Post by maruf on Aug 7, 2005 17:16:01 GMT -5
ORIENTALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
" like the United States must shoulder "the White Man's Burden" and attempt to westernize the "benighted" peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Roosevelt confessed privately in 1907 that "it is impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism is supreme." The Egyptians, for example, were "a people of Moslem fellahin who have never in all time exercised any self-government whatever." Britain's Lord
. Cromer, Roosevelt added, "is one of the greatest modern colonial administrators, and he has handled Egypt just according to Egypt's needs" -military occupation, foreign tutelage, and Christian patience.24
If Roosevelt ranked Muslims near the bottom of his hierarchy of race, he placed Jews closer to the top. To be sure, like many other members of the patrician elite that still ruled America at the turn of the century, Roosevelt harbored some patronizingly offensive stereotypes of Jewish Americans.25 But he was also highly critical of the wave of anti-Semitism that swept Turkey and Russia during the First World War, and he was an early supporter of the idea of establishing a Jewish state in the Holy Land. The United States and its allies, Roosevelt observed in July 1918, should "pledge themselves never to make peace until the Turk is driven from Europe, and. . . the Jews [are] given control of Palestine." It seemed, he added two months later, "entirely proper to start a Zionist State around Jerusalem."26
" like the United States must shoulder "the White Man's Burden" and attempt to westernize the "benighted" peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Roosevelt confessed privately in 1907 that "it is impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism is supreme." The Egyptians, for example, were "a people of Moslem fellahin who have never in all time exercised any self-government whatever." Britain's Lord
. Cromer, Roosevelt added, "is one of the greatest modern colonial administrators, and he has handled Egypt just according to Egypt's needs" -military occupation, foreign tutelage, and Christian patience.24
If Roosevelt ranked Muslims near the bottom of his hierarchy of race, he placed Jews closer to the top. To be sure, like many other members of the patrician elite that still ruled America at the turn of the century, Roosevelt harbored some patronizingly offensive stereotypes of Jewish Americans.25 But he was also highly critical of the wave of anti-Semitism that swept Turkey and Russia during the First World War, and he was an early supporter of the idea of establishing a Jewish state in the Holy Land. The United States and its allies, Roosevelt observed in July 1918, should "pledge themselves never to make peace until the Turk is driven from Europe, and. . . the Jews [are] given control of Palestine." It seemed, he added two months later, "entirely proper to start a Zionist State around Jerusalem."26