Note: Another article, by Jonathan Spyer on Israeli politics will be added later and I will inform you when it is available
MERIA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2010)
THE UK, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND ISRAEL: A SYMPOSIUM
Jonathan Spyer, Introduction HTML PDF
Douglas Murray, HOW THE UK ARRIVED AT THE PRESENT SITUATION REGARDING ISRAEL AND MIDDLE EAST ISSUES
HTML PDF
Ronnie Fraser, UK ATTITUDES TOWARD THE MIDDLE EAST: THE BRITISH TRADE UNION MOVEMENT HTML PDF
Jonathan Rynhold, THE MEANING OF THE UK CAMPAIGN FOR AN ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL HTML PDF
Jonathan Cummings, BRITISH-ISRAEL RELATIONS SEEN THROUGH VISITING ELITE OPINIONMAKER DELEGATIONS HTML PDF
Dave Rich, FROM BLOCKADE TO BOYCOTT: THE IMPACT ON UK JEWRY OF REACTIONS TO GAZA HTML PDF
Hadar Sela, ANTI-ZIONIST AND ANTISEMITIC DISCOURSE ON THE GUARDIAN'S COMMENT IS FREE WEBSITE HTML PDF
Colin Shindler, THE ROAD TO UTOPIA: THE ORIGINS OF ANTI-ZIONISM ON THE BRITISH LEFT HTML PDF
OTHER ARTICLES:
Elie Elhadj, ABU DHABI'S NUCLEAR POWER PLANT FOLLY HTML PDF
Gil Ehrenkranz, HOW THE UNITED STATES HAS BENEFITED FROM ITS ALLIANCE WITH ISRAEL HTML PDF
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Explaining Jewish Political Behavior
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We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
The key to understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in Europe and North America is the history of Jewish assimilation strategy. I tell the story more fully in my book, Assimilation and Its Discontents, but here is a short version, adapted for what’s happening right now.
This strategy was developed in Western Europe in the mid-1800s. There was no single theorist, influential book, or coherent doctrine. Rather, it was a pragmatic approach to the issue of how Jews could adapt to the pressures and opportunities of democratic societies. The assimilationist strategy continues to this day though people aren’t aware of it.
There were many—religious traditionalists, Zionists, and leftist revolutionaries—who pursued alternative routes but I’m not going to talk about them here. I am also fully aware of exceptions, such as the Jewish Bund and the post-World War One political situation in Poland, but cannot deal with them in this limited space. Please understand that the following points need to be generalizations but they are accurate ones.
The mainstream assimilationist approach has been as follows:
--Since the Jews were so weak and the surrounding majority so hostile, they would have to beg for equality and prove themselves worthy rather than to agitate or demand. Moreover, since Jews were attacked for allegedly having too much power, even when they had little or none, the emphasis was on being eager to make concessions, not to gain victories through threat or pressure. This was a strategy developed long before the days of majority guilt, multiculturalism, and Political Correctness. The Jewish approach thus contrasts with contemporary movements of minority groups which are more confident, aggressive, united, and demanding.
--How would this strategy try to succeed? By proving Jews were good citizens, by showing they were unselfish and sought nothing for themselves, by demonstrating their willingness to dissolve the bonds and customs of their own community, by becoming exemplars in spreading the values and culture of the country where they lived, and by showing that being nice to them would benefit everyone or almost everyone. In other words, altruism was a central element in the strategy. This, too, contrasts with contemporary practice in which rights are taken for granted and society is expected to adapt to the demands of minorities.
--A key element of the assimilationist doctrine has been to prove that Jews were assimilating as individuals, to deny there was a collective communal interest, and to avoid making collective demands. This, too, is in contrast to the situation of other minorities today, which hold onto their intellectuals and elite members while keeping them in line largely through shame or even forms of intimidation. This approach is totally absent in the Jewish community. On the contrary, large parts of the Jewish elite are proud to stand aloof from their own people and deem it virtuous to abandon it and reject any notion of communal interests (including Israel and religion). Indeed, they think they can best prove their credentials by championing the causes of other groups even--sometimes especially--those in conflict with Jewish interests.
--The elite Jew's emphasis is often to escape identification with the community, proving he is a cosmopolitan with a universalist identity, being the first to demand the dissolution of any community loyalty and viewing the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood—Israel—as an impediment to those goals. While antisemites charge that all or almost all Jews in positions of power pursue a distinctively Jewish interest, the exact opposite is the truth. This explains how left-wing Jews extol multi-culturalism and self-determination for other peoples even as they hold the exact opposite attitude toward their own people, whom they are determined to show are not their own people.
The concept of “self-hating Jew” is totally useless in today’s environment, when the radicals simply have an alternative definition of self, albeit one as destructive as that held by their Bolshevik predecessors who mostly ended up being shot or imprisoned by Stalin. At best, the Jew is assigned the role--in the phrase of the pro-Stalinist Isaac Deutscher, the "non-Jewish Jew"--of being part of a revolutionary vanguard one of whose tasks is to dissolve the Jews as a people and a religion.
--For a variety of the reasons listed above, many Jews, particularly in elite positions, are eager to prove their credentials by criticizing their own people or Israel. (Can you imagine any other group constantly being pressed to do this?) They will fete their enemies and jump at showing sympathy with their grievances. The very concept of "bending over backwards" is a typically Jewish one that simply cannot be applied to any other community.
--Zionism is a threat to the dissolving of Jews as a people as well as a problem for those who oppose the idea of nations. It undermines the interest of the leftist Jew or elite Jew in a dozen different ways. This explains why the opposition to Jewish nationalism is so strong among them and has been for well over a century.
--A number of the above-mentioned weaknesses are balanced out by a high degree of activism and energy, education and articulateness, shown by many Jews, particularly among those not in the intellectual elite or of leftist ideology. History has taught Jews that engaging in politics and intellectual dispute is a matter of survival. Issues involving Jews or Israel are so controversial precisely because many Jews do fight back. It isn't that only Jews (or Israel) are being criticized, it is that other groups and causes let themselves be run over with far less complaint. Having said this, though, one must quickly add that this applies largely to more recent historical times and even then mainly to North America and Australia, far less to Europe where Jewish communities are far more passive and often paralyzed with fear and deference.
--From the mid-nineteenth century through 1945 the main enemy of Jews was on the political right, not only fascists but also traditionalists, nativists, Christian reactionaries, and conservatives generally. As a whole, Jews are unable to make the intellectual or political transition to understanding that the main enemy in the West is from the left. Nor do they understand that Christians, even traditionalists, are not a serious threat while Islamic extremists are. Those on the right are seen as Cossacks, missionaries, and potential Nazis, a theme that the extreme left knows very well how to exploit.
--In addition, Jews succeeded largely by being the bearers of modernism in every respect from science and technology, to marketing techniques, to cultural innovation. Conservatism or traditionalism is thus seen as a threat to this pattern. Of course, the association of Jews with modernism (or leftism) has been a prime cause of antisemitism in modern times. For example, the passionate embrace of German culture, liberal or left politics, and economic life--giving it their own interpretations--was a prime factor in building a mass base for Nazi antisemitism.
--As noted above, Jews want to prove they are good citizens but that has come to be interpreted—once cultural assimilation has been achieved—as those who make society better, who help the poor and downtrodden, who are also seen as potential allies against the suspect elites. This concept remains unchanged even when Jews become key parts of the elite.
Imagination continuing to supply a fantasy, which had a basis in reality during past times, that there is a wealthy reactionary antisemitic blend of aristocrats and capitalists ready to pounce. Or, simultaneously, that the ignorant masses, manipulated by demagogues, will stage a pogrom, presumably nowadays starting with a Tea Party rally. It is easy to make fun of such ideas but they are very deeply embedded in the psyche of many Jews in the West.
--Given these premises, what do most Jews implicitly believe will work for them in the present? To show they are tolerant in order to gain the tolerance of others. It is simply not imaginable for such people that rabbis can demonstrate in favor of the establishment of a (radical) mosque near the World Trade Center attack site yet the resulting institution will then teach systematic hatred for Israel and anti-Jewish doctrines. Having succeeded in persuading Western societies that they are nice people worthy of fair treatment, they assume equal success can be achieved with Arabs, Muslims, or various other groups.
-- Not surprisingly, then, a weak spot for Jews has been dealing with situations where hatred for them and an effort to destroy them as a community has been coupled with seemingly humanitarian, progressive rhetoric. Communism, of course, has been the ultimate example up until recently, a cause which attracted many Jews though it killed them or betrayed them. Since the history of this experience is simply not taught anywhere, most have not been learned from it. This story must be told in large part because it bears such relevance to contemporary parallels.
