I had an argument yesterday with Lady Liberty's parents where they said you can't make a deal with the Arabs because in their culture "truth" and "lying" don't mean what they do to us. Lady Liberty agreed that any commitments from them would not be worth anything. She says that even the most enlightened Arabs, down to the last man, when the subject of the Jews come up, something washes over them and they are in a different mode. Wise men turn ugly, spewing forth invective possible only regarding this subject.
But is it really possible for a "people" to not know what truth is? Aren't concepts of veracity and commitment and loyalty and reliability so intrinsic that it just isn't meaningful to consider their not existing in a cultural framework? Yes, I would grant that there's a sophisticated meta-language for mistrust and deceit, but it's still a choice. In fact, to be human (and I think this is one of those unprovable things you take with you all along the way) I would say is to be aware of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
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Here's what I think is going on. The "Arabs," or really the Islamic Middle East, the ex-Ottoman Empire, has been uniquely fucked by the industrial age and European hegemony, and it just burns. Look at nations anywhere else in the world and something ameliorates their humiliation at the hands of the West. The colonial countries and continents have mostly had their tapes erased and reprogrammed. Sure they had their past glories, but these were either on a small scale (say the northern Amer-Indian folk paradise) or are long, long gone, practically archaeological--Benin was a power 300 years ago, the Aztecs 500 years ago. These places have been settling for hundreds of years into a dialectic of the Westernizing center and the indigenous folk periphery. Someone from Brazil or Nigeria or a South Dakota Reservation has a reason to be proud of his place in history--feels that he or she possesses some magic that the nominally all-powerful West does not, while at the same time rapidly absorbing Western technology (if not all of its ideals). And places like Indonesia and Korea have all that plus the technology and wealth that they have reason to believe will someday surpass ours. Never-quite-conquered empires like China, Russia, Japan and India are sitting pretty, silently cheering on the Islam/Christianity war and waiting for their day in the sun.
But the heirs of Mohammed can't forget that their empire was crushed less than a hundred years ago, and that it was not all that long before that when the citizens of Paris were wading through sewage in their streets while the standard of civilization was carried by Arabs.
In the seventies, when the oil states tried to get some leverage, the world financial markets rewrote the rules to shut them down. In the years before that, the West, just as it did everywhere else, installed evil puppet regimes to give their corporations near total freedom to exploit Arab economies. But when the colonies gained independence worldwide after WW2, the states of the Arabic Middle East embarked on a different path than most other former colonies. The colonial states that were established early on, once technologically backward, had often absorbed a good dose of the machinery and ideology of capitalism and democracy during their long subjugation. If we regard political systems as secondary for these purposes, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the Philippines, where some kind of effective democracy has arrived, or an autocratic state like Singapore, or the oligarchies and kleptocracies of South American countries, they are all enfolded into the global market system and are making money and building local technological capacity.
This has simply never occurred in the Islamic Middle East. There are all kinds of varieties, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, but it doesn't matter whether it's a "democracy" or a monarchy, or religious or secular, or "open" or closed, or an "ally" or "enemy" of the West. None of these states is participating fully in the global market, and none is building or making anything or teaching technological knowledge to its citizens. And it is very much not a coincidence that most secular, westernized, and technologically advanced Muslim nation is the one we recently hit with 10 years of crushing sanctions and then invaded.
So this is the humiliation and rage for the ordinary Islamic people (especially the middle class, who are the most shut out of power relative to what they see their counterparts possess elsewhere in the world), which is so nearly total, so much greater than anywhere else in the world. It is a rage that is different in kind even from that of say, the Shining Path. People see that things are changing in Peru, and the Shining Path has lost its steam. Nothing is changing in Saudi Arabia.
The Jews are just the symbol of all this. The Jew is an ideal, overdetermined symbol of what oppresses the Arab, he is the nexus of multiple confluent streams of injustice. The Jew is a mythological enemy, the subject of invented narratives that draw on ancient texts and lapsed and reawakened hatreds; he is the historical/military enemy, standing in for the West playing god at Versailles and Yalta and wherever, the key item being the creation of Israel. He is the symbol of the ongoing enemy of Western economic injustice, with his high-tech economy fed by the West as they deliberately technologically starve the rest of the mideast.
Well this is where that asshole Thomas Friedman is right. We need to corrupt the Muslims entirely, finish the job with whiskey and video games and James Bond. But it can only happen when these things are delivered along with factories and jobs and cars and vcrs and money. And that only happens when the Saudi princes go down. When I look at Iran, I see some hope. Democracy in these countries is a joke, just a meaningless word, there simply is a total lack of the traditions on which it depends. Let them have their religious revolutions and give them back some pride. Then, as the decades pass, as in Iran, slowly the moderates, the educated middle class will begin to win a voice in things. The transition will be hard on us, but until we give them back their self-respect there will be no peace.
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