TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
- (september 2009)
Obama's Cairo speech: wishful thinking at its worst.
It is always dangerous to generalize. Three hundred million Arabs and one
billion Muslims are not identical robots who adher to one stereotype.
However, i'd rather err on the same of generalization when it comes to
the problems of the Islamic world because i think they are serious enough,
and they were serious enough way before 2001.
Obama gave a speech in Cairo that is totally out of touch with the reality
on the ground (in the streets of Cairo and of any other city or village of
the Arab world, and of the Islamic world at large). The biggest problem of
USA foreign policy is that very few USA officials know and understand what
"the street" thinks and how the mind of the average Arab works. You cannot
bridge the gap between our reality and their reality if you don't know
and understand how different the world appears to them after decades of
self-brainwashing.
It is not only a USA problem.
The entire (non-Islamic) world is still living in denial of what the real problem is.
The real problem is that the Islamic world has a perception of reality that
is (allow me to grossly simplify) the exact opposite of reality.
The Muslims of the world are convinced that
exactly the opposite happened of what really happened. There is a massive,
consistent, relentless distortion of the facts within the Islamic world
that creates "their" reality, a Muslim-friendly "reality" in which every piece
of (the real) reality is an anti-Islamic lie.
If a Muslim commits a crime, it's a matter of minutes before the story is
twisted by the Arab media (and the mosques are the main media here) into
a story in which the Muslim criminal is innocent and the whole thing has
been fabricated by the CIA, by Israel, by India, by Russia, ...
If a Muslim is the victim of a crime, it's a matter of minutes before the
story is
twisted by the Arab media (and the mosques are the main media here) into
a story of religious intolerance against Islam.
If, on the other hand, a non-Muslim is victim of religious intolerance in
an Islamic country, the news never reaches ordinary people.
Therefore there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who believe (and i am
not exaggerating) that thousands of Muslims are murdered every year in the West
for being Muslims (including women shot dead for wearing a headscarf) while
nobody, absolutely nobody, is discriminated or persecuted in Islamic countries
for being a non-Muslim.
The reality is, of course, the exact opposite: non-Muslims have left the
Islamic world because of the constant persecution, while tens of millions of
Muslims have moved to non-Muslim countries and are protected by the local laws
against discrimination or persecution; and these Muslims gladly remain there
and raise their children there. But the average Muslim is convinced of
exactly the opposite, and s/he gets angrier by the day, thinking that fellow
Muslims are helpless victims of continued massacres in the USA, Europe,
Russia, India, China...
(And sometimes i suspect that there is also a more subtle reason: ordinary
Arabs do discriminate based on nationality, religion, ethnicity, social status
and so forth, and therefore assume that others do as well).
The story of all stories for them becomes that there is an international,
world-wide conspiracy against Islam. The non-Muslim world is out to destroy
the Islamic world. As evidence their media point to the fact that so many
Islamic countries are falling apart: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, ...
The rest of the world views this fact as evidence that Muslim extremists
are a major problem (inside and outside the Islamic world) but ordinary Muslims
are indoctrinated to believe that the Muslim extremists have nothing to do
with it (and, in fact, sometimes they are just an invention of Western
propaganda). Ordinary Muslims are repeatedly told (sometimes in subtle way
and sometimes explicitly) that the real cause of the trouble in all the
Islamic countries is the interference of non-Muslim countries. Once you assume
this premise as true, you view every world event through a different lense: you
look for the hand of the infidel in every negative event. Therefore the daily
distortions of the facts are merely the reflection of a more global world view.
If you point them to a book or a magazine to clarify the facts, they will refuse to read it.
Any scholarly work is considered Western propaganda. This is truly the huge
divide between Islam and the rest of the world. Islam considers unreliable
any scholarly study. The more scholarly it is, the less likely to be read in
the Islamic world. They consider highly reliable the word of mouth that they
pick up in the mosque or at the cafe. They will never read a book written by
a historian who spent his life studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
the very fact that the historian spent his life studying that topic plays
against the book. Muslims (and especially Arabs) want a gossip that can be
broadcast in a second, and that doesn't need to be proven, not a complex theory
with lots of names and episodes.
The fact that the gossip cannot proven is the very reason that the gossip is
believed to be true.
You have to be a Muslim to understand this logic: the whole Islam is founded
on the idea that you have faith, and not that you prove scientifically your
faith. As a Muslim, you are raised to have faith: you are rewarded if you
have faith without doubting, you are punished if you need a proof.
