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Jewish World Review
Feb. 16, 2006
/ 18 Shevat, 5766
The West as scapegoat
By
Max Boot
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Why are so many Muslims so enraged by a handful of cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper? It's not enough to point out how the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iran are stoking the protests in a cynical ploy to deflect Western pressure for democratic reform and to curry favor with Islamic radicals. Their strategy wouldn't be so successful if it didn't resonate with deeply ingrained attitudes among the Muslim multitudes.
I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: "Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?" We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a red-hot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.
If only I had a ringgit for every time some delegate complained that the plight of the Palestinians showed the world's anti-Muslim bias. One attendee even had the gall to claim that Israel is allowed to violate U.N. resolutions while no Muslim state has that luxury at the very moment Iran is thumbing its nose at the United Nations! This was coupled with ritualistic denunciations of other anti-Muslim offenses from the real (Russian repression in Chechnya) to the farcical (a Pakistani academic blamed the CIA for creating Islamic fundamentalism in his country).
Naturally the United States got scant credit (except from one Bosnian) for repeatedly waging war to free Muslims from oppression. Instead of being thanked for saving Muslims from genocide in places such as Kosovo, the U.S. was denounced for committing genocide against them.
Other complaints abounded the global financial system is biased against Muslim countries such as Indonesia (which was hurt by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis); the propagation of knowledge is dominated by American universities such as Harvard and Yale; the U.N. Security Council has no permanent Islamic member; and on and on.
Of course, blaming the U.S. for the world's ills is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon, as one non-Muslim attendee from Austria proved by complaining that Hollywood had destroyed the European film industry. (Pity those poor Europeans forced by evil American capitalists to watch movies they hate.) But such whininess is particularly pronounced among the large number of Muslims who have never come to grips with the subservient position they have occupied in world affairs since Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Max Boot is Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times. To comment, please click here.
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© 2006, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate
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