The Arab World: The Politically Incorrect Truth

Self-Criticism in the Muslim World

An organization called MEMRI (Middle Eastern Media Research Institute) records and translates TV broadcasts in the Middle East. Their specialty has been chilling videos of fanatical Muslims (and even Muslim children) discussing the need to kill Jews.

However, that’s not the whole story. In some parts of the region self-criticism of Islam is seen on TV, and real intellectual debate happens. Here are a few examples.



OK, this one is an entertainer, so one might be inclined to claim this is a lot like (say) Kim Kardashian offering a critique of U.S. society. But (1) people like this may have more effect on the culture than intellectuals, and (2) her observations are sensible.

Romney to Israel: You Did Build That

From Front Page Magazine:

When Mitt Romney arrived in Jerusalem and suggested that Israel’s success contrasted with its Muslim neighbors was due to a culture of success, he was waving a red flag in front of a red bull. Romney’s comments were as provocative to the left as Obama’s “You didn’t build that” remark was to us.

To the left, success has become the Mark of Cain. Where success once used to be proof of good character, the balance has shifted and it is now proof of bad character. The left blames all disparities on injustice. If A has less than B, then B has somehow discriminated against A. All that’s left is for the sociologists and critical race theorists to plug in the variables, write their papers and explain the mechanism for the injustice and how it can be remedied through centralized redistribution.

This is the era of “You didn’t build that” where achievement is inherently unfair and an object of guilt. To succeed is to steal. Anyone who has achieved more than those around him has unfairly taken from them. And the more he succeeds, the more he has to feel guilty about and the more he must atone through social justice.

Mitt Romney didn’t build companies; he unfairly redistributed what should have been equal resources in an unequal way to create that success. America also didn’t build anything; it just looted the resources and markets that should have been divided equally among the nations of the world. And the same goes for Jews and the Jewish State. Individual success is not exceptionalism; it’s stealing from the collective. The left already knows why Israel is more successful. Because it’s a greedy country whose success has come at the expense of its poorer neighbors. The left finds the idea of explaining success in terms of character, either individual or national, to be offensive. To suggest that success is due to personal virtue is to also imply that failure is due to a lack of virtue. The left is not interested in exploring what’s wrong with nations or groups that fail, only in explaining how their failure is no fault of their own.

The left was only interested in Jews as an oppressed minority and in Israel as a small doomed country. Once Jews became successful and Israel emerged victorious, the left turned on them and on Israel.

Israel’s success is one of the greatest weapons that the left uses against it. If Israelis were still living in tents and trying to get the power to stay on for more than a few hours a day, the Jewish State wouldn’t make nearly as tempting a target. Israel’s transformation from a bunch of refugees and farmers armed with third-rate weapons to a prosperous nation of flowering orchards, booming tech companies and new towns rising out of the earth, is proof of its immorality. If the Jewish State were truly moral, it would have stayed poor.

Most offensively Israel’s economic success has kept pace with its transition from socialist collectives to free enterprise, going from a “You didn’t build that” culture to a “You built it” culture. While the Palestinian Authority and most of Israel’s Muslim neighbors still operate under government monopolies, Israel’s tech industry revolution has boosted its international trade while making it possible for a few army or air force veterans to cobble together a company that brings a revolutionary new product to market.

USB flash drives and instant messaging software came out of that “You built it” culture. On the other side of the border malaise and misery, bombs and fanatics, have come out of the economic monopolies wielded by military rulers, tribal leaders and religious despots.

Like the left, the Muslim world believes that Israel’s success and its failure is proof of guilt. But even out of the Muslim world come glimpses of the basic truth. Khalaf Al-Harbi, a Saudi columnist, wrote, “The secret to Israel’s survival, despite all the great challenges it has faced, lies in democracy and respect for the worth of the [Israeli] individual… The secret to the collapse of the Arab countries, one after another, lies in dictatorship and in the oppression of the individual… [Israel] drew its power from the honor it granted to its citizens, while its Arab neighbors trampled the [poor] creatures known as their citizens.”

