Dr. Zaman Stanizai is a professor of Mythological Studies at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif. He also teaches Political Science at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He received his M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Washington and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California. His post-doctoral studies centered on Sufism. As a Fulbright scholar he has worked in Indo-Iranian languages, and as a political scientist he writes on the politicization of ethno-linguistic and religious identities in regional conflicts. He blogs on The Huffington Post and Middle East Institute, among others.
SBB: We recently did an article on the pharmaceutical industry and the lack of assistance in making the U.S. medical infrastructure …
ZS: There is no medical infrastructure left in Syria. It has all been bombed out. In Syria, there is no functional medical program, there are no healthcare facilities left standing, and even if any such facilities were still operational, there is no public transportation to carry the elderly and the poor to such facilities. If you have an 89-year-old mother that needs urgent care, there is no place for her to go or any means by which to take her. In Syria, just as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen, Libya, and many of the other Middle Eastern and North African countries, cities have been bombed to a degree that would put Dresden to shame.
SBB: Dresden being a non-military target that was leveled in WWII, and it did not produce any international outcry. When you wipe out an entire city, you wipe out the universe: medical, education, libraries, public transportation. There is no city left anymore. You are killing people and cultures.
ZS: Western powers have wiped out city block after city block in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Raqqa, and other major cities in Syria. The refugees are flocking out of these cities and are heading to Europe. They know the risk of drowning as they cross the Aegean Sea, but that risk is less than living in Syria under the constant threat of being bombed by the indiscriminate bombing of Western powers.
As far as their survival in Syria is concerned, the tumultuous sea crossing is less risky than living under the endless, uncoordinated, random bombing by the different Western countries that are literally “smoking out” the skilled and the talented out of Syria. In this intended or unintended brain-drain bombing strategy, the West is impoverishing Syria of the only resources it has—human resources.
The lives of people in Syria are threatened not only by the indiscriminate aerial bombardment, but also by the ground troops that come from the West—the disenfranchised, marginalized, and radicalized Muslim youth from the European slums. These unintegrated and unassimilated Muslim youth in their frustration embrace anything anti-Western. So while the European countries look the other way in their attempts to “get rid of the menace in European slums,” once they join ISIS, European powers simply go after them and bomb them. While this unspoken solution of getting rid of the restless Muslim youth from the European slums by letting them join ISIS may be the unintended consequence of an undeclared policy, Europeans do not have the foresight to predict that one unintended action could have unforeseeable unintended consequences, such as the recent blow-backs in Paris and Brussels.
SBB: How do you view the present political rhetoric?
ZS: Donald Trump is wrong about Muslim Americans and has no idea how significant the role of Muslims is in the American economy. In the healthcare profession alone, American Muslims have a substantial presence.
According to the Islamic Medical Association of North America, there are more than 20,000 Muslim physicians in the United States. Similarly, an analysis of statistics provided by the American Medical Association indicates that 10 percent of all American physicians are Muslims. Add to that the substantial number of medical professionals such as nurses, technicians, hospital staff, etc., and one realizes that without American Muslims healthcare in the U.S. would collapse.
A bit of sarcasm notwithstanding, Trump and the fanatic Republicans, through their Islamophobia, could not only get rid of the Obamacare, but they could bring down the entire healthcare system in America—a feat they have not be able to achieve through the futility of successively passing obstructionist legislation.
While the present generation may have lost hope altogether in those war-torn countries in the Middle East, in Europe and America there is at least the hope of survival for them—a luxury they can’t even dream of in their countries.
SBB: When did war become a civilian activity in terms of targets? When and what changed our mentality regarding civilian bombing? Since the Korean War, there are no military targets. We are just leveling cultures.
ZS: In warfare around the world, civilian casualties have consistently increased from 10 percent of the total war casualties in WWI to over 95 percent in Afghanistan—this in spite of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting harm to non-combatants. Yet, as a signatory of such Conventions, American officials such as General Tommy Frank during the 2003 Iraq War declared that “we are not in the body-counting business.” Similarly, General Boykin, who is eager to lead the charge in the “Armageddon,” is a consultant in Ted Cruz’s 2016 election campaign.
It seems that the more civility we claim in terms of general human progress, the less civil we behave in wars. In fact, our technological advances in the development of remotely operated weapons have made us less human as war has become game and entertainment for the so-called advanced societies, while in the less advanced countries the worth of an unidentified human on the screen is fast approximating the value of the electronic beep of a pixilated target, with no conscious registry that, with an imprint of a thumb from thousands of miles away, a life has been snuffed out.
SBB: Are the new technologies and the new media overload desensitizing us to the point of moral distraction? Has making war become almost the new Roman coliseum—an entertainment of moral abandonment?
ZS: In the past, we would lose our lives in a war, but now we lose our humanity to war games. We cannot live in a shrinking world with two drastically different norms.
SBB: How can we expect the rest of the world to live by our norms, if we are so totally oblivious to theirs?
ZS: Unless we do right by our people, not as a mere political slogan, but as a commitment to a democratic principle demanded by the American Constitution, we may not survive as a republic.
For years, the West has tried to establish new norms of civility, distancing itself from earlier civilizations. The main trait of this trend would have to be the norms of civility and non-violence.
The reality is that more violence is perpetrated on the Third World than ever before. That violence cannot be kept away from the public eye for long merely by sanitizing the viewings on TV screens, because social media and smart phones will come to their rescue as it has in revealing the pain we inflict on our pigmented citizens. Black lives do matter.
Our resorting to violence in every turn where diplomacy may be a civil alternative calls into question whether we in the West have really evolved to a higher moral plane as we claim. If we are acting more violently than the cultures we despise, we take the risk of losing the identity we claim to have attained. The more effective our war and warring technology becomes, the less sensitive we become to the woes of others. Will we in the West take the challenge to right ourselves by not doing wrong to others regardless of our ability to justify it?
SBB: Thank you, Zaman.
ZS: Thank you, Shelley.
