Author: Leon de Winter
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: August 16, 2004
Anyone who follows the developments
in the Arab Islamic world will be struck by the complete absence of self-knowledge
and introspection that characterizes these vexed cultures. Almost every
problem is attributed to hostile external forces. The poverty and underdevelopment
that plague most of the Arab world are the result of malicious machinations
of Americans and Jews. This is no less true of the disaster in Darfur.
Last week UPI reported that the Sudanese foreign minister Mustafa Osman
Ismail had told journalists in Cairo that his government possessed "information
that confirms media reports of Israeli support (for the rebels in Darfur)."
He added that he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of Israeli
contacts with the rebels."
What Mr. Ismail said, and the eagerness
with which the Arab Islamic press publicized it, highlights the hopeless
position of the forces for modernization in North Africa and the Middle
East. Within the existing cultural context it is practically impossible
to subject the widespread abuses in Arab countries to reflection and objective
analysis in order to obtain a clear picture of their causes and effects.
Not only are "self-reflection" and "objective research" alien concepts,
there is no need to analyze causes and effects since both are by definition
already known. The causes are always the diabolical forces of Jews and
Christian crusaders, a central dogma even among Arabs and Muslims who have
not yet joined the queue to blow up some Iraqi police station for al Qaeda.
The effects are always the sufferings of the Arab nation and the ummah,
the global Islamic community. Infidels, in pact with the devil, have hoodwinked
and deceived the ummah, depriving it of its God-given right to rule supreme
over the world.
On July 29 Egypt's government newspaper,
Al-Ahram, published an article entitled "The Key to the American Voting
Booths Is in Darfur: The Plot which Is Called Oil." An English translation
of the article can be found on the Middle East Media Research Institute's
Web site at www.memri.org.
Al-Ahram is probably the most important
newspaper in the most important and populous Arab country. The article
is typical for the kind of hatred and paranoia that pervades much of the
wider Arab Muslim world. Given the tight control the Egyptian state has
over the media in general and Al-Ahram in particular, the paper's views
must also be seen as reflecting the views of the country's ruling elite.
"Bush is awaiting his fate in November and the U.S. is planning to make
Darfur an easy path towards its major plan to transport the (Persian) Gulf
Oil and the African oil to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, so that Washington
can meet its needs in the next decade," the article said.
This is the oil card--a tried and
tested recipe according to Michael Moore's model that reduces American
government policy to the interests of the oil industry. It shatters any
hope one might have had of a rational Arab approach to internal Arab problems.
The entire Arab-Islamic world is convinced that Jews and crusaders are
continually conspiring to steal Arab wealth-forgetting that thousands of
billions of dollars have been paid into the accounts of Arab and Islamic
oils states over the past decades--and this article accuses the West of
misusing the crisis in Darfur to lay its hands on Sudanese oil.
The entire Arab-Islamic world has
ignored the humanitarian disasters in Darfur, but they require an explanation
for the curious attention the deaths of tens of thousands of black Muslims
have received in the West--which Arab opinion maintains despises Muslims
and Africans. According to the Arab-Islamic view the West is not driven
by a sincere concern for over a million innocent Muslims, but by oil. We
Westerners are simply hypocritical when we shed crocodile tears for Darfur,
the Arab-Islamic media claims.
Facts are not important here. What
matters is how phenomena are "experienced" and how they fit into the underlying
plot that explains the world to the average Arab and Muslim: the Muslim
is the victim of conspiracies.
This is what, according to BBC World
Service Monitoring, the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi had to say about
the rather timid U.N. resolution demanding an end to the massacres: "For
the U.N. Security Council decision to give the Sudanese government one
month to disarm the jingaweit militias or face economic and diplomatic
sanctions is yet another link in the chain of efforts to target Arab and
Muslim countries by the U.S. and the Western world in general."
Based on this simple idea everything
falls into place. It explains why power is in other people's hands, when
it should be the ummah that holds sway; it explains the poverty, inferiority,
the way the West supposedly tries to tempt pious Muslims with obscenities
such as film, television, music, dance and drink; it explains the appalling
conditions in the Palestinian territories and the unemployment in Morocco,
the lack of modern research and development in the universities; it explains
the internal Arab divisions; it explains why a third of all Arabs have
less than two dollars a day to spend; it explains why the superior Islamic
world is-temporarily-the victim of the inferior West.
Satan, devils and spirits are not
just symbols. They are actual living phenomena in Islam. The notion of
conspiracy is an essential aspect of modern Muslim religious philosophy
and of Islamic world history.
This is what remains, in the perspective
of many Arabs and Muslims, of European and American reports in the press
and media, of the fundraising campaigns, of our disgust, anger and astonishment
at the fate of hundreds of thousands of Islamic victims in Africa. It is
unimaginable that we infidels might be inspired by compassion. Because
an unbelieving crusader or Jew could never be inspired by compassion. After
all, unbelieving crusaders and Jews are too busy ensuring the diabolical
downfall of the ummah. While the crusader and Jew may seem compassionate,
in fact they are cunning conspirators.
So last Sunday, foreign ministers
of the 22-member Arab League rejected "any threats of coercive military
intervention in the region or imposing any sanctions on Sudan."
Darfur is not just a humanitarian
disaster. Darfur shows once again, and more tragically than ever, that
the Arab-Islamic world is a hostage of its own delusions and will not lift
a finger to prevent the deaths of countless fellow Muslims.
This article appeared in the August
16, 2004 Wall Street Journal Europe.
Leon de Winter is an adjunct fellow
of Hudson Institute.