It is the "infidels" who need to prove their theory. Proving a theory is
impossible if your Muslim audience does not believe a word of what you are
saying. They will even doubt that the World Trade Center ever existed.
They may even doubt that New York exists.
But they will never doubt any conspiracy theory that assigns the blame on
a non-Muslim, no matter how ridiculous that conspiracy theory is.
As long as the culprit is a non-Muslim, hundreds of millions of Muslims will
believe it without questioning it.
In fact, questioning it would be equated to treason and blasphemy.
There are countless books written by experts who spent years researching
their subject. But in the Islamic world a rumour picked up in a cafe is
much more credible than a book. Just about nobody in the Islamic world is
willing to read a book to learn the opinion of an expert. When they want
to find out who blew up the World Trade Center, they walk to the neighborhood
cafe and listen to the day's gossip. You can point them to any number of books
that refute the gossip but they will never read them. They won't even read
the titles. The gossip at the cafe always wins. It is difficult to educate
people who don't want to be educated, who are skeptic about education,
and who sometimes feel that education is equivalent to Western propaganda.
To them, the version of history that they learn at the cafe is much more
"objective" than the version of history that comes from a distinguished
scholar.
One of the fundamental dogmas of the Islamic world (and this too comes from
religious belief) is that Muslims are always innocent. Muslims will never
accept that a fellow Muslim is guilty. (In a sense this is a good attribute,
as Muslims honestly believe that Islam makes people better, and therefore
a bad Muslim is a contradiction in terms). Even when a Muslim commits a crime
against fellow Muslims, the first impulse of the fellow Muslims is to deny
that the criminal is a Muslim, and the second impulse is to find a way to blame
Israel or the USA. After a few minutes the situation is already so confused
that distant Muslims will only pick up the accusations against Israel and the
USA (or Russia or China or India).
Perhaps the scariest aspect of Muslim society today is the virtually
infinite supply of suicide bombers. If you spend a few weeks in any Islamic
country, it's not easy to understand why: people are so convinced that Muslims
are being targeted by a world conspiracy that they get very emotional about
"defending" their Muslim brothers. Also, Muslims tend to be very critical,
criticizing everything and everybody (from their own relatives to friends to
neighbors all the way to distant nations). It is not terribly difficult to
turn that belief and this attitude into a deadly weapon.
However, most Muslims deny outright that there are Muslim suicide bombers
at all. All the suicide bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan are blamed on the
CIA and on Israel. The fact that the suicide bomber was a Muslim is never
discussed, and rarely investigated. Nobody really cares for his identity and
life story.
It is puzzling how the media in the Islamic world don't seem interested at
all in interviewing the relatives or analyzing the background of a suicide
bomber the way Western media do with mass murderers. The reason is that the
Muslim masses have already decided that it is all irrelevant: the ultimate
culprit is either the CIA or Israel (or Russia or India or China), and
it doesn't really matter what the name of the suicide bomber is, where s/he
came from, who hired her or him, where s/he got her training, etc.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, very few Muslims will admit that there
are Muslims killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Muslims consistently
believe that it's all architected by the CIA and Israel.
When Al Jazeera shouts that "USA soldiers continue to shed innocent blood in
Iraq and Afghanistan" (the most frequently repeated mantra on that tv station),
it reflects the belief of one billion Muslims: it's the USA that does all
the killing (even if in practice very few people are killed by USA troops and
the vast majority are killed by Muslim suicide bombers, Muslim militias and
Muslim warlords).
There is no amount of
evidence that will change their mind, just like there is no amount of evidence
that will convince them to abjure the prophet of Islam.
The two things are in fact
tightly coupled. Accusing a Muslim of a crime to clear a non-Muslim of the
same crime is perceived as un-Islamic to start with.
(Sunnis may occasionally blame it on Shiites and viceversa, but even then you
are likely to hear accusations that a non-Muslim power is behind this or that
sect).
Whatever crime is committed by a Muslim, no matter how clear the responsibility is, the Muslims of the world find a way to blame the USA, Israel and the West, or at least Russia, India and China, and therefore absolve the Muslims who carried out the attack, and therefore create even more hatred and anger against the non-Muslim world.
It's a win-win situation for the terrorists: the Islamic terrorists can kill their own people and the result will be more hatred and anger against the non-Islamic world.
