The Middle East:When lies are the foundation of policies.

The Middle East and Orwellian Historical Arguments

October 21, 2015 4:33 am / 8 Comments / victorhanson

When lies are the foundation of policies.

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Many of our policy debates and conflicts both domestic and foreign call on history to validate their positions. At home, crimes from the past like slavery and legal segregation are used to justify present policies ranging from racial set asides to housing regulations long after those institutions have been dismantled. Abroad, our jihadist enemies continually evoke the Crusades, “colonialism,” and “imperialism” as justifications for their violence. Yet the “history” used in such fashion is usually one-sided, simplistic, or downright false. Nor is the reason hard to find: as we read in 1984, “Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Bad history is a powerful instrument for gaining political power.

Nowhere is the abuse of history more rampant than in the Middle East. Since World War II all the problems whose origins lie in dysfunctional tribal and religious beliefs and behaviors have been laid at the feet of “colonialism” and “imperialism.” Western leftists––besotted both by a marxiste hatred of liberal democracy, and by juvenile noble-savage Third-Worldism–– have legitimized this specious pretext, which now for many has become historical fact.

In reality, Europeans never had colonies in the modern Middle East, for the simple reason that the territory was controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Hence “colonialism” is irrelevant for that region’s history. The facts of that history teach us that the feckless incompetence of a series of Ottoman sultans, in pursuit of imperialist dreams of recovering their lost Balkan provinces and restoring their hegemony over Egypt, had financially weakened the empire and made it dependent on the European powers who lent them the money. As a result, it became the geopolitical “sick man” that England had to protect against Russian adventurism and Egyptian expansionism.

Historians Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh succinctly state the conclusion of a sober examination of these facts:

Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standingindigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate. Great-power influences, however potent, have played a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the region’s political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility. Even at the weakest point in their modern history, during the First World War and in its immediate wake, Middle Eastern actors were not hapless victims of predatory imperial powers but active participants in the restructuring of their region.

From the Ottoman decision to join the Central Powers in World War I in order to regain imperial status and recover lost territory, to the Hashemite clan’s inveigling England into giving them most of the Ottoman territories after the war, the prime movers in creating the modern Middle East were the Ottomans, Egyptians, and Arabs, not the “colonial” powers who, as great powers have done since ancient Sumer, attempted to influence events in order to advance their own interests. But that’s not “imperialism” properly understood.

The most egregious example of this Orwellian history, however, is the predicating of Muslim violence against Israel on its status as a neo-imperialist Western stooge violently thrust into the “homeland” of the “Palestinian” people whose ancient lands were stolen by an “illegitimate” nation that continues brutally to “occupy” the territory rightfully belonging to the “Palestinians.”

Everything about this narrative is false. There is no such thing as a “Palestinian” people, an idea that arose only after the Six Day War of 1967. The bulk of the people mistakenly called “Palestinians” are ethnically, religiously, and linguistically indistinguishable from Arab Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria. Numerous comments by Arab leaders before 1967 emphasized this fact. For example, Zouhair Muhsin, a member of the Executive Council of the PLO, said, “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity… Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”

Second, the region in question was never an Arab homeland, and Arabs only began to inhabit it permanently after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637. Since then Muslim Arabs have come as conquerors, occupiers, migrant laborers, and immigrants, but they are no more “indigenous” peoples than Americans are of North America. On the other hand, abundant literary and archaeological evidence confirms the presence of Jews in the area and the status of Jerusalem as a Jewish city since 1300 B.C. This fact explains the Orwellian rewrite of history the Palestinian Arabs are currently engaged in, most despicably by destroying the archeological evidence on the Temple Mount that confirms the Jews’ presence on that site almost 2000 years before Islam even existed.

Third, the claim that Israel is an “illegitimate” state is false. Israel was created as part of the mandatory system put into place after World War I as part of the peace settlement, and confirmed by several international treaties, the League of Nations, and later U.N. Resolution 181. Except for the U.N. resolution, that same process created the new nations of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. If Israel is illegitimate, why aren’t those other nations? Could it be because for traditional Muslims, it is Jews who are illegitimate, not their state? Could that explain why over a million Arabs live in Israel, but any future Palestinian state must be Judenrein?

Finally, the charge of an “illegal occupation” of the “occupied West Bank” is a canard. Those territories, comprising the heartland of the ancient Jewish nations of Judea and Samaria, are disputed, their final disposition awaiting a peace treaty. There are no “borders” thought to define the mythical Palestinian nation. Those lines on the map are armistice lines, created after Israel defeated the armies of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in 1967. By all rights as the victor, Israel could have incorporated the so-called West Bank into the state of Israel, on the same eternal wages of war that led to the American Southwest being incorporated into the U.S. after the 1846-48 war with Mexico, or of Prussian Germany into Poland after World War II. Indeed, since the territory in question was for thousands of years the homeland of the Jewish people, Israel would have had abetter case for restoring Judea and Samaria to Israel. Instead, in the Orwellian history created by Muslims and accepted by the West, the indigenous peoples are considered the “occupiers” of their own lands, and conquerors, invaders, and colonizers considered the disenfranchised victims.

The recent suicide-murders of random Israelis by Palestinians have been analyzed in terms that perpetuate this false history. Our intellectually challenged Secretary of State, John Kerry, referred to this false history when he said at Harvard, “There’s been a massive increase in settlement over the course of the last years and there’s anincrease in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing,” he said. “Settlements” is nothing more than a mindless mantra, like “cycle of violence” or “checkpoints” or the “sanctity of the al-Aqsa mosque,” for the pusillanimous West, while for Muslims they are the pretexts for practicing their traditional Jew-hatred and sacralized violence.

