In the case of Iran, western culture only came to be viewed as deleterious when Iranians had a brutal dictator imposing western culture upon them, while at the same time declaring virtual war on Islam.
I believe Greg and Larison both do a fine job addressing all that is wrong with Bret Stephens' recent WSJ piece on Lady Gaga and Jihadism, but this particular snippet caught my attention:
Bear in mind, too, that the America Qutb found so offensive had yet to discover Elvis, Playboy, the pill, women's lib, acid tabs, gay rights, Studio 54, Jersey Shore and, of course, Lady Gaga. In other words, even in some dystopic hypothetical world in which hyper-conservatives were to seize power in the U.S. and turn the cultural clock back to 1948, America would still remain a swamp of degeneracy in the eyes of Qutb's latter-day disciples.This, then, is the core complaint that the Islamists from Waziristan to Tehran to Gaza have lodged against the West. It explains why jihadists remain aggrieved even after the U.S. addressed their previous casus belli by removing troops from Saudi Arabia, and why they will continue to remain aggrieved long after we've decamped from Iraq, Afghanistan and even the Persian Gulf. [emphasis added]
I can't speak in full to the really scary caliphate that guys like Stephens fear is emerging around the Muslim world, and I dare say I have not read the complete works of Sayyid Qutb. I am however a bit familiar with its Iranian counterpart, ??????Û?, or Occidentosis - better known as Westoxification. After reading and seeing the way in which he lumps Iranian anti-western ideology in with all the other disgruntled -isms of Islamism, I have to pull a Woody Allen card and question Stephens' rather cursory understanding of the issue.
In the case of Iran, western culture only came to be viewed as deleterious when Iranians had a brutal dictator imposing western culture upon them. That same dictator, incidentally, had declared a virtual war on Iranian Islam, and on Washington's dime. Iran, Tehran especially, had a large American presence by 1978, and Khomeini even spread absurd rumors about Americans colonizing Iranian cities. It therefore wasn't Western or American culture that bothered Iranians, but the fear of said culture being physically imposed upon them by the United States and the Shah.
Then you have Iran's asymmetric proxies. Here, too, the grievance is physical and territorial and, yes, that territory happens to be Israeli settlements. Groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad exist to resist Israel, and fostering that resistance offers the Islamic Republic a regional lever with which it can condemn and critique the Arab regimes aligned with the West. In short, it allows them to be a player in arguably the world's largest territorial dispute.
But remove that dispute, and you can cut the tie that binds Iran to Sunni Islamists. I don't think Lady Gaga alone could save that relationship, but a prolonged and indefinite dispute over actual land certainly will.
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Abu Muqawama has a fun post up disputing some of Stephens' claims from the Arab perspective, and if you want to read something about Lady Gaga that isn't wonky and lame check out Vanessa Grigoriadis' rather definitive Gaga bio in the recent New York Magazine.
