The Third World's love affair with Islamic fanatics

UK Telegraph ^ | 11/27/01 | R W Johnson

[veronica]

The Third World's love affair with Islamic fanatics

I first realised that militant Islam was beginning to provide the ideological leadership for the Third World as a whole when I attended the mass rally at the ANC's national conference in 1992.

It was an emotional occasion. The organisers announced to the vast crowd packed into Durban's King's Park stadium that delegates from all over the world were in attendance.

As the list was read out, there was a spontaneous cheer for Sweden: all the ANC activists knew that the Swedes had been generous supporters. This was easily eclipsed by the roar of approval that greeted the Cuban delegates.

But the greatest roar, and a standing ovation, came when it was announced that there was a delegate from Iraq. Suddenly, one noticed a flowering of Saddam Hussein T-shirts. Muslims probably accounted for less than one per cent of the crowd, which was overwhelmingly Christian.

But this was not long after the Gulf War, when Iraq had appealed for Muslim solidarity against the Great Satan. It should not be forgotten how seductive that appeal was - it swept even Yasser Arafat off his feet, and Muslims from Indonesia to West Africa enjoyed the thrill of this emotional jihad.

Non-Muslims enjoyed it, too. Although Iraq had been defeated, Saddam was spitting defiance at America and that meant he was still a hero. The Third World respects power like nothing else. Given this fact, it was of cardinal importance that the West should destroy him completely, and it hadn't.

After the fall of Kabul, this is a lesson we need to learn: only the extirpation of the Taliban and bin Laden will convey the right message. Why is the Third World so anti-Western?

Most ex-colonial states absorbed a good dose of Leninist anti-imperialism during their liberation struggles, and sympathised with Soviet tirades against America. The fall of Communism suddenly deprived the so-called non-aligned bloc of the leadership it had implicitly accepted on this issue.

In effect, Saddam Hussein filled the vacuum. As the Nineties progressed, this identification hardened as it became clear that the Third World's warriors against America were no longer North Korean, Chinese or Vietnamese. They were Muslim radicals.

Third World radicals, who had always idolised those most intransigent in the face of American power, such as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, could not help being impressed by the even greater intransigence displayed by the kamikaze tactics of Islamic fundamentalists.

In South Africa, we even had one provincial premier and Christian minister - the Rev Makhenesi Stofile - declare after September 11 that the Americans had it coming. All of which has wider implications for today's non-Muslim Third World than is often realised.

We should remember that Third World nations have naturally supported the struggles to liberate colonies anywhere in the world. In the Fifties, this meant French and British colonies; in the Sixties and Seventies, the Portuguese colonies; then Zimbabwe, Namibia and finally South Africa.

What was left was more problematic: the Falklands, Gibraltar, the Western Sahara. The only remaining "colony" that fitted the campaigning habits of a lifetime was Israel.

Here, recognisably white Western settlers were oppressing a recognisably non-Western population, whose representatives were seen as brothers-in-arms at conferences at which they rubbed shoulders with other Third World leaders.

Thus, attention came to focus ever more squarely on Israel; and, if Israel was a colony, its metropolitan power was America. Much of the Third World has accepted this definition of the situation, and is therefore lined up behind Muslim leadership - a situation pregnant with menace for Israel, and now equally for America.

Just as the Algerian war led to bombs in Paris and the Irish struggle to explosions in London, so September 11 is understood in much of the Third World as the moment when the struggle was brought back to the metropolis.

The only solution, seen in such terms, is the complete "decolonisation" of Israel: a withdrawal of American support for Israel as complete as the French withdrawal of support for French Algeria.

This vision of the future will become increasingly powerful in all those international forums, such as the UN, in which the Third World has a majority voice.

[StoneColdGOP]

Everyone hates the fella on top of the mountain.

[Brian Allen]

Why is the Third World so anti-Western?

ENVY!

The only one of the Seven Deadly Sins that offers no instant, short-term, mid-term or long term gratification but which guarantees only the kind of motivation whose only product is an eventually-all-consuming hatred and rage!

Despite that it eventually twists the faces of all who use it into masks of incredible ugliness -- or drives then into alcoholism and various forms of self abuse and degeneracy -- ENVY -- and its products and byproducts are every breed of the mental illness called "liberalism's" principal primary tools.

[AGAviator]

So Greece is "Third World Islamic Fanatic"?

In Greece, they burn US flags and jeer the minute's silence for New York's terror victims. Helena Smith on the most anti-American country in Europe

"What was wrong with those attacks," says the upright Greek businessman speaking of 11 September, "was that they didn't happen at night. If they had happened then, the towers and perhaps even the Pentagon would have been empty."

The businessman, let's call him Giorgos, has one of those pleasant, open faces. He wears a European Commission flag pinned to his lapel, and is explaining, quite calmly, how the average Athenian sees the day that changed the world.

"In Greece," he murmurs in a matter-of-fact way, "we regard this as a textbook case of David versus Goliath. America is overly arrogant and it needed to be brought down to earth. The attacks were the consequence of all its sins - Kosovo, Korea, Vietnam and Cyprus, a classic case of American double standards; 11 September was a taste of its own medicine."

America is widely disliked throghout the world for its double standards of which its Middle East policies are simply the most egregious example.

If America can't make the lives of other people in the world better by promoting freedom and justice for all people, not just some, and instead supports oppressive regimes which don't have the support of the world's population, and instead chooses as its destiny to attack and punish rather than to build and uplift, we will soon find we will have eveyone in the world against us.

