Sowell and Khalidi: The Widening Gap

Last night, I watched PBS Evening News as an old friend and interlocutor, Rashid Khalidi, spoke in extreme language about America's culpability for the recent war in Lebanon and for the host of difficulties now besetting the US and the Middle East in general. It was the blame-game. Ralph Peters had just pointed out that the most intractable problem in the Middle East was, is and probably ever shall be the inability of the indigenous peoples there to ever take responsibility for themselves and their actions [although the Kurds are making good progress in escaping the eternal finger-pointing].

I understand where Rashid comes from because I formerly thought along the same lines, though not with the intensity and one-sided conviction Rashid now displays. Rashid is a good person, but he was either taking a position for emphasis last night, or he really believes that the US is primarily responsible for the Lebanese debacle. Either way, I have lost a bit of respect for a fellow who I know is, or was, much more nuanced and sophisticated in his analysis of the region and the vexing Palestinian problem than he seemed on PBS.

Unfortunately, Thomas Sowell may now have an equally valid point of view as Rashid, and perhaps there is simply no solution to the quandry we now face, no matter who is to blame:

Hate and humiliation are key forces that cannot be bought off by "trading land for peace," by a "Palestinian homeland" or by other such concessions that might have worked in other times and places.

Humiliation and hate go together. Why humiliation? Because a once-proud, dynamic culture in the forefront of world civilizations, and still carrying a message of their own superiority to "infidels" today, is painfully visible to the whole world as a poverty-stricken and backward region, lagging far behind in virtually every field of human endeavor.

There is no way that they can catch up in a hundred years, even if the rest of the world stands still. And they are not going to wait a hundred years to vent their resentments and frustrations at the humiliating position in which they find themselves.

Israel's very existence as a modern, prosperous western nation in their midst is a daily slap across the face. Nothing is easier for demagogues than to blame Israel, the United States, or western civilization in general for their own lagging position.

Hitler was able to rouse similar resentments and fanaticism in Germany under conditions not nearly as dire as those in most Middle East countries today. The proof of similar demagogic success in the Middle East is all around.

What kind of people provide a market for videotaped beheadings of innocent hostages? What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish? What kind of people would fly planes into buildings to vent their hate at the cost of their own lives?

These are the kinds of people we are talking about getting nuclear weapons. And what of ourselves?

Do we understand that the world will never be the same after hate-filled fanatics gain the ability to wipe whole American cities off the face of the earth? Do we still imagine that they can be bought off, as Israel was urged to buy them off with "land for peace" -- a peace that has proved to be wholly illusory?

Even ruthless conquerors of the past, from Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, wanted some tangible gains for themselves or their nations -- land, wealth, dominion. What Middle East fanatics want is the destruction and humiliation of the west.

Their treatment of hostages, some of whom have been humanitarians serving the people of the Middle East, shows that what the terrorists want is to inflict the maximum pain and psychic anguish on their victims before killing them.

Once these fanatics have nuclear weapons, those victims can include you, your children and your children's children.

The terrorists need not start out by wiping our cities off the map. Chances are they would first want to force us to humiliate ourselves in whatever ways their sadistic imaginations could conceive, out of fear of their nuclear weapons.

After we, or our children and grandchildren, find ourselves living at the mercy of people with no mercy, what will future generations think of us, that we let this happen because we wanted to placate "world opinion" by not acting "unilaterally"?

We are fast approaching the point of no return.

Remember when everyone believed Israel went over the top by blowing up Osirak in 1981? Subsequent behavior by Saddam proved Israel was prescient in preventing an aggressive megalomaniac from acquiring nukes. Iran with nuclear weapons is going to be worse than Saddam, given Shi'ite chiliastic preoccupation with the return of the Hidden Imam on the Yoom Ad-Diin [Last Day] to right the wrongs of the world after evil [read Israel] is destroyed. My Sevener or Twelver Shi'ism theology goes back three decades and hasn't been refreshed recently, so cut me some slack. Ahmedinejad before the UN described the aura he perceived around himself much like Adolph Hitler described his own illumination on a hill outside Linz in 1906 [remember the WH Auden "September 1, 1939" reference to this epiphany?]

This should send a shiver up the bones of even the most-dedicated multicultural hand-holding "Can't we just talk about this" Theo Van Gogh one-worlder.

Predictably, however, the UN Group of Six will continue to [metaphorically] smoke their weed and ask Iran "why can't we just all get along together?"