'BN scraping bottom of barrel in Pakatan-terrorist link' Idiots n morons have infiltrated Special Branch. Simple method to identify them - when they talk, they will bend down n funny noises will come out from their arses. Pariahs to the core. Drowning, in desperation and ketandusan modal, they now clutch at straws. May we have the courage to defeat this evil authoritthe question we should be asking now is whether the elements of the "italian mafia" and the "russian KGB" have infiltrated the Special Branch. Cases like pig heads found at mosque, machettes and other weapons found near shopping malls during Berseh2 and homemade bombs exploded outside the courtyard carpark in Anwars sodomy verdict were not solved. What is the outcome of the investigations? Any suspect arrested? What happened???. And recently as reported in the STAR newspaper of a man firing 10 shots from a revolver into the house of a Dato and fled in a black coloured car. What is the follow up action? Are these incidents reflecting signs of a "false democracy". Do you think the special branch would be still so quiet without any arrest done when PR politicians if the aprty is infiltrated with JI and communists? Our PM and Home Minister would have awaken middle of the night to hear news of any mid-night raids being carried out. IF not, they would be leading the direction to harm PR.This is gutter politics of the sickest kind. Must BN be really stooping so low that they have run out of ideas on how to retain control of Putrajaya. The more silly means and actions taken by BN leadership the more the rebutt and damages will befall on the party making their days ever counterble at the fastest pace.
UMNO will stoop so low in their desperation to retain power. UMNO should take a serious look at the middle-east states that are dropping into the hands of the Rakyat from the autocrats. Najib is throwing huge sums of money at every sector of the communities, so why is he tarnishing his name by saying the Opposition are infiltrated with terrorists and communists and thereby earning the wrath of the Rakyat. The Rakyat is not stupid. Even the kampong folks can now think rationally. They can differentiate what is PURE and what is not. If there is such an instrument called lie detector which will slap those who lied, i am sure our PM face will be bruised with blood...UMNO leaders think they can fool the people all the time. The more they manufacture such shit, the more we are determine to vote in Pakatan as our next govt. Hishammuddin and Najib better beware. We going after you wen we take over Putrajaya. Just wonder why BN needs this strategy. They already have THE GRANDFATHER's BANK t olive away so much money and all the youth already like PM so much based on reports after reports. They will win the 13th election, why they still want to set people up?At 1st they used that shit toilet paper of UMNO called U TOO SAN to accuse you falsely that you were indirectly LKY's agent. When that failed to cause any form of ripples, the SB has now got into the act alleging communist infilteration. When this also fails to evoke any emotion then they will accuse the opposition as being infilterated by LGTB and when that fails they will say that you are deliberately trying to cut off water supply to the people. Can you imagine YB Kirpal while sitting on a wheel chair carrying a gun around and shouting to all and sundry that he is a communist. Who clutches straws ??? Only drowning men. Rest assured that God is with the righteous and the meek shall inherit the world.At 1st they used that shit toilet paper of DUMNO called U TOO SAN to accuse you falsely that you were indirectly LKY's agent. When that failed to cause any form of ripples, the SB has now got into the act alleging communist infilteration. When this also fails to evoke any emotion then they will accuse the opposition as being infilterated by LGTB and when that fails they will say that you are deliberately trying to cut off water supply to the people. Can you imagine YB Kirpal while sitting on a wheel chair carrying a gun around and shouting to all and sundry that he is a communist. Who clutches straws ??? Only drowning men. Rest assured that God is with the righteous and the meek shall inherit the world.Whilst it is normal for parties to outshine each other during election times, Bn has gone too far this time. The real terrorists are people who cause harm, rob the public , brainwash and practice double standards. We all know who are the people doing such things but they are still surviving. But luck may run out soon.Acts of a desperate Prime Minister and an equally desperate BN. This is what Najib means by "protecting Putrajaya at all cost". He thinks that the rakyat are so gullible! Or perhaps by getting the SB to come up with this cock and bull story, the BN government will have a 'real' reason for detaining leaders of the Opposition as they are deemed to be a security threat. Actually the only threat the Opposition is giving is ending BN's 55-year reign. Looking at the current scenario, it is unlikely that the BN would want to surrender power should they lose the 13th GE. BN's salvo is at full steam using moral and immoral ways to get the people to vote for them. Every government machinery is now in full swing with the help of so-called BN friendly organisations and the main media to ensure a BN victory AT ALL COST Desperate UMNO is using desperate tactics. The wonderful part is this un Islamic party of bullshit and nonsense pretends to defend Islam while breaking so many of the laws of Islam itself such as committing fitnah [slander] and the corrupted leaders cheat the people . This hypocrites [ munafiq ] are a disgrace to the race , the religion and the nationSick of this regime. They are bankrupt of ideas. What about those free IC given ti JI and Communists from Indonesia, Vietnam , Nyammar , Bangla ?
