by their enemies. Mr. Mohamad's fantasies bring to mind the old joke about the Polish Jew in the 30s who said he preferred to read the Nazi press over the Jewish newspapers because while the latter wrote about gloom and doom for the Jews, the anti-Semites demonstrated how they controlled the world. But whatever Mr. Mohamad's perspective owes to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,"; the forged Czarist blueprint of Jewish world domination that makes such popular reading in the controlled Arab media (and one of the limited number of foreign works privileged to be translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years), it springs from attitudes in Muslim experience that are quite valid and that we ignore at our peril. We should not condescend to these modalities because they are central to the belief system of many in the Muslim ummah. And we must examine them in light of the Prime Minister's remarks.

Mr. Mohamad raises a sensitive subject in his speech, lamenting that "because we are discouraged from learning of science and mathematics as giving us no merit for the afterlife, we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defense" -- or for that matter to produce much of anything else. It is a painful fact that in the century or so since the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, there have been only a handful of winners from Muslim lands and almost 100 from the Jewish community in virtually every field from Physics to Chemistry to Economics to Literature and, yes, Peace. To cite this is not to flaunt a non-existent Jewish superiority over Muslim thinking. Despite, Mr. Mohamad's racial inferences there is no magical gene or demonic jinni that makes Jews -- admittedly a Western people, in attitude if not origin -- more, or less, intelligent than Arabs or anyone else. But what then accounts for this disparity -- at least by Nobel standards -- in contributing to human progress? Implicit in Mr. Mohamad's words -- and explicit on the airwaves and in the press of the Muslim world -- is that this is due to a conspiracy of Jews and their agents. To Western eyes this may, hopefully, seem like nonsense. But imagine how it appears to, let us say, someone from the Arab world. In a world where kinship is critical, where one advances through the beneficence of family, clan and tribe, it makes perfect sense that one's rivals -- in this case, the Jews -- would act in the same way. The possibility that individuals could advance through hard work, personal effort, talent, drive, enterprise -- and that these virtues might be rewarded in a society based on merit rather than clan, may seem incomprehensible in a society where one's first loyalty is to kin and crony. Even harder to grasp is that in a pluralistic democratic society, the individual's primary loyalty is to the state; it is not tribal. This assumption may be an unpleasant truth but it certainly reflects the premise of Saddam Hussein's regime as well as that of other Middle East despotisms, and it is a reality that is challenging the United States as it struggles to bring democracy to Iraq.

The recent Arab Human Development Report, put together by Middle East scholars for the United Nations Development Program, is a devastating chronicle of the failure of Arab societies to advance politically, economically or socially. And while pro forma lip service is paid to the virtues of Islam, it is clear from the document's authors that the ascendancy of Islamism in recent years has stifled the growth of progress. Traditionalist Islam has become the enemy of modernity, most particularly, the authors suggest, in supporting forces resistant to individual liberty, secular knowledge and women's equality. While the Arab states -- the heart of Islam -- serve as a metaphor for this condition, they are not alone. Half a century after Partition, Hindu-majority India is a democracy that has begun to thrive economically, while a growingly Islamist Pakistan is an economic and political basket case. Afghanistan reverted to a medieval dark age under the Taliban theocracy. Even in modern Iran, the mullahs have done their best to suppress free thought and political opposition, while bringing the nation to the brink of economic ruin. In the Arab world, two-thirds of its 280 million people are illiterate -- half of them women. Education often consists of the rote learning of the Koran taught by fundamentalist clerics in the ubiquitous Saudi-financed madrassahs . Throughout autocracy reins, intolerance abounds and the best and brightest often flee a smothering patriarchal society for the opportunities of the West. Is it any wonder that a fifth of the region's Arabs live on less than $2 a day and economic growth is stifled? The one growth "industry" has been Islamism. With few exceptions, the connection between Islamism and political, economic and social stagnation is too overwhelming to be dismissed as mere coincidence, or caused primarily by other phenomena. It is the only factor that is consistent in all cases -- and that cannot be trumped by such phenomena as colonialism, which other cultures suffered but overcame. How did this come to be?