--There is thus an overwhelming, if irrational or outdated, hysterical fear on the part of most Jews (most obviously in the United States) at seeming to behave or as being perceived as reactionary. There is no group against which cries of "racist!" or "right-wing!" or "fascist!" is more effective. Yet there is no equivalent fear of being seen as too "progressive," an implicit admission (which does not penetrate the conscious mind) that the bogey-man of right-wing antisemitism is no longer taken seriously.
Yet to be placed in the position of seeming to be reactionary is not only seen as joining the hated enemy (and thus treasonous) but also as inviting the vengeance of the "masses." To put it bluntly, when a Jew is called a "racist"--and such can be the penalty in the community even for the sin of not voting for Barack Obama--that not only signifies uniting with the historic enemies of Jews but also to tremble (secretly and subconsciously, of course) at a supposed attack of African-Americans against Jews.
The explanation for much of this psychological complex is a community that is objectively powerful and well-off is also subjectively fearful and insecure. Believe it or not, this is true. By overcoming these diaspora complexes (and creating "tough Jews") Israel for these people is somehow betraying what they understand as Jewishness. On some psychological level, a Western Jewish left-leaning intellectual wants other Jews to be victims so that no matter how wealthy or privileged he is it is possible to claim credentials for being a noble sufferer among the non-Western or non-white or non-wealthy people.
As a result of these factors, Jews in the West generally are not going to be won over to conservative views no matter what arguments are used or logic is invoked. The counter-forces of history and self-image are simply too strong. You can argue on this point but those Jews who do so know in their hearts that it is true.
What is possible, however, is to show persuasively and honestly how the contemporary far left and reactionary, radical Islamism are anti-liberal and anti-democratic in nature. They destroy the tolerance of society through which Jews have benefitted and embody dictatorial tendencies. They seek to destroy religion and demonize the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood, Israel. They have made large parts of those institutions responsible for protecting real liberal values--the university and media--into ideological machines for indoctrination into anti-democratic values and slanderers against Jewish interests. They are bad for the countries to which Jews have given their allegiance and to the Enlightenment values which Jews, more than almost any other group in the world, have embraced.
In other words, Jews will not cease to be largely liberal but survival now requires understanding two things.
First, the threat to real liberal institutions and values come from both extremes of the political spectrum.
Second, radicals and anti-democratic revolutionaries can pretend to be liberals, just as Communists once did when it suited them, but nobody should be fooled by this impersonation.
What might be the most adaptable people in world history must continue to adapt to new threats and changing conditions.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
The key to understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in Europe and North America is the history of Jewish assimilation strategy. I tell the story more fully in my book, Assimilation and Its Discontents, but here is a short version, adapted for what’s happening right now.
This strategy was developed in Western Europe in the mid-1800s. There was no single theorist, influential book, or coherent doctrine. Rather, it was a pragmatic approach to the issue of how Jews could adapt to the pressures and opportunities of democratic societies. The assimilationist strategy continues to this day though people aren’t aware of it.
There were many—religious traditionalists, Zionists, and leftist revolutionaries—who pursued alternative routes but I’m not going to talk about them here. I am also fully aware of exceptions, such as the Jewish Bund and the post-World War One political situation in Poland, but cannot deal with them in this limited space. Please understand that the following points need to be generalizations but they are accurate ones.
The mainstream assimilationist approach has been as follows:
--Since the Jews were so weak and the surrounding majority so hostile, they would have to beg for equality and prove themselves worthy rather than to agitate or demand. Moreover, since Jews were attacked for allegedly having too much power, even when they had little or none, the emphasis was on being eager to make concessions, not to gain victories through threat or pressure. This was a strategy developed long before the days of majority guilt, multiculturalism, and Political Correctness. The Jewish approach thus contrasts with contemporary movements of minority groups which are more confident, aggressive, united, and demanding.
--How would this strategy try to succeed? By proving Jews were good citizens, by showing they were unselfish and sought nothing for themselves, by demonstrating their willingness to dissolve the bonds and customs of their own community, by becoming exemplars in spreading the values and culture of the country where they lived, and by showing that being nice to them would benefit everyone or almost everyone. In other words, altruism was a central element in the strategy. This, too, contrasts with contemporary practice in which rights are taken for granted and society is expected to adapt to the demands of minorities.
--A key element of the assimilationist doctrine has been to prove that Jews were assimilating as individuals, to deny there was a collective communal interest, and to avoid making collective demands. This, too, is in contrast to the situation of other minorities today, which hold onto their intellectuals and elite members while keeping them in line largely through shame or even forms of intimidation. This approach is totally absent in the Jewish community. On the contrary, large parts of the Jewish elite are proud to stand aloof from their own people and deem it virtuous to abandon it and reject any notion of communal interests (including Israel and religion). Indeed, they think they can best prove their credentials by championing the causes of other groups even--sometimes especially--those in conflict with Jewish interests.
--The elite Jew's emphasis is often to escape identification with the community, proving he is a cosmopolitan with a universalist identity, being the first to demand the dissolution of any community loyalty and viewing the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood—Israel—as an impediment to those goals. While antisemites charge that all or almost all Jews in positions of power pursue a distinctively Jewish interest, the exact opposite is the truth. This explains how left-wing Jews extol multi-culturalism and self-determination for other peoples even as they hold the exact opposite attitude toward their own people, whom they are determined to show are not their own people.
The concept of “self-hating Jew” is totally useless in today’s environment, when the radicals simply have an alternative definition of self, albeit one as destructive as that held by their Bolshevik predecessors who mostly ended up being shot or imprisoned by Stalin. At best, the Jew is assigned the role--in the phrase of the pro-Stalinist Isaac Deutscher, the "non-Jewish Jew"--of being part of a revolutionary vanguard one of whose tasks is to dissolve the Jews as a people and a religion.
--For a variety of the reasons listed above, many Jews, particularly in elite positions, are eager to prove their credentials by criticizing their own people or Israel. (Can you imagine any other group constantly being pressed to do this?) They will fete their enemies and jump at showing sympathy with their grievances. The very concept of "bending over backwards" is a typically Jewish one that simply cannot be applied to any other community.
--Zionism is a threat to the dissolving of Jews as a people as well as a problem for those who oppose the idea of nations. It undermines the interest of the leftist Jew or elite Jew in a dozen different ways. This explains why the opposition to Jewish nationalism is so strong among them and has been for well over a century.
--A number of the above-mentioned weaknesses are balanced out by a high degree of activism and energy, education and articulateness, shown by many Jews, particularly among those not in the intellectual elite or of leftist ideology. History has taught Jews that engaging in politics and intellectual dispute is a matter of survival. Issues involving Jews or Israel are so controversial precisely because many Jews do fight back. It isn't that only Jews (or Israel) are being criticized, it is that other groups and causes let themselves be run over with far less complaint. Having said this, though, one must quickly add that this applies largely to more recent historical times and even then mainly to North America and Australia, far less to Europe where Jewish communities are far more passive and often paralyzed with fear and deference.
--From the mid-nineteenth century through 1945 the main enemy of Jews was on the political right, not only fascists but also traditionalists, nativists, Christian reactionaries, and conservatives generally. As a whole, Jews are unable to make the intellectual or political transition to understanding that the main enemy in the West is from the left. Nor do they understand that Christians, even traditionalists, are not a serious threat while Islamic extremists are. Those on the right are seen as Cossacks, missionaries, and potential Nazis, a theme that the extreme left knows very well how to exploit.
--In addition, Jews succeeded largely by being the bearers of modernism in every respect from science and technology, to marketing techniques, to cultural innovation. Conservatism or traditionalism is thus seen as a threat to this pattern. Of course, the association of Jews with modernism (or leftism) has been a prime cause of antisemitism in modern times. For example, the passionate embrace of German culture, liberal or left politics, and economic life--giving it their own interpretations--was a prime factor in building a mass base for Nazi antisemitism.
--As noted above, Jews want to prove they are good citizens but that has come to be interpreted—once cultural assimilation has been achieved—as those who make society better, who help the poor and downtrodden, who are also seen as potential allies against the suspect elites. This concept remains unchanged even when Jews become key parts of the elite.
Imagination continuing to supply a fantasy, which had a basis in reality during past times, that there is a wealthy reactionary antisemitic blend of aristocrats and capitalists ready to pounce. Or, simultaneously, that the ignorant masses, manipulated by demagogues, will stage a pogrom, presumably nowadays starting with a Tea Party rally. It is easy to make fun of such ideas but they are very deeply embedded in the psyche of many Jews in the West.
