Yesterday, I posted on the impossibility of reaching an accommodation with the Arab world as long as they continue to believe any and all delusional conspiracy theories in relation to the West, specifically America and Israel, while at the same time insisting on our surrender. Since even people recognized as "moderates" tend to take part in the thought pattern, I thought it might be useful to differentiate between the manifest paranoid delusions that percolate through and persist in large parts of the Arab (and Western) body politics.
USAF_Linguist made some telling comments on the post yesterday. He was directing his attention to the Arabic media as a reflection of the thought processes at play. I would suggest the Western left shares the same thought structure. The following quotes are all from the comments of USAF_Linguist:
My classmates and I have been watching episodes of a popular Al-Jazeera series, "top secret," which is done along the lines of the "unsolved mysteries" series, but in arabic and frequently focusing on 9/11 conspiracy theories. I have noticed three main trends that I find intensely alarming in this series. Firstly, the level to which they buy into a Jewish/Israeli conspiracy (in today's episode for example, they made reference to a Mosad agent on the plane with Mohamed Atta).
The anti-American, anti-Semitic left fits right at home with this characterization. Cindy Sheehan was not the first and won't be the last to claim we went to war with Iraq for Israel at the behest of the neo-cons (ie, the "Jews".)
Secondly, their intense cultural insecurity; in almost every episode is someone saying how helpless the Arabs are and how they could never pull off something like the september 11th attacks.
This has parallels with the subtle racism of so many liberals who were so ready to believe that the Black Americans in New Orleans once free of the yolk of the police, were capable of vile rapes, murders, throat slitting of children, and cannibalism, all of which has since been discredited.
Of course, the "bigotry of soft expectations" is racism by any other name and has a long history among liberal supporters of the dependency culture.
Thirdly, the deification of the West, especially America and Israel. In the minds of the Arabs interviewed, the Mosad, CIA, FBI, American Military, and American people in general are omnipotent and infallible.
Here, too, the left believes that our President and military are evil, but omnipotent; against the wrath of Katrina, we should have held back the wind, rain, and tides. The more extreme conspiracy theories tend toward the purposeful smashing of the levees by the administration; those who rely on the media to frame the story will devolve to inept as a description of the administration, but only when it seems to have a better chance of discrediting the hated Bush-Hitler than the preferred "evil" depiction.
Arabs cannot believe that America could have screwed up as much as we did in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, and cannot believe that we did not know more about Sadam's regime than even he himself knew. Furthermore, Al-Jazeera has a wonderful habbit of interviewing fringe/looney westerners and treating them like experts. In one episode of the show, focusing on how Atta could not have been a terrorist, they interviewed a spokesperson from the LaRouche campaign, while in another they interviewed the French author of "The Big Lie." The shows cast the opinions of these fringe conspiracy nutters in the same light as spokespeople from intel organizations and the like, and frequently portay the intel officials in a way that makes them seem less than truthful.
The New York Times exemplifies the tendency of those on the left to cover their ears rather than engage in productive discourse. Now that their columnists are hidden behind the wall of Times Select, they are protected form the criticism of the radical right (ie, anyone who disagrees with them and has the temerity to use facts when they do so.)
Generally, the Arab acceptance of really wack-job conspiracy theories worries me more than most anything else. Their religion can be reformed,but their conspiracies combined with their apparent feelings of helplessness seem to me a very dangerous mixture.
The tendency to see the world through a Manichean perspective of all good versus all evil is shared by the Arab world and the Western left. This reflects an underlying fantasy structure which I will attempt to explicate in some future posts.
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