somebody let's say in the eight hundred fifty s or sixty's in paris or london wished to talk about or read about india or egypt or syria there would be very little chance for that person to simply address the subject as we like to think in a kind of free and creative way a great deal of writing and gone before and this writing was an organized form of writing like an organized science you know what i've called orientalism and it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up you know the sensual woman who's there to be sort of used by the man in the east as a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters you know the marvels of the east was a phrase that was used and the more i looked the more i saw that this was really quite consistent with itself you know it had very little to do with people had actually been there and even if they had been there there wasn't much modification otherwise you didn't get what you could call realistic representations of the or and either in literature  painting or in music or any of the arts and this extended even further into descriptions of the arabs by experts you know people who had studied them and i noticed that even in the twentieth century some of sounded like something else that i'd read and then i realized what he was doing almost unconsciously was quoting lane on the egyptians on the theory that the orientals are all the same no matter where they where you find them it's in india or in syria or in egypt it's basically the same essence so that develops a kind of image of the timeless oriental if the orient unlike the west doesn't develop it stays the same and that's one of the problems with orientalism is that it creates an image outside of history of something that kind of break that occurred after napoleon came to egypt in seven hundred ninety eight i think it's the first really important in curial modern imperial expedition so you invades the place but he doesn't invade the way the spaniards invaded the new world looking for loot he comes instead with an enormous army of soldiers but also scientists botanists architects  biologists historians whose job it was to record egypt in every conceivable way and produce a kind of scientific survey of egypt which was designed not for the egyptian but for the european and of course what strikes you first of all about the volumes that they produced or is their enormous size there a meter square and all across them is written the power and prestige of a modern european ways things that the natives themselves the differences between different kinds of orientalism so far and in fact the differences between different experiences of what is called the orient i mean the difference between britain and france on the one hand and the united states on the other a britain and france had colonies in the orient i mean they had a long standing relationship and imperial role in a place like india so that there's a kind of  there's a kind of archive of actual experiences of being in india of ruling the country for several hundred years and the same with the french in north africa let's say algeria  indochina direct colonial experience in the case of the americans experiences much less direct i mean there's never been an american occupation of the near east so i would say the difference in british and french orientals on the one hand and the american experience of the orient on the other is that the american one is much more indirect it's much more based on abstractions the second big thing i think the difference in the american experience from the british and the french of orientalism is that american orientalism is very politicized by the presence of israel for which america is the main clinton and i are proud as are all americans that the united states was the first nation to recognize the state of israel eleven minutes  and what you have in effect is the creation of a jewish state in the middle of the islamic oriental world and the sense that because it's an it's a jewish state and a western state self declared there is a greater coincidence between american interests there then there is between american interests let's say in places like iran and saudi arabia which are important because of oil i think the presence of this other factor which is very anti islamic israel regards the whole arab world as its enemy is imported into into american orientalism i mean the idea for example that how mass terrorists on the west bank are just interested in killing jewish children is what you derive from looking at this stuff and very little attention is paid to the fact that these really occupation of the west bank and gaza has been going on for thirty is the last thirty years the longest military occupation of this century and so you get the impression that the only problem is that you know israeli security  struggle for national independence and in the case of the palestinians for national self determination is looked at with great hostility as upsetting the stability of the status quo and that makes it virtually impossible just a tragedy factually impossible for an american to see on television to read books to see films about the middle east that are not colored publicly by this by this conflict in which the arabs are almost always play the role of terrorists and violent people the late seventies rather and beginning of the eighty's i wrote a third book which is called covering islam and i thought of them as a kind of trilogy and covering islam was an account of the coverage of islam in the popular media immediately occasioned by by the iranian revolution which describes itself as you recall as an islamic revolution and you know what i discovered was a huge  arsenal of images employed by the media large masses of people waving their fists black banners you know the stern faced khomeini all of them giving an impression of the most negative sort of evil emanation so the impression you got of islam was that it was a frightening mysterious above all threatening as if the main business of muslims was to threaten and try to kill americans as recently as last year in one thousand nine hundred six that is say almost sixteen or seventeen years after i wrote covering islam i did the update of the book and i wrote a new introduction and i found quite to my horror and surprise the during those sixteen seventeen years with