--Given these premises, what do most Jews implicitly believe will work for them in the present? To show they are tolerant in order to gain the tolerance of others. It is simply not imaginable for such people that rabbis can demonstrate in favor of the establishment of a (radical) mosque near the World Trade Center attack site yet the resulting institution will then teach systematic hatred for Israel and anti-Jewish doctrines. Having succeeded in persuading Western societies that they are nice people worthy of fair treatment, they assume equal success can be achieved with Arabs, Muslims, or various other groups.
-- Not surprisingly, then, a weak spot for Jews has been dealing with situations where hatred for them and an effort to destroy them as a community has been coupled with seemingly humanitarian, progressive rhetoric. Communism, of course, has been the ultimate example up until recently, a cause which attracted many Jews though it killed them or betrayed them. Since the history of this experience is simply not taught anywhere, most have not been learned from it. This story must be told in large part because it bears such relevance to contemporary parallels.
--There is thus an overwhelming, if irrational or outdated, hysterical fear on the part of most Jews (most obviously in the United States) at seeming to behave or as being perceived as reactionary. There is no group against which cries of "racist!" or "right-wing!" or "fascist!" is more effective. Yet there is no equivalent fear of being seen as too "progressive," an implicit admission (which does not penetrate the conscious mind) that the bogey-man of right-wing antisemitism is no longer taken seriously.
Yet to be placed in the position of seeming to be reactionary is not only seen as joining the hated enemy (and thus treasonous) but also as inviting the vengeance of the "masses." To put it bluntly, when a Jew is called a "racist"--and such can be the penalty in the community even for the sin of not voting for Barack Obama--that not only signifies uniting with the historic enemies of Jews but also to tremble (secretly and subconsciously, of course) at a supposed attack of African-Americans against Jews.
The explanation for much of this psychological complex is a community that is objectively powerful and well-off is also subjectively fearful and insecure. Believe it or not, this is true. By overcoming these diaspora complexes (and creating "tough Jews") Israel for these people is somehow betraying what they understand as Jewishness. On some psychological level, a Western Jewish left-leaning intellectual wants other Jews to be victims so that no matter how wealthy or privileged he is it is possible to claim credentials for being a noble sufferer among the non-Western or non-white or non-wealthy people.
As a result of these factors, Jews in the West generally are not going to be won over to conservative views no matter what arguments are used or logic is invoked. The counter-forces of history and self-image are simply too strong. You can argue on this point but those Jews who do so know in their hearts that it is true.
What is possible, however, is to show persuasively and honestly how the contemporary far left and reactionary, radical Islamism are anti-liberal and anti-democratic in nature. They destroy the tolerance of society through which Jews have benefitted and embody dictatorial tendencies. They seek to destroy religion and demonize the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood, Israel. They have made large parts of those institutions responsible for protecting real liberal values--the university and media--into ideological machines for indoctrination into anti-democratic values and slanderers against Jewish interests. They are bad for the countries to which Jews have given their allegiance and to the Enlightenment values which Jews, more than almost any other group in the world, have embraced.
In other words, Jews will not cease to be largely liberal but survival now requires understanding two things.
First, the threat to real liberal institutions and values come from both extremes of the political spectrum.
Second, radicals and anti-democratic revolutionaries can pretend to be liberals, just as Communists once did when it suited them, but nobody should be fooled by this impersonation.
What might be the most adaptable people in world history must continue to adapt to new threats and changing conditions.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Can You Handle The Truth?: Poll Shows The Shocking Reality of Arab Public Opinion
Please be subscriber 17,200. Put your email address in upper right-hand box of the page at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/
We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
This is one of those stories about the Middle East that is totally amazing but not the least bit surprising. What, you ask, do I mean? From the standpoint of the way the region is portrayed in the West this information is incredible but if you understand the area it is exactly what you’d expect.
I’m referring here to the recent 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll conducted by Zogby International and the University of Maryland for the Brookings Institution. Note that this poll was only done in relatively moderate countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates,
Here are some of the main findings:
--Arab views "hopeful" about the Obama Administration policy in the Middle East declined from 51 to 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, while those "discouraged" rose from 15 to 63 percent. Why? Because while the Obama Administration tried to flatter Arabs and Muslims, go all-out to support the Palestinians, distanced themselves from Israel, and took other steps it was not deemed sufficient.
Nothing the United States did would persuade the audience because of such factors as: different ideologies and ambitions, clashes of interest, the filter of government and Islamist propaganda, and excessively high demands. While the populations are "discouraged" with the administration largely due to their radicalism, the regimes are unhappy with it because they feel the U.S. government isn't strong enough in opposing such enemies as revolutionary Islamism and Iran.
Still, unless U.S. policy comes to resemble that of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, many or most Arabs will continue to be bitter and angry. Obama’s levels of support among Arabs are not that different from those of his predecessor.
--What about perceptions of threat? Same story. Those thinking Israel is a huge threat is at 88 percent (down slightly from 95 percent in 2008) showing that overall hostility just doesn’t go away. Do you think that any conceivable Israeli policy would change this fact?
Note that while it is would not be surprising if Arabs see Israel as an enemy generally or as being mean to the Palestinians, for Jordanians, Saudis, and Egyptians to describe Israel as the greatest threat to their own countries shows something beyond rational calculation is involved. The prevalent idea is that Israel wants to take over the Middle East or wipe out Islam or destroy the Arabs. This makes a lasting compromise, comprehensive, and friendly peace rather unlikely.
--What about the United States? Here, too, Obama’s efforts have failed. The idea that the United States is the other main threat to Arab countries and societies declined from 88 percent under George W. Bush at the end of his term to “only” 77 percent under Obama in 2010. Given the dramatic change in personality and policy this amounts to nothing.
--As for Iran being a threat, this view among the Arabs polled grew from 7 percent in 2008 to a “whopping” 13 in 2009 and then down to 10 percent in 2010. In other words, the Arab masses believe the United States is about eight times more of a threat than Iran. Indeed, if you add in those nine percent of the Arabs polled who view the United Kingdom as the real danger, 86 percent see Washington or London as the greatest threat to themselves. Again, the ruling elites have a different view but no wonder they are so cautious about opposing Iran or lining up with the United States.
--Asked which foreign leader they most admire, almost 70 percent name an Islamist or a supporter of that movement’s forces: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan (20), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (13), Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (12), Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah (9), Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (7), Usama bin Ladin (6), and the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (2).
No relatively moderate Arab leader has any significant international following. And note that two non-Arab Middle Easterners (Erdogan and Ahmadinejad) score so high, showing a decline in Arab nationalism that would have been unthinkable during the 1950-2000 era.
Unfortunately, these and other findings reflect the realities of the Arabic-speaking world: the hegemony of radicalism among the masses, passionate hatred for Israel and the West, and lack of sympathy for democracy or liberalism. And the overall trend is to make things even worse, since there is so much positive feeling toward revolutionary Islamism rather than even militant Arab nationalism.
Presumably, of course, Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others would have expressed support for their own regimes, so this poll should not necessarily be read as implying support for revolution at home. Yet it certainly--like other such polls--indicates backing for terrorism, extremism, and anti-Westernism in regional terms.
The idea that appeasement, concessions, and flattery will make a big shift has been proven wrong in fact and practice, though no doubt the mythology that Obama has transformed America's position in the region will persist among the very elites and "experts" who should know better. Indeed, this is precisely the way the poll was spun on its being released. The clear effort is to portray the problem as one of U.S. policy even under Obama being too friendly toward Israel, as if no other issue in the region existed.
If Arabs are so passionate in their belief that the United States and UK are a threat to their countries, support in large numbers the Islamist transformation of large parts of the region, think Israel is so profoundly dangerous, and are friendly toward an adventurous, expansionist Iranian regime, can someone possibly be so naive to think that bashing Israel or creating a non-Islamist Palestinian state is going to defuse that deeply and passionately held world view?
Yet this is precisely how the poll was spun by the Brookings Institution: as showing the United States wasn't doing enough to distance itself from Israel. Forget about Islamism versus nationalism, poverty, inequality for women, corruption, repression, the war in Iraq, Iran's nuclear weapons' drive, nearly universal dictatorship, Kurds and Berbers, the growing gap between the Arabic-speaking world and the West or even the faster-progressing states of Latin America and Asia, terroristic violence, and every other issue in the region. We are constantly told that the only thing of any importance is the Palestinian issue.
What are the Arabic-speaking world's real problems?