Reports that Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorists and former communists are infiltrating Pakatan Rakyat (PR) parties to be fielded as candidates are a police Special Branch “spin” that reflects the ruling Barisan Nasional’s (BN) desperateness, Lim Kit Siang said today.
The veteran opposition leader also dared Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein to get the police to explain who were such closet leaders and why they allowed the police to go public with the “cock and bull story” carried by state news agency Bernama yesterday.
“Have the Umno/BN leadership become so desperate in the face of the democratic electoral challenge from Pakatan Rakyat that they have to get the Special Branch to conjure up the latest scare, a ‘cock and bull story’ of the JI and communists infiltrating Pakatan Rakyat parties, in particular PAS and DAP, to prepare for an undemocratic pre-emptive strike against the Pakatan Rakyat?” the Ipoh Timor MP asked in a statement this morning.
Lim (picture) also questioned if this was an attempt by the Special Branch to justify its RM381 million allocation from the RM6.3 billion police budget for 2012.The Bernama report yesterday quoted Special Branch chief assistant director of the E2(M) national social extremist threat division Mohd Sofian Md Makinuddin at the National Young Leaders Convention in Parliament yesterday, claiming that JI elements were trying to infiltrate PAS while the communist elements were trying to infiltrate the DAP.
Lim said the statement would have been laughed off and dismissed as the most sick and top political joke of the year “if not for the gravity of having such wild, scatter-brained and crackpot ideas influencing and determining policy-making at the highest government and security levels in the country”.
“Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammmudin Hussein should explain why they are ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ in giving the green light to the Special Branch to go public with the ‘cock and bull story’ of Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorists and former communists infiltrating Pakatan Rakyat parties and trying to be fielded as candidates in the coming general election.
“With the resurrection of the Islamist terrorist and communist bogeys infiltrating the Pakatan Rakyat parties, is the stage being set for a special operation against the Pakatan Rakyat parties to remove the democratic and legitimate threat posed by Pakatan Rakyat to continued Umno/BN hold on federal power in the 13th general election?” he asked.
Lim claimed it was an open secret that Najib would have dissolved Parliament to hold the general election before the start of the fasting month tomorrow if not for the Bersih 3.0 rally on April 28, which placed the ruling coalition in a disadvantageous position.
He also questioned the role of Biro Tatanegara (BTN) in the one-day convention, saying the agency within the Prime Minister’s Department last week was also involved in the 1 Malaysia Social Media Convention where it promised “to raise an army of 10,000 Umno/BN cybertroopers with the message that it was permissible to spin lies and falsehoods against the Pakatan Rakyat parties.”
“Is the Special Branch canard about JI terrorists and communists infiltrating Pakatan Rakyat parties the latest example of such permissible ‘spin’ of lies and falsehoods against PR, just like the earlier ‘spins’ of lies and falsehood about the DAP wanting to establish a Christian Malaysia and appoint a Christian prime minister as well as wanting to establish a republic by abolishing the constitutional monarchical system?
“I challenge Najib, Hishammuddin and Mohd Sofian of the Special Branch to identify the present DAP and PR leaders, MPs and state assembly members who are either closet JI terrorists or communists or name names of those who have ‘infiltrated’ the PR parties and trying to be fielded as candidates in the coming general election,” Lim said.
Otherwise, Lim told Mohd Sofian to withdraw and apologise “for such a serious and baseless allegation or he should face disciplinary action and even be sacked for making a most irresponsible statement unbecoming of a public servant whose top-most priority must be to serve the nation and not the political party currently in power”.
