I almost entered this essay contest on civil rights in the Middle East last year sponsored by the Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance. Looking over the first place essay, I’m glad I didn’t, and I’m almost certain I will not participate this year either. Responding to the question “Why should Americans like you help civil rights reformers in the Middle East?,” an American student named Mohammed Halawi wrote a piece worthy for publication in the California Patriot belittling the people of that region and advancing an imaginary, mythical image of America for the low price of $2,000.
The first sentence defines the submission: What will U.S.-sponsored freedom in the Middle East unleash? In a nutshell Halawi denies hundreds of millons of people, for whose welfare he claims to have great concern, any sense of agency and initiative. Freedom, for them, will not come as a result of their own struggles; instead, it will be “sponsored” by the U.S., who, as we all know, may threaten to take away that “freedom” whenever it disapproves. “Freedom,” after all, isn’t free but a service possible only with the support of that great liberator America. It might not be in the interests of the United States to “sponsor” freedom in the Middle East anyway because it’s not quite clear what happens when the blob of faceless people there and their uninformed and perhaps medieval opinions will do once “unleashed.” Later, Halawi writes that “freedom is not part of a ‘Western conspiracy’ or a ‘foreign imposition.’” This is true. Freedom is not an invention or an export of the West; however, “U.S.-sponsored freedom” is.
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