The Warped Mirror: The 'clash of civilizations'

According to a poll released earlier this year, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is the most admired leader in the Arab world. The second most popular Arab leader is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the third most popular leader among Arabs is, surprisingly, no Arab - it is Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Given this line-up, one thing is obvious: an Arab leader who wants to win the hearts and minds of his (no need for /her) fellow Arabs doesn't have to govern well and doesn't have worry about the economy, jobs, health care, education, civil liberties or human rights - instead, what counts is that an Arab leader is perceived as standing up to the West, in particular the US and Israel.

In the often passionate debates triggered by Samuel Huntington's influential article and subsequent book The Clash of Civilizations - first published exactly 15 years ago - critics of Huntington's thesis sometimes argued that it is wrong to focus on what divides societies; instead, we should acknowledge that there are everywhere "people like us". On an individual level, that is certainly true; and indeed, in our increasingly globalized word, many people have friends from all over the world. But what may be true on the level of individuals may not necessarily simply add up to allow valid conclusions about societies.

If standing up to the West is what makes an Arab leader popular, there is indeed a "clash of civilization", whether that's "politically correct" or not. And if standing up to the West makes an Arab leader popular even if his policies bring his country to the brink of disaster, one can only conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with Arab societies.

Hassan Nasrallah, the Arab world's most popular leader, heads a movement that derives much of its strength from the support of two countries, Syria and Iran, that pursue policies that undermine the independence of Lebanon - which is, of course, itself an Arab state. Hizbullah has managed to build a state within a state, with its own illegal army, weapons arsenal and communication infrastructure; in addition, Hizbullah operates an extensive network of facilities that care for, and control, its followers from the cradle to the grave, making sure that they stay loyal to the fundamentalist Islamic agenda of the "Party of God".

If Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah wishes, he can wage war, never mind what the Lebanese government might have to say if it was consulted. Nasrallah, the Arab world's most popular leader, doesn't need to consult the government of his country if he wants war, and it was of course the war that Hizbullah triggered in July 2006 with a cross-border attack against Israeli soldiers that made Nasrallah so immensely popular in the Arab world. There is arguably considerable irony in the fact that the death and destruction that Lebanon suffered in this war is still decried in the Western media, even though Hizbullah has claimed "victory" and ostensibly believes that it was all worth it, as is illustrated by the fact that "[in] mostly Shi'ite southern Beirut, a ruined district of the capital subjected to Israeli airstrikes last summer [i.e. 2006], Hizbullah has opened a museum called the House of the Spider to celebrate the 'divine victory' and demonize Israeli armed forces."

And last week, Hizbullah celebrated another "victory", another proud accomplishment of Hassan Nasrallah, the Arab world's most popular leader: back in July 2006, his men had managed to snatch the dead bodies of two Israeli soldiers killed in an ambush, and, pretending that the two were still alive, Nasrallah had bargained hard with Israel for the release of a man who had done nothing in life but kill three Israelis, one of them a little girl whose head he smashed with his rifle butt. Last week, Hassan Nasrallah, the Arab world's most popular leader, welcomed this man back to Beirut as a hero.

Anyone who wonders what the "secret" of Hezbollah’s success is could read an article on the subject written by Charles Harb. The problem is, Professor Harb, who teaches social psychology at the American University of Beirut, is apparently himself convinced that Hizbullah has indeed achieved much and thus fully deserves popular support - which arguably illustrates that it might rather take some expertise in social pathology to explain the appeal of Hizbullah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah in the Arab world.

Among the many commentaries written in response to the dismal spectacle of a child killer being feted as a hero and described as "a beacon of light" and an "authentic role model", one of the "Must Reads" is definitely Ben Cohen's blog post on Z Word. Ben reminds his readers of Kanan Makiya's 1993 book "Cruelty and Silence", which he describes as "a masterly exploration of the failure of Arab intellectuals to confront the bestial cruelties which inflict their region".