We are reminded constantly of Islam's contributions to science and medicine and its role as a conduit of Classical Civilization to the West through its preservation and translation of the works of Plato and Aristotle as well as such Latin writers as the Roman physician Galen. What actually transpired in the Arab world during this period -- roughly between the 9th and 12th centuries -- was a long struggle between the theologians and the philosophers over how this knowledge was to be used -- which the Orthodox ultimately won. In short, the theologians saw philosophy -- that is a natural view of the world -- as subservient to Revelation. The ultimate truth was in the Koran, not in experience. Any thinking that deviated from this literal reading of Scripture constituted a threat. It is during this era, which the Arab world would look back on as a Golden Age, that the Rationalists, although beleaguered, held their own in the courts of such Enlightened rulers as the 9th-century Caliph al-Mamoun (when Aristotle was translated into Arabic) and were the scholarly jewels in the crown of such Christian rulers as Frederick II and his fabled court in Sicily. The early Arab Rationalists, known as Mu'tazilites, were decried by their Orthodox critics as exposing Doctrine to the critique of Reason. Nevertheless, protected by various suzerains in the fractious politics of the Muslim world, they persisted. It was at this time, for instance, that the 11th-century physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) published his great medical treatises (although his books on philosphy were burned). The most prominent voice against the philosophers was the theologian Al-Ghazali who attacked rationalism as dangerous to the faith and dismissed Reason as a snare to Revelation in his most famous work, "Refutation of the Philosphers." The last, and perhaps greatest, proponent of Rationalism, the 12th-century judge from Seville Ibn Rushd (Averroes) responded in "Refuting of the Refutation" that natural philosophy could offer knowledge parallel to that of Revelation. But the weight of Orthodoxy was too great and Doctrine won out over Reason. (It might be noted that the Jewish philosopher Maimonedes, while agreeing in principle with his Muslim peers on the issues of the Existence, Unity and Incorporeality of God, criticized the methodology whereby "they employed the same assertion as a proof for the identical argument which had led to the assertion." In effect, he accused them of harnessing arguments to fit their doctrine. He argued that "even the most cogent of their proofs . . . has only been obtained by reversing the whole order of things." Maimonides proposed to attain the same end, yet in doing so, "I shall not contradict the laws of nature." The difference is critical.)

By the 13th-century, the forces of rationalism in Muslim thinking had waned, giving way to mysticism on the one hand and orthodoxy on the other. Averroes, who was harried with charges of heresy was a prophet unheard in his own land, but whose natural philosophy had a major influence on the thought of subsequent generations in Europe. Practitioners of natural philosophy soldiered on in various venues in the Muslim world for several centuries -- increasingly peripheral to the Arab center-- but basically the Guardians of Orthodoxy had saved Islam from the empirical method that within two centuries would usher Renaissance humanism into the Christian world. From an Orthodox Muslim point of view this would be saving Islam from the materialism of the West, but the downside is that, over time, it prevented Islam from producing the fruits of that materialism as well.

