Posted on 07/07/2002 5:47:04 AM PDT by Valin
A U. N. report by Middle-Eastern intellectuals blames Arab culture and Arab tyranny for Arab problems.
The just-released Arab Human Development Report, commissioned by the United Nations and drafted by a group of Middle Eastern intellectuals, utterly confirms the deep pathology gripping the Arab world that Western analysts have long noted. Yet what was truly astounding about the account was less its findings than the honest acknowledgement that Arab problems are largely self-created.
Khalaf Hunaidi, who oversaw the economic portion of the analysis, remarked, “It’s not outsiders looking at Arab countries. It’s Arabs deciding for themselves.” And what they decided is sadly ample proof of Arab decline. Per capita income is dropping in the Arab world, even as it rises almost everywhere else. Productivity is stagnant; research and development are almost absent. Science and technology remain backward. Politics is infantile. And culture, in thrall to Islamic fundamentalism and closed to the ideas that quicken the intellectual life of the rest of the world, is “lagging behind” advanced nations, Hunaidi says.
Yet this novel panel of Arab intellectuals, remarkably, didn’t attribute the dismal condition of Middle Eastern society to the usual causes that Western intellectuals and academics have made so popular: racism and colonialism, multinational exploitation, Western political dominance, and all the other -isms and -ologies that we’ve grown accustomed to hear about from the Arabists on American university campuses.
Instead, the investigators cited the subjugation of women that robs Arab society of millions of brilliant minds. Political autocracy—either in the service of or in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism—ensures censorship, stifles creativity, or promotes corruption. Talented scientists and intellectuals are likely to emigrate and then stay put in the West, since there is neither a cultural nor an economic outlet for their talents back home but sure danger if they prove either honest or candid. The Internet remains hardly used. Greece, a country 30 times smaller than the Arab world, translates five times the number of books yearly.
The report didn’t give precise reasons for the growing Arab hostility toward the United States, but its findings lend credence to almost everything brave scholars like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have been saying for years. With exploding populations, and offering little hope for either material security or personal freedom, unelected governments in the Gulf, Egypt, and northern Africa have allowed their press the single “freedom” of venting popular frustration against a very successful Israel and the United States.
Instead of discussing elections in Egypt, debating the Sudanese government’s budget, or advocating academic freedom in Syria, state-run newspapers and television stations spin countless conspiracy theories about September 11. They dub the Jews subhuman and worse, promise eternal jihad against the West, and churn out elaborate explanations why a tiny country like Israel is responsible for everything from train wrecks in Cairo to lawlessness in Lebanon.
What can Americans learn from this newly honest Arab self-appraisal? We should put no more credence in the preposterous “postcolonial” theories that ad nauseam argue that Westerners are still to be blamed a half-century after the last Europeans vacated the Middle East. Post-Marxist analyses that claim international conglomerates stifle the Arab world are just as silly. Nor must we believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or our own support for Israel is the problem. Instead, the simple fact is that hundreds of millions of people are going backward in time in an age when global communications hourly remind them of their dismal futures. Frustration, pride, anger, envy, humiliation, spiritual helplessness—all the classical exegeses for war and conflict—far better explain the Arab world’s hostility toward a prosperous, confident, and free West.
But our own academic Left isn’t alone in misjudging the Middle East. The Realpolitik of our own government that allies us with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and other “moderate” Arab states offers little long-term hope for an improved relationship with people of the Middle East. It is no accident that America is more popular in countries whose awful governments hate us—Iraq and Iran, for example—than among the public of our so-called allies. Saudis, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, and Egyptians, after all, have been murdering Americans far more frequently than have Iranians, Iraqis, and Syrians.
We have replaced our old legitimate fears of godless Marxism in the Middle East with new understandable worries over fanatical Islamic fundamentalism to justify our own continued support for corrupt dictatorships. Yet the old excuse that there is no middle class in the Arab world, no heritage of politics, and few secular moderates will no longer do. It should be our job to find true democrats, both in and outside of the existing governments, and then promote their interests at the expense of both the fundamentalists and the tribal grandees. Chaos, uncertainty, risk, and unpredictability may ensue, but all that is better than the murderous status quo of the current mess.