--A failure of Arab statist dictatorships and Arab nationalist ideology which promised so much and delivered so little. The results include repression, corruption, and far lower living standards (except in low-population, high oil-production Gulf states) than might exist otherwise.
--A stifling traditional culture that clashes with modernity without finding some hybrid solution. This gives rise to the attractive slogan that "Islam is the solution" which promotes an effort to turn the clock back parallel to what happened in past Western societies (the Counter-Reformation, the post-1815 anti-democratic reaction, fascism) and Japan (the revival of feudal military ideology that led to Pearl Harbor).
--The regimes' effort to use violence, scapegoating of the West and Israel, elements of Islamist ideology, and intransigence to win mass support. (Though when one sees the poll figures this is understandable.)
--Internal group conflicts among Sunni, Shia, and Kurds, among other group and regional quarrels.
--The failure to achieve fully integrated states which are sabotaged by pan-Arab and pan-Islamic doctrines.
This is only a partial list. Yet one thing is clear: whether by force or appeasement, seeking popularity or advertising for their own way of life, Western countries cannot solve these problems. The only solution is internal and it will take decades at best. What the West can do is to defend itself, help the most relatively moderate forces (both governments and mass opposition movements as in Lebanon and Iran), and stand up for its own values.
The worst thing it can do is to practice appeasement, a policy that seems to prove the radicals right about Western cowardice and admitted sinfulness, thus inspiring them to more aggression and a stronger popular base of support. Apology and retreat appears to confirm the dysfunctional revolutionary ideologies and favor the revolutionary forces. In the face of the radical advance and Western retreat, demoralized moderates rush to get good surrender terms or join the mob.
Transformation to something better can only come when Arabs and Iranians conclude that the revolutionary road doesn't work and is wrong. Teaching them that it does work and that they are right to pursue it will lengthen the period of change and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
As long as there is a huge gap between the actual Middle East and the fantasy Middle East so dear to many Western academics, journalists, and diplomats, the region will remain incomprehensible and Western policies will not engage with reality.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
This is one of those stories about the Middle East that is totally amazing but not the least bit surprising. What, you ask, do I mean? From the standpoint of the way the region is portrayed in the West this information is incredible but if you understand the area it is exactly what you’d expect.
I’m referring here to the recent 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll conducted by Zogby International and the University of Maryland for the Brookings Institution. Note that this poll was only done in relatively moderate countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates,
Here are some of the main findings:
--Arab views "hopeful" about the Obama Administration policy in the Middle East declined from 51 to 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, while those "discouraged" rose from 15 to 63 percent. Why? Because while the Obama Administration tried to flatter Arabs and Muslims, go all-out to support the Palestinians, distanced themselves from Israel, and took other steps it was not deemed sufficient.
Nothing the United States did would persuade the audience because of such factors as: different ideologies and ambitions, clashes of interest, the filter of government and Islamist propaganda, and excessively high demands. While the populations are "discouraged" with the administration largely due to their radicalism, the regimes are unhappy with it because they feel the U.S. government isn't strong enough in opposing such enemies as revolutionary Islamism and Iran.
Still, unless U.S. policy comes to resemble that of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, many or most Arabs will continue to be bitter and angry. Obama’s levels of support among Arabs are not that different from those of his predecessor.
--What about perceptions of threat? Same story. Those thinking Israel is a huge threat is at 88 percent (down slightly from 95 percent in 2008) showing that overall hostility just doesn’t go away. Do you think that any conceivable Israeli policy would change this fact?
Note that while it is would not be surprising if Arabs see Israel as an enemy generally or as being mean to the Palestinians, for Jordanians, Saudis, and Egyptians to describe Israel as the greatest threat to their own countries shows something beyond rational calculation is involved. The prevalent idea is that Israel wants to take over the Middle East or wipe out Islam or destroy the Arabs. This makes a lasting compromise, comprehensive, and friendly peace rather unlikely.
--What about the United States? Here, too, Obama’s efforts have failed. The idea that the United States is the other main threat to Arab countries and societies declined from 88 percent under George W. Bush at the end of his term to “only” 77 percent under Obama in 2010. Given the dramatic change in personality and policy this amounts to nothing.
--As for Iran being a threat, this view among the Arabs polled grew from 7 percent in 2008 to a “whopping” 13 in 2009 and then down to 10 percent in 2010. In other words, the Arab masses believe the United States is about eight times more of a threat than Iran. Indeed, if you add in those nine percent of the Arabs polled who view the United Kingdom as the real danger, 86 percent see Washington or London as the greatest threat to themselves. Again, the ruling elites have a different view but no wonder they are so cautious about opposing Iran or lining up with the United States.
--Asked which foreign leader they most admire, almost 70 percent name an Islamist or a supporter of that movement’s forces: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan (20), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (13), Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (12), Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah (9), Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (7), Usama bin Ladin (6), and the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (2).
No relatively moderate Arab leader has any significant international following. And note that two non-Arab Middle Easterners (Erdogan and Ahmadinejad) score so high, showing a decline in Arab nationalism that would have been unthinkable during the 1950-2000 era.
Unfortunately, these and other findings reflect the realities of the Arabic-speaking world: the hegemony of radicalism among the masses, passionate hatred for Israel and the West, and lack of sympathy for democracy or liberalism. And the overall trend is to make things even worse, since there is so much positive feeling toward revolutionary Islamism rather than even militant Arab nationalism.
Presumably, of course, Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others would have expressed support for their own regimes, so this poll should not necessarily be read as implying support for revolution at home. Yet it certainly--like other such polls--indicates backing for terrorism, extremism, and anti-Westernism in regional terms.
The idea that appeasement, concessions, and flattery will make a big shift has been proven wrong in fact and practice, though no doubt the mythology that Obama has transformed America's position in the region will persist among the very elites and "experts" who should know better. Indeed, this is precisely the way the poll was spun on its being released. The clear effort is to portray the problem as one of U.S. policy even under Obama being too friendly toward Israel, as if no other issue in the region existed.
If Arabs are so passionate in their belief that the United States and UK are a threat to their countries, support in large numbers the Islamist transformation of large parts of the region, think Israel is so profoundly dangerous, and are friendly toward an adventurous, expansionist Iranian regime, can someone possibly be so naive to think that bashing Israel or creating a non-Islamist Palestinian state is going to defuse that deeply and passionately held world view?
Yet this is precisely how the poll was spun by the Brookings Institution: as showing the United States wasn't doing enough to distance itself from Israel. Forget about Islamism versus nationalism, poverty, inequality for women, corruption, repression, the war in Iraq, Iran's nuclear weapons' drive, nearly universal dictatorship, Kurds and Berbers, the growing gap between the Arabic-speaking world and the West or even the faster-progressing states of Latin America and Asia, terroristic violence, and every other issue in the region. We are constantly told that the only thing of any importance is the Palestinian issue.
What are the Arabic-speaking world's real problems?
--A failure of Arab statist dictatorships and Arab nationalist ideology which promised so much and delivered so little. The results include repression, corruption, and far lower living standards (except in low-population, high oil-production Gulf states) than might exist otherwise.
--A stifling traditional culture that clashes with modernity without finding some hybrid solution. This gives rise to the attractive slogan that "Islam is the solution" which promotes an effort to turn the clock back parallel to what happened in past Western societies (the Counter-Reformation, the post-1815 anti-democratic reaction, fascism) and Japan (the revival of feudal military ideology that led to Pearl Harbor).
--The regimes' effort to use violence, scapegoating of the West and Israel, elements of Islamist ideology, and intransigence to win mass support. (Though when one sees the poll figures this is understandable.)
--Internal group conflicts among Sunni, Shia, and Kurds, among other group and regional quarrels.
--The failure to achieve fully integrated states which are sabotaged by pan-Arab and pan-Islamic doctrines.
This is only a partial list. Yet one thing is clear: whether by force or appeasement, seeking popularity or advertising for their own way of life, Western countries cannot solve these problems. The only solution is internal and it will take decades at best. What the West can do is to defend itself, help the most relatively moderate forces (both governments and mass opposition movements as in Lebanon and Iran), and stand up for its own values.
The worst thing it can do is to practice appeasement, a policy that seems to prove the radicals right about Western cowardice and admitted sinfulness, thus inspiring them to more aggression and a stronger popular base of support. Apology and retreat appears to confirm the dysfunctional revolutionary ideologies and favor the revolutionary forces. In the face of the radical advance and Western retreat, demoralized moderates rush to get good surrender terms or join the mob.
