Two news items ought to be required reading for every Western official dealing with policy towards the Middle East. one is the Italian Psychoanalyst David Gerbi's failed attempt to re-open a Synagogue in post-Qaddafi Libya; the other is the increasingly ferocious attacks on Egypt's Christian minority. Both suggest that the Arab revolts against the long-reigning strongmen of the Middle East will bring about more radically Islamicist and anti-Western regimes.
Gerbi, who is of Libyan Jewish birth, apparently believed the propaganda about the Libyan rebels representing a more open, tolerant, and democratic regime. Having been booed out of his natal country with howls for his immediate deportation, perhaps he can take comfort that these were not howls for his death. Maybe this is the moderation that the "Arab Spring" represents. Or, perhaps, along with the attacks on one of the last functioning synagogues in Tunisia a few months earlier, it proves that the Arab peoples once again face a change of thugs-in-power who will whet a deep-seated desire for more anti-Jewish and anti-Western demagoguery.
The attacks on Egypt's Christians--the last carriers of the language (in the form of liturgical Coptic) and elements of the culture of the ancient, Pharaonic Egyptians--further warns of the power of Muslim radicalism across the Arab world. The attacks of the last week are not de novo, but have a number of precedents reaching back into the waning years of the Mubarak dictatorship, when the regime was often successful in deflecting hatred of the regime towards the Coptic Christian minority. With Nasser's successful snuffing out of Egypt's millennia-old Jewish community as a precedent, Islamic radicals apparently hope that they may now make Egypt purely Islamic, by snuffing out the Copts.
This wave of Islamic radicalism bodes ill for the Middle East Peace Prospect. The very existence of states like Israel, and Christian Lebanon earlier, are an affront to Islamic doctrine, which posits perpetual Muslim supremacy over the Peoples of the Book; for these states exist on lands that have been under Muslim rule for centuries, apart from the very brief interlude of Western colonialism (which, incidentally, were the only period since the eruption of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula when a non-Muslim's word in court carried as much weight as a Muslim's). The likelihood that an Egyptian regime dominated by the Islamic Brotherhood will maintain its cold peace with Egypt is small; the likelihood that an Islamicist-dominated Egypt will throw its weight behind an increasingly Hamas-dominated Palestinian Arab entity is great. This rejectionism probably will further continue to dominate until a future Arab-Israeli War results in the Islamicists producing no more than an unbearably high number of "martyrs" killed by an Israel that will recognize that it has no alternatives but clear-cut victory or death. Should such a wave of Islamic radicalism engulf Israel, the Balkans and Spain are probably the next countries that must get very, very worried.
At present, most of the Western world is in a state of denial (not a river in Egypt, pun intended) about the danger posed by the new Arab regimes. We have convinced ourselves too long that Islam is at heart, a "tolerant" religion (ask the Armenians, extinct Mizrahi Jewish communities, the Copts of today, or Pastor Nardakhani aawaiting execution in Iran for apostasy from Islam about "Islamic tolerance"), especially since a line of cultural elites from the writers of the French enlightenment to today's so-called multi-culturalists have ever sought convenient sticks to beat the dog of the West's Christian heritage. But the handwriting is on the wall, and it is our choice to read and heed it if we will.
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Monday, October 10, 2011
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Undiplomtatic Activity in Egypt
I fear that the Egyptian mob actions show that all governments are representative of their peoples, whether they intend to be or not; and that people's theologies matter.
John Adams famously said that the US Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and would work for none other. The religiosity he understood was that bounded by the Anglican Church on the Right and his own Unitarians (still biblically oriented in his day, rather than the free-form faith we know today) on the Left, with the Reformed (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed) right in the middle; and a few sprinklings of Roman Catholics and Jews. Indeed, he spoke after two centuries of agitation for rule of law and checks on the balances of kings, which, in his Anglophone context, meant the politics of the more thoroughly Reformed persuasion. This stemmed from a deep humility about what human nature was after the Fall of Adam, and a corollary that, rather than have Leviathan grab all power and right to prevent the war of all against all (viz. Hobbes), no set of human hands should ever have too much political power.
In the Muslim lands, it seems that there is a choice only between strongmen and uncontrolled mobs. The strongmen, when they take power, must pander to the supremacism, hatred, and violence of the Muslim street lest they open the way for new strongmen to come and topple them. This is why Sadat was assassinated and why Mubarak prudently allowed the government-controlled media to spew venom.
Islam lacks a doctrine of original sin and holds its followers to be "the best of men". Hence, it can never conceive of Muslims truly wronging the Kufr, and when things go wrong, it causes people to ask "Who did this to us?" rather than "Where did we go wrong?" Add to this, its ethics represent a standard far below that of either Judaism or Christianity; as if fearing the charge of hypocrisy, it sanctified the lust, greed for plunder, and violence of at least the males among its members. Hence, it will sooner or later injure itself and blame another.
It is clear from this incident that the peace between Israel and Egypt, while sincere at the official level when Sadat made it, was sincerely greeted by the populace of only the Israeli side.
I also suspect that after the mob driving out the Israeli embassy, the Obama administration's use of good offices to secure the rescue and evacuation of the last Israeli diplomats will further enrage the Egyptian Muslim street. it may very well decide that it has the power to seize the US Embassy in Cairo, and precipitate a new major crisis between the USA and the Muslim world.
The apologetic tone Obama took towards the Muslim world at Cairo may thus prove repetitive of the Carter administration's stance towards the Pahlavi regime in Iran, and with the same unhappy results.
John Adams famously said that the US Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and would work for none other. The religiosity he understood was that bounded by the Anglican Church on the Right and his own Unitarians (still biblically oriented in his day, rather than the free-form faith we know today) on the Left, with the Reformed (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed) right in the middle; and a few sprinklings of Roman Catholics and Jews. Indeed, he spoke after two centuries of agitation for rule of law and checks on the balances of kings, which, in his Anglophone context, meant the politics of the more thoroughly Reformed persuasion. This stemmed from a deep humility about what human nature was after the Fall of Adam, and a corollary that, rather than have Leviathan grab all power and right to prevent the war of all against all (viz. Hobbes), no set of human hands should ever have too much political power.
In the Muslim lands, it seems that there is a choice only between strongmen and uncontrolled mobs. The strongmen, when they take power, must pander to the supremacism, hatred, and violence of the Muslim street lest they open the way for new strongmen to come and topple them. This is why Sadat was assassinated and why Mubarak prudently allowed the government-controlled media to spew venom.
Islam lacks a doctrine of original sin and holds its followers to be "the best of men". Hence, it can never conceive of Muslims truly wronging the Kufr, and when things go wrong, it causes people to ask "Who did this to us?" rather than "Where did we go wrong?" Add to this, its ethics represent a standard far below that of either Judaism or Christianity; as if fearing the charge of hypocrisy, it sanctified the lust, greed for plunder, and violence of at least the males among its members. Hence, it will sooner or later injure itself and blame another.
It is clear from this incident that the peace between Israel and Egypt, while sincere at the official level when Sadat made it, was sincerely greeted by the populace of only the Israeli side.
I also suspect that after the mob driving out the Israeli embassy, the Obama administration's use of good offices to secure the rescue and evacuation of the last Israeli diplomats will further enrage the Egyptian Muslim street. it may very well decide that it has the power to seize the US Embassy in Cairo, and precipitate a new major crisis between the USA and the Muslim world.
The apologetic tone Obama took towards the Muslim world at Cairo may thus prove repetitive of the Carter administration's stance towards the Pahlavi regime in Iran, and with the same unhappy results.
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