You cannot convince a Muslim that Islamic terrorism is a problem because the Muslim will typically point the finger to the USA, Israel or someone else to explain a terrorist attack.
The more Islamic terrorists strike, the more anger Muslims feel against the non-Islamic world.
(Needless to say, this only encourages Islamic terrorists: you don't solve a
problem by denying that the problem exists, and you certainly don't solve a
problem by pointing to a cause that has nothing to do with the problem).
The judgment that Muslims (especially Arabs) give on Western politicians and
Western media is similarly odd. Western media are obviously much more objective
than Arab media. Arab media present only one side of the story (Arab journalists
who have tried to present the other side have been fired, jailed and even
killed). Western media range from the right-wing commentators of Fox News
to left-wing film-maker Michael Moore (author of the best-selling documentary of all times, which was, incidentally, an indictment of the USA government)
to left-wing writer Noam Chomsky (who has published countless books that have
sold countless copies) to CNN to the New York Times to all sorts of
right-wing and left-wing blogs, magazines, newspaper, tv stations. It should
be obvious who has the most open and diverse media, and who is instead
brainwashed by just one monolithic and very biased version of the facts.
In fact, most of the scandals or suspicions that are routinely used in the
Arab world to create conspiracy theories originated in the Western media:
Western media (magazines, newspapers, books, films, tv shows) exposed most of
the wrongdoings of the Bush administration, from torture to civilian deaths.
Nonetheless,
Arabs will consistently tell you that USA media brainwashed USA citizens
(the same Arab who says so will probably mention Michael Moore's documentary
without realizing that Moore is a member of the USA media) but will
never admit that he or she has been brainwashed by the Arab media.
The often quoted and repeated fact that there was no weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq was documented by the Western media (an Arab dictator would have simply
put the weapons where he wanted the media to find them or even more simply
ordered the media to write that the weapons had been found).
The plurality of opinions that one can find in Western media is somehow taken
by Arabs as proof that the Western media are unreliable, whereas the consistent
version of the facts of their media is taken as evidence that the Arab version
of the facts is correct.
Another aspect is
the curious alliance between the anti-Western propaganda that countries like
Russia and China have inherited from their communist times and the anti-Western
propaganda of the media in the Islamic world. The Islamic world loves the
conspiracy theories that were typical of the communist regimes. It has simply
revised them and adapted them to the post-communist world.
Ironically the Islamic media (and the masses of the Islamic world) tend to
be more forgiving of the "crimes" committed against Muslims by Russia and
China than of the actions carried out by the West in the Islamic world.
Very few Muslims hate Russia for the genocide in Chechnya the way Muslims
hate the USA for invading Iraq. Very few Muslims hate China for scientifically
eradicating the Uigur culture from Eastern Turkestan. The difference, of
course, is that neither Russia nor China has a Michael Moore and countless
other leftists spinning conspiracy theories against the government and
becoming a world-wide best-seller. Neither Russia nor China tolerates that
journalists investigate and publicize the dubious actions of the government.
Neither Russia nor China has CNN broadcasting live from the war zones.
The Islamic world comically mis-interprets the wealth and diversity
of information in
the Western world (and in particular in the USA) as a sign that the sins
of the Western world are more numerous and more serious than the sins
of Russia and of China, where the actions of the government are less criticized
or not reported at all.
The rest of the world misses the point when it blamed only their dictators for
the state of the Islamic media. The cause runs much deeper into Muslim society
(and possibly in the religion itself) than anyone is willing to admit.
Muslims are used to a uniform opinion (on foreign-policy matters). When they
congregate at a cafe or meet friends in their house, there is a limit to what
opinions can be expressed. A Muslim who defends Israel is unthinkable: he would
be expelled from his own house.
It's easier for a USA citizen to spit on the flag of the USA than for a Muslim
to say that Israel is a better country than any Muslim country.
There are orthodox opinions that all Muslims are supposed to share.
Any other opinion is viewed as treason, blasphemy, apostasy.
It happens all the time from Morocco to Pakistan that people receive death
threats for something they have said or done.
When a group of men (usually it's men) discuss politics at a cafe, it is not
about comparing different opinions: it's about who gets angrier and louder
about the commonly agreed opinions.
Therefore the uniformity of opinion is inherent in Islamic society.
