<...the Arab world....Global Village Idiocy, reinforcing every prejudice and inciting the common man to rage at external enemies...>
I have no experience of the Arab World, but I have a great deal of experience with Native Americans, and they have the same attitude as Arabs, toward the dominant Western Culture. When I read the Arab press, I see the same attitudes I saw every day, living for years in a remote Native village.
It is an attitude which develops, when a people find themselves, personally and culturally, under siege. They feel attacked, encircled, defiled, violated. The conditions they live in, are controlled by unseen all-powerful foreigners, who cannot be deterred or influenced in any significant way. They feel raped.
Most Arabs feel totally helpless, to control the governments they live under. At best, those governments ignore them, and are benign. Mostly, those governments act as parasites on the civilian populations they control, and a government job is a license to steal. Those governments, in turn, are mostly helpless in the face of the overwhelming military (and economic) power of America and Israel, who have replaced the previous overwhelming power of the European colonial nations. The utter humiliation of Iraq's conventional army in 2003, was a repeat of the Arab's utter humiliation at the hands of Israel in 1967. They've been raped, again. And can't imagine any way to prevent a future rape. Imagine the rage, the despair.
Maybe I'm making a false extrapolation here, but this analogy makes sense to me, after reading the Arab press.
This view of the world is why so many Arabs are eager to believe that 9/11 was a Mossad plot to bring American armies to the ME, to steal their oil. They assume powerful entities are not benign. They assume the West is all-powerful.
We need to quit bullying them, quit overthrowing their governments, quit sending our armies and settlers onto their land. As long as we continue these bad habits, Arabs will continue to feel violated. And they will continue to lash out at us, yesterday with fuel-filled planes, tomorrow with nuclear weapons. |
