Are you frustrated with the simplicity of the “No Blood For Oil” slogan on Middle East matters? Baffled by the peculiar American coalition in defense of Israel between Zionist Jews and the Christian Right, who believe Jews are Christ killers and are going to hell? Confused by an African American community politics that maintains both a vocal minority in the forefront of Palestine solidarity for decades and a silent majority which is at best ambivalent and by no means active in Palestine’s defense? Outraged by the U.S. empire and the Israeli colonial settler state’s persistent ability to maintain a democratic ethos while culturally, economically, and militarily waging war on Arab and Muslim peoples for generations? Wondering how anti-colonial revolt in the Middle East could possibly be historically reduced to terrorism alone, and how terrorism could be said to be the antithesis of Western civilization founded on empire? The following book is a must read.

Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters has a surprising response to these questions: let’s look more closely at culture and the media in relation to U.S. foreign policy. Before the righteous skeptic throws rotten tomatoes at the stage and cries, “I’ve seen such empty whimpering before. Never again!” Consider this. The power of her thesis is astonishing given so many books about the Middle East have pursued these avenues of inquiry fruitlessly, with barely an ability to forge a spark much less a flame. No simplistic argument about the power of the Zionist lobby, the obtuse premise that US rulers don’t know their best interests, or the media bamboozling the American public are found here. The insurgent activist who gives this illuminating text a chance will enjoy it and perhaps after will be more productive.

Marshalling cultural products, from films and news reports to museum exhibits and novels into a historical and political scope from 1945 to 2000, McAlister clarifies the foundations of many crises. We learn that the origins of US “benevolent [white] supremacy” toward the Middle East are in Judeo-Christian messianic biblical narratives that folks of many races and ethnicities believe. Terrorism has become socially defined in the context of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Palestine anti-colonial struggle as justification for American empire. Israel was a significant factor in resurrecting support for American imperialism in the wake of defeat in Vietnam and in transforming the vision of the Christian Right. The rise and decline of African American cultural nationalism and opposition to empire, and the persistent ability of Colin Powell and the US military to be imagined as embodying a working class and a diverse nation is shown by the author to be justifying the world civilizing mission of the American state and capital but also everyday peoples’ cultural values.

The author examines films such as Charleton Heston’s Ten Commandments and Denzel Washington’s and Bruce Willis’ The Siege, novels by Leon Uris such as Exodus and Thomas Harris’ Black September, and Steve Martin acting like King Tut on Saturday Night Live. Further, she examines the ability of television newsmakers to portray US and Israeli colonial politicians, soldiers, and agents as civilians and thus non-violent and rational, or the evangelical Christian’s ability to better adapt their apocalyptic spirituality through media representation to liberal imperial sensibilities. The author offers many planks, which could be wielded unconventionally to wake up ordinary people if not to opposing empire in the Middle East, then greater awareness of how it works. These glimpses of popular culture come together in the following way.

McAlister’s overall argument is rooted in an insight little understood by many activists today. Unlike Edward Said’s Orientalism, which argues the Arab and Muslim worlds were imagined as “the other” to establish diverging identities of East and West as a basis of colonial relations, the author explains American imperialism by and large does not work this way in contemporary times.

The author makes a unique contribution by giving much evidence that America’s white supremacy and imperialism is imagined as advancing a multi-racial, multi-cultural character and interests in pursuit of freedom, not as a battle of races. To the extent a “clash of civilizations” is propagated, it’s equal parts “racial” argument (for those that hear it that way) and a claim about modernity and rationality designed to appeal to all races open to messianic visions of a Judeo-Christian ethics or rational government by capitalist rulers.

McAlister paints this intricate picture without allowing this fact to support a common overwhelming liberal argument: that America’s multi-racial character is proof positive it cannot be distinguished by institutional racism domestically or as an imperial power abroad. In fact, the author argues, if too subtly for my taste, it’s the very idea of the progressive multi-racial ruling class, the idea to which many of the most committed anti-war, anti-colonial activists are enslaved, which is decisive for the power of American empire.

If America presents itself as a multi-racial benevolent empire as it subordinates the Arab and Muslim nations, the author shows how the state of Israel presents itself as both the embodiment of a historically oppressed people and a white rational nation-state worthy of US support. Israel is the jewel of the American empire, not simply because US rulers desire to control the oil economies of Arab and Muslim nations. For they wish to control the politics and economics of all countries with no regard for a special emphasis on particular commodities. Rather, America’s relationship to and aiding of Israel consolidates America’s claim, with the failure to maintain an imperial consensus after the Vietnam War, that historically oppressed people indeed want their support.

The reader may wish to ponder McAlister’s treatment of the PLO’s armed militants kidnapping and killing Israeli civilians at the 1972 at the Olympics in Germany and their hijacking of a plane to Entebbe, Uganda where the Israeli army by all accounts miraculously struck killing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) armed militants and saving Israeli civilians—both American media spectacles. These attacks on civilians by those fighting in the name of the Palestinian national liberation struggle created a decline in American public opinion’s sympathy for anti-colonial armed struggle that reached its highpoint in the Vietnam era. When the 1979 Iranian Revolution occurred against the US backed dictator, the Shah, images of “irrational” Islamic militants were used to transform State Department and CIA officials (the folks that work in US embassies abroad and are the representatives of US empire) into “civilians” “with families” who should be beyond politics and who should have American and world sympathy when they are in fact rationally being defeated more or less.

If Arabs and Islam in the Middle East continue to be presented in US media as a racialized inferior “other” who are of different or inferior civilizations, then the author argues there are multi-racial, multi-cultural foundations for this idea of “epic” proportions. Further, that the Middle East in many respects is part of America’s Manifest Destiny or civilizing mission, because ordinary Americans do identify their religious and cultural interests and “good fights” - not just economic ones - historically in the Middle East. Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters asks readers to revise the general liberal awareness of how American identities relate to international matters if we are to oppose racism and empire effectively. At the heart of this we might begin to close this review with a quote that the author references from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recently deceased Senator of New York and advisor to many Presidents:

The second feature [of terrorism], and vastly the more dangerous, is the principle that no one is innocent of politics. Terrorism denies the distinction between state and society, public and private, government and individual, the distinction that lies at the heart of liberal belief. For the terrorist, as the totalitarian state, there are no innocent bystanders, no private citizens. Terrorism denies that there is any private sphere, that individuals have any rights or any autonomy separate from or beyond politics. [1]

Of course, this idea is a ridiculous one. It is quite sensible, and not a position of an aspiring terrorist, that no adult is innocent of politics or of acts of warfare, having no rights they are not willing to consciously advance or defend. It’s not that everyday people must engage in politics but that all in fact do engage. “Private citizens” or “innocent bystanders,” if they are not children, are objective supporters of whatever state or ruling class that governs them unless they behave or act otherwise. Moynihan, like most liberals, asks that ultimately “citizens” behave like children and subordinate their will to that of the state to defend their freedom in all matters of economics and war under capitalism and empire. It is of course incorrect for armed anti-colonial liberation fighters to attack civilians, even of imperial nations, because these citizens are not necessarily racist, and many of them may be won to support the democratic nature of the cause of self-government for all. Most importantly, the denial of the liberal’s central role in modern authoritarian government is what really lies at the heart of their beliefs, and of most multi-cultural miseducation today.

Melani McAlister.  Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000.  Berkeley, California: Univeristy of California Press, 2001.  358p.

Notes