the large number of events in the islamic world taking place which you would think would allow for more familiarity with a more refined sense of what was taking place on let's say as reflected in television and print journalism in fact was the opposite i think the situation got worse and that what you had instead now is a much more threatening picture of islam represented for example by television film called jihad in america based on the bombing of the world trade center i reported in international terrorism for the past ten years and since the world trade center bombing i've been investigating the networks of islamic extremists committed to jihad in america where these militants hit hard as a holy war an armed struggle to defeat nonbelievers or infidels and they're all timid go is to establish an islamic empire but this gathering did not take place in the middle east it happened in the heartland of america kansas city missouri combat in these groups within the boundaries of the constitution will be to greatest challenge to law enforcement since the war on organized crime but never the same generalizations were made let's say about the oklahoma city bombing that this was a christian fundamentalist etc etc but the islamic jihad had come to america and you had these scenes of the most of the most irresponsible journalism where you'd see people talking in arabic and in a voiceover saying and they're discussing the destruction of america whereas if you picked up a little of what was being said if you knew the language had nothing to do that and that islam and the teachers of the teachings of islam became synonymous with terror and the demonization of islam allowed for very little distinction between piety let's say and violence the so called independent media in a liberal society like this in a factor so lazy and i controlled by interests that are commercial and political at the same time that there there is no investigative reporting it's just basically repeating the line of the government only days ago i concluded a broadcast on the world trade center bombing by telling you what senior u s law enforcement officials were telling us that the threat of muslim extremists operating within the united states is an ongoing danger is something we'll have to live with from now on and repeating the lines of the people who have the most influence for whom islam is a useful foreign and i mean i myself growing up in the middle east in palestine car used to delight in films on the arabian nights you know done by hollywood producers you know with john hall and mary i'm on tears and sabu i mean they were dancing girls and all that that was that's really the material the situation in the popular media is is basically that muslims are really two things one they're villains of once or villains and fanatics i w and be many films and up with huge numbers of bodies muslim bodies strewn all over the place the result of arnold schwarzenegger or demi moore  kill muslim terrorists so the idea of islam is something that to be stamped out the whole history of these oriental struck presentations which which portrayed the muslim and the oriental as in effect a lesser breed in other words there but the only thing they understand is the language of force this is this is the principle here that unless you give them a bloody nose they want to stand we can't talk reason with them is the arab world full of to of terrorists well i mean all you have to do is really break down the question into into common sense and say there are terrorists as there are everywhere but you know there's a lot more going on there and we're talking about two hundred fifty three hundred million people and one of the great problems with orientalism to begin with is these vast generalizations about islam and the nature of islam and it's very little in common that you can talk about as islam let's say between indonesia and saudi arabia they're quite mean they're both muslim countries but you know the differences in history and language and traditions and so on i so vast that the word islam has at best a tenuous meaning the same is true within the arab world i mean morocco is very different from saudi arabia algeria it's very different from egypt and i would argue in fact have argued that the predominant mood of the arab world is very secular you know it's easy to attract attention and certainly the media's attention for some of the political reasons that are obvious i mean to discredit the arabs to make them seem like a threat to the west to keep  the idea around at the end of the cold war that you know there are foreign devils otherwise what are we doing with this gigantic military you know this huge military budget that is twice as much as entire world's military budget combined the english press and it was full of the racist cliches of orientals discourse i mean that this is what the sunday times but one of the leading newspapers in england had a headline to a fifteen thousand word story entitled a match made in mecca and the idea of muslim conspiracies trying to infect you know taking over this white woman by these dark people with the prophet muhammad who's historical personage of the seventh century somehow stage managing the whole thing that's the power of the discourse you see to see if you're thinking about people and islam and about that part of all those other words you constantly have to use so this course is a regulated system of producing knowledge within certain constraints whereby certain rules have to be observed live exports yet you american period to think past it to go beyond it not to use it is virtually impossible because there's no knowledge that isn't codify it in this way about that part of the world may i help you and there's a certain sense in which in not really mounting a serious critique of it the arabs have participated and have and continue to allow themselves to be represent orientals in this oriental list way there is no for example information policy of the twenty arab countries twenty two arab countries to try to give a different picture of what their worlds of life because most of them are dictatorships all of them are dictatorships and not democracy who are in desperate need of us patronage government patronage to support them and so they're not about to criticize the united states not about to engage in a dot in a