Let
us confess it: Many of the things that are bothersome in the world today
originate in the Middle East. Billions of air passengers each year take
off their belts and shoes at the airport, not because of fears of
terrorism from the slums of Johannesburg or because the grandsons of
displaced East Prussians are blowing up Polish diplomats. We put up with
such burdens because a Saudi multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden, and his
unhinged band of Arab religious extremists began ramming airliners into
buildings and murdering thousands.
The Olympics have become an armed camp, not because the Cold War
Soviets once stormed Montreal or the Chinese have threatened Australia,
but largely because Palestinian terrorists butchered Israelis in Munich
40 years ago and established the precedent that international arenas
were ideal occasions for political mass murder.
There is no corn or wheat cartel. There are no cell-phone monopolies.
Coal prices are not controlled by global price-fixers. Yet OPEC adjusts
the supply of oil in the Middle East to ensure high prices, mostly for
the benefit of Gulf sheikhdoms and assorted other authoritarian
governments.Catholics donāt assassinate
movie directors or artists who treat Jesus Christ with contempt. Jewish
mobs will not murder cartoonists should they ridicule the Torah.
Buddhists are not calling for global blasphemy laws. But radical
Muslims, mostly in the Middle East, have warned the world that Islam
alone is not to be caricatured ā or else. Right-wing fascists and red
Communists have not done as much damage to the First Amendment as have
the threats from the Arab Street.
The world obsesses over Israel and the Palestinians because of the
neurotic Middle East. The issue is not really the principle of a divided
capital ā or Nicosia would be daily news. Nor is the concern over
refugees per se, since well over 500,000 Jews were religiously cleansed
from the major Arab capitals following the 1948 and 1967 wars. No one
cares where they went or how they have fared in the decades since. Is
the global worry really over occupied territories? Hardly. Lately it
seems that every desolate island between China and Japan is equally
contested. Are there special envoys to the Falklands, and do the
islanders receive international aid? Will there be a U.N. session
devoted to the Kuril Islands? Does Gdansk/Danzig merit summits? We are
told ad nauseam that the Arab minority in Israel suffers ā would that
the ignored Coptic minority in Egypt had similar protections and
freedoms.
The oil-rich Middle East is just different from other regions. We
donāt expect another Cal Tech to sprout in Cairo in the way it might in
either Bombay or Beijing. Nor do we assume that a cure for prostate
cancer could ever emerge from Tripoli as it might from Tel Aviv. The
world will not be flooded by Syrian-made low-cost, durable products that
make our lives better ā comparable to what comes from South Korea.
There will be not a Saudi or Algerian version of a Kia. High-speed
machine lathes will not be exported from Pakistan as they are from
Germany. I doubt that engineers in Afghanistan or Yemen will replace our
iPads. The Middle Eastās efforts in the production of biofuels will not
rival Brazilās. Libya will not send archaeologists to the American
Southwest to help investigate Native American sites.
In other words, in politically incorrect terms, the world tacitly
gives exemptions to the Middle East ā and expects very little in return.
It assumes that the rules that apply elsewhere of civility, tolerance,
and nonviolence are inoperative there ā and perhaps have reason to so
be. Money is made in the Middle East either by pumping out oil that
others have found and developed or, less frequently these days, by
catering for tourists who wish to see the remains of what others built
centuries earlier. Few foreigners decide to spend a relaxing week in
Egypt, or to sunbathe on the beaches of Gaza, or to enjoy the wine and
cheese of Libya, or to snorkel in the waters off Syria, or to study
engineering in Algiers. How many tourists choose to mountaineer in
Afghanistan or visit Persepolis or unwind in Pakistan?
The world also assumes a sort of Middle Eastern parasitism: Daily its
millions use mobile phones, take antibiotics, hit the Internet, fire
RPGs, and play video games, and yet they not only do not create these
products that they rely upon, but largely have antipathy for those who
do.
Asymmetry is, of course, assumed. One expects to be detained for
having a Bible in oneās baggage at Riyadh, whereas a Koran in a tote bag
is of no importance at the Toronto airport. The Egyptian immigrant in
San Francisco, or the Pakistani who moves to London, expects to be
allowed to demonstrate against the freewheeling protocols of his hosts,
while a Westerner protesting against life under sharia in the streets of
Karachi or Gaza would earn a death sentence. What is nauseating about
this is not the hypocrisy per se, but the Middle Eastern insistence that
there is no such hypocrisy. We expect the immigrant from Egypt to
deface public posters and call it freedom of expression; we expect Mr.
Morsi, who enjoyed American freedom while he studied for his Ph.D. and
then taught for three years in California, to deny it to others and
trash his former host.
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