Newsgroup: it.cultura.single
Titolo: What Is the Tragedy of Arabia?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1317/pub_detail.asp
What Is the Tragedy of Arabia?
Mark Silverberg
According to recent UN Arab Human Development Reports, written by an
independent group of leading Arab scholars and intellectuals, oil has
become a curse rather than a blessing for the Arab world. Unlike
Japan, Taiwan, Israel, Singapore and many other countries who
recognized early on that their scarce resources required them to turn
their lack of material resources into technological strengths in order
to become competitive in the world economy, the Arabs relied
exclusively on the great sea of oil beneath their deserts as a
substitute for intellect, creativity and entrepreneurship. It has now
cost them their future and saddled the world with a parasitic and
pathologically suicidal movement that has proven its capacity to
destroy and its incapacity to create anything of substance to human
civilization.
While it can be argued that the borders of the Arab Middle East are
man-made deformities that must be redrawn to take into account the
tribal nature of Arab society rather than the strategic interests of
the French and the British who created them in the early 20th century,
border corrections alone cannot account for, nor will they resolve the
sorry state of affairs in the Arab world. While a redefinition of
borders would separate Shiites from Sunnis and Kurds from Baluchis,
the problems plaguing Arab society in the 21st century cannot be so
easily resolved.
That is because Arab societies, for the most part, have immersed
themselves in a culture of denial. They emphasize struggle, quash
competition and reject alternate approaches or ways of thinking. With
few exceptions, Arab governments live in a state of internal fear that
avoids investigating their failures or acquainting themselves with or
opening their societies to the cultures of others. As a result, their
societies cannot hand down positive achievements to future generations
unless they overcome their secretiveness, their isolation, and
especially their compulsive need to blame others for their own
failings.
Several years ago, Abd Al-Munim Said, head of the Al-Ahram Research
Center in Egypt, wrote: "We thought that by the end of the 20th
century, the Arab mind would be open enough not to explain everything
with a 'conspiracy theory'...The biggest problem with conspiracy
theories is that they keep us not only from the truth, but also from
confronting our faults and problems. This way of thinking relates any
given problem to external elements, and thus does not [lead] to a
rational policy to confront the problem."
Consequently, in Arab politics today, from Egypt to Riyadh, opponents
are neither answered nor rebutted. They are discredited, imprisoned,
exiled or murdered and with each disaster, defeat, or tragedy, it is
always the Zionists, colonialists, or American imperialist
conspiracies that are to blame.
For all the oil revenues that have flowed into the wealthier Arab
countries, the overall state of the Arab world is appalling. It does
not produce one single manufactured product of sufficient quality to
sell on world markets.
Arab productivity is the lowest in the world. There is not a single
Arab university of world-class. The once-great tradition of Arab
scientific achievement that flowed from Andalusian Spain has
degenerated into a few research programs in the fields of chemical and
biological warfare. There is not one country in the Arab world that
can truly call itself a democracy.
No Arab state genuinely respects human rights. No Arab state hosts a
responsible media. No Arab society fully respects the rights of women
or minorities, and no Arab government has ever accepted public
responsibility for its own shortcomings.
Blame has become the opium of the Arabs, and the greatest blame for
their failures is that directed at the United States and, of course,
Israel.
A central Bernard Lewis theme is that Muslims have felt downtrodden
since 1683, when the Ottomans failed for the second time to sack
Christian Vienna. For 300 years, Prof. Lewis says, Muslims have
watched in horror and humiliation as the Christian civilizations of
Europe and North America have eclipsed them militarily, economically
and culturally. The Arab Muslim world prefers to blame others, to
sleepwalk through history as it were, and to cheer when tyrants and
terrorists avenge them. They knew that Saddam Hussein was a monster
who had killed more Arabs than Israel ever could. They knew he was the
worst thing to happen to the Arab world since the Mongols sacked
Baghdad in 1258. But they were (and continue to be) so discouraged
that they needed to inflate even "the butcher of Baghdad" into hero
status.
