I would question the thesis that anti-Semitism caused the
Arab Spring to fail. In as much as like any other transfer of power in the Arab
world we in the west mistakenly call revolutions, the forces of secular
democracy aren’t fighting the forces of tyranny. Instead it’s a group of
Salafist extremists fighting quasi secular monarchies (including all those
genetic presidents-for-life). The end result is generally another mutated form
of authoritarian oppression. This one will be founded not on Nazism as was
Michel Aflaq’s Baath party in Syria and
Iraq, or Soviet communism as in Egypt but on Sayyid Qutb’s Islamic ideology
that forms the basis of the Muslim Brotherhood and its even more extreme
offshoots.
In short there never was an Arab Spring to succeed or fail.
There were collapses of secular police states which discovered, just as we in
the west did, that you can’t successfully fight someone fueled by fanaticism who’s
willing to combine the worst aspects of Islam with Ho Chih Minh’s theory of
guerilla warfare.
It was entirely predictable what happened in Egypt. Just as
the Bolsheviks waited for the Mensheviks to claim power before they murdered
them in Russia in 1918, just as Kohmeni waited for the seculars to try to grab
power after the Shah before killing them, the Islamic fanatics waited for the
facebook generation of seculars to march in Tahir square without much of a plan
and then they sprang on them and pushed them out of the way.
Did anti-Semitism cause that? I would say no. I refer to
Bernard Lewis’ “What Went Wrong” about the Muslim middle east’s turn away from
modernity. Lewis focuses on the Ottoman Empire but the rules generally apply across
the Maghreb. The Muslim middle east, after having suffered a few key defeats
and being structurally unable to organize to confront the west, turned away.
They satisfied themselves, much like Imperial China that xenophobia was a good
thing and that the outside world was a barbarian wasteland. Hundreds of years
of telling themselves they were more highly evolved, smarter, more enlightened
caused them to slip further and further behind.
In this sense Jew hatred is one of many xenophobic bigotries
that hold them back. A symptom really of what’s so catastrophically wrong with
them overall. They hate Jews, they hate Christians. In Saudi Arabia women are
barely tolerated to go to school. The Maghreb is home to honor cultures where success,
initiative, information sharing, discipline, learning, tolerance are frowned
upon. This is why Arab armies are terrible at their job. The princes want to be
fighter pilots w/o having any training, and everyone else is treated like a
slave. Honor cultures demand that leaders and chieftains rule ruthlessly with
no regard for their underlings, with no regard for material success. What’s
important is being appreciated as the Big Man. And with that comes a hardwired
disgust and hatred of everyone else.
Yes of course dhmmitude harmed their societies overall just
like slavery in the American south put a hold on industrialization and
progress. But it goes wider than that. These
are societies which fundamentally are looking inward. They see the root of
their own failure in all of the wider world. The Jews happen to be in their
crosshairs now. It’s a convenience for dictators to blame the Jews or anyone
for why they’re backwards. Thus they have done for the last 500 years. Which is
not to say that their anti-Semitism isn’t virulent and insane but I don’t
believe it’s the reason for their failure.
Their failure is all their own.
Their failure is all their own.
Great post with much to untangle.
ReplyDeleteI want to talk just a little bit about this:
The Muslim middle east, after having suffered a few key defeats and being structurally unable to organize to confront the west, turned away. They satisfied themselves, much like Imperial China that xenophobia was a good thing and that the outside world was a barbarian wasteland.
Sayyid Qutb, one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s and thus one of the founders of the movement for political Islam in the modern era, came to the United States in the early middle part of the 20th century and found it full infidels.
{Shocking, I know.}
The basis of the entire movement - a movement that progressive-left American Jewry can hardly even bring itself to acknowledge - was the failure of the Ottoman Empire and thus the failure of the broader Caliphatic dream.
In the west we are taught that the Crusades are a terrible stain on the morality of the European nations and states, but what we are not taught is that the Crusades were a response to prior Islamic imperial aggression against Europe.
Political Islam developed as an early twentieth century response to the failure of Islamic aggression toward the west. The question that people like Qutb and Hassan al-Banna were asking themselves was, how is it that if Islam is the superior form of human organization that we have lost to the European infidels?
That very question represents the kernel of the birth of the movement.
The answer that the Brotherhood offered was a return to "traditional" Islam and it is only now - lo these many decades later - that we are witnessing the movement come to fruition.
The Middle East is going Islamist and the American administration, along with the American press, cannot bring themselves to notice.
Their willful blindness is a danger to all of us.
I also think this was a really good post. The problem stems from Medina and the imperial Arab culture that propagated, and the subsequent death of ijtihad.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3114/muslims-ijtihad
I see he doesn't allow comments at his site.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has spent 1/3 of my entire life (including the 0-14 years of childhood when I didn't work at all) working in environmental remediation, and therefore actually knows a thing or two about environmental issues, I'll put Israel's environmental record against anyone else's in that region any day of the week, and... wait for it... twice on Sundays (heh)!
That Angry Arab hack is so full of shit he's a walking biohazard.
(of course, he's on the blogroll of all too many Daily Kossers, top to bottom...)