Why the Muslims Misjudged Us
They hate us because their culture is backward and corrupt.
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
[CIA-Rockefeller Manhattan-Institute -&- MI + Victor Davis Hanson] Monday, February 25, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
Since September 11, we have heard mostly slander and lies about the West from radical Islamic fundamentalists in their defense of the terrorists. But the Middle Eastern mainstream--diplomats, intellectuals and journalists--has also bombarded the American public with an array of unflattering images and texts, suggesting that the extremists' anti-Americanism may not be an eccentricity of the ignorant but rather a representative slice of the views of millions.
Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz reportedly announced from his Cairo home that America's bombing of the Taliban was "just as despicable a crime" as the September 11 attacks--as if the terrorists' unprovoked mass murder of civilians were the moral equivalent of selected air strikes against enemy soldiers in wartime. Americans, reluctant to answer back their Middle Eastern critics for fear of charges of "Islamophobia" or "Arab smearing," have let such accusations go largely unchecked.
Two striking themes--one overt, one implied--characterize most Arab invective: first, that there is some sort of equivalence--political, cultural and military--between the West and the Muslim world; and second, that America has been exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by pillars of utter ignorance. Few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins or history of democracy, a word that, along with its family (constitution, freedom and citizen), has no history in the Arab vocabulary, or indeed any philological pedigree in any language other than Greek and Latin and their modern European offspring. How much easier for nonvoters of the Arab world to vent frustration at the West, as if, in some Machiavellian plot, a democratic America, Israel and Europe have conspired to prevent Muslims from adopting the Western invention of democracy! Democracy is hardly a Western secret to be closely guarded and kept from the mujahideen. Islam is welcome to it, with the blessing and subsidy of the West. Yes, we must promote democracy abroad in the Muslim world; but only they, not we, can ensure its success. Wall Street Journal | Why the Aryan Law Source: E. H. Schulz and R. Frercks, Warum Arierpargraph? Ein Beitrag zur Judenfrage (Berlin: Verlag Neues Volk, 1934). The barriers between Germans and Jews fell as a result of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The path to Jewish world domination would take a different direction than pious, observant Jews had expected. Emancipation made it possible to build Jewish dominance through secular means. With the disappearance of racial consciousness, only religious differences seemed to remain. It seemed at the time unjust to give someone a preferred position only because of his religious beliefs, which are an entirely personal matter. At the time, this was tied to a belief in human equality and freedom. It was revolutionary. It shattered the church dogmas that had ruled for centuries and was the foundation of liberal thinking during the last two hundred years. The new goal was humanity itself, and nothing stood in the way of racial mixing. Some had the quiet hope that assimilation would mean the absorption of Jewry. Jewry itself, however, was more than willing to use the opportunities of religious assimilation, which opened the path to all important positions, even to political leadership. As H. Heine said, "baptism was the ticket to European culture." Gradually, an intermixing with the German people developed, particularly in its cultural elite. Foreign blood infiltrated to a degree that we realize only today now that the "Law to Reestablish a Professional Bureaucracy" has exposed numerous sources of foreign blood. This process has greatly accelerated during the last fourteen years. Today the age of raceless thinking is being displaced by the ideals of human variability. Values are rooted in origin and territory, and each group has a historic mission based on its own unique and eternal values. Such new racial thinking will of course secure the opposition of those who either through faith or reason still believe in the unity of humanity in culture, social order and organization. The Jews will naturally oppose any discussion of race, since the denial of any significant differences between people is the foundation of his infiltration of Western European society. The Jew finds any mention of the racial question as an attack on his current existence. His leading role in every anti-national area is characteristic of his mimicry, and is necessary for his continued existence. That explains the phrase "German citizen of the Jewish faith." The recognition that the Jew is of a foreign and different race along with the reawakening of German racial consciousness must necessarily lead to a change in the relations between Germans and Jews. --German Propaganda Archives |