Transformation to something better can only come when Arabs and Iranians conclude that the revolutionary road doesn't work and is wrong. Teaching them that it does work and that they are right to pursue it will lengthen the period of change and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
As long as there is a huge gap between the actual Middle East and the fantasy Middle East so dear to many Western academics, journalists, and diplomats, the region will remain incomprehensible and Western policies will not engage with reality.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
The Radical War Against Liberal History
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We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of the page at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
The history of Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism is one of success, the greatest civilizational achievement in world history. All of its problems, shortcomings, and injustices should be discussed fully but the priority should be on explaining how the system's was able to overcome these things while other systems have done either far worse or collapsed in catastrophe.
In his little book, “England in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in 1950, the historian David Thomson wrote the following passage, discussing an 1816 report on London:
“Hardships began to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted:….Sweated labor and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them.”
This was once a standard approach in the great historical works. Past centuries saw tremendous poverty and suffering, usually due to natural conditions, enhanced by human nature. But in Western democratic states leaders, citizens, and systems strove to make things better and eventually succeeded in doing so. As people saw the possibility of improvement in their lives due to democracy, education, growing wealth, and technological advances, they sought to achieve more though, of course, change was also limited by resources and the nature of society.
The liberal school of history understood this progress and extolled the democracy and Western civilization that made it possible. It well understood that dictatorships, ideological extremism, those who promised utopia or who wanted to go too far and too fast threatened to wreck the very mechanism that made possible a better, freer life. It also comprehended that greed had to be restrained and power balanced, as in the need to manage both the tremendous wealth concentrated during the industrialization process, the ambitions of individuals or institutions, and the excessive control governmental institutions might wield.
True, it was well understood, as Thomson and many other historians showed, that the concentration of land ownership in England and the industrialization process worsened the situation of many people during a historical period, but it also made possible their improvement through increased production of food and goods. Similarly, the shortcomings of capitalism were noted yet so was the indispensibility of a reasonably regulated system of free enterprise. As Winston Churchill put it, there were many terrible things about the system but it was better than any other that might be devised.
And so, it was precisely those "dark satanic mills" that eventually produced the highest living standards for the most people ever seen on this planet.
Thomson, for example, does not stint on discussing the suffering, injustice, and conflict involved. A few pages earlier in his book, he quotes the reformer William Cobbett who wrote of the new social problems in the early nineteenth century:
“Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who…are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eight-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out of a window o the factory!”
Still, the lesson is that the system established—political democracy, capitalism with limited state regulation, a culture based on individual rights—was capable of constant improvement while keeping out changes that would have destroyed all of the good things it offered. Trade unions evolved not to promote revolution but to secure the workers' reasonable share in the products of their labor.
Victorian England, the very place where Karl Marx saw only a dead end leading to revolution, instead provided scientific progress, rising living standards, expanding liberties and their extension to an ever larger proportion of the population, freedoms, integration into a single society yet with freedom for pluralism, and a wonderfully productive culture.
Thus, historians generally saw an ever-improving civilization and were proud of that fact. They did not need to hide the problems—like slavery in the United States—because they could record how those problems were resolved over time. This is what we have always called liberal history.
Like so many things, however, the intellectually barbarous era we live in today has turned history on its head, attacked liberal history, and replaced it with radical history. The emphasis is not on how solving problems proved the system's validity but on the existence of problems showing the system's evil and hypocrisy. Rather than endorsing Enlightenment values and Western civilization, the theme is to prove that these things should be destroyed. Instead of stressing a workable society, the emphasis is on the endless spending of resources beyond the society's capability. Rather than equal opportunity, the complaint is the failure to achieve identical results regardless of merit, labor, or productivity.
Thus, history becomes portrayed as a series of Western crimes—imperialism, sexism, class exploitation, racism—which are matters of permanent shame. Marxism or neo-Marxism has become the mainstream approach, an ideology aimed at revolutionizing society rather than studying it. (Though some great historians did employ this approach in a scholarly manner, I’m referring to Eugene Genovese and not the hack Howard Zinn.)
Rather than show how well the society has worked, history becomes a tool for discrediting it, covering it in crime, and thus (not unintentionally) showing that it is unworthy of continued existence.
There are four other aspects in which history has been distorted and turned upside down in this battle.
One of them is the search for the single discrediting action or quote, or deed taken out of the context of the times in order to besmirch and discredit the heroes of the past. Rather than producing a balanced picture (mostly good, some bad) the goal is to delegitimize them--and thus their work and the country as a whole--completely. This technique has been applied to such as George Washington (slave owner) Andrew Jackson (mistreating Native Americans) to Mark Twain (something he said that might be purposefully misconstrued as racism) or Franklin D. Roosevelt (internment of Japanese). Thus, American history is turned into a series of evils and much is left out, including their criticisms of injustices and attempts to resolve them.
Second, there is the throwing out of the main narrative of historical developments for the sake of studying aspects of it. While it is certainly true that the history of various races, women, and workers, for example, was neglected in the past, there has been more than fifty years of rectification going on in that regard. The story of the United States should be kept in proportion.
The fact is, however, that Marx was wrong and therein sits the key to understanding. Marx believed that Western democratic capitalism was on a dead-end street. He “scientifically ” proved that capitalism could never improve the lot of the workers to the point where they could enjoy high living standards, the very goods that they produced.
That flaw explains precisely why Communism failed and socialism mellowed in the West, and why the radicals of today had to dump class and move on to gender and race. Yet on both of these issues, once society had ripened, the West adapted with remarkable ease. The time it took to go from thinking it would be ridiculous to have a female or African-American president to the overwhelming majority of Americans accepting the idea was about three decades. And this transition happened with incredibly little violence or conflict. Yet supposedly this story proves that American society is evil?
With so much progress here, the radicals have to once again move on (gender has been pretty much abandoned politically by them though race is still a mainstay) to advocate the existence of the nation-state as evil and to extol its destruction by unlimited immigration (in practice, even if illegal), multiculturalism, and a passionate endorsement of even the most regressive and repressive Third World revolutionaries.
Herein is a delicious irony: those who denounce the Western past as having accepted racism, religious obscurantism, slavery, oppression of women, and murderous denial of rights are the same people who advocate these things in the present! They back precisely the same things once known as racism—non-Europeans were said to be incapable of democracy and unsuited for liberty--under the guise of multiculturalism!
The liberal Victorians, whatever their shortcomings, advocated the spread of Enlightenment and progress, while the progressives of today cheer the maintenance and reinforcement of feudalism and the triumph of oppressive traditionalism as supposedly respect for the (presumably never-changing) culture of others! It is as if someone toured the South in the 1850s and then justified that institution by saying that it was, after all, the local culture and Northerners had no right to reject it.
Third, is the academic sin of presentism, reading the present into the past and failing to understand the past on its own terms. The past, is truly is another country. What often happens today, however, is the transformation of difficult and complex issues into conspiracies in which a vicious ruling class seeks to keep down the masses.
One aspect of this is the demand that the past conform to the present. A good example of this is the ludicrous decision of a federal judge in California claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, designed to protect the rights of former slaves, made any ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Whatever one thinks of the contemporary issue, this is a travesty in terms of interpreting the past.
Another example is the idea that the Federal government's powers are unlimited, that the Executive Branch can create legislation, or that new rights can be created and then read into the Constitution.
Finally, there is the fascinating, dangerous, and counterproductive act of burying the truly bad examples of the past, sometimes because those who created disasters had good intentions, often because those very cases show the mistakes being made by radicals at present.
A good example in the United States is the story of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In truth, and there is massive documentation, the imposed governments on the Southern states engaged in such excesses of corruption, overspending, incompetence, and arrogant disregard for their citizens as to fail. The result was disastrous for all concerned.
If the terror of the Klu Klux Klan and white supremacy succeeded in setting back the cause of equal rights by about 90 years (1877 to 1965) the mistakes of the Radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers were critical to that outcome through discrediting themselves and ensuring a mass base for their opponents. The radicals of today would do well to consider these lessons. If the post-Civil War era had been conducted better, racial equality would have come to America a century earlier.
Critical lessons can also be learned from foreign examples. The French (26 years of war, 56 years of restoration of the old order) and Russian (70 years of bloody tyranny) revolutions were catastrophes, despite the humanitarian-sounding rhetoric that emerged from them. There is no better way to teach the virtues of the Western democratic, free enterprise plus reasonable regulation, individual rights system than to see where the alternatives led. Yet while the sins of Western capitalism (or fascism, which is essentially used as a stick to beat the status quo, not the threat of radical statist ideologies) are taught manifold times, the far worse and more massive crimes of Communist statism are hidden from the students’ view.