Critics of Islam have lamented that the Muslim world never had a Luther. More to the point, it never had a Spinoza. The turning point for the West -- visa vis its relations with Islam and the rest of the globe, came in the mid-17th century when social and political conditions allowed the rational criticism of nature to become completely freed from religious doctrine. The philosophical and cultural seeds planted in Europe centuries earlier, nurtured by the Reformation, Religious Toleration and Free Thought lead to the extraordinary harvest of critical thinking and observation yielded by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton and countless others that made possible the ascendancy of the West. The template for the industrial revolution was, in effect, in place. It was no accident that by the end of the century, the Ottoman Empire would make its last great thrust at the heart of Europe and then Islam would implode. At best, it would become a consumer of Western goods, at worst exploited by Western enterprise. Neither side was imbued with any special virtue or vice, but nature abhors a vacum and the West marched in to fill the void that Islam created. By insulating its tradition from any internal critique over centuries, Islam had created the conditions of its own downfall. All that was needed was for a rival society to throw off its own dogmatic blinders and cast an empirical eye on the world around it. Once that happened, there was no contest. Other societies -- the ever-pragmatic Chinese and the adaptable Japanese -- have observed the West, caught up and often surpassed it. But Islam seems to take a perverse pride in refusing to adapt to the 21st century by accepting individual liberty, utilizing its women and introducing modern education. Rather, it insists on teaching its young to accept authority, to insist on its ancient Text to the exclusion of the empirical knowledge that might challenge it. In embracing the Wahhabism of the fundamentalist Saudi preachers, Islam has rejected not only the West, but, more important, the critical approach that inspired its own Golden Age. It has retreated behind the walls of its madrassahs to shake a defiant fist at modernity. Yet unless, Islam is willing to find a way to hear the best voices of its own past, to reconcile tradition with modern life, it will remain mired in its own chaos, blaming the West for a fate that is, ultimately, one of its own choosing.

 

THE DOUBLE STANDARDS OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD

The Double Standards of the Islamic World
By Jack Schwartz
October 23, 2003

It is a commonplace for Western supporters of the Palestinian cause to attribute violence against Israelis to the occupation of the West Bank. Presumably, if the injustices connected to the occupation of the territories ended, the violence would end with it. The Palestinian Authority goes somewhat further and insists that only when all Palestinian refugees are allowed to return to the homes which their forbears lost in the wars with Israel will the urge for retribution be assuaged. Leaving aside for a moment, whether this would permit a viable Jewish state, the logic of both assumptions is that what drives the Palestinian cause is the desire for land and statehood. Give us a country of our own and the property taken from our kin in an unjust war and we will live with you in peace. It is the basic argument that advocates of the Palestinian cause in the West use in rallying support for their position, whether at the U.N., among the European Left or on American campuses. On the face of it, the argument appeals to a sense of justice which -- while debatable -- can at least be understood in Western terms. Many in the West, still haunted by the demons of colonialism, can appreciate the appeals to Restitution and Self-Determination. Would these ostensible grievances offered by Palestinian advocates in the West be the true reasons driving their cause, a settlement, albeit fractious, could be achieved, and might already have been forged.

But while these grievances are significant factors in the Palestinian cause, they are not the driving force that has stirred passions throughout the Muslim world. What motivates peasants in Indonesia, politicians in Malaysia, tribesmen in Pakistan, to be so incensed by the cause of a people with whom they have no affinity in language, proximity or culture? Nothing in common, that is, except faith.

It would be understandable, of course, for Muslims worldwide to take up the cause of what they see as their beleaguered co-religionists anywhere on the globe. But how then can we explain the rather abject global response of Islam to far worse persecution of Muslims from Bosnia to India in much greater numbers and often with worse outcomes? In the current intifada, over more than three years about 1,500 Arabs have been killed, two-thirds of them combatants, the others tragically, because they were in the line of fire. (More than 800 Israelis, most of them noncombatants have also been killed, deliberately, most in suicide bombings, but let us put this aside.) In India's Gujarat state, a firebombing of a train carrying Hindu zealots lead to riots in which more than 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in a single week, many burned and hacked to death. The state did little to protect them or prosecute their killers. During the war in Bosnia, Muslim communities were subjected to a near-genocide -- the men slaughtered, the women raped -- the most infamous, but far from the only one, being the massacre of more than 7,000 in Screbenica. In Kashmir, a Muslim majority has been struggling for independence from India in a violent conflict longer than the Palestinians have been under Israeli control. How is it that Jenin, where less than 50 Arabs are killed (more than half combatants along with 27 Israeli soldiers) is considered a "massacre" that propels Muslim demonstrators into the streets of Indonesia but a real massacre of 2,000 co-religionists in Gujarat gets hardly a shrug? Why this quiescence to the slaughter of Muslims everywhere that is more excessive, brutal, intense and deliberate than in Palestine? Why this near fatalism to the setbacks of co-religionists with one exception -- the Palestinians? Why does the outrage -- which by any objective standards should be set off by far greater and truer atrocities -- virtually ignore all the rest and focus on one set of enemies -- the Jews? The answer lie not in the victims but, as perceived by Islam, in the perpetrators.