In the Bernama report, Mohd Sofian said the Special Branch had detected several JI elements who attempted to infiltrate PAS besides some communist movement elements into the DAP.
“Several leaders from the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) also frequent Bangkok and southern Thailand, believed to attend secret meetings with former Malayan Communist Party leaders there.
“The effect is new political ideas which have the potential of threatening the nation’s core values have spread. The movement receives support from foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which assist in terms of finance, training locally and abroad as well as exposure to specific expertise in facing the general election,” he was quoted as saying when delivering a lecture titled “Keselamatan Negara Tanggungjawab Bersama” (National Security A Shared Responsibility) at the convention.
Mohd Sofian said the movement’s aim was to create local NGOs which would always be hostile to the government and create chaos to weaken the ruling government.
“In this matter, we worry that the opposition parties and NGOs play up controversial issues to stir hatred among the public towards the government by the time the elections come.
“Or (it’s) to increase demonstrations and incidents which can divert police attention... demonstrations will continue to be a trend in our country,” he said.
Mohd Sofian said the Bersih rally, Orange and Green rallies, organised by opposition supporters recently, were planned specially in the run-up to the coming general election.
“In addition, the campaign culture practised by Malaysia throughout the year has caused the public to be exposed to information with political values,” he added.American images of Arabs and Muslims have remained remarkably consistent over the decades. Despite the diversity of Arab and Muslim experience, reel Arab women have appeared mostly mute and submissive -- belly dancers, bundles in black and beasts of burden, argues Jack Shaheen.
You can hit an Arab free; they’re free enemies, free villains -- where you couldn’t do it to a Jew or you can’t do it to a black anymore. -- Sam Keen, author of Faces of the Enemy
In 1918 American movie audiences were treated to their first major silver-screen glimpse of a reel bad Arab. In Tarzan of the Apes, the first of six popular Tarzan films to vilify Arabs, viewers got to see brutal Arab slave masters whipping African slaves and forcing their kidnapped Englishman “to endure ten years of agony,” all the while brandishing guns and scruffy goatees. It was quite a debut.
Three years later, with the release of Rudolph Valentino’s box-office hit The Sheik (1921), audiences got their second sustained peek at big-screen Arabs. Still brutal and erratic, these Arabs had the added awfulness of being lecherous and rapacious. “When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he takes her,” promised the titillating blurb on The Sheik’s movie posters.
For four decades I have been tracking these kinds of images of Arabs and Muslims in more than 1,200 feature films and hundreds of television programs, from dramas and news documentaries to comedies and children’s cartoons. Along the way, I’ve discovered that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes have a long and powerful history in American popular culture. Constantly repeated, these damaging portraits have manipulated viewers’ thoughts and feelings, conditioning them to ratchet up the forces of rage and unreason. Make no mistake: fictional narratives have the capacity to alter reality. As the Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli reminds us, “The great majority of mankind are…more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”
American images of Arabs and Muslims have remained remarkably consistent over the decades. Despite the diversity of Arab and Muslim experience, reel Arab women have appeared mostly mute and submissive -- belly dancers, bundles in black and beasts of burden. Arab men have fared no better, appearing as Bedouin bandits, sinister sheiks, comic buffoons and weapon-wielding terrorists. As a result, when readers open the pages of Holy Terror, the 2011 graphic novel by comic book icon Frank Miller, the warped messages they receive about bloodthirsty Muslims read almost like companion drawings for John Buchan’s 1916 novel Greenmantle. (Sample Buchan line: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Quran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”) And my late friend Edward Said’s 1980 Nation essay “Islam Through Western Eyes” feels as relevant today as it did thirty years ago. “So far as the United States seems to be concerned,” he wrote, “it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of…the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead [are] crude…caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.”
