Enduring Fables

The myth that the Arab and Muslim world insists reveals the truth about their dysfunctional relationship with one another.  They create havoc in the world by their covert and overt activities meant to disrupt normalcy and create fear and apprehension in Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike for the greater glory of Islam.  They pulverize one another into insensibility, slaughtering their sectarian rivals with impunity as the world looks on in horror. 

And of course, it is because of Israel.  Because of the existence of a Judaic state in the midst of an entire geography consecrated to the glory of Islam and the worship of Allah and his Prophet, Mohammed.  The presence of the State of Israel is an insult to Islam.  It is an assault against Islamic values.  It is a reproach to the Arab states which have been for much of a century, incapable of expunging its presence.

And Israel, that alien, malign presence, is guilty of the unforgivable sin of harming the Palestinians.  Of stealing their land.  Of causing them grief.  Of making of them the world's most populous and long-lasting, and dependent and restive refugee population.  Refugees living in refugee camps that resemble cities, quite modern ones at that, driving late-model vehicles and depending on the United Nations and the European Union and other charitable nations to transfer billions in aid annually.

For they can be citizens in virtually no other country in the Arab Middle East.  And where they have settled, elsewhere in the Middle East, the Palestinian refugees have managed, though they are despised by the resident citizen populations as uncouth troublemakers, to disrupt inordinately their host countries.  In Jordan, the one country where they do achieve citizenship, they have always presented as a social canker.

Arab anger directed toward Israel "weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes", was the warning given by none other than United States CENTCOM commander David H. Petraeus in 2010.  This is an echo of what Arab States have always insisted, that everything that goes wrong for them and for the Middle East in its entirety has its genesis in the presence of the Jewish State, an abomination on their body politic. 


It is as though Arabs have a love affair with victimization.  Themselves as victims and the world as their oppressor.  Exemplified by the presence of the State of Israel, assaulting their honour.  For if they cannot keep Arab land in Arab possession because of the insistence of a foreign upstart entity which has no legitimate claim, neither in history nor in heritage to Arab land, then why should foreign countries be comfortable in their lands?

Spain, the former Islamic Andalusia, and Portugal, and France, the Balkans, Italy, Ukraine, all prospered under Islam, and it is to that glorious time of Islamic supremacy that thoughts of the Islamic ummah turn in pride.  Elsewhere, in the plans of fanatic Islamists there exist hopes of a revival of a global Caliphate through the strenuous auspices of an Islamist conspiracy of terror and conquest.

If Israel did not exist as a thorn of contention, none of this dysfunction, this glorifying of the fabled past, this culture of self-loathing that pits Sunni against Shia and both against the Amadiya and the Ismaili and the Baha'i.  And the oppression of the Arab people by their theocratic leaders, their monarchies and their oil sheikdoms, that too would not exist to punish the human rights of the powerless.

All faults can be laid at Israel's feet.