The basic appeal of the Palestinians to their co-religionists worldwide. has little do with Nationalism, Territory or Restitution of Property Rights. It is a matter of Faith and cuts to the heart of the basic beliefs of Islam. An alliance of Islamicists, Leftists and the Politically Correct have set up a Catch-22 whereby any examination of Islam by a Westerner or, for that matter, a Muslim who fails to toe the party line, is decried as "racism," an intellectual bullying tactic perfected by the late Edward Said. This creates a situation in which no one can comment on the relationship between a faith and its zealots without being labeled "a racist." It also conveniently insulates Islam from any rational criticism or self-examination of its historical and cultural antecedents regarding its relationship with other cultures, except on its own narrow terms.

Christianity, after the painful experience of the Holocaust, has re-examined its attitudes toward the Jews and absolved them of the scriptural charge of deicide. Islam has yet to come to terms with its own Revelation regarding the Jews. The simple fact is that the second chapter of the Koran -- the first is, in effect, a preamble -- bristles with polemical lines against the Jews. Historically, this makes perfect sense. Mohammed had to establish his new faith in a world where the two monotheistic religions -- particularly the Jews -- were already established among the local tribes. His failure to convert the Jewish clans was a stinging humiliation. They dismissed his Revelation as a parody of their own. He achieved his retribution by defeating the three Jewish tribes in battle, ultimately slaughtering and despoiling them and driving them from the Hijaz, an early ethnic cleansing celebrated by Islam and enforced to this day.

If we may, for a moment, look at the Koran in human, rather than Divine terms, it makes sense that the first major chapter is rife -- particularly at the outset -- with polemics against the Jews for rejecting Mohammed's mission. We are not talking about a casual reference or a stray passage. This Sura is replete with words condemning the Jews for their rejection of the Prophet's revelation. In an accretion of verses, they are condemned to hell for eternity, cursed by God, pictured as stubborn, wayward and covetous and derided as apes -- the latter being not only derogatory but symbolic of creatures who are avaricious and duplicitous. The Chapter is called "The Cow." It evokes to the Golden Calf which the Israelites worshipped while Moses was away on Mount Sinai. The Koranic version depicts the Jews as maintaining their worship of the Calf which had sunk deep into their hearts, thereby being unworthy of the Revelation offered to them which has to wait until Mohammed's arrival for its true manifestation. Subsequent chapters reinforce this view, depicting the Jews as wretched, base, slanderers, evildoers, corrupters and the most vehement of enemies to the Faithful. Their wickedness is manifest in by their refusal to accept the Prophet's gospel.

Apologists for Islam cite bloodthirsty exhortations from other faiths as well to deflect criticism of these polemics. The Torah, for instance, is replete with such passages. The critical difference, however, is that such imperatives, for the most part, no longer obtain in Judaism and Christianity, but they are literally carried out in Islam. Stoning to death for adultery is a precept that would horrify Jews and Christians, but is still widely ascribed to in Shariah. Slavery has been abolished in the West -- whatever Scriptural injunctions to the contrary -- but it still thrives in Muslim countries where it is justified under the Koran. The Ancient Israelites are enjoined to slaughter Amalekites but 2,000 years of persecution have altered the rabbinic view of such mandates. Centuries of religious warfare and the consequences of the Holocaust have led to Christianity to evolve into a faith of tolerance which has acknowledged and sought forgiveness for some of the bloodier episodes of its past. Whatever the atavistic injunctions of Scripture, Judaism and Christianity have put them in their past. This has yet to happen for Islam which is experiencing a fundamentalist revival that drives the politics of many of states.