The history this reporting on the Temple Mount ignores is the great forbearance, and to be sure tactical pragmatism, of the Israelis in leaving the Temple Mount under the management of the Arabs; while a mosque created as a triumphalist boast over conquered Christians and Jews, in a city never mentioned in the Koran, is respected more by the West than its own empty cathedrals. Meanwhile the travails of Muslim immigrants are hyped and agonized over more than the crucifixions, torture, rape, and murder of Christians in the greatest mass persecution of Christians in history.

These are the wages of historical ignorance and the acceptance of a history made up by an adversary who can “thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened,” as Orwell says of the Party in1984. Our foreign policy has often been predicated on these lies, and the outcome has been predictable when lies are the foundation of policies––the abject failure we are witnessing in the region today.

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Moral Equivalence in the Middle East

October 20, 2015 7:29 am / 17 Comments / victorhanson

The West has developed a dangerous concern for ‘proportionality.’

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have moreKoranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.

The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”

In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.

Two reasons stand out.

One, Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. Phony red lines, faux deadlines, reset with Putin, surrendering all the original bargaining chips in the Iranian deal, snubbing Israel, cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing the threat of ISIS, allowing Iraq to collapse by abruptly pulling out all American troops, giving way to serial indecision in Afghanistan, ostracizing the moderate Sunni regimes, wrecking Libya, and setting the stage for Benghazi — all of these were the result of administration choices, not fated events. One of the results of this collapse of American power and presence in the Middle East is an emboldened Palestinian movement that has recently renounced the Oslo Accords and encouraged the offensive of edged weapons.

Mahmoud Abbas, the subsidized president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State, and his subordinates have sanctioned the violence. Any time Palestinians sense distance between the U.S. and Israel, they seek to widen the breach. When the Obama team deliberately and often gratuitously signals its displeasure with Israel, then the Palestinians seek to harden that abstract pique into concrete estrangement.

Amid such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed the Obama pronouncements — from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of Netanyahu — and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.”

The more chaos there is, the more CNN videos of Palestinian terrorists being killed by Israeli civilians or security forces, the more NBC clips of knife-wielding terrorists who are described as unarmed, and the more MSNBC faux maps of Israeli absorption of Palestine, so all the more the Abbas regime and Hamas expect the “international community” to force further Israeli concessions. The Palestinians hope that they are entering yet another stage in their endless war against Israel. But this time, given the American recessional, they have new hopes that the emerging Iran–Russia–Syria–Iraq–Hezbollah axis could offer ample power in support of the violence and could help to turn the current asymmetrical war more advantageously conventional. The Palestinians believe, whether accurately or not, that their renewed violence might be a more brutal method of aiding the administration’s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in the Middle East.

But there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and anemic response from the White House. The Obama “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature.

Affluent and leisured Western culture in the 21st century assumes that it has reached a stage of psychological nirvana, in which the Westernized world is no longer threatened in any existential fashion as it often was in the past. That allows Westerners to believe that they no longer have limbic brains, and so are no longer bound by Neanderthal ideas like deterrence, balance of power, military alliances, and the use of force to settle disagreements. Their wealth and technology assure them that they are free, then, to enter a brave new world of zero culpability, zero competition, and zero hostility that will ensure perpetual tranquility and thus perpetual enjoyment of our present material bounty.

Our children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers — and thus they are schooled that competition is not just detrimental but also can, by such training, be eliminated entirely. Our adolescents are treated according to the philosophy of “zero tolerance,” in which the hero who stops the punk from bullying a weaker victim is likewise suspended from school. Under the pretense of such smug moral superiority, our schools have abdicated the hard and ancient task of distinguishing bad behavior from good and then proceeding with the necessary rewards and punishments. Our universities have junked military history, which schooled generations on how wars start, proceed, and end. Instead, “conflict resolution and peace studies” programs proliferate, in which empathy and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him to desist and seek help — as if aggression, greed, and the desire for intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have remained dangerous throughout history.

Human nature is not so easily transcended, just because a new therapeutic generation has confused its iPhone apps and Priuses with commensurate moral and ethical advancement. Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Deterrence — which alone prevented wars — was predicated on the shared assumption that starting a conflict would bring more violence down upon the aggressor than he could ever inflict on his victim. Once lost, deterrence was restored usually by disproportionate responses that led to victory over and humiliation of the aggressive party.

The wreckage of Berlin trumped anything inflicted by the Luftwaffe on London. The Japanese killed fewer than 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor; the Americans killed 30 times that number of Japanese in a single March 10, 1945, incendiary raid on Tokyo. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” was the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.

The tragic but necessary resort to disproportionate force by the attacked not only taught an aggressor that he could not win the fight he had started, but also reminded him that his targeted enemy might not be completely sane, and thus could be capable of any and all retaliation.

Unpredictability and the fear sown by the unknown also help to restore deterrence, and with it calm and peace. In contrast, predictable, proportionate responses can reassure the aggressor that he is in control of the tempo of the war that he in fact started. And worse still, the doctrine of proportionality suggests that the victim does not seek victory and resolution, but will do almost anything to return to the status quo antebellum — which, of course, was disadvantageous and shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies.

Applying this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American indifference to the region and Washington’s slapdowns of Netanyahu have reshuffled relative power. They now hope that there is no deterrent to violence and that, if it should break out, there will be only a proportionate and modest response from predictable Westerners.

Under the related doctrine of moral equivalence, Westerners are either unwilling or unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent. Instead, because the world more often divides by 55 to 45 percent rather than 99 to 1 percent certainty, Westerners lack the confidence to make moral judgments — afraid that too many critics might question their liberal sensitivities, a charge that in the absence of dearth, hunger, and disease is considered the worst catastrophe facing an affluent Western elite.

The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular — and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.