Al-Harbi, no friend of Israel, went further than Mitt Romney did. If Mitt Romney crediting freedom and democracy as the ingredients that make for Israel’s culture of success is racist, then the Democrats must also charge Al-Harbi with racism.

Mitt Romney came to Israel to try and explain Israel’s success in the same terms that he has explained the success of the American businessman, by crediting the labor and dedication of the free individual in a culture that values freedom and accomplishment.

Every Israeli, like every American, who set foot in a new land, had to start all over again. They had to build houses, plant fields and raise cattle. They had to learn how to build armies and run institutions. And they had to do all those things while surrounded by enemies. They had to learn to sink or swim.

While the Muslim world wails over Palestinian refugees, the Jewish State is a nation of refugees populated by refugees from Czarism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Nasserism and Islamism. And each of those refugees had to begin a new life. The process wasn’t easy and Israel is still struggling with the challenges of absorbing millions of people from cultures as far apart as Russia, Yemen and France. But the refugee camps where they once lived, the tents and shacks, are a distant memory. The survivors of the Holocaust are not still living in DP camps in Europe and Iraqi Jews aren’t living in tents in Israel. The last DP camp in Europe closed in 1959. The last of Israel’s refugee camps shut down in 1963. Meanwhile the Shatila refugee camp for Palestinian Arabs has been an ongoing concern in Beirut since 1949 making it older than many Israeli towns.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the Cambridge Union and told them, “Success, the real success, does not depend upon the position you hold but upon how you carry yourself in that position.” That assessment is the final rebuttal to the class warfare worldview of the left. Success is not in what you have, but in what you make of it.

A culture of free men and women who believe that they are here to build rather than destroy is able to do great things. And a culture of slaves of Allah who believe that they are here to destroy what others build and who prefer the public martyrdom of the suicide bomb and the refugee camp cannot hope to equal their accomplishments. When the individual has the power to build then he is living in a “You built it” society. But when he only has the power to complain or destroy, then he is living in the Islamic or leftist “You didn’t build that” society.

For liberals and leftists, the assigned role of all minority groups is to fail. That failure justifies a sense of grievance, and an excuse for the expansion of government to redress the grievance. Groups like the Jews who overcomes great obstacles to success are thus traitors to the left. Admittedly, so long at they keep voting left (as Jews do in the U.S.) that can be forgiven.

But Israeli Jews are a different matter.

Obama’s Pandering to the Muslim World Has Done No Good

The idea that if we just are more “sympathetic to Arab concerns” and more “balanced in our approach to the Middle East” Arabs (and presumably, Muslims generally) will be more favorable to the U.S. has been shot to hell by a pollster of Arab heritage.

From the Arab American Institute:

With the 2008 election of Barack Obama, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. more than doubled in many Arab countries. But in the two years since his famous “Cairo speech,” ratings for both the U.S. and the President have spiraled downwards. The President is seen overwhelmingly as failing to meet the expectations set during his speech, and the vast majority of those surveyed disagree with U.S policies.

In five out of the six countries surveyed, the U.S. was viewed less favorably than Turkey, China, France—or Iran. Far from seeing the U.S. as a leader in the post-Arab Spring environment, the countries surveyed viewed “U.S. interference in the Arab world” as the greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East, second only to the continued Palestinian occupation.

While the vehemence of Arab reaction to the U.S. was startling, the general sentiment echoed points made in AAI President James Zogby’s 2010 book Arab Voices, in which he reflected on Arab opinions of both the U.S. and our foreign policies. “American democracy [seems] a lot like damaged goods to many Arabs… U.S. policy in the region has increasingly undermined Arab attitudes toward America as a global model.”

Executive Summary

• After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran’s favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia).

• The continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and U.S. interference in the Arab world are held to be the greatest obstacles to peace and stability in the Middle East.

• While many Arabs were hopeful that the election of Barack Obama would improve U.S.-Arab relations, that hope has evaporated. Today, President Obama’s favorable ratings across the Arab world are 10% or less.

• Obama’s performance ratings are lowest on the two issues to which he has devoted the most energy: Palestine and engagement with the Muslim world.

