Arab-Israeli

It bothers me that the Palestinian terror organizations receive as much sympathy as they do. The willful targeting of non-combatants has been a crime of warfare since the 19th century. As warfare’s technology made mass killing more and more simple to achieve yet difficult to control, the excess destruction of industrial warfare drove governments to politicize the security needs of non-combatants, and to try to rein in the indiscriminant use of force. There is no way to adequately ensure that violence doesn’t exceed it’s proscribed limits, of course, and there are innumerable exceptions where non-combatants were specific targets of military forces. World War Two is the most complicated example of such inconsistencies To name a few, from the rape of Nanking and the siege of Warsaw to the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, westernized military commanders have made their exceptions with or without the blessings of their governments.

Today, we accept that the destruction of non-combatants is a type of strategy. We’ve coined the term ‘asymmetrical warfare’. A military force that recognizes its inability to directly confront the armed forces of its opponents will lash out in ways that maximize its ability to survive, and to conduct limited military objectives successfully. Terrorism and guerilla warfare are today’s most recognizable strategies of such asymmetrical combatants.

Terrorism is widely recognized as an abomination on human morality. We feel it is wrong to target the innocent as they go about their daily lives oblivious to the harm plotted against them. This is true insofar as we sympathize with the victims. For terrorism to seem morally justifiable, one would have to see the targets of terrorism as aggressors, or of being direct supporters of aggressors against one’s self-interests. To justify the destruction of civilians, one has to see them as one’s own victimizers. Thus, to understand how it was that crowds of Palestinians cheered in their streets when the World Trade Center was destroyed, we must understand that these demonstrators deemed us guilty of doing them sufficient harm that our harm was cause for celebration.

You can sympathize with anyone in the right circumstances, or when the justification is spun correctly. Our perceptions define our reality, but we are unable to judge the accuracy of perceptions objectively in any moment. Only after perceptions change can old ones be examined and objectified (perhaps even then, this isn’t objective, as the new perceptions dictate the perspective with which we view the old). The middle east conflict is a war based on faulty perceptions. In my assessment of it, it is rooted in the perceptions of the cultures of the Arabian peninsula and of the Muslim nations.

As the people of Palestine, and the other struggling Muslim nations would explain it, Israel, backed by the United States, is exploiting them, keeping them repressed economically and politically. This perception is very difficult to address, because to understand socio-economic conditions of a given nation or region requires a serious examination of history and economics. It involves some key elements: the advantage of democracy over monarchy and dictatorships, the advantage of individualism over tribalism, the advantage of secularism governments over theistic governments. All of these take a great deal of time to explain, but in defense of my position and in refuting the argument of hegemony aimed at repressing Muslim states, these facts are important. There is no democracy among Muslim states in the Middle East (Turkey is essentially a European state). There is no free press in any state in the region, except within Israel. Individuality is second to tribe in most of these countries as a cultural practice.

The essence of my argument is that the bulk of the peoples in the Muslim world are ignorant of the differences between how their societies live, and how European-descended societies live, and how their practices and institutions conspire against them developing on their own. To be blunt, the leadership among the nations of Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are despotic. To label them Monarchies is indeed too benign a term. The chief exploiters of Muslim nations are the leadership and the institutions.

The apparati of these nation-states exist to perpetuate the leaders. To use Iraq as an example, the nations wide-ranging agricultural and oil assets were resources controlled by the Baath party. The economic value of these resources was hoarded among the ruling class, and were shared only insofar as necessary to coax assistance from an otherwise repressed populace. The only means of advancement in this society was to find a way to further the goals of the Baath party. There was no way for a person with a desire to elevate his status to do so unless that also served the Baathists’ goals. This tyranny exists also in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran (I can’t say for sure in Egypt, which is a miasma of influences).

Excepting those who subscribe to X-Files type conspiracy theories (I dismiss out of hand the notion that handfuls of people in America and Europe control things and that we are puppeteers without our knowledge), this is not a situation to which free societies in the west can relate. Indeed, when institutions are exposed as corrupt and unfair in the west, there are legal means to redress injustice, and the freedom of the press enables information that is harmful to the powerful to be disseminated. The corruption of legal and journalistic institutions in these Muslim nations serves only the entrenched powers. The ignorance that I assign to the populations of Islamic nations is purposefully indoctrinated unto them by their depraved leaders. Just as Nazi Germany needed a scapegoat around which to rally a dissatisfied and angry population, so to do the leaders in the Middle East.