Wishful Thinking

Sunday's New York Times ran a piece by Michael Kimmelman entitled "Watching 'Friends' in Gaza: Culture as a Moderating Force." While the online version was more appropriately subtitled "A Culture Clash," I found the article's vague suggestion that the popularity of Western culture was somehow a moderating force to be naive and misleading.

First, if one looks at the pictures that accompany the article (look at how the people at Roots are dressed, the table settings, and the landscaping) and some of the descriptions of where he is talking to people ("The club, a private retreat amid garbage and ruins was a whitewashed of bougainvillea..."), you can see that he's not hanging around the average, ordinary Gazan. He's hanging around with relatively wealth Gazans who choose to go to private clubs and trendy cafes like Roots. This is a skewed sample.

Second, just because people like to escape in Western culture, doesn't mean they become any more endeared to Western policies. The problem that the West and especially the U.S. has in the Middle East is not that Arabs hate Americans or American culture. They (mostly) don't. They hate U.S. policy. With a passion. American culture won't moderate that.

And in a third point, related to the second, people get what they want out of cultural products. For those that love the U.S. or the West, they may already be fairly moderate toward even Western policy and find more to love and long for in Western cultural products. For others, they still might like the Western cultural products, but they can still pick out supporting evidence for their worldview. I met a teen selling pirated American DVDs in Casablanca. After about two hours of him telling me how bad the U.S. was, how it was controlled by Jews, no Jews died in 9/11, everything is a conspiracy and everyone is out to destroy Islam, etc., I told him that not everything is a conspiracy. Not everyone is out to get them. Many people in America want to do good. He said, I know, but even you Americans do not trust your own government, so why should we? I watch your movies, I know your culture and all your movies prove that you believe the government is controlled by a small group of men who are conspiring to control the world. He started pointing out movies that had this sort of plot line on the table next to us and there, of course, were quite a few. So, don't think that our culture will inevitably break down walls. People take what they want and their worldview is often unchanged.