And yet, despite the consistency of these representations, the last decade has brought profound and critically important changes in the ways Muslims and Arabs are portrayed in the United States. The catalyzing event was September 11, when nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans. It was an attack designed, cruelly and perversely, to inflict maximum cinematic as well as real-life horror, and in its traumatized aftermath, the shape of American fantasies began to shift. Added to the Arab threat was the Muslim threat, and as this new threat materialized, it also intensified. While anti-Arab and anti-Muslim imagery had long been part of the background noise of American bigotry, Arabs and Muslims now became the chief bogeys of our most paranoid fantasies. They were no longer simply some Evil Other From Over There; now they were the Evil Other From Over There and Here, wild-eyed supervillains in the ongoing American epic of good and evil.
To put a sharper point on it: in a 1977 60 Minutes special titled “The Arabs Are Coming,” Morley Safer warned that Arabs were “invading” by buying up US businesses and farmland; in 1990 The National Review sounded a similar alarm in a cover story titled “The Muslims Are Coming! The Muslims Are Coming!” accompanied by the requisite picture of marauding men on camels. Today’s media-makers, by contrast, have dispensed with the future tense altogether, as well as anything as nonthreatening or absurd as camels. Instead, they drape their Muslims in shredded American flags and shriek, The Muslims have arrived and are about to destroy us! Or, as Newsweek blared from the newsstands in June 2003, “Al Qaeda in America: How the Terrorists Are Recruiting -- and Plotting -- Here.”This change happened overnight, or so it seemed, as scores of programs began displaying Muslim Americans and Americans with Arab roots as “terrorists,” falling into the stale trap of “seen one, seen ‘em all.” These “terrorists” waged holy wars against their fellow Americans from sleeper cells in Los Angeles and mosques in Washington. Series such as 24, The Unit, The Agency, NCIS, Sleeper Cell, Threat Matrix and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye exploited post-9/11 fears, pummeling home myths that made the profiling, imprisonment, extradition, torture and even death of these one-dimensional characters more palatable to the public. Producers made few, if any, distinctions between American Arabs and Arabs, between American Muslims and Muslims, as if it were impossible to be truly American and Arab or Muslim.
This kind of viral paranoia has a long and sordid history in this country, as Richard Hofstadter persuasively argued in his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Fueled by the “animosities and passions of a small minority,” the paranoid style has helped to stir many of our most virulent “scares”: from the anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic movements of the nineteenth century to the more recent “Yellow Peril” and “Red Menace.” And now, of course, there’s the “Green Menace” (green being the color of Islam) with its high-pitched paranoia about 1.6 billion Muslims that serves not only to prime American audiences for military aggression -- as Said suggested in his Nation essay -- but make hefty sums of money for the media industry.
At the forefront of this effort is a series of well-funded, politically motivated campaigns dedicated to painting Islam as an inherently violent and savage religion. These campaigns are the work of a small group of wealthy donors, misinformation specialists like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and groups of interconnected anti-Islam organizations: Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum and so forth. Together they pound home the myth that mainstream Muslims have “terrorist” ties, that Islam is the new global ideological menace and that Muslims are intent on destroying Western civilization. Then they spread their message far and wide.
Consider Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (2005), the first film made by the Clarion Fund, a pro-Israel nonprofit organization. Steeped in hatred, the film uses propaganda to convince the masses -- including law enforcement officials, military personnel and public servants at every level -- of its righteousness by systematically dehumanizing Muslims as the evil, alien “other.” The film’s frighteningly Islamophobic message also draws parallels between Islam and Nazism. Shockingly, the fund persuaded major newspapers to distribute some 28 million DVD copies to their readers, free of charge, which were inserted in more than seventy papers -- predominantly in swing states -- before the 2008 presidential election. Only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a handful of other newspapers refused to distribute the DVD. (More recently, the Clarion Fund released The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, which was screened before nearly 1,500 New York City police officers, and Iranium, which warns of an Islamic nuclear threat.)
In an environment in which 62 percent of Americans have never met a Muslim, these representations matter. After all, the media mediate. Is it any wonder, then, that nearly half of us (49 percent) say the values of Islam are at odds with “American values”? Or that 45 percent of Americans say they would be uncomfortable with a mosque being built near their home? Left unchallenged, the continuous barrage of reel Islamophobic imagery makes it difficult for some Americans to accept real Muslims into our society -- a situation that was painfully illustrated by the protests surrounding the reality TV show All-American Muslim.