• The U.S. role in establishing a no-fly zone over Libya receives a positive rating only in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but, as an issue, it is the lowest priority.

• The killing of bin Laden only worsened attitudes toward the U.S.

• A plurality says it is too early to tell whether the Arab Spring will have a positive impact on the region. In Egypt, the mood is mixed. Only in the Gulf States are optimism and satisfaction levels high.

You can read the full poll here.

And the following graphic makes the failure of the policy clear:


Obama, of course, it a standard liberal, and standard liberals believe that if people dislike the U.S., it must be our fault.

But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s their fault. Those Muslims who sympathize with terrorism are at fault. Those Muslims who want Israel wiped off the map are at fault. Those Arabs who blame the failure of nations in the Middle East to create free and democratic governments on the West are at fault. Those who blame the U.S. for their economic backwardness are at fault.

Sometimes, it’s best to take to heart Machiavelli’s famous dictim that “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

Thus we have trouble believing that killing Bin Laden really harmed attitudes toward the U.S. If it didn’t engender the warm fuzzies, it probably engendered attitudes a lot more beneficial to us.

Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t matter much whether a country is feared or hated. If you are big enough and powerful enough, they have to deal with you.

The bottom line of this issue is that America should be America: a friend of Israel, and an enemy of terrorism. Willing to intervene when vital national security interests are at stake -- and being a democracy, there will always be a vigorous debate about whether they are.

As for Arabs: if you insist on disliking us, so be it.

Netanyahu Speaks to US Congress

The most obvious thing about this speech is the contrast between the moral clarity of Benjamin Netanyahu and the equivocating, apologizing, half-hearted support for America and democracy that is the best that Barack Obama can produce.

Obama, in other words, is afflicted by all the moral and intellectual vices of liberal elites. The contrast to Netanyahu is stunning.

Israel & the Palestinians: The Chimera of a “Two State Solution”

Virtually everybody claims to want a “two state solution” in the Middle East -- the State of Israel living alongside an independent Palestinian State.

This sounds reasonable. It sounds sensible. Indeed, it would be both things. Except for one thing. According to Jeff Jacoby:

It isn’t going to happen.

International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera. Peace will not be achieved by granting sovereignty to the Palestinians, because Palestinian sovereignty has never been the Arabs’ goal. Time and time again, a two-state solution has been proposed. Time and time again, the Arabs have turned it down.

In 1936, when Palestine was still under British rule, a royal commission headed by Lord Peel was sent to investigate the steadily worsening Arab violence. After a detailed inquiry, the Peel Commission concluded that “an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.” It recommended a two-state solution -- a partition of the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. “Partition offers a chance of ultimate peace,” the commission reported. “No other plan does.”

The Peel Commission’s proposed two-state solution (1937). The Arabs said no.But the Arab leaders, more intent on preventing Jewish sovereignty in Palestine than in achieving a state for themselves, rejected the Peel plan out of hand. The foremost Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, actively supported the Nazi regime in Germany. In return, Husseini wrote in his memoirs, Hitler promised him “a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.”

In 1947, the Palestinians were again presented with a two-state proposal. Again they spurned it. Like the Peel Commission, the United Nations concluded that only a division of the land into adjacent states, one Arab and one Jewish, could put an end to the conflict. On Nov. 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly debated -- and by a vote of 33-13 adopted -- Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine on the basis of population. Had the Arabs accepted the UN decision, the Palestinian state that “the whole world wants” would today be 61 years old. Instead, the Arab League vowed to block Jewish sovereignty by waging “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.”

Over and over this pattern has been repeated. Following its stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel offered to exchange the land it had won for permanent peace with its neighbors. From their summit in Khartoum came the Arabs’ notorious response: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

At Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians virtually everything they claimed to be seeking -- a sovereign state with its capital in East Jerusalem, 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, tens of billions of dollars in “compensation” for the plight of Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and launched the bloodiest wave of terrorism in Israel’s history.

To this day, the charters of Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian factions, call for Israel’s liquidation. “The whole world” may want peace and a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want something very different. Until that changes, there is no two-state solution.