It is not so much that the media of the Islamic world distort the facts
but that ordinary people have a different understanding of what those facts
mean, all based on who the culprit is. The best (worst) example is always
about the wars. The average Muslim blames George W Bush for causing the death
of thousands of people ("people" really means "Muslims" otherwise they wouldn't
care that much). The same Muslims were never particularly upset with the
thousands (sometimes millions) of people killed by the likes of Saddam Hussein,
nor about the thousands killed in the civil war of Algeria.
In those cases the killers were Muslims. When the killer is a Muslim, the
Islamic world is willing to ignore, tolerate and sometimes justify.
When the killer is not a Muslim, then there is absolutely no justification.
If one Muslim kills one thousand Muslims in a premeditated act, the average
Muslim thinks it's a bad event, but life goes on.
if one non-Muslim kills ten Mulims by accident, the average Muslim views it
as an unspeakable atrocity that nothing can possibly justify and that must be avenged.
This attitude explains why, for example, the Islamic world hates George W Bush
more than Saddam Hussein or any mass terrorist: from the point of view of the
average Muslim,
Bush "screwed" up the Arab world but Saddam Hussein and all the other Arab
mass murderers (who killed a lot more Muslims than Bush) did not.
The media simply reflect that attitude.
There are certainly brilliant intellectuals who know the truth and realize who
is guilty of what. But they cannot do much: if they challenge the popular
opinion, they are despised and persecuted, and eventually have to leave the
country and settle in a Western country.
It doesn't help to change the mindset in their country of origin.
The same odd attitude applies to Western politicians.
The average Arab firmly believes that USA politicians are despicable and
untrustworthy people, as if their presidents, prime ministers
and kings were any better: they are obviously much worse. So much worse than
millions of Arabs prefer to live abroad. Arabs in Israel enjoy more rights than
Arabs in Arab countries (starting with the right to vote).
In the wave of democratization that has swept the world after the fall of
the Soviet Union, the Arab world has remained painfully behind. The vast
majority of remaining dictatorships is concentrated in the Arab world.
It should be self-evident that someone living in or coming from that region
should not criticize Western politicians but envy them.
It's the exact opposite: the worst Arab dictator (pick your favorite, from
Mubarak to Assad) is viewed as more credible and respectable than the president
of the USA or the prime minister of Israel.
On the other hand, don't view Muslims as evil people that fabricate all these
accusations for fun. The vast majority are very honest and good people.
It actually gives them peace to get angry against the non-Muslims in order
to defend Muslims. When they trade fictional stories about Muslims being victimized
by non-Muslims, they somehow reassure each other that they faith is good.
Whenever they are forced to listen to the other version of the facts (for
example, to Israel's reasons, or to an unbiased account of the civil war in
Iraq, or to the horrors of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan), they lose
their sense of security. Some of them may even have a heart attack.
They argue about politics the same way that they recite the Quran: there is
a standard list of complaints and recriminations that they expect to simply
recite, not to be asked to use logic and facts to discuss. In most cases
the logic alone would easily prove that they don't have the correct facts,
but, again, they expect to simply recite the narrative they have memorized
in mosques and cafes.
The world according to the average Muslim is simple.
The Islamic world is perfect. Muslims are perfect. All the problems in the
world, and particularly in the Islamic world, are created by non-Muslims.
Whenever something happens in the world, there is a template that Muslims use
to interpret it and that within minutes changes the narrative into one in which
Muslims are innocent, Muslims are victims, Muslims are heroes.
We (the rest of the world) see an Islamic world that is full of problems,
and we see that the Islamic world is at war against everybody (USA, Israel,
Russia, China, India, Africa, Philippines, Thailand...)
All the problems in the Islamic world are created by Muslims, and in particular
by their religion (Islam).
The vast apparatus of science, history and politics that European, Chinese and
Indian civilizations have created over the last decades is scorned by the
Muslim masses, who perceive all of that as an attack against their civilization.
In a sense, they are right, because the Islamic religion is inherently
opposed to modern values.
The net result is a vicious process of distorting the facts that is very similar
to what the Soviet Union was doing decades ago. The difference is that the
Soviet Union was forcing its people to accept false statements, whereas in
the Islamic world (and particularly in the Arab world) the anti-Western
propaganda is created in the streets and in the cafes by ordinary people.
The difference is that in the Soviet Union there was a vast government
apparatus devoted to censorship of any news that would hurt the reputation
of the communist system, whereas in the Islamic world the censorship against any
criticism of the Islamic world is created by ordinary people.