During the war the Palestinians cheered him on and celebrated his
defiance of the American war machine, but, in the end, he failed them
as well.
While most Arabs understand America's current dilemma in Iraq and fear
the expansion of Iranian Shiism and Ahmedinejad's religious
imperialist ambitions, they are not eager to assist in stabilizing
that country. They prefer to see America leave humiliated even if it
is at the expense of the Iraqi people and the stability of the entire
region. Above all, they do not want to see America, a non-Muslim
superpower, as the cause for Iraq's good fortune, especially when the
Arab countries did nothing to stop Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. And
because Arab societies require a target for their anger and
frustration, they are increasingly drawn to radical Islam.
Since external conflict is the lifeblood of Arab dictatorships (be
they secular or theocratic), conflict in the Arab world is not seen as
a problem that requires a solution.
The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism and
the humiliation that accrues when millions are nursed by fantasies,
hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain away their own failures.
Quite simply, any society whose allegiance is to the tribe rather than
to the nation, that does not believe in democracy enough to institute
it, shuns female intellectual contributions, allows polygamy, insists
on patriarchy, institutionalizes religious persecution, ignores family
planning, expects endemic corruption, tolerates honor killings, sees
no need to vote, and defines knowledge as mastery of the Quran.....is
deeply pathological.
Instead of responding to demands for democracy, human rights, higher
living standards, less corruption and incompetence, reducing
illiteracy or improving education and educational standards, Arab
rulers blame America for their societies' ills and refocus popular
anger against it. That enables them to demand national unity and
silence reformers in the face of the supposed American "threat," and
by seizing on anti-Americanism as the excuse for Arab failure, they
insure that their opponents cannot blame them.
Hence Egypt and Saudi Arabia have willingly accepted American weaponry
and protection, yet they continue to promote anti-Americanism through
their governments' policies and their state-controlled media.
In the end, casting the blame for their own misfortunes on the West
will not save them from the rising tide of radical Islam in their
midst. That is because the histories of these countries are so
intertwined and their socio-economic problems so interrelated and
severe that none of them will be able to escape the consequences of
those failures.
"The painful truth," writes columnist Suleiman Al-Hatlan in the daily
Al-Watan in Saudi Arabia, "is that the acts of violence and barbarism
occurring at present are nothing but the natural consequence of
generations of Muslims having been misled and force-fed speeches
(filled with) hostility and hatred for others over the course of
decades, which deepened the backwardness and the ignorance in the
Islamic world."
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in income from oil and massive
amounts of Western humanitarian aid, the Arabs have yet to create one
single monument to human achievement. Rather, at different times, the
Arabs have pointed the finger of blame at colonialists,
multinationals, missionaries, communists, liberals, religious and/or
ethnic minorities, middle classes and even poor Orientalists. But the
blame rests only in themselves. To the best of my recollection, the
Arab League has never once convened an Arab summit to discuss the
backward state of education in the Arab world and therein lies the
problem.
The sad truth is that the fantasies portrayed in Arabian Nights have
long since become an Arabian nightmare in large measure because (as
Victor Davis Hanson writes): "The Arab world has no real consensual
governments; statism and tribalism hamper market economics and ensure
stagnation. Islamic fundamentalism, the absence of an independent
judiciary, and a censored press all do their part to ensure endemic
poverty, rampant corruption and rising resentment among an exploding
population.
For the Arab world, the status quo is no longer sustainable and time
is not on its side. The Salafi Jihadists are gaining strength in
Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories and
warn that an apocalyptic Armageddon between the Muslim world and the
West is approaching. Whether moderate Muslim intellectuals and
Western-educated Muslim technocrats will be able to bring on an
Islamic Renaissance before rising radical Islam draws us all into a
nuclear confrontation remains to be seen. Their success in doing so is
by no means assured.

 What Is the Tragedy of Arabia?
Mah... non vedo grossi cambiamenti in questi ultimi 16 secoli...
-- 
<<Un giorno le macchine riusciranno a risolvere tutti i problemi, ma mai 
nessuna di esse potrà porne uno>> (Albert Einstein)