In considering how to begin removing the sting of Islamophobia from the media, let’s return for a moment to Sam Keen’s stunning statement: “You can hit an Arab free; they’re free enemies, free villains -- where you couldn’t do it to a Jew or you can’t do it to a black anymore.” This was true in 1986, when Keen made the observation to the Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and it is all the more true today.
To some, dispensing with this stereotype may seem an impossible task. Yet openness to change is an American tradition and the strength of our society. The path ahead may be littered with ingrained, prejudicial precedents, but I believe these baleful portraits will be shattered, one image at a time. Young scholars and artists will lead the way, creating inventive new portraits that depict Arabs and Muslims as neither saints nor devils but as fellow human beings, with all the strengths and frailties that condition implies. Bold leaders and audiences of conscience will make it more costly, morally and politically, for the media to demean a whole population. And as Americans begin to experience the humanity of Muslims and Arabs of all beliefs, backgrounds, opinions and cultures, we too will regain some of our lost humanity.
Many parts of the world, such as Korea, China, and India – basically medieval kingdoms fifty or sixty years ago — are now among the pacesetters of the modern world, both producing, and improving on, existing inventions. The Muslim world, however, often better off than these countries just half a century ago, has remained as it was, or has even, in many instances, deteriorated. This inertia in the Islamic world seems to stem not from any genetic limitations, or even religious ones, but purely from Islamic culture.Although one can gain some insight into Islamic culture from books and other written material, if one is to really understand the Muslim world, there is no substitute for sitting in coffee or tea houses, spending time with Muslims, and asking them questions in their own surroundings and in their own languages. A result of these approaches would seem to indicate, with respect, some of the factors citizens of the Arab and Muslim world might wish to consider to use their extraordinary talents even more fully:
The Ability to Question – Western culture is predicated on questioning: inquiring of authorities how they came to the conclusions they reached — a concept from the ancient Greek word “historayn,” to learn by asking. Although in the Shiite world questioning occurs among religious authorities and the educated elite, in the Sunni world, for centuries, asking questions of those more learned or in positions of authority has been unacceptable. Until Muslims once again allow themselves to ask questions and engage in critical examination, they are disabling themselves from accomplishing as much as they otherwise might.
The Role of the Individual vs. the Role of the Group – In much of the Muslim world, people are often seen not as individuals but as members of particular families, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, or religions. In the Muslim and Arab world, a problem between two people can become a problem between two families, with the individual becoming a “soldier” in the ensuing feud. What an individual might think personally – who is right and who is wrong – becomes irrelevant, fostering a mindset that obstructs the impersonal and dispassionate analytic thinking that defines the modern world.
Encouraging Creativity – A good way to define Western intellectual creativity in the Muslim world is to use the Arabic word ijtihad, roughly meaning using one’s intellectual and reasoning capabilities to determine answers. Today’s Islamic culture seems not to encourage this ability: among the Sunni Muslims, who comprise about 85% of the approximately 1.4 billion Muslims, the “Gates of Ijtihad” were closed about a thousand years ago, apparently for political reasons: religious authorities declared that all questions had been addressed during the past four centuries, so there was therefore no more need for questioning. Since then, Muslims have been asked to accept institutionally what they learn from their authority figures – as in the word Islam, itself, meaning “submission.” Islamic culture therefore does encourage creativity as much as it might; it appears actively to discourage it – people are educated to memorize, not criticize.
Creativity requires, above all, questioning the accepted ways of doing things. What many Muslims do, therefore – and do very well – is produce things invented by others. The Turks, for example, who have had longer and closer contacts with the West than most other areas of the Muslim world have had, are superb at replicating what others have created. Although the F-16, for example, was created in the US, the only perfect one ever manufactured by the mid-1990′s was assembled in an F-16 plant in Turkey. Individual Turks would have been perfectly capable of inventing an F-16, but often feel constrained to think creatively in their own country. This might be a reason that gifted individuals in the Muslim world who feel the need to expand their abilities often abandon their native countries for the West, and do brilliantly there.