One might add the distortion of Third World history into a near-exclusive blame on colonialism for the problems that exist today. It is doing those countries no favors by disregarding their social and political problems that ensure they fall behind. Western modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s showed how countries needed to change in order to succeed. In contrast, radical slogans ensure that the wrong policies will be followed, preach demagogic hatred that produces violence, and guarantees the continued oppression of tens of millions of people.
How ironic that the forces portraying themselves as progressive have become the reactionaries of our time, the worst threat and enemy of liberalism.
Translated into Polish.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of the page at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
The history of Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism is one of success, the greatest civilizational achievement in world history. All of its problems, shortcomings, and injustices should be discussed fully but the priority should be on explaining how the system's was able to overcome these things while other systems have done either far worse or collapsed in catastrophe.
In his little book, “England in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in 1950, the historian David Thomson wrote the following passage, discussing an 1816 report on London:
“Hardships began to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted:….Sweated labor and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them.”
This was once a standard approach in the great historical works. Past centuries saw tremendous poverty and suffering, usually due to natural conditions, enhanced by human nature. But in Western democratic states leaders, citizens, and systems strove to make things better and eventually succeeded in doing so. As people saw the possibility of improvement in their lives due to democracy, education, growing wealth, and technological advances, they sought to achieve more though, of course, change was also limited by resources and the nature of society.
The liberal school of history understood this progress and extolled the democracy and Western civilization that made it possible. It well understood that dictatorships, ideological extremism, those who promised utopia or who wanted to go too far and too fast threatened to wreck the very mechanism that made possible a better, freer life. It also comprehended that greed had to be restrained and power balanced, as in the need to manage both the tremendous wealth concentrated during the industrialization process, the ambitions of individuals or institutions, and the excessive control governmental institutions might wield.
True, it was well understood, as Thomson and many other historians showed, that the concentration of land ownership in England and the industrialization process worsened the situation of many people during a historical period, but it also made possible their improvement through increased production of food and goods. Similarly, the shortcomings of capitalism were noted yet so was the indispensibility of a reasonably regulated system of free enterprise. As Winston Churchill put it, there were many terrible things about the system but it was better than any other that might be devised.
And so, it was precisely those "dark satanic mills" that eventually produced the highest living standards for the most people ever seen on this planet.
Thomson, for example, does not stint on discussing the suffering, injustice, and conflict involved. A few pages earlier in his book, he quotes the reformer William Cobbett who wrote of the new social problems in the early nineteenth century:
“Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who…are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eight-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out of a window o the factory!”
Still, the lesson is that the system established—political democracy, capitalism with limited state regulation, a culture based on individual rights—was capable of constant improvement while keeping out changes that would have destroyed all of the good things it offered. Trade unions evolved not to promote revolution but to secure the workers' reasonable share in the products of their labor.
Victorian England, the very place where Karl Marx saw only a dead end leading to revolution, instead provided scientific progress, rising living standards, expanding liberties and their extension to an ever larger proportion of the population, freedoms, integration into a single society yet with freedom for pluralism, and a wonderfully productive culture.
Thus, historians generally saw an ever-improving civilization and were proud of that fact. They did not need to hide the problems—like slavery in the United States—because they could record how those problems were resolved over time. This is what we have always called liberal history.
Like so many things, however, the intellectually barbarous era we live in today has turned history on its head, attacked liberal history, and replaced it with radical history. The emphasis is not on how solving problems proved the system's validity but on the existence of problems showing the system's evil and hypocrisy. Rather than endorsing Enlightenment values and Western civilization, the theme is to prove that these things should be destroyed. Instead of stressing a workable society, the emphasis is on the endless spending of resources beyond the society's capability. Rather than equal opportunity, the complaint is the failure to achieve identical results regardless of merit, labor, or productivity.
Thus, history becomes portrayed as a series of Western crimes—imperialism, sexism, class exploitation, racism—which are matters of permanent shame. Marxism or neo-Marxism has become the mainstream approach, an ideology aimed at revolutionizing society rather than studying it. (Though some great historians did employ this approach in a scholarly manner, I’m referring to Eugene Genovese and not the hack Howard Zinn.)
Rather than show how well the society has worked, history becomes a tool for discrediting it, covering it in crime, and thus (not unintentionally) showing that it is unworthy of continued existence.
There are four other aspects in which history has been distorted and turned upside down in this battle.
One of them is the search for the single discrediting action or quote, or deed taken out of the context of the times in order to besmirch and discredit the heroes of the past. Rather than producing a balanced picture (mostly good, some bad) the goal is to delegitimize them--and thus their work and the country as a whole--completely. This technique has been applied to such as George Washington (slave owner) Andrew Jackson (mistreating Native Americans) to Mark Twain (something he said that might be purposefully misconstrued as racism) or Franklin D. Roosevelt (internment of Japanese). Thus, American history is turned into a series of evils and much is left out, including their criticisms of injustices and attempts to resolve them.
Second, there is the throwing out of the main narrative of historical developments for the sake of studying aspects of it. While it is certainly true that the history of various races, women, and workers, for example, was neglected in the past, there has been more than fifty years of rectification going on in that regard. The story of the United States should be kept in proportion.
The fact is, however, that Marx was wrong and therein sits the key to understanding. Marx believed that Western democratic capitalism was on a dead-end street. He “scientifically ” proved that capitalism could never improve the lot of the workers to the point where they could enjoy high living standards, the very goods that they produced.
That flaw explains precisely why Communism failed and socialism mellowed in the West, and why the radicals of today had to dump class and move on to gender and race. Yet on both of these issues, once society had ripened, the West adapted with remarkable ease. The time it took to go from thinking it would be ridiculous to have a female or African-American president to the overwhelming majority of Americans accepting the idea was about three decades. And this transition happened with incredibly little violence or conflict. Yet supposedly this story proves that American society is evil?
With so much progress here, the radicals have to once again move on (gender has been pretty much abandoned politically by them though race is still a mainstay) to advocate the existence of the nation-state as evil and to extol its destruction by unlimited immigration (in practice, even if illegal), multiculturalism, and a passionate endorsement of even the most regressive and repressive Third World revolutionaries.
Herein is a delicious irony: those who denounce the Western past as having accepted racism, religious obscurantism, slavery, oppression of women, and murderous denial of rights are the same people who advocate these things in the present! They back precisely the same things once known as racism—non-Europeans were said to be incapable of democracy and unsuited for liberty--under the guise of multiculturalism!
The liberal Victorians, whatever their shortcomings, advocated the spread of Enlightenment and progress, while the progressives of today cheer the maintenance and reinforcement of feudalism and the triumph of oppressive traditionalism as supposedly respect for the (presumably never-changing) culture of others! It is as if someone toured the South in the 1850s and then justified that institution by saying that it was, after all, the local culture and Northerners had no right to reject it.
Third, is the academic sin of presentism, reading the present into the past and failing to understand the past on its own terms. The past, is truly is another country. What often happens today, however, is the transformation of difficult and complex issues into conspiracies in which a vicious ruling class seeks to keep down the masses.
One aspect of this is the demand that the past conform to the present. A good example of this is the ludicrous decision of a federal judge in California claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, designed to protect the rights of former slaves, made any ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Whatever one thinks of the contemporary issue, this is a travesty in terms of interpreting the past.
Another example is the idea that the Federal government's powers are unlimited, that the Executive Branch can create legislation, or that new rights can be created and then read into the Constitution.
Finally, there is the fascinating, dangerous, and counterproductive act of burying the truly bad examples of the past, sometimes because those who created disasters had good intentions, often because those very cases show the mistakes being made by radicals at present.
A good example in the United States is the story of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In truth, and there is massive documentation, the imposed governments on the Southern states engaged in such excesses of corruption, overspending, incompetence, and arrogant disregard for their citizens as to fail. The result was disastrous for all concerned.
If the terror of the Klu Klux Klan and white supremacy succeeded in setting back the cause of equal rights by about 90 years (1877 to 1965) the mistakes of the Radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers were critical to that outcome through discrediting themselves and ensuring a mass base for their opponents. The radicals of today would do well to consider these lessons. If the post-Civil War era had been conducted better, racial equality would have come to America a century earlier.
Critical lessons can also be learned from foreign examples. The French (26 years of war, 56 years of restoration of the old order) and Russian (70 years of bloody tyranny) revolutions were catastrophes, despite the humanitarian-sounding rhetoric that emerged from them. There is no better way to teach the virtues of the Western democratic, free enterprise plus reasonable regulation, individual rights system than to see where the alternatives led. Yet while the sins of Western capitalism (or fascism, which is essentially used as a stick to beat the status quo, not the threat of radical statist ideologies) are taught manifold times, the far worse and more massive crimes of Communist statism are hidden from the students’ view.
