How Iran uses the Arabs
A fascinating article in Sunday's New York Times by Iranian Karim Sadjapour provides some insight into how Iran uses Arab Muslims in its war against Israel. Until now, Iran’s interests have been served by the Arab status quo: frustrated populations ruled over by emasculated regimes incapable of checking Israel, and easily dismissed as American co-dependents. A conversation I once had with a senior Iranian diplomat is instructive.The longer I live here and the more I read, the more convinced I am that it is Islam that is responsible for Israel's dispute with the Arabs.
He complained, justifiably, about Washington’s excessive focus on military power to solve political problems. I posed a simple hypothetical: What if, instead of having spent several billion dollars financing Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the past three decades, Iran had spent that money educating tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites to become doctors, professors and lawyers? Wouldn’t those communities now be much better off and in a much stronger position to assert their rights vis-à-vis Israel?
“What good would that have done for Iran?” he responded candidly. (He himself had a doctorate from a British university.) “Do you think if we sent them abroad to study they would return to southern Lebanon and Gaza to fight Israel? Of course not; they would have remained doctors, lawyers and professors.”
Iran, in essence, understands that it can inspire and champion the region’s downtrodden and dispossessed, but not the upwardly mobile. Its strategy to dominate the Middle East hinges less on building nuclear weapons than on the twin pillars of oil and alienation.
Imagine the unlikely outcome that all of the current 'revolutions' in Arab countries were to be democratic and without an Islamist component. Imagine, if you would, that the Arabs will vote just like most people in the West vote: Am I better off economically than I was two or four or five or six years ago? Does anyone really doubt that we would reach an agreement with such reasonable democrats within some period of time?
Of course, what I'm discussing is a fantasy world. In the real world, most Arabs are loyal Muslims and they are required by their religion to attempt to subjugate, convert or murder Jews - and Christians for that matter. It is for that reason that a 'peace agreement' between Israel and its Arab neighbors is unlikely to be attained or sustained. In the real world, Iran and other 'true believers' will continue to fight to the last Lebanese, Gazan, Egyptian and Syrian - and Iranian for that matter - to destroy Israel (God forbid).
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Arab backwardness, Iranian interference, Muslim Jew hatred
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:25 PM
2 Comments:
Islam and the Koran were the same 100 years ago, but Islam was not a problem then. So it isn't simply Islam that is the problem. The difference is the trillions of dollars of oil money that the Muslims get from the West. They use the western money to buy western technology to wage jihad against the west.
If we want peace, we have to stop paying for oil.
The problem may eventually be solved by the fact the Islamists have no solution to Arab backwardness than by killing large numbers of people, including Jews.
But it will take a generation, maybe longer for the Arab World to come to that conclusion. In the meantime, there will be much suffering and death in the future. They have tried every other totalitarian ideology. There is one dead end left and it will not be revealed as a dead end in our lifetime.
Post a Comment
<< Home