The Ability to Admit Failure and Learn from It – Although no one particularly likes to fail, people in the West expect those who have failed to examine why they have failed, and to learn from their mistakes. Some high-tech firms even try to hire people who have failed at startups in the hope of gaining insights so their companies will not pursue avenues that did not succeed. It is hard to imagine a similar approach in any Muslim country, where it is virtually impossible for anyone publicly to admit failure. The concept of personal honor (in Arabic, ‘Ayib), what others say about you – is prevalent everywhere: admitting failure means shaming yourself, a situation to be avoided at all costs. In Western culture, this concept of shame is largely alien; we are more of a “guilt” culture, in that what we think about ourselves counts more than how others view us, and largely motivates our advancement.
The results of this contrast – The Asian and Western cultures on one hand, and the Muslim culture on the other — might be described as two kinds of cakes: just looking at the cake tells you nothing about how it tastes. The Western world is like a cake covered with an uninviting khaki-colored frosting. Although it might look awful, the cake inside tastes great: its ingredients are first class and well-baked. By contrast, the Muslim world is like a cake covered with beautiful frosting, but made out of ingredients that might disappoint the people at the table.
The Learning Process – Muslim culture emphasizes memorization. Universities in Muslim lands grant degrees based on the students memorizing vast amounts of material, but not necessarily knowing how to apply them. In engineering, for instance, the Arab world graduates more than 250,000 engineers each year, but when the Arabs want to build an airport, they invariably import foreigners to do it, In the Arab world, engineering degrees often have become symbols of “personal honor” rather than knowledge to be used.
Taking Responsibility for One’s Actions – In the same vein, there is no equivalent in the Muslim world to the Western concept of taking responsibility for one’s actions. The word mas’uliya in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian is usually translated in Western dictionaries as “responsibility,” but it really has a meaning which corresponds more to the Western concept of “being held responsible for, or being blamed for something not going well.” The meaning of this word in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish has little to do with the Western concept of responsibility — defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the ability to act independently and make decisions,” and largely devoid of personal honor.
How Information Is Passed On To Others – In Western societies, information is usually passed down along a chain, based on information moved up it by subordinates. In Muslim societies, the opposite usually occurs: the job of the subordinate is to implement what superiors pass command him to do; the subordinate almost never participates in the decision-making process. The Middle Eastern subordinate fears not doing what his superior tells him to do, even if the subordinate knows that what his superior wants him to do is wrong or will not work. At best the subordinate is discouraged, on pain of being fired, from questioning the decision — true even in the most Westernized country in the Muslim world, Turkey. Most officers in the Turkish army, for example, have a sign behind their desks: “The commander wants answers, he does not want questions.” That attitude was most likely the reason senior Turkish military officials could not learn how deeply the Islamic fundamentalists had penetrated the military establishment – their subordinates knew their officers did not want to hear that their units had been penetrated by people who disagreed with Ataturk’s philosophy of separating religion from the state.
The Western Concept of Compromise – In the West, the precept of “win-win” forms the basis of how we negotiate. To reach an agreement, each side gives in to some of the demands of the other side; doing so entails no loss of personal honor. In the Arab, Turkish, and Persian worlds, however, giving in to the other side’s demands involves enormous amounts of shame and the loss of honor – which is why the culture in these Islamic lands requires negotiations only after victory. Asking to negotiate before one has won indicates weakness – or why else would one be reaching out to end a conflict? — and another loss of personal honor to be avoided at all costs. After one side has decisively won, and has then imposed a solution on the vanquished party, then one begins to negotiate: the vanquished party licks his wounds and looks for the opportunity to redress his loss. This is known in Arabic assulh, somewhat like the Western concept of a truce, by definition temporary. In such circumstances, there cannot be a win-win situation. This is, unsurprisingly, why conflicts in the Middle East are never permanently resolved, and why life in the Muslim world, unlike the West, seethes in a constant state of tension.