The positions are reversed: in the Soviet Union ordinary people knew that
the government was lying, but they were powerless to object;
in the Islamic world it's the government that knows that the people are lying,
but it finds more expedient to go along the lies than to establish the truth.
For example, any journalist who has dared give Israel some credit has been
immediately persecuted by its government after the masses got outraged, not
viceversa (the masses got outraged after the government denounced the journalist).
(The USA, and the West in general, has its own responsibility for creating
this climate of mistrust, but that's another story. See my
Report from a trip to the Middle East.
I am also painfully aware that Europe was in a similar situation until not
long ago. It's precisely because of what happened in Europe, and of what Europe
ended up doing to the rest of the world, that the attitude of today's Muslims
is worrying).
Coming to the worst part of the issue, the attitude of the Islamic world
towards suicide bombing has always been outspoken but the rest of the world has
always pretended not to hear it: the vast majority of Muslims has always
justified suicide bombers and often approved their action ("approved" is more
than "justified"). The numbers have decreased slightly over the years for a
simple reason: the majority of victims are now Muslims. The Islamic world was
united in thinking that suicide bombings was a legitimate tool when the victims
were mostly Jews, Christians and Hindus. Now that the vast majority of victims
are Muslims, the opinion has changed a bit. But the rest of the world is fooling
itself if it thinks that suicide bombings are tolerated only by the
"extremists". Ask ordinary housewives and high-school students, not politicians
and clerics who are paid to prove that "Islam means peace" (only when they
speak in English, of course). There is wide-spread adulation for suicide
bombers. There is wide-spread acceptance of the principle that, when you
commit a crime against me, i am then entitled to
kill someone from your family and even your neighbors and even someone who simply
lives in your city and anyone of your nationality and even anyone of your
religion anywhere in the world. Throughout the Islamic world you will find
very few people willing to condemn the killing of a person in retaliation
for a crime committed by another person. Therefore no surprise that most
Muslims tolerate, justify and sometimes openly approve of the killing of a Jew
in retaliation for something that was done by the government of Israel;
or the killing of a Danish person for something that was done by a small
newspaper in Denmark. In their logic this is a correct way of complaining:
just kill someone who is ethnically, religiously or politically related to
the real target. The rest of the world still has to grasp how widespread this
principle is in the Islamic world.
The truth is even worse. Very often it is obvious that a terrorist attack was
pointless or counterproductive. If you kill ten random Israelis, you have not
hurt the prime minister of Israel. You might, in fact, have killed some
Arabs, or some tourists, or even some Israelis who disagree with the prime
minister and would have voted against him at the next election. However, the
Muslim masses tend to be favorably impressed by such a terrorist attack.
Worse: this is true even when the victims are Muslims. When 100 people get
killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad, the normal reaction by the Islamic
world is to blame Israel and the USA for it (even when it is obvious that
the perpetrators are enemies of the USA). The second reaction (when it
becomes clear who the perpetrators were) is to side with the perpetrators.
Killing 100 people has some glorious attribute to a lot of "moderate" Muslims,
because they are 100 not because of the merits or faults of those people.
It's the number that matters.
When (october 2009) a massive suicide attack killed 50 people at a market in Pakistani, the main article on Al Jazeera's website seemed proud of the high number of casualties and commented that "it follows the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud by a USA drone attack, that the militants have repeatedly vowed to avenge". In other words, it was a legitimate act of resistance. The fact that the victims were random civilians (and even Muslims) do not seem to matter.
That's the reason why so many Muslims (of those who believe that Osama did it, as opposed
to blaming Israel or Bush for it) think that September 11 was justified:
it was justified for some Muslims to blow up 3,000 random people to avenge
whatever wrong the Christians are guilty of.
If you are a Muslim, you probably find this logic perfectly fine.
How much of these attitudes originates from religion (from the inherent
"jihadism" of the Quran and from the fact that the "Prophet" himself was a
warrior) can be debated forever. But denying the obvious and outspoken
attitude and thought of hundreds of millions of Muslims will not help solve
the problem.
There is no question that the Christian world has been even more violent than
the Islamic world is today. No religious group has killed so many people
as the Christian world. However, mostly Christians hated and killed other
Christians: French, Spanish, British, Germans, Russians, ... Most of their
wars were wars against other Christian powers. In any case even the Christian
world has been moving towards peace, democracy and civil rights,
and so are doing most of Asia, Latin America, and now even sub-Saharan Africa.