One might add the distortion of Third World history into a near-exclusive blame on colonialism for the problems that exist today. It is doing those countries no favors by disregarding their social and political problems that ensure they fall behind. Western modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s showed how countries needed to change in order to succeed. In contrast, radical slogans ensure that the wrong policies will be followed, preach demagogic hatred that produces violence, and guarantees the continued oppression of tens of millions of people.
How ironic that the forces portraying themselves as progressive have become the reactionaries of our time, the worst threat and enemy of liberalism.
Translated into Polish.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
The False Issue of "Race" in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
This article was published by Pajamas Media and you can link to their version.
Please be subscriber 17,195. Put your email address in the upper right-hand box of the page at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/
We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
As the waitress whose family had come from Ethiopia put the pizza on the table at the Tel Aviv restaurant, I contemplated the ridiculous misuse of "race" as a factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Regardless of skin color, we belong not only to the same country by way of citizenship but also to the same nation and people in a very profound way that isn't true for countries that are merely geographical entities.
Among the scores of ridiculous things said, thought, and written about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the pretense that it has something to do with "race" ranks high among them. This has been interjected for two reasons. First, this is a blatant attempt to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
Second, as part of that point but also due to trends in Western intellectual discussions, there is a conflation of nationality and race. Often, there is an attempt nowadays to portray any form of nationalism in the West as racist, though this is never applied to Third World nationalists situations. Neither the internal conflicts in Iraq (among Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds) nor in Lebanon (among numerous groups) are about race but rather arise from national, ethnic, and religious (sometimes all rolled up into one) conflicts.
One of the most basic lessons in looking at foreign or international affairs is to understand that countries just don't think alike about issues. America, and in a different way Europe, has been obsessed with race. That doesn't mean everyone else is racially oriented. Israelis don't think about skin color as such and are well aware that Jews, while having a common ancestry, have been affected by many cultures and societies.
With intermarriage rates between Jews whose ancestors came from Europe and those who came from the Middle East approaching half in Israel today, there is no way to classify people. In fact, Israelis are far less interested than other countries about people's ancestral travels.
Moreover, what does one say about such "darker-skinned" Israelis as my Hungarian-Yemenite colleague or my Syrian-origin pianist neighbor (whose wife is from Poland by way of Argentina? There is absolutely no issue involved here. And many Israelis of European origin are not exactly "white" in their appearance.
Indeed, Israel has more "blacks" among its Jews (from Ethiopia) than do the Palestinians by far. Israeli media never use racial stereotypes or epithets while Arab and Palestinian media have had numerous racist remarks and cartoons about such American leaders as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and now even Barack Obama. In a recent radio interview one of the leaders of the Islamist movement in Israel, in other words from the Arab minority here, said that it was a disgrace that a black Israeli soldier could ask for the identity document of an Arab Muslim. Yet such racism from the Arab/Palestinian side is ignored in the Western media.
While there have been some incidents in reaction to the arrival of Jews from Ethiopia, these have been few and universally rejected. Moreover, Israel has given refuge to the American "Black Hebrew" movement when it easily could have deported them.
It is officially estimated that at least 19 asylum seekers have been shot dead by Egyptian forces in Sinai. To my knowledge no one in this category has ever been injured in Israel.
I have had friends, mostly Filipinos, who were illegal workers (they overstayed work permits) deported from Israel and they simply accepted it and were soon working in another country. None of them bears any grudge against Israel, quite the contrary they could serve as citizen ambassadors on its behalf. None of them ever reported a single case of "racial" mistreatment and I don't believe there has ever been--and workers' advocacy groups have never reported--a racial assault or even insult on any foreign worker in Israel. The problem, of course, is that there is at times terrible economic exploitation by unscrupulous employers, which is in no way atypical in the world today.
The Israel-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts are in no way "racial." National identity is something quite different from "race" generally. Israelis and Arabs are not easily distinguished by skin color, though of course there are exceptions.I was in an Israeli government agency meeting a high-ranking official whose skin shade was darker than that of Barack Obama. This was only something I noted because I was planning to write the article you are reading now.
I arrived at the meeting mentioned above by taking a cab from my neighborhood taxi stand. I gave the address and the driver went back to speaking on his mobile phone in Arabic, which is the only reason I realized he was an Israeli Arab. I couldn't tell just by looking at him.
The attempt by anti-Israel slanderers to inject a racial aspect is ludicrously nonsensical. If you have ever travelled in Syria you would find that the average skin color of people there is lighter than that of Israelis on average. Generally speaking, there is less variation in "racial terms" between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs than there is among member states of the European Union.
It just doesn't apply to conditions here. 'While Palestinian Arabs are on average a shade or two darker than Israelis you can find wider variations within the EU member states.
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By Barry Rubin
As the waitress whose family had come from Ethiopia put the pizza on the table at the Tel Aviv restaurant, I contemplated the ridiculous misuse of "race" as a factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Regardless of skin color, we belong not only to the same country by way of citizenship but also to the same nation and people in a very profound way that isn't true for countries that are merely geographical entities.
Among the scores of ridiculous things said, thought, and written about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the pretense that it has something to do with "race" ranks high among them. This has been interjected for two reasons. First, this is a blatant attempt to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
Second, as part of that point but also due to trends in Western intellectual discussions, there is a conflation of nationality and race. Often, there is an attempt nowadays to portray any form of nationalism in the West as racist, though this is never applied to Third World nationalists situations. Neither the internal conflicts in Iraq (among Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds) nor in Lebanon (among numerous groups) are about race but rather arise from national, ethnic, and religious (sometimes all rolled up into one) conflicts.
One of the most basic lessons in looking at foreign or international affairs is to understand that countries just don't think alike about issues. America, and in a different way Europe, has been obsessed with race. That doesn't mean everyone else is racially oriented. Israelis don't think about skin color as such and are well aware that Jews, while having a common ancestry, have been affected by many cultures and societies.
With intermarriage rates between Jews whose ancestors came from Europe and those who came from the Middle East approaching half in Israel today, there is no way to classify people. In fact, Israelis are far less interested than other countries about people's ancestral travels.
Moreover, what does one say about such "darker-skinned" Israelis as my Hungarian-Yemenite colleague or my Syrian-origin pianist neighbor (whose wife is from Poland by way of Argentina? There is absolutely no issue involved here. And many Israelis of European origin are not exactly "white" in their appearance.
Indeed, Israel has more "blacks" among its Jews (from Ethiopia) than do the Palestinians by far. Israeli media never use racial stereotypes or epithets while Arab and Palestinian media have had numerous racist remarks and cartoons about such American leaders as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and now even Barack Obama. In a recent radio interview one of the leaders of the Islamist movement in Israel, in other words from the Arab minority here, said that it was a disgrace that a black Israeli soldier could ask for the identity document of an Arab Muslim. Yet such racism from the Arab/Palestinian side is ignored in the Western media.
While there have been some incidents in reaction to the arrival of Jews from Ethiopia, these have been few and universally rejected. Moreover, Israel has given refuge to the American "Black Hebrew" movement when it easily could have deported them.
It is officially estimated that at least 19 asylum seekers have been shot dead by Egyptian forces in Sinai. To my knowledge no one in this category has ever been injured in Israel.
I have had friends, mostly Filipinos, who were illegal workers (they overstayed work permits) deported from Israel and they simply accepted it and were soon working in another country. None of them bears any grudge against Israel, quite the contrary they could serve as citizen ambassadors on its behalf. None of them ever reported a single case of "racial" mistreatment and I don't believe there has ever been--and workers' advocacy groups have never reported--a racial assault or even insult on any foreign worker in Israel. The problem, of course, is that there is at times terrible economic exploitation by unscrupulous employers, which is in no way atypical in the world today.
The Israel-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts are in no way "racial." National identity is something quite different from "race" generally. Israelis and Arabs are not easily distinguished by skin color, though of course there are exceptions.I was in an Israeli government agency meeting a high-ranking official whose skin shade was darker than that of Barack Obama. This was only something I noted because I was planning to write the article you are reading now.
I arrived at the meeting mentioned above by taking a cab from my neighborhood taxi stand. I gave the address and the driver went back to speaking on his mobile phone in Arabic, which is the only reason I realized he was an Israeli Arab. I couldn't tell just by looking at him.