Then Bush can huff and puff about "terror" all he wants, just like his Israeli counterpart and it will simply make his - and our - country more enemies.

[timestax]

The USA is just one islamic/muslum terrorist attack away from total chaos. They better think about it before they try anything.

[timestax]

Why is the Third World so anti-Western? ENVY!

Yep, that describes those islamic wierdos to a " T" !!

[Brian Allen]

America is widely disliked throghout the world for its double standards of which its Middle East policies are simply the most egregious example.

Bullshit!

[constable tom]

The third world is third because they have cultures that are deficient in their ability to define and devise effective governmental and economic structures.

Infidel dog! How dare you mock Allah with your western words! Abdullah! Stop the Mercedes, get out, and beat this infidel westerner. Do as I command, you mangy cur! My wives are offended.

[monkeyshine]

Unquestionably.

Israel is not a colony. It is an independent nation with 6 million inhabitants. The parallel doesn't work.

[AGAviator]

So what's the constant whining about "they don't like us" for, and "our allies aren't supporting us enough," then?

After September 11 about one third of people in Moscow were polled as saying we deserved it, plus many people in South America, India, and China - all non-Islamic countries. Oh and let's not forget Cuba and Africa. Yeah I know they're nothings, but you know what? There's billions more where they come from.

That's the real world and that's what happens when your policies are based on thinking onself better than everyone else on the planet and not having to play by the same rules.

The reaction to this arrogance is what you dismiss as "envy."

There will be a lot more of your "envy" coming our way in the years ahead from many different countries, with less and less for them to be envious of as we sink beneath the weight of trying to rule the world without ever making a serious attempt to make it better. You may not like it, but tough shit!!!

[NixNatAVanG InDaBurgh]

Do you understand that we ARE the best, AGA? We are the best because we fought for our freedom and WON. We won and we have never lost it, while the rest of the world NEVER HAD IT. We are free to be the best, and even the worst we want to be, at whatever we decide to do. We rise and fall on our own ingenuity, entrepeneurship, risktaking, and thinking that we CAN succeed, even after we fail, often more than once, when all the rest of the planet knows they can't so they don't even TRY.
On a talkshow this morning, (yesterday morning,) I heard someone who had just returned from Italy relating how a long awaited visit to relatives never seen, left her stunned at the backwardness of the entire country, including her own family. They do not KNOW freedom. They know CHURCH and Mafia. Every country on the face of this earth, including the arrogant French who are far more worth disliking than we are, the twittery Brits who still think they are a major colonial power, and to a lesser extent, even the Canadians and Aussies have a self-imposed restriction or they would declare themselves unchained from the Crown and get with their own programs. For heaven's sake, they built a highway in Jamaica that Jamaican's can't use. It was built specifically for a *Royal* visit, used once, and never before or since. Take a spin around Charlotte Amalie. It will shock you.
Most countries have one or two fairly decent cities. We have hundreds of GREAT cities. No guilt here. So don't start picking out second and third world countries that have been here centuries longer than we have that still exist in a 19th century or earlier paradigm and blame us for it.
We have the guts. We have the minds and we don't know the meaning of *can't*. Far as I'm concerned, *can't* didn't try. We have the desire. And we will stay free because there is NO agenda greater than our vigilance and our willingness to keep it at all costs. Believe it.

[lavaroise]

What a bunch of unrepenting SOBs. It's been known that misery often angers the stubborn even more against God, any self doubt the dying had against God, he or she utterly rebels against them the minute they die. We could say this is the case of the third world. Never repent to them because they are poor or miserable, these people obviously are more stubborn in their ways than dying life itself.

[nopardons]

BIG BUMP !

[Brian Allen]

Pretty darn close! Cigar!

[Brian Allen]

John Derbyshire on NRO

Hesperophobia
On blaming the Jews. [Or US, come to that!]

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
September 13, 2001 5:00 p.m.

 

Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"

I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: While I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.

Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is hesperophobia.

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]

Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.

The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.

If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.

Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis</a>. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.

So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.

What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example — are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?

And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.

Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism. It was in part all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.

[dennisw]

You got it!

[dennisw]

Great and I just posted it to start a new thread.

[dennisw]

Americans worked hard and worked smart (very important!) and worked centuries to make this nation a great place to live. USA is not perfect but better than the alternatives......In most cases far far better.

[dennisw]

Looks like you are part of the hate America crowd too. Why not move to an Islamic nation or some other 3rd world pesthole and live the life you want?

This way you are happy and America is happy....A win-win situation!

[Long Cut]

We cannot "make the world better". We can, however, make it safer for truly peaceful folk. Yes, millions of angry, ignorant, ENVIOUS savages will disagree, but we can make millions of bullets. This terrorist foolishness must stop, and NO other nation seems to want to do what is required to stop it. If we must "go it alone", it will be messy. The point to remember is that at the moment an innocent life, unconcerned with the conflict, is taken, the cause becomes non-existent. We did not start this, they did. All else that happens is on them.

[Brian Allen]

Ref: #34

Great and I just posted it to start a new thread.

Thanks. I also posted it to the boards when it was first published and twenty times since in support of my argument in various places and to try and give the Blame-Israel/America chorus -- and every other theorist -- the opportunity to get up to speed with reality.

It is inarguably the Absolute Truth.

John Derbyshire's experience in the real world is -- without the steady diet of adrenelin upon which I continue to sup -- like a microcosm of my own. The man has been out there and done that -- and speaks every bit as much from his experience as from his classical education.

He is an immigrant in the process of consumating his love for My America [His Chinese wife just did -- and is a Truth Teller -- and I love him.