The Islamic world is being left behind on all fronts: economic, cultural
and political (not to mention the condition of women).
When i have discussions in the streets and cafes of the Arab capitals (and
this is mainly true of the Arab world, and not true of Turkey and Iran),
i sense that the very idea of coexisting peacefully with non-Muslims is a
contradiction in terms. The reason is simple: any ruler of a Muslim country
who entertains friendly relationships with the West (or Russia or China or
India) is viewed by the masses of his country as a coward and a traitor,
by definition. You begin to understand why Arafat never made compromises with
Israel: for the simple fact of being nice to Israel in any shape and form,
the Muslims of the world would have thought of him as a traitor. In the West
you win the Nobel Prize for Peace, but in the Islamic world they behead you.
Saddam Hussein was not terribly despised by the Arab world for his behavior
against his own people, but
became a hero of the Islamic world when he stood up against the USA; not because
he had become any better as a human being, but simply because he was a Muslim
doing... the thing that all Muslims should do, i.e. be hostile to non-Muslims.
Contrary to what most Westerners think, hostility towards the West is not
government-sanctioned
propaganda: it is the ordinary people who despise any politician who entertains
friendly relations with the non-Muslim world. It's the other way around:
the political elite of most Islamic countries would love to do business with
the world powers. They are stopped by the "street". Arab leaders are despised
not for the terror regime they created but for their friendly dealings with
the world powers. That is the ultimate sin: be friend with an infidel.
The Arab streets are willing to tolerate poverty, corruption, crime and even
sectarian violence, but not a friendly gesture towards a non-Muslim power.
I am pessimistic about the possibility that there can ever be peace and harmony
between the Islamic world and the rest of the world. They are moving in opposite
directions.
In order to have real peace between Islam and the rest of the world
it takes much more than words. It takes a much higher level of education.
The regimes and the media of the Islamic world, and in particular of the
Arab world, have to start teaching people the truth: that the trouble started
when a man came out of the Arabian peninsula proclaiming himself a prophet
and oppressing the other religions, that the kingdom he created invaded the
lands of the Christians and of the Jews and of the Zoroastrians and of the Hindus (de facto, the first "world war", and the first one fought with guns, the first "weapons of mass destruction"),
that many countries (not only Israel) have oppressed and still are oppressing minorities (Morocco invaded and still occupies the land of the Sahrawis, Turkey and Iraq oppress the Kurds, Sudan oppresses the Christians of the south, etc),
that Muslims occupy the holy lands of at least four religions (Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Zoroastrian),
that the Arab world has the highest percentage of totalitarian regimes in the world,
that Israel has a much better government than any of the Arab countries,
that many more Iraqis are killed by Muslims than by the USA,
that many more Muslims are killed by Muslims in the Arab world than in Palestine,
that many more Muslims were killed in civil wars like the Algerian civil war than in all the wars against Israel or the USA,
that many more Christians and Jews have left the Islamic world than Palestinians have left Palestine,
that millions of Muslims migrate to the Christian world but not viceversa,
that Muslims are welcome in the capitals of the other religions whereas non-Muslims are banned from Mecca,
that (for the first time in history) there is peace in all regions of the world except the Islamic world and its borders,
that the most famous Muslims are terrorists and dictators and not scientists and poets,
that Jews have won more than 100 Nobel Prizes whereas the entire Islamic world has won only six,
that the Indians, the Chinese, the Brazilians and just about everybody else on this planet has managed to rise from colonialism and create a good economy except the Islamic countries (most of which are poorer today than they were under the European empires),
that Arabs are ultimately the ones responsible for the downfall of their great civilization (and not everybody else is responsible for it except the Arabs),
and, last but not least, that the religion (Islam) is an important factor to explain all their problems.
All of these topics are still taboo in 2009.
The educational systems of the Islamic world, and in particular of the Arab
countries, produce not higher education but biased ignorance about the history
of their countries through the most severe form of censorship in the
entire world.
Obama doesn't seem to know that Al Jazeera routinely announces to its audience
of millions of Arabs that this or that scientific theory has been proven wrong,
from Darwin to Einstein.
Worse. The anti-Western stance is now often used to justify ignorance.
If you point out that Muslims know very little about Chromodynamics or the history of Russia,
they often reply that there is no need to study such things: it is Western propaganda that it is important to know such things to distract from the study of
the things that are really important (typically, anti-Western conspiracy
theories and the Quran).