real dialogue and in that respect i think the arabs keep themselves collectively in a way that is that a subordinate to and and inferior to the west and in fact fulfills the kinds of representations that most westerners have in their minds about the  attack without warning and according to a u s government source told c b s news that it has middle east terrorism written all over the attack in oklahoma city appears to have a familiar mark this was done with the attempt to click as many casualties as possible that is a middle eastern trait the fact that it was such a powerful bomb in oklahoma city immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that have roots in the middle east a b c news has learned that the f b i has asked the s military to provide up to ten arabic speakers to help in the investigation well one of the interesting things about about the persistence of orientalism i mean almost when you think about it on this astonishing persistence of it is was the or close home a city bombing in ninety five in april of ninety five i can give you a personal example i was in canada giving some lectures at the at the actual time of the bombing and maybe half an hour after the event had occurred in the afternoon my office was inundated with phone calls from the media and i rang my office from canada as i frequently do to find out you know if there was any message for me that needed attention and so on and she said every twenty five calls that come in from the major networks from the cable channels from the major newspapers news magazines and so forth all of them wanting to talk to you and i said what about about this event in oklahoma city i said what does an have to do that he well apparently somebody had volunteered one of these in some commentators that the notion that this seemed like the middle east sile bombing and that there were a couple of swarthy people around right after the bombing or seen after the bombing within hours of the explosion local police and the f b i had issued they are points bulletin looking for three men believed to be of middle eastern origin and sources tell c b s news that i know personally the f b i is parading this as a middle eastern related incident oklahoma city i can tell you is probably considered one of the widest centers of islamic radical activity outside the middle east and so this got them to think that they should talk to me not because i had anything to do with it but because by virtue of being from the middle east i would have an inside insight into this you know and of course the the proposition is so preposterous and so racist the just if you from the area you would understand who and why this is being done never thinking for a moment that it was a local homegrown boy called mcveigh who was you know totally american in his outlook and was doing it out of the best principles of american extermination and they had like anger you know the world palestine is so important in this respect because of its local complexities of say arabs and jews arab muslims and arabs christians and israeli jews of themselves very mixed background i mean we're talking about polish jews russian jews american jews yemeni jews iraqi jews indian jews it's a it's a fairly complex mosaic somehow find a way to live together on land that is saturated with significance on a world scale unlike any other country in the world i mean it's holy to three of the major religions and every inch of it has been combed over and fought over for the last several thousand years and the pattern so far has been the zionist pattern which is to say that you know it's promised to us we're the chosen people everybody else is sort of second rate thrown out or treat them a second class citizens and in contrast to that some of us not everybody but many palestinians have said well we realize that we are being asked to pay the price for what happened to the jews in europe under the holocaust it was an entirely christian and european catastrophe in which the arabs played no part and we are being dispossessed displaced by our by the victims and we become the victims of the victims but as i say not us say well they should be thrown out because we have been thrown out and so we have another vision which is a vision of coexistence in which jew an arab muslim christian and and you can live together in some polity which i think it requires a kind of crude creativity and invention that is possible vision that would replace the authoritarian hierarchical model but this idea that somehow we should protect ourselves against the infiltrations the infections of the other is i think the most dangerous idea at the end of the twentieth twentieth century and unless we find ways to do it and there are no there are no shortcuts to it u nless we find ways to do this i you know there's going to be wholesale violence of the sort that represented by the gulf or by the killings in bosnia rwanda massacres and so on i mean those are the powder of emerging conflict that is extremely dangerous and needs to be counteracted and and i think therefore it's correct to say that the challenge now is is the challenge i wouldn't call it anything other than coexistence how to how does one coexist with people whose religions are different whose traditions and languages are different but who are who form part of the same community or polity in a national sense and how do we accept difference without violence and hostility i've been interested in a field called comparative literature most of my adult life and the ideal of comparative literature is not to show how english literature is really a secondary phenomenon in french literature or auric literature as you know kind of poor cousin to persian literature or any of those silly things but to show them existing you might say ask contrapuntal lines and a great composition by which difference is respect without without coercion and that attitude i think that we need because that's another thing that america really needs to think about is our racism racism the columns in the united states towards muslim people and towards arabic people and that's something that has to stop in the united states has to start respecting people from the eighty's in the late seventies rather and beginning of the eighty's i wrote a third book which is called covering islam and i thought of them as a kind of trilogy