Adonis Diaries

Rage and Pride in the Greater Middle East

November 26, 2007

After the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in September 11, 2001 by the followers of Ben Laden, the late Oriana Fallaci broke her long silence and fulminated in her manuscript “Rage and Pride” and that Hillary Clinton loved so much.  Fallaci raged against the Moslem “sons of Allah”, the “cicadas” of the Italian left that tends to find all kinds of excuses for the assaults committed on the USA, and the western women who refuse to wage demonstrations in front of the Moslem State Embassies and Saudi Arabia in particular for treating their women as inferior to men.

Fallaci raged against the late Pope Jean-Paul II for presenting his apology to the Moslems for the Crusades’ campaigns that started in the eleventh century that ransacked Jerusalem and occupied the coastal territories from Turkey to Palestine; she raged against the western organizations making a parallel of cultural differences between the West and the Moslem World and stating that the Moslems have no culture whatsoever to compare it with the West.  How can a dark culture that forbid painting, sculpting, and music and is far behind in technology and knowledge and human rights be compared to the western culture?

Fallaci enumerated bestial events and described graphically her own experiences in the Moslem World.  She went on how the Taliban in Afghanistan executed three young girls in a parking lot, simply because they entered a hair dressing saloon; the minister of the interior Wakil Mutawakil declared that Kabul is a cleaner place after the execution of the girls.  The Taliban deliberately and through an Islamic court announced that all pre-Islamic statutes should be destroyed and the two gigantic Buddha statues engraved on a mountain in the valley of Bamyan from the 3^rd and 4^th century were detonated and watched on International TV.  Fallaci recounted how the Palestinian guerillas in Jordan locked her up in a storage containing explosives while the guerrillas hide in an underground bunker during an Israeli air raid, for the simple reason that women are inferior to men.  In Bangladesh, they executed 12 young “impure” citizens in a stadium attended by 20,000; after the execution the masses filed in a disciplined manner on top of the cadavers.  When Fallaci was in Iran to interview Khomeini she could not locate a single hotel to accept her; she could not find a space to change in Khomeini palace and she was forced to marry the photographer because he was protecting her while she changed.  Bashir, Oriana’s hair dresser in Iran, was imprisoned for eight years. In the Iranian Embassy in Italy they were obfuscated by Oriana’s red nails and she had to rage and threaten to cut their balls before they let her loose.

Fallaci mentioned that when the western people visit the Moslem World they behave and respect the customs of Islam but the Moslem immigrants don’t mind pissing on the walls of churches and cathedrals and selling drugs and defaming the western holy places.  She claims that this massive immigration of Moslems to Europe and the USA is planned and well-organized; if the immigrants were so poor how then could they afford to pay exorbitant amount of money to get their tickets in by all ways available?

Fallaci might have legitimate claims to rage on many counts; she has legitimate ground to feel pride on many counts. What the western civilization proved was that institutions that are organized according to processes that allow changes as society develop can make a qualitative difference for survival.  This does not mean that western civilization has lost any of its carnivorous animal instincts for survival; on the contrary, this instinct has been developed far than is necessary and the western civilization is very much proud of its animal instincts.  The proofs can be found in the World Wars where millions, military and civilians, lost their lives the last centuries in Europe for domination and market outlets in the colonies and for natural resources.  Invading Iraq is the most recent and striking example.

However, any tendency of pride on individual attributes is sheer ignorance: we have to remember that modern man is relatively young specie and there are more differences among 55 chimpanzees than the whole human race.  Any serious studies on samples among the remote aborigines and the citizens of the most advanced States would not show any significant differences in attributes and aptitudes in social and political intelligence.  Probably, ignorance and stupidity will be discovered to be more predominant in advanced States.

I admit with Fallaci that it is not appropriate to compare the current western and Moslem cultures on the basis of technology, culture, arts, and institutions. The qualitative differences are too vast to compare these two civilizations, for the simple reason that Moslem civilization has been immutable since the tenth century because of caste structure founded on religious dogmas that would not alter the civil laws to change as they claim was revealed to the Prophet Mohammad; even worse, civil dogmas were founded on selective verses that were emphasized out of context and without the recommendations of how better men should behave and act accordingly.  We have firm ground to rage against the activities and deeds of the West for bringing forth the worst among the worst of Arabic leaders to command our political landscape.  Indeed, we have been raging for decades against the Western machinations for installing dictators, monarchs, and oligarchic structures in order to rob us out of our natural resources and killing in the bud any progressive movements revolting for changes

I admit with Fallaci that the West has progressed incrementally and continuously for centuries starting at the time of the Crusades while the “Greater Middle East” was robbed of any chance for changes by the antiquated Sunni Central Asian Empires that dominated our region. Instead of the West encouraging a change in our social structures and investing in any social and political institutions it has been creating a bogus abstract enemy Islam to eradicate the people in our region and keeping them in the Middle Ages status.