Without adequate education (and the Arab world ranks last in education among
the regions of the world) even democracy becomes dangerous, as Iraq proved.
Check how many Arab universities make the
list of the top 200 of the world: none.
In the list of the top 500 universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, there are six Israeli universities but not a single Arab one. The Swiss-based World Economic Forum ranks Egypt (the cultural cradle of the Arab world) 128th in the world in primary education.
The report "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2007" found that less than 1% of students in Arab countries have an adequate education in the sciences, compared with 10% in the USA and even higher in Asia and Europe.
Any solution that we may suggest or try to implement for their problems
(whether accepting their immigrants in Christian Europe and allowing them
to practice Islam even in the capital of Christianity or signing free-trade
agreements with their governments or granting scholarships to their students or,
gog forbid, removing their hated dictators)
can be interpreted (and most likely will be) as another move in the holy crusade
against Islam. If we do nothing, that will also be interpreted as a move
in the holy crusade against Islam.
How do we dispel the notion that there is a world conspiracy against Islam?
It takes a lot more than a speech in Cairo, Mr Obama...
P.S.
Western media are routinely accused of generalizing and blaming the religion of
Islam for behavior and beliefs that are (according to scholars) un-Islamic.
I tend to believe that the Western media are more accurate than the people
who criticize the Western media. See my highly controversial article
Intolerance and modern Islam.
I think that Islam has a lot to do with the attitude of Muslims (both the
sense of being victims of a world-wide conspiracy and the aggressive stance
towards non-Muslims).
Having read all the main religious books of all the main religions,
there is no question in my mind that
the Quran is inherently more violent than other religious books, and Islam
is the only major religion that was founded by a man who personally killed
people (the Hadith prevail over the Quran whenever the interpretation is
dubious). That prophet killed them because they did not believe in his god,
which is precisely the opposite of the civil rights that the rest of
the world is trying to impose (the right of anyone to worship any god they choose).
That prophet created a Mecca where all other religions were and still are
banned, precisely the opposite of the multi-religious society that the rest of
the world is trying to create (there are mosques in Rome and Beijing, but no
Christian churches or Buddhist temples in Mecca).
Mecca "is" hell from the point of view of anyone who believes in religious
freedom.
It will always be very difficult for a Muslim (for someone who believes that
Mohammed was carrying out Allah's will) to accept a multi-religious society
and to open Mecca to other religions (the way Rome or Beijing or Kyoto
are open to all visitors and even immigrants). Mecca is open to neither
visitors nor immigrants from other faiths.
Hence there is no question that some of the traits that make it difficult
to coexist with Muslims are not going away any time soon.
Furthermore, i don't think that the most barbaric attitudes of today's
Islamic world were endemic of North Africa
or Mesopotamia or Persia or of the Indus Valley. These are all places that
were highly civilizes before Islam (in fact, the greatest Muslim scientists and writers
later came from these areas). I do think that the most barbaric attitudes
(all of them the consequence of a stone-age tribal mindset)
were endemic of the Arabian peninsula. Islam comes from there. I think that
the side effect of the Arabian religion of Islam has been to "export" these
Arabian attitudes together with the religion itself (were they encoded in
the Quran or not). Basically, Islam spread not only a religious idea but also
the customs of the Arabian peninsula.
The religion spread the evil vices (as well as the virtues) of the Arabian peninsula to the whole Islamic world.
The fact that most of Islam later fell into the hands of tribes coming from
Central Asia (like the Ottoman empire and the Mughal empire) only helped
cement those tribal attitudes.
In my opinion, most of the Islamic world (at least from Morocco to Pakistan)
is still living under the influence of the moral values of the Arabian desert
and of the Central Asian steppes.
In this case Islamic scholars are correct in pointing out that Islam is not
the source of the evil: Islam indirectly spread the evil, but the evil is not
embedded in Islam. By the same token, Italy and Spain exported Latin habits to
Latin America while it was converting Latin America to Catholicism.
See also
Report from a trip to the Middle East, which
also talks about the responsibilities of the West.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2009)
Dreaming a peaceful Islamic world.
There is a new Gallup poll out about the Islamic world.
It's pure fairy tale. It depicts the Islamic world as close to perfect.
Virtually nobody supports terrorism. Virtually nobody discriminates against
women. Virtually everybody wants peace and democracy.