Although Islam decided to accept the followers of the two predecessor faiths as "dhimmi" -- people of the book -- they were to be tolerated provided that they acknowledged their subjugated status. Sura 9:29 of the Koran directs that the dhimmi should remain in a "humbled" state. The idea that today, the most reviled of the dhimmi -- the Jews -- should rule over Muslims is, from a religious point of view, anathema. It reflects a cosmic disorder that must be rectified. Tolerance, in Islamic terms, does not mean mutual respect among equals; it means permitting a subjugated people -- providing they are monotheists -- to profess their faith in a humbled manner. They are not expected to challenge Islam in any way on pain of retribution. It might be noted that the vaunted periods of Muslim tolerance were invariably followed by anti-Jewish riots, massacres, ghettoizing in mellas and expulsions, most notably under the Almoravids in Spain in the 11th century, in Morocco in the 13th and 15th centuries, all the way through modern times to the Arabic countries where Jews suffered pogroms and expropriation both prior and subsequent to the founding of the Jewish state.

The essence of the Muslim narrative in the Koran and the Hadith -- the life and sayings of the Prophet -- is the triumph of Mohammed over his enemies, unbelievers and naysayers -- not least the Jews who are seen as duplicitous rivals rather than honorable dissenters defending their beliefs. It is only fitting, in this narrative, for Islam to appropriate the belongings of the Jews -- including their Holy City of which they are unworthy. Thus, Mohammad decamps there on a night journey to Paradise. When the Muslim conqueror Caliph Umar seizes Jerusalem from the Byzantines, he is taken to the site where the Hebrew Temple had been and it is there that he builds the mosque known as the Noble Sanctuary. It is Islam's third holiest shrine, referred to in the Koran simply as the Furthest Mosque. (It is Judaism's holiest shrine, mentioned about 900 times in the Torah.) For devout Muslims, anywhere in the globe, for the sons of apes to rule in Jerusalem and have sway over the Faithful is not simply unjust or unpalatable; it is a sign of heavenly discord. It is this, an atavistic impulse based on fundamentalist literalism and religious zealotry that drives the Muslim faithful throughout the globe, incited to rage and anger by Wahabbi preachers funded with Saudi petrodollars. Imagine the impact of this on an often illiterate audience whose only source of knowledge is the Koran. Palestinian propagandists, well aware of this disparity, play a double game, exploiting a sense of secular justice among Western intellectuals while inciting the Muslim mob to acts of atavistic fury and vengeance not only against Israelis, but all Jews, in a confrontation that they well know, is cultural.

Since the Koran and Hadith predate by centuries the confrontation of an expansionist Islam with enemies such as Hinduism, there is no religious context for condemning such rivals as there is with Judaism, so although violence involving such later -- and current -- opponents may far outweigh anything in Palestine, it remains limited geographically to ethnic conflict. For instance, at the very same time of the first Arab--Israeli War, the Partition of India led to at least a million Muslim and Hindu deaths in a frenzy of mutual massacre and the displacement of 14 million people as refugees from both sides fled the vengeance of ethnic mobs for the safety of Muslim and Hindu enclaves. (Comparatively, about 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven off by the fighting in Palestine -- about an equal number of Jews were driven from Arab lands -- and a relatively low number of Arab civilians were killed.) Yet the slaughter during the Partition of India --as well as subsequent outbreaks of religious carnage -- failed to mobilize the outrage of the Muslim world then or later, and there has been no attempt to restore the millions of refugees to the homes from which they were driven or even compensate them.