The contemporary Arab world is like the old communist domain of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with its political and intellectual tyranny. We should accept that, and then adopt the same unyielding resolve to oppose governments that lie, oppress, and murder—until they totter and fall from their very own corrupt weight. There was a silent majority yearning to be free behind the Iron Curtain, and so we must believe that there is also one now, just as captive, in an unfree Middle East.
Copyright 2002, The Manhattan Institute
The million dollar question is - is it really a majority or are there actually just a handful who would like to live free. I'm guessing the "majority" are content to go on blaming hating the "infidels." To think otherwise and plan for a better future would require hard work and sacrifice. Something Arabs hate more than infidels.....
Absolutely!
I blame all the worlds woes on left-handed albino hypno-therapist!
I suppose we should believe that, but it's pretty hard to hang unto that hope while you watch people with their fists raised in the air shouting "Death to America". We used to just ignore them. I used to think they were harmless, now I want to get rid of them. They have come into OUR country and killed OUR people and they are planning on killing more. It's not much different then the old west. Someone comes gunning for you, you'd best go gunning for them first.
Those who mean us no harm had best get out there and identify themselves pretty quick or we'll just assume they're all alike.
The declared goal of these people is world domination and the imposition of Islam on all people of the world, i.e. establishment of world-wide Islamic theocracy.
In other words, they intend to doom all of the people of the world to the wretched, backward lives that they themselves live under Islamic theocracies.
The rest of the world should ignore these people and let them find their way or not.
In order to do this, these people must be contained and their designs on expansion, terror, and imposition of world-wide Islamic theocracy frustrated.
This requires a powerful defense but more importantly a powerful and single-minded resolve.
For this reason, "Liberals" (who represent decadence) and others who would weaken the Western resolve to contain expansionist, terrorist Islam are in fact its enablers and consititute a greater threat to the U.S. and Western Civilization than do the Islamists themselves.
The two main things that the U.S. needs to do--and the rest of the world as well--are (1) repudiation of decadence, especially "Liberalism", its predominant form, and removal of "Liberals" from political office and (2) the maintanence of domestic security and a powerful military. These done, the Islamic world can go its way so long as it poses no threat to the rest of the world.
The greatest threat to the U.S.--and the rest of the world--is not Islam or any other foreign enemy. It is "Liberalism".
Ambitious Muslims know this. In fact, they're betting on it.
Freedom relies on individual values, individual self-governance, the individual's willingness to "do the right thing", and, to a large degree, voluntarily acting in a manner that does not infringe on the freedom of others.
There is a grand total of ONE thing that supports those values and actions and that thing is Judeo-Christian tradition. [At that, neither half of the equation gets it entirely right most of the time].
It is well and good to desire democracy [as we define it] for the world but unless the islamic world, and the assorted tribal clots that populate Africa, can come around to recognizing each and every individual as being the core of, and responsible for, his or her society there ain't much to hope for.
Asian states, absent muslim infiltration of their own, have a better shot at it (despite socialism & historic isolation) because they generally focus on the obligations of each member of society: more structured, tight, and far more ethnocentric than Americans are used to but not matching islam's self defined rightness in all matters involving 'others'.
Although this does not offer any real clues at to what we can do in fighting today's terrorism, it surely does offer a lesson in what we should NOT do.
First and foremost, get over the silly notion that people will see things just as we do once they are given the opportunity and funding to do so.
Then simply look to europe, our cultural well-spring; look at the decay in both individual rights (the ICC) and in democracy itself that socialism and 'diversity' have brought to the very place the founding fathers got their ideas from.
Finally, look at what the left in America is advocating today, and be very worried.
PS: With apologies to Senor Fox, I omitted reference to mexico and much of latin america because most of that region has yet to get past the wanna-be phase, because there is no sign of culture there other than that which has been imported, and because until they stop blaiming their neighbors for every problem they have, much of the comment regarding islam should apply there as well.
OK, I'm ranting, it's a reasonably rare event.
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