A Return to Clarity [America is sleeping with the enemy]

It’s a given here in Israel, that cab drivers and kiosk owners have a certain political acumen. If you’re ever confused about what you’ve been hearing on the local radio station or been reading in between those first sips of morning coffee, just hop into a Jerusalem taxi. After a 12 minute ride, you’ll emerge with the clarity and insight of one who has spent 12 days at an ashram in Tibet. The only difference being that you’ll still have that nervous twitch in your right eye and knot in your stomach.

Well, what did you expect? This is the Middle, not the Far, East and although your driver will address the current national and world situation with an utter simplicity that’s not lacking in profundity, the TAO to him is simply an acronym for Terror, Arabs and Oil. He understands with sagacious depth that those three things are what makes our present world go ‘round, and that’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I have a theory about these men behind the wheels and grocery counters. Their common wisdom stems from the fact that they never had the opportunity to wallow in the hallowed halls of Oxford, Yale and the likes; whereas, the privileged among us tend to lose ourselves in a linguistic maze as tangled as the vines that grow up the walls of those distinguished institutions. Some will remain untainted (miraculously) and will only gain from their years of higher education. Others will receive degrees in journalism, communications, Middle Eastern affairs and diplomacy. They will then leave those polished academic corridors with a Masters in BS. Once they land a prestigious and challenging position with an international media service like the Associated Press, they will, with unparalleled enthusiasm, put those university-acquired skills to work.

Two weeks ago the AP reported on the terrorist kidnaping of an Israel taxi driver. In a staggering use of verbiage, one brief report refers to the “Palestinian criminals”, “Palestinian militants”, “the Palestinian Authority”, “Palestinian Police”, “the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - a group affiliated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement”, “Islamic groups”, “members of the gang”, and “a suicide attacker”.

The reporter is obviously suffering from a classic case of over-education. He bends over backwards in order to avoid the very fundamental "T" word. Let’s go back to basics, shall we?

Q: Find the common denominator in all of the above terms (you have ten seconds).... Time’s up.

A: I suggest that the missing link can be found in the term “terror”, as all of those groups use and endorse terrorist tactics.

Your simple Israeli simply doesn’t care about the hair splitting ideological differences behind Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, al-Alska Brigades, Hizbollah, Abu Nidal, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), and Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), because he or she knows that all that really matters right now is that “these guys wanna kill me.” Save the analysis for Harvard.

I imagine the Arabs leaders at those summits rolling on their oriental rugs in hysterical laughter, as they devise and bankroll another dozen or so groups to keep thousands of American and Israeli intelligence agents busy running around and gathering historical/ideological background information.

Take note America: It’s all very imposing when those Fox, CNN and NBC correspondents discuss, with Pentagon officials, the subtle and intricate distinctions between the Sunnis and Shiites, Baathists and Wahhabists, Al-Qaida and the Taliban. Meanwhile, while you’re breaking your head and teeth trying to understand and say the names of these groups, your American soldiers are caught in the blistering desert sun, watching their buddies being cut down. Those guys must be asking themselves, “Let’s see, was it about deposing Saddam or liberating the Iraqi people? Was it about WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) or securing oil fields?”

Darn shame the distraught GI can’t take a bit of leave and hightail a taxi over to a Jerusalem kiosk. For the time it takes to purchase a package of Bamba snack food, the guy on the other side of the counter will tell it to him straight. He’ll tell him that America was blind-sided on 9/11 and lost 3,000 American citizens. He’ll say, “You guys have every right to kick ass.” What he means is, any regime that supports that kind of terror is fair game. And, you didn’t have to spend months groveling, spinning stories and convincing Kofi Anan and Europe about your intentions.

He’ll also lean over and, in no uncertain terms, tell that soldier the naked truth. Too bad I can’t use the vernacular in this article, but he basically whispers that America is sleeping with the enemy and we Israelis are the reluctant third party in this illicit threesome. Disaster is emanating from the eminent Saudi regime. Jihad and Mecca are at the foundations of a kingdom that American petro-dollars built. The sooner the relationship ends, the better for America, Israel and the good people of this world.

The American GI finishes his Bamba and gulps down the last of his overly-sweetened grapefruit drink. It’s time to hail a taxi and head back to the sweltering tents of Babylon. As he turns, he can’t help but notice the man with the slight smile who, through the whole conversation, was stacking boxes of Telma Flakes in the corner of the store.

That man never had the time to attend university or any glorified yeshiva, as he was too busy putting bread on the table for his family. Heck, he doesn’t even fathom the Eastern philosophical idea behind that which drives him. The TAO says that “Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know.” What he does intrinsically know is that the world really isn’t any more complex then it was at the beginning of time. The addition of man’s ego and the media just make it seem that way.

And, he’s smiling because he knows that one day (may it come soon), “The humble shall inherit the earth, and delight in abundant peace.” (Psalm 37)

The highlights in this post are mine.

I'm not sure about your analogy, norraad -- but what we must do if we are to defeat the primitive barbarism that is arrayed against US, is to stop projecting our Judeo-Christian Civilization's inherent Judeo-Christian Goodness upon our arrayed barbaric, medieval, hesperophobic enemies.

And recognise them for the manifestation of Evil that they are.

Or perish.

QUOTE:

Article by John Derbyshire

National Review Online - September 14 2001

Hesperophobia

Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing -- but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"

I've been getting the same feeling from some of my eMail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: while I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers," [Perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough] some of this stuff comes pretty close - though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.

Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish, [As, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins], and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive emails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: the root phenomenon is hesperophobia.

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words ‘Ýóðåñïò [hesperos], which means "the west" and öüâïò [phobos], which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate".

Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West.

[While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans]

Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us. Does the name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization -- "the West" -- is widely hated. And as a matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank", i.e. crusader.

Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand.

Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, which had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries. [Or in the case of the Chinese, millennia] When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter.

Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.

The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. [That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs -- the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them] Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more.

The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees a hundred and fifty years earlier.

The Chinese are still mad about that and are still making angry, bitter, delusional movies about "The Opium Wars."

A hundred and fifty years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.

If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.

Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed.

There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well-treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: more often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a Crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful Nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.

So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. [Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.] It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.

What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail?

Apparently not: several of my correspondents have explained to me that the Arabs are enraged by the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons". Oh. No weapons, then [and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have ? lots of luck with that, guys]. But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic gangs of despots - in China, for example - are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?

And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips to hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.

Israel's culture is ours. The Nation of Israel is part of the West and if that Nation goes down, we will have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism will have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight.

You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice.

What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism or anti-Semitism.

It was in part all those things:

But more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.

END QUOTE.

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