Posted on 09/08/2002 12:38:13 PM PDT by Lockbox
Palestinians have no compunction about telling lies and see truth as irrelevant, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has claimed in an interview. "They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie... creates no dissonance," Mr Barak says. "They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture."
"Truth is seen as an irrelevant category," he says."There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as 'the truth'."
Interviewed by the Jewish historian Benny Morris for an article in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Mr Barak not only relates his comments about lying to Yasser Arafat in particular, but to Arab society in general.
He says: "The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation once told me that there are societies in which lie detectors don't work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance [on which the tests are based]."
As an example of Mr Arafat's alleged mendacity, Mr Barak cites an incident in October 2000, shortly after the start of the intifada. The Israeli and Palestinian leaders, together with Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state at the time, were meeting in Paris to discuss a ceasefire.
Mr Arafat had agreed to call a number of his police commanders to implement a truce.
Mr Barak recalls protesting: "'But these are not the people organising the violence. If you are serious, then call Marwan Bargouti and Hussein al-Sheikh [two West Bank Fatah leaders].'
"Arafat looked at me, with an expression of blank innocence, as if I had mentioned the names of two polar bears, and said, 'Who? Who?'
"So I repeated the names, this time with a pronounced, clear Arabic inflection... and Arafat again said, 'Who? Who?'
"At this, some of his aides couldn't stop themselves and burst out laughing. And Arafat, forced to drop the pretence, agreed to call them later."
Milosz gives this practice a name, Ketman, which, he says, is 'To say something is white when it is black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one's adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one).' (The Captive Mind, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985 (1953, p 57.) He derives the name "Ketman" from a practice of deception in Islamic societies described by Gobineau during the last century: 'He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and maintain in error.' The necessity of this practice derived, Gobineau suggested, from the extreme sanctions applicable under religious fundamentalism to those who strayed from orthodoxy.
Extending the idea to socialist totalitarianism, Milosz describes a number of different varieties of Ketman, including National Ketman, to espouse belief in the centrality of Russian socialism while secretly remaining attached to your own national culture; Ketman of Revolutionary Purity, to practice modes of revolutionary rigour, such as the ruthless elimination of weak human links in the ideological chain, while secretly believing in ordinary human values and sometimes even practising them; aesthetic Ketman, to infiltrate into your novels, poems or paintings hidden humanist symbols and messages while apparently expressing loyal Party social realism; and professional Ketman, to practice Party science or art, which imposed a political line on reality, attending the right conferences and gatherings in order to announce this, while secretly practicing real art and science in the privacy of the laboratory or study.
From this link.
Thanks to Barak for pointing out this ingrained tendency of Muslims to deceive.
This is something I've been pondering for a while. I've never understood how they could tell such transparent lies so bald-facedly. Of the various things I've seen that could be a reason, this is more straight-forward and simpler than most.
"The Arab, that child of the lie....." Says it all.
LOL! You have just described exactly why the American press essentially can never be believed!
(There is a difference, though -- among the American press it's considered poor form to be caught too far out, but that's only because some of the population here will call them on it.)
Do you mean "Not all Arabs are Muslims"?
Didn't you know? He was the first Black Muslim President. [-;
Did you mention this book about 3 weeks ago? Someone here recommended it and I got it from the library. It's a great book and it is an eye opener as you say. Uris has a great feel for the situation and realism about it. He really peers into the Arab mindset.
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