As some people who read this blog might know, I'm a big fan of Detroit sports teams.  As the Detroit Red Wings are currently defending the Stanley Cup in the NHL finals, I've lately been doing a bit more reading than unusual of my favorite Detroit Newspaper, the Detroit Free Press. 

There's no question that the most popular columnist for the Free Press is Mitch Albom. While Albom is a sportswriter, he has also produced incredibly successful non-sports related books like Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

I've never read either of those books but I do like reading Albom's sports columns, as well as his weekly "comment" columns in the Free Press which often touch upon political and social issues. Albom's political commentary tends to be left-of-center, and he was frequently a critic of the Bush administration in relation to the Iraq War and security policies in the United States after September 11, 2001. Late last year, I thought he wrote an excellent column criticizing the double-standard people seemed to have between bailing out the financial industry and bailing out the automotive sector. While I do sometimes find his human interest pieces to be pretty maudlin, I've been reading his columns since I was a kid and am really proud that he's stayed in Detroit despite finding success on the national stage. 

I therefore read with interest a column he ran two days ago on Obama's speech in Cairo. Albom's views, as always, were quite middle of the road, vaguely liberal, and not terribly controversial. Most of what he wrote I had no trouble agreeing with at all.

But I was struck by the bizarre tone he struck when he began to invoke the differences between the United States and Muslim and Arab "worlds" with respect to political violence. In reference to the bomb that went off Friday in a mosque in Pakistan, Albom writes:

Albom, of course, isn't an expert on the Middle East, but he is a very popular left-leaning columnist who uses considerable powers of empathy in his writing. His message was that, in the face of political (or "religious") extremism, it will take more than just words to right America's relationship with societies in the Middle East and elsewhere, it will take partners. 

Fair enough. But I do find it telling that even here, in the words of a columnist who is far from right-wing, it is possible to detect a tendency to blame violence on some kind of timeless oriental conception of fate, that "this is the way it is, the way it has been for centuries, and the way it will be for the years to come."

Actually, people in the Middle East and in Muslim societies in the rest of the world often do take their fate into their own hands, as was the case when Pakistani lawyers took to the streets to protest the authoritarian rule of Pervez Musharraf—a military leader backed by the United States who had taken power in a military coup. Indeed, there were even people in Iraq brave enough to stand up to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, back when he was receiving military aid from the Reagan administration.


Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983

Political violence is indeed an enormous problem in Pakistan and many other parts of the world. But come to think of it, violence is also a big problem in the United States, where tens of thousands of people are killed by firearms every year. And how do we respond to that? Basically by shaking our heads and telling ourselves that this is just how the United States is. And then forgetting about it. This was the topic of a post I put on this site a few months ago.

I think there is a tendency in the United States and elsewhere in the world to view violence occurring in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere in civilizational terms. We see this violence as indicative of a less developed civilization, of a weaker culture, of an innate flaw in their humanity. When it comes to our own violence, on the other hand—when it comes to handguns and school killings and the wars that we start—we tend to rationalize things. And when people attack the United States after innumerable American political interventions in regions of the world where Muslims live, and after long-standing American support for dictators like Saddam Hussein in the Middle East and beyond, we ask why they hate us.

I'm probably being unfair to Albom, who was just trying to say something true about Obama's speech (we do need partners, not just words), and then wandered into a bit of a minefield. But I do think his words reflect a problematic attitude among Americans, even relatively open-minded and politically liberal ones like Albom, regarding the origins and nature of our political challenges in the Middle East and among Muslims elsewhere in the world. Yes, Muslim religious and political leaders need to denounce violence—and they do. But "blind hate" and "utter disregard" for human life are no more features of the Muslim landscape than they are of the United States.