MUST READ: THE WEST IS LOSING BECAUSE IT THINKS ITSELF THE ENEMY

The West is Losing Because It Thinks Itself The Enemy
by Prof. Barry Rubin

Why is the West losing the battle against radical Islamist and other forces in the Middle East? Simple, because it has people like Alvaro de Soto running things. De Soto, if you hadn’t notices, was a veteran UN official whose last job was as the organization’s top Middle East envoy. De Soto wrote a 52-page secret report on retiring and, duly leaked, it now explains to us that the fault for Hamas’s victory in the Gaza Strip—and no doubt just about everything else in the region—lies with the United States and Israel. It is people like de Soto--dare I say over-dressed, over-paid ignoramuses?—who had no idea what they are doing and no understanding of who they are dealing with.

And of course his arguments are published prominently in the mainstream media thus poisoning yet more minds, published for example uncritically in the June 14 Washington Post for an audience ready to believe anything bad about the current administration.

What does de Soto say? That the UN, United States, and Israel “radicalized” Hamas by trying to isolate it. This, de Soto explains, “hampered” peace efforts.

Let us summarize. According to de Soto:

• Hamas needs external forces to radicalize it. Thus, it is presumably already moderate.
• If Hamas had been given large-scale aid and diplomatic coddling it would have been content to go along.
• That the Quartet which runs Middle East negotiations is too biased toward Israel. In other words, its mistake was not to be “evenhanded” between Hamas and Israel.

Where to begin? How about with Paul Berman’s analysis in his 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism. Berman explains that there are two basic arguments that make people blind to the realities of the struggle between liberal democracies and totalitarian forces today.

The first is that the claim about there being a radical, intransigent other side is phony. As Berman characterized the argument: the threat is exaggerated by those who have an interest in doing so. This is why the reaction against dealing with reality has been so anti-Jewish and anti-American. Because these are the two groups that want people to think that they are endangered by radical Islamism, Iran, Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, and so on.

The second is to suggest that these movements are not motivated by an extreme doctrine, a thirst for power, and a desire for loot but by ”unspeakable social conditions” through which “small groups of exploiters or imperialists, through their terrible deeds, have driven…millions of people out of their minds. Perhaps a population has been humiliated beyond human endurance.”

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Pertinent Links:

1) The West is Losing Because It Thinks Itself The Enemy