A typical question is "Do you think that women should be allowed to work when
they are qualified for it"? The vast majority of Muslim men replied "yes".
But it's a trick question: ask the same men "what jobs are women qualified
for"? and you'll get the real picture.
Ask Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia not what they think of the USA (which is
pretty much what the French or the Russians think of the USA) but what they
think of Osama bin Laden: then you get the real picture (that the vast majority
does not hate him, and a sizeable minority views him as a hero).
It is very easy to get a standing ovation from a Muslim audience when one claims
that most Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people. But it does not explain
why so many Muslims are willing to use extreme violence (from suicide bombing
to beheading) to achieve their goals unlike the other six billion inhabitants
of the planet. John Esposito, the Italian-American who co-wrote the book
"Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think" based on this
Gallup Poll, fails to remember why the mafia prospered among the Italians:
because the vast majority of Italians were ambiguous about it. When the
Italians finally decided that the mafia was an evil to get rid of, the mafia
declined very rapidly. Esposito should look into his own roots to understand
why Islamic terrorism is prospering today throughout the Islamic world.
Denying that a problem exists is not a good way to find a solution.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2009)
Islam has not changed.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA there was a lively (and in my
opinion healthy) debate on the merits of Islam. Now that the USA is disengaging
from Iraq and that there haven't been any major terrorist attacks on the
West in a few years, people are beginning the forget. Unfortunately, nothing
has changed: the Quran is still the same book, and one billion people still
believe that the Quran is the word of a god named Allah and that Allah is the
only god.
(See Intolerance and modern Islam)
Islam is still Islam, and will not change any time soon. For example, Nasr
Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian intellectual, declared publicly that it is wrong to
keep slave girls. Sounds innocent enough? An Egyptian jury condemned him for
blasphemy, declared him a non-Muslim, divorced him from his wife (using the
clause that a Muslim woman is forbidden from marrying a non-Muslim) and was
de facto expelled from the country. All of this happened in the most "liberal"
of Arab countries. Just imagine what is happening on a daily basis in the
rest of the Islamic world...
Let us not forget who the real enemy is: religious superstistion.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2009)
How can the Arab masses be so gullible?
It should be self-evident that literally nobody is helping Hamas.
When someone shot rockets from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah went out of
its way to prove that it was not responsible
(See this article).
Iran is not even threatening the slightest of intervention
(See this article).
Egyptian state press has blamed Hamas for breaking the truce
(See this article).
And we all well know that Egypt has contributed to the Gaza embargo as much as
Israel.
It sounds like all Arab regimes are secretly happy that Israel is
killing all those Palestinians. It sounds like Hezbollah is secretly happy
that Hamas is losing a war after Hezbollah won one. And it sounds like Iran
is more interested in becoming a nuclear power than in saving Palestinian
lives.
The interesting question is: why do the Arab masses always blame only
Israel (and the USA) for what obviously all Arab countries are doing too?
How can the Arab masses be so gullible?
Why do they volunteer to become suicide bombers in Jerusalem but not
in Mecca or Cairo or Tunisi or Casablanca?
The Arab regimes are cowards who help Israel aim while hiding in
their palaces. They are as guilty as Israel of everything that Israel does
to the Palestinians.
In fact, Israel could not do what it does without the tacit approval
of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc etc.
And the ordinary Arabs who live under those regimes are guilty of not
doing anything to overthrow their regimes. They are cowards too: they
yell at Israel because it's free and easy, but they don't yell at their
own kings and tyrants because they are afraid of going to jail.
They want to become suicide bombers but then they are afraid of going
to jail... It would be funny if it weren't tragic and stupid.
The Hamas leadership that has called for Palestinians to blow up Israeli
malls, buses and markets should call for Palestinians to also blow up
Jordanian malls, Egyptian bus stations, Saudi markets, etc.
If the Hamas leadership doesn't, the Arab masses should finally (after 60
years) begin to wonder whether they are being used by Arabs who are no
less evil than their Israeli counterparts.
How can the Arab masses always be so ridiculously gullible and naive?
Furthermore, it should be so obvious by now that the Arab state media use
Israel's actions to deflect attention from those state's failures.
Israel's invasion of Gaza was
certainly timed with the last days of the Bush administration, but
it was also timed with the economic crisis that is beginning to grip
the whole Arab world: people are losing their jobs but they get distracted
by Israel's invasion. What a convenient coincidence for the failed Arab regimes.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- Articles on the Arab world before 2009
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