Let Them Have Footbaths

Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian immigrant to the United States and author of an anti-Muslim tirade "They Must Be Stopped", is the latest example of a publishing phenomenon that digs up women from Middle Eastern backgrounds or Muslim countries who know how to wear cocktail dresses and uses them as mouthpieces for racist and xenophobic beliefs that don't get much of a hearing when spouted by angry white men. Check out her crank interview in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, complaining about how Muslims are taking over America and forcing the University of Michigan to build foot-baths in public bathrooms."I lived in the Middle East for the first 24 years of my life," she says. "Never once did I see foot-washing basins in airports or public buildings." Now, I personally can't vouch for what happens in ladies' bathrooms in the Middle East, but surely Gabriel has seen the many difficult ways by which Muslims ritually cleanse themselves in preparation for prayer in western-style bathrooms. Perhaps Michigan thought its many Muslim students would have an easier time blending into the student body if they didn't have to put their feet in the sink.

But the real problem for Gabriel is really that Muslims have had the bad taste to follow her to the United States, and the gumption to practice their constitutional rights. First foot washing, then jihad. After all she says, that's what "they" did in her native Lebanon. "I grew up in the Paris of the Middle East, and because we refused to read the writing on the wall, we lost our country to Hezballah and the radicals who are now controlling it."

Actually, that's not what happened. Beirut is no longer the Paris of the Middle East (if it ever was) because the region's political ruling classes -- Christian, Muslim, Lebanese, Israeli, Syrian, Palestinian, American, Iranian, etc -- decided it was better to blow the place up than to try to live together. But living together is what Americans do better than anyone in the world, and if Gabrielle doesn't understand this, perhaps it would be better off if she, rather than the Muslims of Michigan, got on the next plane back to Lebanon.

But Clash of Civilization hucksters often ignore the way in which the West -- through colonialism, militarism and our love of dictators -- has helped create the chaos that is blowing back at it us and how the best way we could help moderates in the Middle East fight what is mostly an epic internal struggle over the nature of Islam and the fate of the Middle East (akin to our Reformation and Enlightenment rolled into one) is by holding out our own society as a beacon of tolerance and pluralism. This isn't our civil war, and lady, we don't want yours.

Andrew Lee Butters/Eheden, Lebanon