The Western Concept of Peace – In Western culture, making peace boils down to putting the past behind one, letting bygones be bygones, and moving on from there. This mindset already existed in ancient Hebrew culture, in which the word shalom, from the root sh-l-m, meaning completeness, involved leaving past disagreements behind. But in the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian cultures, such a concept does not exist. The Arabic word salam – used in all three languages – derives from the same Semitic root, but instead means “the special joy that one gets by submitting to Allah’s will through Islam.” The word Islam, from the same root, means submission; not exactly the same as peace. If bygones can never be bygones, conflicts can never be resolved. In these Muslim lands, when one side is stronger, it attempts to subdue its ancient enemies. The culture does not permit Muslims to put the past behind them: the internet, for example, is filled with discussions among Muslims about how they must and will reconquer Spain, which they lost to the West 520 years ago. In the Muslim culture, individuals — both the leadership and the common man — spend so much time looking for ways to right perceived wrongs, that they might find it disconcerting to focus their energy on looking what we might think of as more productive and positive activities.
Book Publishing – The subject of most of the books sold in the Arab world, except for Lebanon and Iraq, concern either to Islam or hatred of the West – more specifically, they are either anti-America or anti-Israel. The number of books translated annually into Arabic is about the same as those translated into Finnish. There are, however, about 365 million Arabs, compared to 5.5 million Finns. How are Arabs to acquire the knowledge necessary to propel them into the modern world if they do not have access to modern scientific and intellectual thought, easily available in their own languages? Sadly, there does not seem to be a market in the Arab world for these types of books. Is this because there is little desire for that knowledge? If so, this inertia guarantees that as the outside world gallops into the future, the Arabo-Muslim world will find it harder and harder to catch up to Asia and the West. Arabs leaders can, of course, buy modern technology, but this solution, although instant, only guarantees a permanent dependence on outsiders.
The Status of Women – The great 19th century Ottoman historian, Namik Kemal, argued that the Muslim world was in danger of being left behind because of its oppression of women. He asked how a country could advance if it oppressed and failed to educate half its population — the equivalent of intentionally paralyzing half of one’s body. Further, this paralyzed part of society is the one responsible for raising the next generation of males. Much of the Muslim world continues to place great obstacles in the paths of its women. In Iran under the Shah, for example, the marital age for women was 16; under the Islamic republic, this age was lowered to nine lunar years, meaning that an 8-1/2 year old girl can legally be married off by her family. In the Arab, Turkish, and Persian worlds, women can be murdered, often without definitive proof, if the male members of their families believe that they may have done something that could have put a stain on the family honor; if a woman is regarded as contaminated, the entire clan can be held in disrepute and cast out by the community.
In some parts of the Muslim world, females are pressured to undergo various forms of “female circumcision,” a cutting of their genitals presumably intended to prevent women from having sexual pleasure — a practice that often takes place in unsanitary conditions that can cause significant health problems, if not death. This practice, however, has nothing to do with Islam; it is tribal, it pre-dates Islam, and it has everything to do with Islamic culture and a seeming male terror of being tempted by women’s sexual allure.
The Oil Curse – Since Muslims in the oil-rich states can now afford to have others do everything for them, they are not compelled to use the one renewable resource available to everyone: the human brain — if exercised to think creatively, capable of amazing feats. But given the cultural realities and financial wealth available in so much of the Muslim world, there seem to be few incentives, if any, to be productive in ways other than gaining, conserving, or enjoying wealth.
Palestinians, as well, are easily capable of accomplishing what anyone else does, if only their education, governance and cultural incentives were changed from destroying their neighbor, Israel, to building a felicitous society. Palestinian political leaders, however, seem to have decided that the rewards from the international community, at least for them, will be greater if they are seen as victims receiving perpetual handouts, rather than as leaders receiving rewards linked to accomplishments. The economic system seems to have evolved into bribes in exchange for promises that are never kept, followed later by the request for still more bribes.
Ironically, all genetic analyses of the many ancient Muslim Palestinian families indicate that they are largely from the same genetic stock as Ashkenazi Jewry. So what is the difference here? The Jewish culture encourages questioning and thinking from an early age, whereas the Palestinian Muslim culture does not. What is encouraged instead is the unexamined acceptance of whatever is set before one, whether on government-run television or in government-written textbooks. Religion has nothing to do with this situation; Islam therefore is not the problem: Islamic culture is. Only when Muslims address their culture head-on can there be any real hope for their world to overcome its self-imposed limitations and start fully contributing to the wonders of the 21st century.
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