We, citizens of States in the Greater Middle East, that Bush and company feel that only pre-emptive wars can spread the seeds of democracy and human rights values, have also reasons to rage about and maybe a few qualities to be proud of. The USA has already spent over two trillion dollars since its invasion of Iraq, a budget that is many times larger than the combined GNP of over one hundred underdeveloped States.  All that fortune was wasted and nothing to show for but over 200,000 civilian casualties in Iraq alone since Bush entered Baghdad.  Worst, civil war was rekindled in Iraq after it was in check for decades and the coalition forces retreated on ground of not willing to be caught in a civil war and let all hell burn these backward people. Taliban is back and spreading its wings all over Afghanistan and we do have ground to rage against the West for not comprehending that “changing the minds” in our region cannot be done by unilateral military force alone.

We have been raging for decades against the US cohabitation with the theocratic, monarchic and dictatorial regimes in this region for the lame excuse that the US is at war with communist and atheist Russia.  We have been crushed, humiliated, and our liberty and freedom robbed for decades by these totalitarian regimes because oil was far more precious than the rights guaranteed by the UN charter.

We do have big reasons to rage against and hate the western nations for dismantling any democratic processes that we initiated with our blood and determination on the ground that the time was not ripe for their greed to be quenched so that we establish institutions that guarantee freedom and liberty in the Greater Middle East.

I would never relinquish my firm proclamation that it is our caste structure, in this whole region, that is the main culprit to our misery and underdevelopment and extremist tendencies. The Koran, as a spiritual and earthly dogma for regulating the lives of the believers, is a formidable barrier for change but it remains nevertheless only a catalytic factor in the hand of the wrong leaders for our lack of freedom to speech and opinion.  The regulated barriers to communicating among castes and the weak social and economic interactions among these closed religious sects are the Monsters for our backward status.

Only family atmosphere and peer influences in the immediate surroundings that encourage freedom of opinion and selecting among choices can generate free minds and independent behavior among the sons and daughters.  If this liberal climate is lacking within a family then by the time the children enroll in schools and universities it is already too late to change behavior toward listening and conversing with our colleagues as free people with potentials to change society.  Whatever liberal education we receive in universities is tantamount to inflaming our anger with no material outlets, since true democracy is a mockery within our closed religious sect structure:  Our caste systems regulate our lives through autonomous Personal Status Laws and religious courts that central governments have no say in their decrees.

We are proud that we are immigrating in drove to better pastures to experience freedom and liberty and economic independence if the West institutes programs that penalize conglomeration in ghettos and encourage the immigrants to breathe the spirit of their new homelands.  The West is best in instituting programs that last and survive upheavals and the hope is on these immigrants to take advantage of opportunities that immerse them in the social and political dialogue and way of life that is hopefully rooted in freedom of speech and availability of choices and opportunities.

We are proud that we are fighting by any means available to claim our rights for International balanced policies and rational behavior that view us as human with inalienable rights to life, happiness, liberty in religious beliefs, and freedom from our internal oppressors through fair election laws.  We have ground to rage against the West who denies our democratic results that do not suit its expectations like in Palestine, Algeria, and Egypt.

We are proud that with all the obstacles, internally and externally, the spirit of resistance to external oppressions is alive and growing and reaping its fruits as nations demanding equal treatments and fair shares in the resources and just applications of the UN resolutions and fair responsibilities in the upheavals hurtling on Earth.  We are raging for the unfair representation that citizens in the Greater Middle East are born criminals, are evils, and are incapable of governance.

There are many theocratic and monarchic regimes in our region that are the hotbed of obscurantism and extremist sectarianism.  We are damned raging against the West for considering these loathsome regimes as moderate and as their best allies for fighting against terrorism. Yes, we are proud that we are far ahead of the West in recognizing our internal enemies and fighting the right war on the West behalf.

We are proud that we discriminate what is Liberty with responsibilities and duties and what is License to do any thing because of abundance and laxity in applying free-falling laws among the Western adolescents.

We are proud that we don’t need heavily armed police forces to secure our neighborhoods, simply because we managed to hang on to our basic traditions and customs of peaceful coexistence and respect for life and properties. It is a miracle of high spiritual endurance that our societies are surviving without central governments whose only purpose is to levy taxes for its own survival, and through the calamities brought on us by the support of the West to our outdated and backward regimes.

All that we have been asking from the West was to offer us minimal moral and diplomatic guarantees that our fights against our retrograded systems and regimes receive an adequate support so that the grain of hope for change can take root.

Finally, I need to rage against the late Fallaci and her supporters like Bush, Cheney, the Christian Conservatives in the USA for lashing out against billions of people, simply because it felt right and good, without offering a sensible alternative but to waging pre-emptive wars and crushing the immigrants by sheer force.  Fallaci’s fulminating emotion is the ultimate in terrorism because it rekindled the mean-spirited “race superiority” ideology that is bringing the World closer to a Third World War and failing to bring some rationality in the causes of current terrorism.