The Man And His Blog

Victor Davis Hanson's list of things he believes we have learned, or learned more deeply, about the warped lens through which Arab Muslims of the Middle East regard the West.

It is difficult in history to find any civilization that asks as much of others as does the contemporary Middle East—and yet so little of itself. If I were to sum up the collective mentality of the current Arab Middle East—predicated almost entirely on the patriarchal sense of lost “honor” and the rational calculation to murder appeasing liberals and appease murdering authoritarians— it would run something like the following:

(1) We will pump oil at $3 and must sell it over $50 — and still blame you for stealing our natural treasure.

(2) We will damn your culture and politics, but expect our own to immigrate in the thousands to your shores; upon arrival any attempt to integrate Muslim immigrants into Western pluralistic society will be seen as Islamaphobic

(3) Send us your material goods, whether machine tools, I-pods, or antibiotics. We desperately want them, but will neither make the necessary changes in our own statist, authoritarian, religiously intolerant, tribal, and patriarchal culture to allow us to produce them ourselves, nor will show any appreciation for the genius of others who can do what we cannot.

(4) We ostensibly wish you to stop the killing of Muslims by ourselves and others—Milosevic murdering Kosovars, Saddam destroying Kuwaitis, Kurds, and Shiites, Russians killing Afghans and Chechnyans — but should you concretely attempt to do so, we will immediately consider your intervention far worse than the mayhem caused by others or ourselves.

(5) Any indigenous failure in the Arab Middle East will eventually be blamed on the United States or Israel.

(6) Your own sense of multiculturalism must serve as an apology for our own violent pathologies, that can only be seen as different from, never worse than, your own culture.

(7) We must at all times talk of anti-Americanism and why we want you out of the Middle East; you must never become anti-Arab or anti-Muslim, much less close your borders to our immigrants and students.

(8) We will tolerate and often defend those who burn churches, ethnically cleanse Jews from our cities, behead priests, kill nuns, and shoot infidels as the necessary, if sometimes regrettable, efforts of our more zealous to defend Islam. But if any free spirit in the West satirizes Islam, we will immediately demand that Western governments condemn such blasphemy — or else!

(9) Material aid—billions to Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, or the Palestinians — is our entitlement. Any attempt to curtail it is seen as an assault on the Arab nation.

(10) We are deathly afraid of nuclear Russia, China, and India who have little tolerance for either Islamism or terrorism, and so will ignore their felonies, while killing you for your misdemeanors.

If you have to have a geopolitical adversary, we should be grateful that we have been blessed with such an obviously incoherent and incompetent one. It ought to be a huge advantage. Unfortunately, huge numbers of Westerners -- especially those schooled in our universities in the last thirty years and now populating the chattering classes -- are determined to cede that advantage. How? By declaring that it would be immoral to use the vast array of cultural, social, economic, political and military tools at our disposal for geopolitical gain against the Arab Muslims of the Middle East.

h/t TigerHawk