When we try to explain genocidal rationales, we speak of Dehumanization -- placing the victim in a subhuman category which permits the perpetrator to traverse moral strictures -- but an equally valid rational is Demonization, which catapults the victim into a superhuman category, a Satanic force that has to be expunged, which permits the perpetrator to vent his fury with moral rectitude. I think this explains the psychology of suicide bombing better than the rationales of despair. There have been many peoples who have suffered occupation or oppression as bad as if not worse than the Palestinians in the last half century in Tibet, East Timor, South Africa, and Kosovo to name only a few -- without resorting to suicide bombings. Terrorists by now have enough facility with car bombs and remote control to set off a bomb without attaching it to a shihad. Despite the disclaimers of some mainstream clerics, there is a religious component to this act which speaks to the Muslim faithful at the deepest level. A "martyr" -- in a clear act of religious passion as evinced by the elaborate videotaped ceremony prior to the sacrifice -- consecrates him-or-herself to God for this blow against the usurpers. From their point of view, it is a Holy Deed in a Holy War. How else can we explain the act of the young woman at the Haifa café who deliberately stopped between two tables of families when she exploded her device. This was not a military act. It had no strategic goal. Its purpose was vengeance fueled by sheer hatred and a belief that the families and children she was slaughtering were all seeds of the Devil; that morally, they were fair game, that it was right, indeed, necessary to kill them, that it was religiously sanctioned -- indeed, required under the rubric of jihad. Her act was, to her, justified by her faith; it was part of its very fabric. When Hamas zealots justify terror bombing in Israel's cafes and restaurants by condemning all Israelis -- including women and children -- as soldiers, they are echoing the Koranic verses that condemn all Jews, without exception, to the fires of hell for eternity. Albeit indirect and refracted, their rationale has scriptural resonance among Muslims which, in a volatile situation, trumps the Koran's more humane injunctions against shedding the blood of innocents.

Any doubts about this can be dispelled by simply reading the praise heaped on the shihads by mullahs after their acts. We are not talking here about a death cult on the periphery of a religion, but rather about a driving force in contemporary Islam that has captured the imagination of a large part of the Muslim world. It doesn't come from nowhere and it derives from more than despair. It is embedded in the origins of the faith. Only the belief in the Satanic powers of the Jews can explain the medieval fury of the mob that lynched the two Israeli reservists who had strayed into a Palestinian enclave; it can best account for the demonic rage of the murderers who crushed the two Israeli teenage hikers to death with stones, or the killer who slaughtered the mother and her two children in their own bedroom. This is not a "defense" of Palestinian rights. Such abominable acts make a mockery of the words "defense" and "rights." It is sheer hatred of another people seen as both inferior but somehow supernaturally endowed by Dark Forces who must be fought with ever means at hand -- and not only subjugated but extirpated. Arafat's repeated references to the Prophet's expulsion of the Jewish tribes from the Hijaz resonates with welcome religious overtones on Muslim ears. Muslim pulpits, media and textbooks bristle with anti-Semitic rhetoric directed not only at Israelis but at Jews everywhere, be they Zionists or not. In the current Muslim world view there is a cosmic struggle occurring between the Realm of Islam and the Realm of Satan. We know where the Jews stand in this and what they can expect. From a fundamentalist Islamic point of view, tolerating these vipers in their midst for over a thousand years only proved what ingrates they are. Islam's contemporary leaders and their apologists, by dismissing its fundamentalism as peripheral, or rationalizing that all faiths have their atavistic sides, have failed to confront its implications. The fact is that faiths evolve but Islam for too long has been mired in its own past glories.

It is sad, and telling, that in the Torah, God refuses to allow Abraham to sacrifice Ishmael but in reality the Arabs have no compunction about sacrificing his seed. Palestinian nationalism is the only nationalism based primarily not on the founding of its own state but on the destruction of another. If the Palestinians were not so obsessed with destroying Israel they could have had their state in 1947 and again in 2000. Ironically, the only Middle East people who approved the creation of a Palestinian State were the Jews. But a Palestinian State was meaningless to its leaders -- at the outset, a Muslim cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem -- if it had to share the Holy Land with a Jewish State. So the Palestinian cause became a nationalism of negation -- prior to the 1948 war and the refugee exodus. But in doing so, it fit in with the cultural assumptions of its Muslim adherents -- that it was unthinkable for Jews to rule anywhere in the Holy Land and for Muslims -- any Muslims -- to be under their suzerainty. This was not about land or statehood. Then and now, it was about culture -- the refusal of a once-dominant culture to accept the ascendancy of a people whom it considered inferior. It still is.