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The Arabic word shamata has its own power. The closest approximation to it is the German schadenfreude—glee at another's misfortune. And when the Twin Towers fell 10 years ago this week, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.
The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in New York, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than three decades of U.S. aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in that Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.
There were sympathetic vigils in Iran—America's most determined enemy in the region—and anti-American belligerence in the Arab countries most closely allied with the United States. This occasioned the observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations, and anti-American regimes with pro-American populations.
I traveled to Jeddah and Cairo in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In the splendid homes of wealthy American-educated businessmen, in the salons of perfectly polished men and women of letters, there was no small measure of admiration for Osama bin Laden. He was the avenger, the Arabs had been at the receiving end of Western power, and now the scales were righted. "Yes, but . . . ," said the Arab intellectual class, almost in unison. Those death pilots may have been zealous, but now the Americans know, and for the first time, what it means to be at the receiving end of power.
Very few Arabs believed that the landscape all around them—the tyrannical states, the growing poverty, the destruction of what little grace their old cities once possessed, the war across the generations between secular fathers and Islamist children—was the harvest of their own history. It was easier to believe that the Americans had willed those outcomes.
The two paragraph's emphasized above epitomize the plight of the Arab and the Muslims in the region. Last night, a second-rate libtard named Robin Wright was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show reciting the usual lying mantras of the Hollyweird/Academicide/Demonrat catechism of how and why the 9/11 debacle was somehow America's fault. The second paragraph emphasized above in bold is the typical whinging of second- and third-rate powers and of people who prefer hanging onto their victimhood. The Japanese and Chinese and S. Koreans have largely avoided this. They are First Class cultures that abhor the fingerpointing and female "it's his fault" blame culture of the very underdeveloped Arab and Muslim state of mind. Only the Arab world has had THREE [3] UN-sponsored Special Studies, the last two by Arab economists, intellectuals, and businesspeople themselves that have condemned the backwardness of Arab dictators. And the easy and lazy Arab conclusion always seems to be that, because the Americans work with Arab strongmen and Iranian Shahs in order to facilitate access to America's energy appetite, we are therefore totally and completely responsible for their plight.
Arabs and other Muslims [though not so much the Iranians] appear all too ready to blame America, the French, the British, anyone but themselves for the fact that they are a second-rate culture and a third-rate economic power, based on rentier income and persistent lapses in moral and ethical probity on any and all important issues concerning their own fate and destiny---to borrow another German word with resonant meaning, Shicksal. Fouad hesitates to use the word craven cowardice, but the patriarchal braggadocio of Arab males couldn't accept that in the last thousand years, they had only conquered their own women---the Turks had largely done the fighting and the leading in the Second Millenium for the so-called caliphate. Ajami proceeds to fill in the blanks:
In truth, in the decade prior to 9/11, America had paid the Arab world scant attention. We had taken a holiday from history's exertions. But the Arabs had hung onto their belief that a willful America disposed of their fate. The Arab regimes possessed their own sources of power—fearsome security apparatuses, money in the oil states, official custodians of religion who gave repression their seal of approval.
But it was more convenient to trace the trail across the ocean, to the United States. Mohammed Atta, who led the death pilots, was a child of the Egyptian middle class, a lawyer's son, formed by the disappointments of Egypt and its inequities. But there was little of him said in Egypt. The official press looked away.
There was to be no way of getting politically conscious Arabs to accept responsibility for what had taken place on 9/11. Set aside those steeped in conspiracy who thought that these attacks were the work of Americans themselves, that thousands of Jews had not shown up at work in the Twin Towers on 9/11. The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America's torment. The Americans had might, but were far away. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.
The masters and preachers of terror had told their foot soldiers, and the great mass on the fence, that the Americans would make a run for it—as they had in Lebanon and Somalia, that they didn't have the stomach for a fight. The Arabs barely took notice when America struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a blighted and miserable land at a safe distance.
But when Cobra II rolled into Baghdad after only desultory resistance and less than a month's fighting, the Arabs had to resort, with their Western enablers like Robin Wright and a thousand other lamestream MSMers, Hollyweirdos, Academicide nobodies, and corrupt Demonrat pols, to the old games of "stab in the back." The WMD had been destroyed or shipped to Syria by the paranoid monster Saddam before the war over a period of a couple of years and George Tenet's "slam dunk" was ridiculed by the castrati and crone-hives of the institutional surrender apparatus of the American left. The basic lack of backbone and moral probity at the heart of Arab politics surfaced with a third-rate mediocrity in the Iraqi Al-Maliki and had Petraeus and GWB not done the Surge in '06, the Demonrats would have inflicted another self-administered defeat on the US military---which seems to be their long-term goal: The fact that a hateful demon like Saddam could symbolize much that the Arabs admired in themselves says more than anything else about the backwardness of that part of the world.
....the American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit the Arab world itself. Saddam Hussein may not have been the Arab idol he was a decade earlier, but he was still a favored son of that Arab nation, its self-appointed defender. The toppling of his regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism.
It is said that "the east" is a land given to long memory, that there the past is never forgotten. But a decade on, the Arab world has little to say about 9/11—at least not directly. In the course of that Arab Spring, young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life.
America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn't brilliant at everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history. Now their world is what they make of it.
Indeed, though it has taken a decade to shake off the silly tropes the Arabs loved to repeat about "violation" by the Americans, when they themselves had a dictator in Saddam who had his own rape rooms to sodomize the wives of citizens who wished to meet their strongman in a family setting---just one example of the total loo-zer status of this culture---the feckless Palestinians are now once again begging for nationhood status after doing little to earn it on its own. Even though the West Bank Palestinians are willing to turn over an Israeli soldier held hostage---typical Arab perfidy and cowardice in action by their HAMAS brothers supported by CAIR, their treasonous Fifth Column now working "legally" in the USA to undermine any sense of Palestinian self-respect---the USA should not and must not blindly support Palestinian membership in the UN as long as they violate every tenet of human rights and civilized behavior by continuing to hold a relatively innocent Israeli soldier hostage.
I doubt this temporizing victim of leftist doctrine in our White House can rise to the occasion and demand that Israel at least get back its Corporal Shalit before giving the murderous thugs in Gaza any membership among nations that practice a bare minimum of humanitarian fairness and don't persist in self-defeating narratives of national suicide. Leave that to the North Koreans and take at least one tiny step to demonstrate that you are not all the cowardly loo-zers that history has shown you to be----with occasional exceptions under the right circumstances---ever since the end of the Abbasid Caliphate moved its capital to Iraq and then was destroyed by the Mongol Horde of Helagu in 1258.
Try pulling yourselves up by your socks and not simply succumb to cutting corners and fingerpointing---that will only keep the rest of the world's secret opinion that the Arab's are constitutionally unable to run any kind of democratic and representative society which takes into account the role of its own heterodox minorities such as Coptic & Greek Christians and Druzi and Alevis and several in Pakistan and other heterodoxies such as Shi'ism. Perhaps following a path such as the great subcontinental experiment of India is attempting to do so could serve as a move in the right direction.
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