The attempt by anti-Israel slanderers to inject a racial aspect is ludicrously nonsensical. If you have ever travelled in Syria you would find that the average skin color of people there is lighter than that of Israelis on average. Generally speaking, there is less variation in "racial terms" between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs than there is among member states of the European Union.
It just doesn't apply to conditions here. 'While Palestinian Arabs are on average a shade or two darker than Israelis you can find wider variations within the EU member states.
But if you can label someone as a "racist" because they are engaged in a conflict with another nation or group automatically "proves" they are in the wrong. If the conflict is a national one, however, you actually have to think about it. Who's right in the following conflicts: Irish Catholics or Protestants; Basques or Spain; Bosnians or Serbs; Russians or Chechens, Somalis or Ethiopians; Iraqi Sunni, Shia, or Kurds; India or Pakistan; Azerbaijan or Armenia, and so on?
The answer cannot be deduced automatically. But label one side as racist and the discussion is over. This, then, is a trick for deceiving, not a tool for understanding.
The ridiculousness of attempts to transfer American or European situations to Israel was embodied in an American student asking an Israeli professor how many blacks were on his university's basketball team. Actually, there are many on the professional teams but they are all, of course, from the United States, though I believe one or two had converted and remained in Israel.
I don't think there's any question of the fact that there is far far more racism in Europe or in the Arabic-speaking world than in Israel--and that's an understatement.
PS: The following was written by a reader:
I simply Googled 'racial discrimination in saudi arabia'. Here's the result. About 1,110,000 results (0.20 seconds)
A few weeks back I read of the appalling numbers of Sri Lankan women who had gone to Saudi to work as maids and returned in body bags. Around forty per month, beaten to death.
How many foreign women leave Israel in such a condition to be interred in home ground? Answer: Not one.
Advanced search
About 1,110,000 results (0.20 seconds)
Search Results
1. Racism in the Middle East - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Racism in Saudi Arabia mainly against Labor workers who are foreigners , mostly from Bangladesh , Pakistan and the poor countries. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Middle_East - Cached - Similar
2. My World and More ..: Racism in Saudi Arabia
17 Jan 2010 ... Racism in Saudi Arabia. Again thanx to Abu Sinan for inspiring me to write this post about racism. the comment was made in this post and ...
musesephere.blogspot.com/2010/.../racism-in-saudi-arabia.html - Cached - Similar
3. How a British jihadi saw the light - Times Online
3 May 2010 ... The problems of Saudi Arabia were not limited to racism and sexual frustration. In contemporary Wahhabism there are two broad factions. ...
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and.../article1685726.ece - Similar
4. Saudi Arabia Forums: Closet racists, I witnessed pure racism the ...
13 posts - 12 authors - Last post: 21 May 2007
Saudi Arabia Forums: Closet racists, I witnessed pure racism the other day when a group of colleagues made some jokes about Asian workers, ...
www.justlanded.com › Saudi Arabia › Forums › Culture - Cached - Similar
South Africa Forums: South Africa - Reverse Racism, Whites are ...
Dubai Forums: Racism in dubai, I am a Coloured South African women ...
More results from justlanded.com »
5. Is There Racism in Saudi Arabia? « American Bedu
26 Oct 2007 ... I understand this to be racism. I was asking as I have only ever spent a short time in Saudi Arabia so am not able to know the true lay of ...
americanbedu.com/2007/10/.../is-there-racism-in-the-kingdom/ - Cached - Similar
6.
Is there racism in saudi arabia? - Yahoo! Answers
racism towards Pakistanis, Filipinos, Bengalis ... If you are not a muslim they hate you!!! PERIOD!!!! ... There is racism everywhere...unfortunately. ...
answers.yahoo.com › ... › Saudi Arabia - Cached - Similar
7.
Saudi Arabia and racism? - Thai360 - Powered by FusionBB
10 posts - 8 authors - Last post: 12 Jun 2007
In response to drogon - Saudi Arabia and racism? You'll hate it. Everyone does. The only reason to go there is if they are paying good money ...
www.thai360.com › ... › Thai Life › Career/Finances - Cached - Similar
8.
Saudi Arabia Racism & Xenophobia News - Media Monitoring Service ...
Saudi Arabia Racism & Xenophobia News. Service for global professionals. Constantly updated news and information about Saudi Arabia.
www.einnews.com/saudiarabia/newsfeed-saudi-racism-xenophobia -
9. Saudi Pride or Simple Racism? Crossroads Arabia: 20 Feb 2010 ... Saudi Gazette/Okaz run this piece taken from another Saudi newspaper but just which one isn't apparent. The content, however, is good.
xrdarabia.org/2010/02/20/saudi-pride-or-simple-racism/
10. The Daily Star Web Edition Vol. 5 Num 61: 27 Jul 2004 ... Anyone who has visited Saudi Arabia knows the racism with which ordinary Saudis treats the brown and black-skinned masses that come for Hajj ...
www.thedailystar.net/2004/07/27/d40727150297.htm
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
I don't think there's any question of the fact that there is far far more racism in Europe or in the Arabic-speaking world than in Israel--and that's an understatement.
PS: The following was written by a reader:
I simply Googled 'racial discrimination in saudi arabia'. Here's the result. About 1,110,000 results (0.20 seconds)
A few weeks back I read of the appalling numbers of Sri Lankan women who had gone to Saudi to work as maids and returned in body bags. Around forty per month, beaten to death.
How many foreign women leave Israel in such a condition to be interred in home ground? Answer: Not one.
Advanced search
About 1,110,000 results (0.20 seconds)
Search Results
1. Racism in the Middle East - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Racism in Saudi Arabia mainly against Labor workers who are foreigners , mostly from Bangladesh , Pakistan and the poor countries. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Middle_East - Cached - Similar
2. My World and More ..: Racism in Saudi Arabia
17 Jan 2010 ... Racism in Saudi Arabia. Again thanx to Abu Sinan for inspiring me to write this post about racism. the comment was made in this post and ...
musesephere.blogspot.com/2010/.../racism-in-saudi-arabia.html - Cached - Similar
3. How a British jihadi saw the light - Times Online
3 May 2010 ... The problems of Saudi Arabia were not limited to racism and sexual frustration. In contemporary Wahhabism there are two broad factions. ...
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and.../article1685726.ece - Similar
4. Saudi Arabia Forums: Closet racists, I witnessed pure racism the ...
13 posts - 12 authors - Last post: 21 May 2007
Saudi Arabia Forums: Closet racists, I witnessed pure racism the other day when a group of colleagues made some jokes about Asian workers, ...
www.justlanded.com › Saudi Arabia › Forums › Culture - Cached - Similar
South Africa Forums: South Africa - Reverse Racism, Whites are ...
Dubai Forums: Racism in dubai, I am a Coloured South African women ...
More results from justlanded.com »
5. Is There Racism in Saudi Arabia? « American Bedu
26 Oct 2007 ... I understand this to be racism. I was asking as I have only ever spent a short time in Saudi Arabia so am not able to know the true lay of ...
americanbedu.com/2007/10/.../is-there-racism-in-the-kingdom/ - Cached - Similar
6.
Is there racism in saudi arabia? - Yahoo! Answers
racism towards Pakistanis, Filipinos, Bengalis ... If you are not a muslim they hate you!!! PERIOD!!!! ... There is racism everywhere...unfortunately. ...
answers.yahoo.com › ... › Saudi Arabia - Cached - Similar
7.
Saudi Arabia and racism? - Thai360 - Powered by FusionBB
10 posts - 8 authors - Last post: 12 Jun 2007
In response to drogon - Saudi Arabia and racism? You'll hate it. Everyone does. The only reason to go there is if they are paying good money ...
www.thai360.com › ... › Thai Life › Career/Finances - Cached - Similar
8.
Saudi Arabia Racism & Xenophobia News - Media Monitoring Service ...
Saudi Arabia Racism & Xenophobia News. Service for global professionals. Constantly updated news and information about Saudi Arabia.
www.einnews.com/saudiarabia/newsfeed-saudi-racism-xenophobia -
9. Saudi Pride or Simple Racism? Crossroads Arabia: 20 Feb 2010 ... Saudi Gazette/Okaz run this piece taken from another Saudi newspaper but just which one isn't apparent. The content, however, is good.
xrdarabia.org/2010/02/20/saudi-pride-or-simple-racism/
10. The Daily Star Web Edition Vol. 5 Num 61: 27 Jul 2004 ... Anyone who has visited Saudi Arabia knows the racism with which ordinary Saudis treats the brown and black-skinned masses that come for Hajj ...
www.thedailystar.net/2004/07/27/d40727150297.htm
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
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