Fueling the Disease in the Middle East

David Brooks, writing in this morning’s New York Times from Jordan, where he attended a conference with “moderate Arab reformers” about the Middle East, found they mainly wanted to talk instead about the “Israel Lobby”:

Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government.

The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies.

We Americans tried to press our Arab friends to talk more about the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran, but they seemed uninterested. . . . It was all Israel, all the time. . . .

The events of the past three years have shifted [the Arabs’] diagnosis of where the cancer is -- from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in Aipac. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.

The widespread, and spreading, cancer in Arab society is in fact an intellectual disease that Paul Johnson analyzed nearly two years ago in COMMENTARY:

In my view as a historian, [anti-Semitism] is so peculiar that it deserves to be . . . [called] an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. . . .

As an example of the self-destructive force of anti-Semitism, the case of Hitler and Nazi Germany is paralleled only by what has happened to the Arabs over the course of the last century. . . . Had Jewish-Arab cooperation been possible from the start, and had money from oil been creatively invested in education, technology, industry, and social services, the Middle East would now be by far the richest portion of the earth’s surface. . . .

Over the last half-century, anti-Semitism has been the essential ideology of the Arab world; its practical objective has been the destruction of Israel and the extermination of its inhabitants.  And this huge and baneful force, this disease of the mind, has once again had its customary consequence. . . .  100 million or more Arabs, marching under the banner of anti-Semitism, have totally failed, despite four full-scale wars and waves of terrorism and intifadas without number, to extinguish tiny Israel.

In the meantime, by allowing their diseased obsession to dominate all their aspirations, the Arabs have wasted trillions in oil royalties on weapons of war and propaganda -- and, at the margin, on ostentatious luxuries for a tiny minority.  In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law.  Despite all their advantages, they are now being overtaken decisively by the Indians and the Chinese, who have few natural resources but are inspired by reason, not hatred.

Yet still the Arabs feed off the ravages of the disease, imbibing and spreading its poison.

The source of the problem in the Middle East was not the re-creation of a tiny State of Israel in 1948; or the “occupation” of a further part of its ancient homeland when that land was used in 1967 to wage still another genocidal war; or the building of “settlements” on the reacquired land when Arabs rejected, with their famous “Three No’s,” the attempt to trade the land for peace; or the purported inadequacies of repeated offers of a Palestinian state in 2000-2003 at Camp David and Taba and in the Roadmap (each offer rejected since what was desired was not a second state, but the destruction of the one that was already there).

The problem is an Arab state of mind, fueled by history’s oldest mental disease, now excused and encouraged by faux academic papers and intentionally inflammatory books in the West, poisoning even the Arab "moderates."